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Over recent decades, research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has developed a broad range of approaches and methods that can be utilized or adapted to address complex optimization problems. As real-world problems get increasingly complicated, this requires an effective optimization method. Various meta-heuristic algorithms have been developed and applied in the optimization domain. This paper used and ameliorated a promising meta-heuristic approach named Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) to address numerical optimization problems. Although CSA can efficiently optimize many problems, it needs more searchability and early convergence. Its positioning updating process was improved by supporting two adaptive parameters: flight length (fl) and awareness probability (AP) to tackle these curbs. This is to manage the exploration and exploitation conducts of CSA in the search space. This process takes advantage of the randomization of crows in CSA and the adoption of well-known growth functions. These functions were recognized as exponential, power, and S-shaped functions to develop three different improved versions of CSA, referred to as Exponential CSA (ECSA), Power CSA (PCSA), and S-shaped CSA (SCSA). In each of these variants, two different functions were used to amend the values of fl and AP. A new dominant parameter was added to the positioning updating process of these algorithms to enhance exploration and exploitation behaviors further. The reliability of the proposed algorithms was evaluated on 67 benchmark functions, and their performance was quantified using relevant assessment criteria. The functionality of these algorithms was illustrated by tackling four engineering design problems. A comparative study was made to explore the efficacy of the proposed algorithms over the standard one and other methods. Overall results showed that ECSA, PCSA, and SCSA have convincing merits with superior performance compared to the others.

This chapter introduces the 5 ‘pillars’ through which to (re-)build a shared sustainable prosperity. The five pillars aim to provide a framework through which policymakers, decision-makers, politicians, community groups and the corporate sphere might begin to consider, map out and plan for just transitions in their domains. The theoretical framing combines socio-technical transitions, social justice and just transitions perspectives; the novelty of our proposed approach here is the further inclusion of resilience perspectives, to account for the shifting relations between sustainability and resilience. Our understanding of sustainability aligns with a ‘strong sustainability’ perspective, whereby ecological limits represent ‘hard’ limits to development, limits which need to be acknowledged and respected.

Aphasia is a language disorder that occurs as a result of brain damage. It affects auditory comprehension, verbal expression, reading, and writing due to the disruption of specific language components such as phonology, semantics, and/or syntax. A hallmark characteristic of aphasia is anomia, or impaired word retrieval. This may occur in the context of fluent speech (normal rate, rhythm and prosody) or nonfluent speech (hesitant and agrammatic verbal output). Other characteristics of aphasia vary depending on the specific location and extent of brain damage. Alexia and agraphia are acquired impairments in reading and writing, respectively. These deficits may occur in isolation but more commonly co-occur with aphasia. Assessment and treatment of aphasia, alexia, and agraphia focuses on identifying and restoring impaired function as well as determining the impact of the impairment of quality of life and developing compensatory strategies to manage persisting deficits. This article describes the symptoms associated with aphasia, alexia, and agraphia, the subtypes and neurological correlates of each impairment, the general trajectory of recovery, and assessment and treatment approaches. © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

COVID-19 caused an increase in the demand for medications, which led to an increase in pharmaceutical waste and there is no doubt that this contributes to environmental pollution. Hence, it became necessary to search for how to protect and improve the environment by encouraging the behavior of medication waste reduction. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the factors affecting intentions to reduce medication waste. Considering this, we develop an extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) framework by incorporating the constructs of moral obligation, environmental awareness, and medication waste risk perception. Using the convenience sampling method and based on a self-administered questionnaire, a total of 225 usable responses were collected in five Algerian cities. The results showed that positive attitudes (β = 0.316, p < 0.001), moral obligation (β = 0.291, p < 0.001), environmental awareness (β = 0.227, p < 0.001), perceived behavior control (PBC) (β = 0.151, p = 0.001), greater perceived risks (β = 0.127, p < 0.001), and subjective norm (β = 0.096, p < 0.05) significantly and positively influence the medication waste minimization intention. Furthermore, our analyses revealed that the extended TPB model explained 73.40% of the intention variance. In conclusion, we have explored the intentions, and there may be a gap between intent and actual behavior. Therefore, we recommend future studies to examine the factors affecting the actual behavior of medication waste reduction and to investigate environmental ethics and religious commitment as predictors of waste reduction intentions.

