Interdisciplinary Subject Research Articles

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

The Italian American Studies Association at Fifty-Five: 1966–2021

Global Mapping of Interventions to Improve the Quality of Life of People Living with HIV/AIDS: Implications for Priority Settings.

Enhancing the quality of life (QOL) of people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) has become a significant global health goal, as combination antiretroviral therapy has helped to transform HIV/AIDS from a fatal illness to chronic disease. In this study, we aim to comprehensively describe the growth of research publications and the development of research landscapes regarding interventions to improve QOL among PLWH, as well as to characterize interdisciplinary topics and emerging interests of the research community. English articles and reviews published from 1991 to 2018 concerning interventions to improve QOL among PLWHA were retrieved from the Web of Science. Collaboration among organizations sharing coauthorships and co-occurrence network of authors' keywords was illustrated through network graphs. Latent Dirichlet Allocation was used for classifying papers into corresponding topics. A total of 2304 publications were included in the study. The USA continues to lead in research productivity, followed by South Africa, China, and India. Emerging research themes were found to be the application of multilevel interventions and long-term care, rehabilitation, along with topics relating to mental health issues, behavioral therapy and social supports for patients receiving treatments, and application of e-health approaches in designing and implementing interventions. There has been, however, a modest appearance of topics covering local, cultural, and environmental contexts of interventions. The findings of the study suggest expanding the coverage of psychosocial, behavioral, and contextualized interventions, increasing the involvement of family and community, improving the effectiveness of technology-based and e-health interventions, and developing strategies for lifelong treatment of HIV/AIDS.

Palliative care in undergraduate medical education - consolidation of the learning contents of palliative care in the final academic year.

Background: Demographic change and the medical imperative to accompany patients at all times and also in the case of illness leading to death require good basic knowledge of palliative care in large parts of the medical profession. Palliative care has been introduced into undergraduate medical education as a compulsory subject: “interdisciplinary subject 13 palliative care” (Q13). While course concepts for Q13 have already been positively evaluated, assessment of the consolidation and practical relevance of the knowledge taught is lacking.Methods: Assessment of the consolidation of the learning content from Q13 after the practical year (the “practical year” is the sixth and final year of undergraduate medical education in Germany) by means of a survey with a proven questionnaire and integrated qualitative free-text analysis of a cohort of medical students (n=176) who had already participated in an evaluation before and after Q13.Results: The response rate was 96% after Q13 and 45% after the practical year (PY). Teaching was predominantly perceived as more helpful than the PY (p<0.001). Compared to the status after Q13, students rated themselves as less competent after the PY in all areas surveyed, including drug-based pain therapy (p=0.0386). The certainty in informing patients about the incurability of the disease also decreased significantly after the PY (p=0.0117), although the preparation in Q13 was positively highlighted.Conclusion: The knowledge acquired in Q13 could not be anchored in the PY. On the contrary, after initial practical experiences, the students found it challenging to conduct conversations in cases of serious illness and to deal with their own uncertainty in the care of seriously ill patients. Structural factors regarding palliative care in the PY, as well as intrinsic motives of students, such as prior knowledge or motivation to learn, should be analyzed to identify ways to close the gap between theoretical and practical training in general palliative care. To generate samples that are sufficiently representative, future studies on teaching should be easily accessible to students and consider attractive forms of evaluation including electronic methods and social media.

Bioinformatics and Machine Learning Approaches to Understand the Regulation of Mobile Genetic Elements.

Simple SummaryTransposable elements (TEs) are DNA sequences that are, or were, able to move (transpose) within the genome of a single cell. They were first discovered by Barbara McClintock while working on maize, and they make up a large fraction of the genome. Transpositions can result in mutations and they can alter the genome size. Cells regulate the activity of TEs using a variety of mechanisms, such as chemical modifications of DNA and small RNAs. Machine learning (ML) is an interdisciplinary subject that studies computer algorithms that can improve through experience and by the use of data. ML has been successfully applied to a variety of problems in bioinformatics and has exhibited favorable precision and speed. Here, we provide a systematic and guided review on the ML and bioinformatic methods and tools that are used for the analysis of the regulation of TEs.Transposable elements (TEs, or mobile genetic elements, MGEs) are ubiquitous genetic elements that make up a substantial proportion of the genome of many species. The recent growing interest in understanding the evolution and function of TEs has revealed that TEs play a dual role in genome evolution, development, disease, and drug resistance. Cells regulate TE expression against uncontrolled activity that can lead to developmental defects and disease, using multiple strategies, such as DNA chemical modification, small RNA (sRNA) silencing, chromatin modification, as well as sequence-specific repressors. Advancements in bioinformatics and machine learning approaches are increasingly contributing to the analysis of the regulation mechanisms. A plethora of tools and machine learning approaches have been developed for prediction, annotation, and expression profiling of sRNAs, for methylation analysis of TEs, as well as for genome-wide methylation analysis through bisulfite sequencing data. In this review, we provide a guided overview of the bioinformatic and machine learning state of the art of fields closely associated with TE regulation and function.