Monastic tonsure of citizens of the Russian Empire abroad became a particularly complex issue during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Mt. Athos became a favorite destination of those interested in assuming the monastic habit outside the empire. The Russian authorities sought to control and regulate such tonsures by establishing procedures for checking their validity, and by ruling out automatic recognition of them in the empire. Individuals who were tonsured as monks abroad manipulated or tried to manipulate such regulations in order to facilitate travel back and forth from the Russian Empire for their own purposes. The result was that the real and apparent ambiguities that such rules allowed for were exploited by both state authorities and by real or fake monks themselves. The essay seeks to offer some perspectives on this phenomenon by focusing on four cases preserved in archival records. © 2023 Ltd "Integration: Education and Science". All rights reserved.

The growing diversity of students in schools has raised important questions regarding how students learning English and discipline-content simultaneously succeed academically. This challenge has been exacerbated by disparities in resources among multilingual communities throughout the COVID-19 pande...

Parental and family involvement in schools has been a concern for educators and administrators. The authors set out to assess the path directions and significance of the interrelationships between Performance Feedback (PF), Academic Performance (AP) on Parent–Family Involvement (PFI), and Parent Satisfaction (PS) in schools. This study utilizes data from the PFI in Education Survey 2019 under the National Household Education Surveys program done by the US Department of Education. The sample for this research is 954 parents. Structural equation modeling was employed using AMOS. Results establish the three research propositions: influence of PFI on PS with the mediation of AP and PF, influence of AP on PS is moderated by PF, influence of AP on PFI is moderated by PF. The findings are important for school administrators and all stakeholders for ensuring greater PFI, improved PF and AP of students, and higher PS. This study is unique in assessing the interactional effects of the variables considered. The study also establishes mediating and moderating influences and offers new insights in understanding the influences on PFI and PS and some bidirectional effects. © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

The following research examines the acculturation processes of migrants, working in Switzerland, particularly in the hospitality industry. Due to rapid globalisation and lack of investigation on worker’s adaptation, there remains a gap in the research based on the employees’ cultural clash occurrence. The study explores potential tools which might simplify cultural adaptation and provide a better understanding of international communication for any future employees coming to live and work in Switzerland. Semi-structured interviews with participants from different nationalities were conducted to identify the importance of effective acculturation, the adaptation issues, and the influence of those on work and life in Switzerland. The results demonstrate that the most efficient way to acculturate in Switzerland is integration to the culture and traditions of the country and its history through understanding their values, norms, practices. Moreover, Switzerland was viewed as a very conservative and strict country where one must work hard to be accepted. Those participants who tried to separate, assimilate, or marginalise tend to experience tougher acculturation. Language, namely Swiss German or German, was highlighted as the most essential to learn or to be provided by the workplace. Lastly, current research identified a link between successful acculturation with job opportunities and development. Since salaries and job opportunities are not the same for the foreign workers in comparison to Swiss employees on the same position there might be a potential recommendation for improvement. Little to no link has been found between acculturation and psychological well-being, financial status, and health conditions. © 2023 AJHTL /Author(s)

Winning football matches is the major goal of all football clubs in the world. Football being the most popular game in the world, many studies have been conducted to analyze and predict match winners based on players’ physical and technical performance. In this study, we analyzed the matches from the professional football league of Qatar Stars League (QSL) covering the matches held in the last ten seasons. We incorporated the highest number of professional matches from the last ten seasons covering from 2011 up to 2022 and proposed SoccerNet, a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-based deep learning-based model to predict match winners with over 80% accuracy. We considered match- and player-related information captured by STATS platform in a time slot of 15 minutes. Then we analyzed players’ performance at different positions on the field at different stages of the match. Our results indicated that in QSL, the defenders’ role in matches is more dominant than midfielders and forwarders. Moreover, our analysis suggests that the last 15–30 minutes of match segments of the matches from QSL have a more significant impact on the match result than other match segments. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is the first DL-based model in predicting match winners from any professional football leagues in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We believe the results will support the coaching staff and team management for QSL in designing game strategies and improve the overall quality of performance of the players.

Audiovisual speech perception includes the simultaneous processing of auditory and visual speech. Deficits in audiovisual speech perception are reported in autistic individuals; however, less is known regarding audiovisual speech perception within the broader autism phenotype (BAP), which includes individuals with elevated, yet subclinical, levels of autistic traits. We investigate the neural indices of audiovisual speech perception in adults exhibiting a range of autism-like traits using event-related potentials (ERPs) in a phonemic restoration paradigm. In this paradigm, we consider conditions where speech articulators (mouth and jaw) are present (AV condition) and obscured by a pixelated mask (PX condition). These two face conditions were included in both passive (simply viewing a speaking face) and active (participants were required to press a button for a specific consonant–vowel stimulus) experiments. The results revealed an N100 ERP component which was present for all listening contexts and conditions; however, it was attenuated in the active AV condition where participants were able to view the speaker’s face, including the mouth and jaw. The P300 ERP component was present within the active experiment only, and significantly greater within the AV condition compared to the PX condition. This suggests increased neural effort for detecting deviant stimuli when visible articulation was present and visual influence on perception. Finally, the P300 response was negatively correlated with autism-like traits, suggesting that higher autistic traits were associated with generally smaller P300 responses in the active AV and PX conditions. The conclusions support the finding that atypical audiovisual processing may be characteristic of the BAP in adults.