Thoughts on the Construction of Marketing Specialty under the Background of New Liberal Arts

With the continuous advancement of the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the requirements for Humanities in higher education are gradually updated. In the context of the new liberal arts, since 2019, liberal arts majors such as economics, management and law have paid more and more attention to interdisciplinary subjects, and the content of higher education has also tended to be diversified and comprehensive. For the marketing specialty, although it has experienced many years of development, the construction of marketing specialty is still facing some problems and challenges in the initial stage of the construction of new liberal arts. Based on the brief description of the new liberal arts background and marketing specialty, this paper analyzes the problems existing in the discipline construction at the present stage, and puts forward innovative solutions in combination with the future talent demand and specialty training objectives.

PSO Based Optimized Ensemble Learning and Feature Selection Approach for Efficient Energy Forecast

Swarm intelligence techniques with incredible success rates are broadly used for various irregular and interdisciplinary topics. However, their impact on ensemble models is considerably unexplored. This study proposes an optimized-ensemble model integrated for smart home energy consumption management based on ensemble learning and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The proposed model exploits PSO in two distinct ways; first, PSO-based feature selection is performed to select the essential features from the raw dataset. Secondly, with larger datasets and comprehensive range problems, it can become a cumbersome task to tune hyper-parameters in a trial-and-error manner manually. Therefore, PSO was used as an optimization technique to fine-tune hyper-parameters of the selected ensemble model. A hybrid ensemble model is built by using combinations of five different baseline models. Hyper-parameters of each combination model were optimized using PSO followed by training on different random samples. We compared our proposed model with our previously proposed ANN-PSO model and a few other state-of-the-art models. The results show that optimized-ensemble learning models outperform individual models and the ANN-PSO model by minimizing RMSE to 6.05 from 9.63 and increasing the prediction accuracy by 95.6%. Moreover, our results show that random sampling can help improve prediction results compared to the ANN-PSO model from 92.3% to around 96%.

Petroleum rock mechanics: An area worthy of focus in geo-energy research

Petroleum rock mechanics: An area worthy of focus in geo-energy research

Application of Adobe Illustrator for drawing schematic diagrams of anatomical structure of acupoints -- taking Five Shu-points of Jueyin Meridian as an example

The schematic diagram is an indispensable part of research article in life science，which can effectively and intuitively show the specific content of the article with simple composition. As an intuitive expression of the interdisciplinary subject at the early stage, the schematic diagram in the literature has gained an all-round improvement in the quality along with the deve-lopment of computer technology and modern drawing tools. In contrast，the level of the schematic diagram appears to be lagged behind in the field of acupuncture research papers. In order to improve the drawing level of this field, we took the Five Shu-points of Hand and Foot Jueyin Meridian as an example, and drew some vector diagrams of their anatomical structures including the body surface, skeleton, nerves, arteries and veins by using the Adobe Illustrator image software, through which we sum up a simple and easy-to-learn process including application skills and key points needing attention. We hope these methods can play a role in the acupuncture research in the future.

Osteoimmunology as an intrinsic part of immunology.

Osteoimmunology has emerged as a field linking immunology and bone biology, but it has yet to be recognized as belonging to mainstream immunology. However, the extent of the research fields immunology actually covers has been enormously widened, and it is now ready to include such an interdisciplinary subject. One of the most obvious examples of an interaction between the immune and bone systems is the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis, where bone resorption is increased by the autoimmune response. Moreover, the regulation of the immune system by bone cells has been clearly demonstrated by the finding that osteoprogenitor cells contribute to hematopoietic stem cell maintenance as well as the suppression of hematopoietic malignancy. Thus, the bidirectional dialogue has been established and inevitably will lead to the union of bone and immunity. Here, I summarize the history and concept of osteoimmunology, providing a perspective on the future of immunology.

Knowledge mapping of skills mismatch phenomenon: a scientometric analysis

PurposeThis paper aims to understand the development track of skills mismatch research and discover the hidden internal connections between literature.Design/methodology/approachThe authors gathered data through scientometric quantitative analysis using CiteSpace. Specifically, this article applied basic analysis, journal cocitation analysis (JCA), author cocitation analysis (ACA) and document cocitation analysis (DCA), cluster analysis, citation burstness detection, scientific research cooperation analysis and coconcurrence analysis of keywords of 3,125 documents from Web of Science core collections for the period 2000–2020.FindingsThrough the document cocitation analysis and the keywords' co-occurrence, this article identifies influential scholars, documents, research institutions, journals and research hotspots in research on the skills mismatch phenomenon. The results showed that the publications had ballooned, and the phenomenon has become an interdisciplinary research subject. The USA and Finland remain the main contributors, which is attributed to their high-yield institutions such as the University of Helsinki, the University of Witwatersrand, the University of Washington and so on. While the African continent lacks research on skills mismatch even with the continent’s effort to overcome such a crucial issue. The paper presents an in-depth analysis of skills and educational mismatch issues to better understand the evolutionary trajectory of the collective knowledge over the past 20 years and highlight the areas of active pursuit.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors only used Web of Science core collection to collect data; however, they can added Scopus indexed database as well to extend the research trends and explore more new research hot topics to solve the skills mismatch phenomenon.Originality/valueThe scientometric analysis is of great significance for identifying the potential relationship between the literature and investigating the knowledge evolution of skills mismatch research. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Labor Organization and the World Health Organization are the giants who are mostly concerned of the mismatch skills phenomenon. Researchers can refer to this study to understand the status quo, gaps and research trends to deal with the skills mismatch issue.

Social Network and Bibliometric Analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Remote Sensing Applications from 2010 to 2021

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Remote sensing (RS) has unique advantages over traditional satellite RS, including convenience, high resolution, affordability and fast acquisition speed, making it widely used in many fields. To provide an overview of the development of UAV RS applications during the past decade, we screened related publications from the Web of Science core database from 2010 to 2021, built co-author networks, a discipline interaction network, a keywords timeline view, a co-citation cluster, and detected burst citations using bibliometrics and social network analysis. Our results show that: (1) The number of UAV RS publications had an increasing trend, with explosive growth in the past five years. The number of papers published by China and the United States (US) is far ahead in this field; (2) The US has currently the greatest influence in this field through the largest number of international cooperations. Cooperation is mainly concentrated in countries and institutions with a large number of publications but is not widely distributed. (3) The application of UAV RS involves multiple interdisciplinary subjects, among which “Environmental Science and Ecology” ranks first; (4) Future research trends of UAV RS are expected to be related to artificial intelligence (e.g., artificial neural networks-based research). This paper provides a scientific basis and guidance for future developments of UAV RS applications, which can help the research community to better grasp the developments of this field.

Undergraduate Medical Students Perception of Immunology Learning Process: A Cross-sectional Questionnaire-based Study from a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital

Background: Undergraduate medical education constitutes the preparation of the students towards a broad understanding of human anatomy, physiology, and several other basic, allied, medical, and surgical subjects. Immunology is an integral, and interdisciplinary subject among them, which is generally perceived by the students as a complex one to understand and apply in practice. Methods: A cross-sectional questionnaire-based study was undertaken among the II MBBS students to understand their perception regarding learning experiences of immunology as a subject. The study included 157 students, and all had given oral consent to participate in the study. The data collected from the study were entered into a Microsoft Excel sheet and were used to analyze and generate graphs and tables. Results: More than 90% (n=157) of the students believed that immunology is an integral part of medicine and medical research, and 85% of the students felt that knowledge of immunology is essential while doing clinical practice. Only 58% of students had enjoyed the immunology learning process, and at least 20% of them were unsure if the knowledge in immunology will be of any help to understand other areas of medicine. Conclusions: Students perceive immunology as an important subject that helps them to practice medicine and research. A general perception prevailed among the students regarding the complexity of immunology as a subject, wherein most of them felt that the learning process could be further improved with the use of audio-visual aids and patient/case-oriented/practical teaching.