The aim of this study is to describe a measured return to instrumental dysphagia assessments for our vulnerable surgical patient population, such that best practice patterns could be resumed and our staff kept safe from transmission of COVID-19. A retrospective medical record review provided data on clinical practice patterns of swallowing assessment in an at-risk surgical patient population. Outcomes of this study support protocols that allow clinicians to safely resume the use of instrumental assessment and return to best practice in dysphagia assessment for our surgical patient population.

In modern-day computing, cloud services are widely used in every aspect of life. So, user satisfaction depends on the effectiveness and efficiency of cloud services. Service broker policy of the cloud maintains the effectiveness and efficiency of cloud services. Service broker policy provides the rules and norms based on which a data center is selected for a userbase request. This paper proposes a genetic algorithm-based service broker policy that provides the optimal sequence of data centers for different userbases based on their requirements. This research aims to find an optimal data center for userbases that can achieve user satisfaction by minimizing the cloud service's response time and data processing time. We have experimented with our proposed genetic algorithm-based service broker policy in the CloudAnalyst platform based on different real-world scenarios. Simulation results indicate that our proposed genetic algorithm outperforms existing traditional algorithms. © 2023 IEEE.

Impaired autonomic modulation and baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) have been reported during and after COVID-19. Both impairments are associated with negative cardiovascular outcomes. If these impairments were to exist undetected in young men after COVID-19, they could lead to negative cardiovascular outcomes. Fatigue is associated with autonomic dysfunction during and after COVID-19. It is unclear if fatigue can be used as an indicator of impaired autonomic modulation and BRS after COVID-19. This study aims to compare parasympathetic modulation, sympathetic modulation, and BRS between young men who had COVID-19 versus controls and to determine if fatigue is associated with impaired autonomic modulation and BRS. Parasympathetic modulation as the high-frequency power of R-R intervals (lnHFR-R), sympathetic modulation as the low-frequency power of systolic blood pressure variability (LFSBP), and BRS as the -index were measured by power spectral density analysis. These variables were compared between 20 young men who had COVID-19 and 24 controls. Independent t-tests and Mann-Whitney U tests indicated no significant difference between the COVID-19 and the control group in: lnHFR-R, P=0.20; LFSBP, P=0.11, and -index, P=0.20. Fatigue was not associated with impaired autonomic modulation or BRS. There is no difference in autonomic modulations or BRS between young men who had COVID-19 compared to controls. Fatigue did not seem to be associated with impaired autonomic modulation or impaired BRS in young men after COVID-19. Findings suggest that young men might not be at increased cardiovascular risk from COVID-19-related dysautonomia and impaired BRS.

COVID-19 has extensively reshaped lifestyle practices, supply chain dynamics, and climate mitigation efforts. The resulting crises from the pandemic in relation to local and community sustainability practices have not yet been investigated in depth. There is a need to explore the individual characteristics and responses from rapid transitions of lifestyles at various scales. Analysing how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped and altered sustainable living practices, and the motivations supporting them, has yet to be determined but is crucial to gain further insight to improve management responses to large-scale disruptive change. Presenting empirical findings from semi-structured interviews in New Haven County, Connecticut, this study elucidates the ways in which the lifestyles have been altered and how they responded while specifically highlighting the consequences for behavioural routines and sustainable lifestyle practices. As a result of lockdowns and pandemic mitigation responses, individual sustainability engagement fluctuated with participants shifting dietary, mobility, and energy and food consumption patterns. Specifically, participants emphasised substantial decrease in daily travel during initial phases of the pandemic alongside increased online shopping and energy use at home. Though changes to consumption practices were replaced former habits with unsustainable ones, individuals also noted how they co-opted the pandemic over time to pursue sustainable actions at home. As a macro-level ‘window of opportunity’ and disruptive change, this study illustrates how sustainable lifestyle practices were reshaped; some by choice, some by force, and some reflecting a forced choice. These findings have clear implications for the stability of maintaining sustainable practices influenced by landscape-level shocks.