Desirability of Tribo-Performance of Natural Based Thermoset and Thermoplastic Composites: A Concise Review

Tribology, which may be defined as an interdisciplinary subject, deals with relative motion between two or more bodies, i.e., surfaces that are interacting relatively. Thus, tribology is a science covering three vital classes, namely, 1) wear, 2) friction, and 3) lubrication. The focus of this article is to bring out the elements that are influencing the wear-resisting behavior of thermosetting and thermoplastic composites with natural-based constituents. It was also identified from the literature sources that 1) the treatments on the natural fibers acting as reinforcement and 2) the addition of fillers in resin acting as matrix could improve the wear-resisting behavior of the composites. Additionally, other conditions such as 1) sliding speed, 2) sliding velocity, 3) sliding distance, and 4) operating temperature could also influence the friction coefficient and specific wear rate of the natural-based composites.

BENDRŲJŲ PROGRAMŲ ATNAUJINIMAS: KUR LINK JUDAME?

The need to update the curriculum and the Curriculum framework of general education has been discussed for several years, as long as a year ago, the renewal work of primary and basic education curriculum began, and this year the renewal of the secondary and preschool education curriculum started. The curriculum of the general preschool education is described for one year, with the possibility for the child to study for the second year. The preschool education programme is not structured in separate subjects – the knowledge is acquired integrally, by developing seven competencies in all activities in which the child participates, in order to ensure the balance and coherence of all competencies in different content areas. Excluded content areas are given equal volume. It is being focused on the purpose and goals of preschool education, areas of achievement and intended achievements. The learning content is divided into five areas of learning content: • language education; • social education; • STEM education(natural science, mathematics and informatics, technological education); • health and physical education; • artistic education. The general curricula for pre-primary, primary, basic and secondary education must ensure vertical and horizontal coherence of content, possible interdisciplinary links, and indicate how they can be meaningfully disclosed including the interdisciplinary topics set out in the General curriculum framework updating guidelines: • personal power, • cultural identity and community spirit, • sustainable development. The volumes of primary, basic and secondary education curricula are presented distinguishing between compulsory subject content (about 70 per cent) and optional content (about 30 per cent), which is selected and modelled by the teacher himself, taking into account school, classroom context, student needs, achievements, possibilities and in coordination with other teachers as required. When implementing optional content, more time is devoted to the development of certain skills, values, and learning of subject topics. Project works can be organised, interdisciplinary themes can be developed, time can be allocated for cognitive, cultural, artistic, and creative activities. According to the concept of the Guidelines for the Renewal of the General Curriculum Framework, this distribution of the content ratio is focused on deeper learning, integration, topic development, competence development. Keywords: curriculum framework, general education, interdisciplinary topics, project works.

Kazakh culture and Literature in the American Higher Education Curriculum

I am an American educator and researcher working in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona, a large public university in the Southwestern region of the United States. As a longtime student of the Kazakh language and literature, as well as a researcher of the cross-cultural links between Kazakhstan and its neighbor countries, I often encounter a surprised reaction by both Kazakhstanis and my fellow Americans when I describe my topic of research. Both Americans and Kazakhstanis have asked me: Why would an American study Kazakhstan? What use is the Kazakh language to an American? What can American students hope to learn from Kazakhstan? The ultimate purpose of this article is to provide some answers to these questions. I have found the study of Kazakhstan to be enriching in many ways, both for myself and for the students I work with at the University of Arizona. In this article, I will provide an overview of the contemporary status of Kazakhstan as a subject of study in American institutions of higher education, and I will also share some of my personal experiences as both a student and a teacher. I will discuss not only specialized courses on the Kazakh language and culture, but also courses in the humanities and social sciences that incorporate Kazakhstan into broader interdisciplinary topics, such as global studies. Finally I will discuss international connections between American and Kazakhstani institutions of higher education.

Cross-cultural metacognition as a prior for humanitarian knowledge: when cultures collide in global health emergencies

PurposeA serious global public health emergency (GPHE) like the COVID-19 aggravates the inequilibrium of medical care and other critical resources between wealthy and poor nations, which, coupled with the collision of cultures, indicates the vital need for developing humanitarian knowledge transcending cultures. Given the scarcity of literature addressing such unprecedent issues, this paper thus proposes new, unconventional viewpoints and future themes at the intersection of knowledge management (KM) and humanitarian inquiry.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is conceptual in nature. The data of the World Bank and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are analysed to introduce some emerging real impact topics regarding cross-cultural conflicts and humanitarian knowledge in the post-COVID business world. The theoretical foundation was built upon a critical literature review.FindingsThis paper synthesizes the perspectives of culture, KM and the humanistic philosophy to distil the core component of cultural intelligence and comparatively and thereby illuminating why cross-cultural metacognition acts as a priori for achieving cosmopolitan humanitarian knowledge.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper provides profound implications to academics by highlighting the importance to formulating new, inter-disciplinary themes or unorthodox, phenomenon-driven assumptions beyond the traditional KM domain. This paper also offers practitioners and policymakers valuable insights into coping with the growing disparity between high- and low-income countries by showing warning signs of a looming humanitarian crisis associated with a GPHE context.Originality/valueThis paper does not aim to claim the birth of a new domain but call for more research on developing a normative theory of humanitarian knowledge as transcendence of cultures. It implies uncharted territories of great interest and potential for the real impact KM community.

Cultural Sustainability and the SDGs: Strategies and Priorities in the European Union Countries

This research aims to analyze how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are included in the EU cultural policies and which are the priorities of the European Union (EU) in the cultural sustainability’s agenda. We performed a content analysis of the EU Countries’ cultural policies, evaluating the grade of inclusion of the SDGs. The conclusions show that the EU cultural policies, although not explicitly, include the SDGs in the definition of their strategies, policies, projects and actions. Specifically, eight of the seventeen SDGs are included in relation to the following interdisciplinary topics: Cultural and Natural Heritage (SDG11), Cultural Education (SDG 4), Cultural Diversity (SDG 4), Social Inclusion (SDG 10), Information Access (SDG 16), Cooperation with other institutions (SDG 17), Environment (SDG 13), Economic Growth (SDG 8) and Gender Equality (SDG 5). Topics’ priorities are generally commonly defined in the different EU countries.

GIS and Multicriteria Decision Analysis for Landfill Site Selection in Edirne Province, Turkey

A sustainable solid waste management system planning is a complex and interdisciplinary subject, which requires considering technical, environmental, economic, and social factors. Landfills play an essential role in solid waste management strategies, and landfilling is an extensively accepted preference for the clearance of solid waste worldwide. Site selection of landfill facilities can be a considerable problem as all infrastructural projects can deteriorate the ecology of the site on which they are developed because of changing land uses, loss of habitats, and displacement of fauna. These effects are mainly specific for location and need to be evaluated on every example. Landfill site selection is related to certain factors and limitations defined by natural and artificial thresholds and/or legislation. Legal provisions may vary according to the country's policy and even to the provincial policies. In addition to these features of study zones or sites, landfill site selection methods may have different criteria and sub-criteria in identifying parameters. This paper aims to identify landfill site(s) multicriteria decision analysis depending on Edirne's environmentally sensitive areas by using the Geographic Information System (GIS) technique. Data of land use, geologic features, protected areas, natural and archeological sites, transportation network, hydrological data, soil suitability for agricultural activities, and land capability classes which have been acquired from the relevant public authorities were used to proposed model. Regional factors were identified and assessed according to the risk of contamination for environmental components such as natural resources, sensitive ecosystems, and unique habitats. The chosen criteria were graded in this context, and alternative landfill sites were proposed by applying GIS-based analysis. According to the analysis, the northern subprovince of the study area, Lalapasa, has the most appropriate landfill sites.

The wheel of fortune as a novel support for constructive alignment and transformative sustainability learning in higher education

Purpose Education for Sustainability in Higher Education (ESHE) sits within and across disciplinary settings that share the need for a framework that provides a basis for pedagogy, assessment and learning outcomes (Kalsoom, 2019). ESHE strives to create transformative learning spaces that help students gain the knowledge and skills they need to understand and contribute to shaping a world based on communities living within the limits of earth’s resources. This paper aims to offer a novel solution to the challenge of teaching students from different disciplines struggling with the complexity of sustainability. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores the development of an interdisciplinary subject designed for undergraduate students from four faculties. It presents a case study of pedagogy that moves away from three pillars/concentric circles approaches towards practices based in systems thinking and interactive transformative learning. It describes the iterative process of developing and implementing an infographic: the “Sustainability Wheel of Fortune” (Wheel), to support constructive alignment of content, assessment tasks and learning outcomes. Findings The Wheel provides a holistic, interconnected and dynamic focus for framing content and teaching. The pedagogy aligns with sustainability competencies, builds in flexibility in response to changing times and student experiences and provides teachers and students with a common framework for interrogating the possibilities for sustainable futures. Originality/value The Wheel is a novel learning tool for contemporary sustainability education. It captures key elements of approaches to and concepts about sustainability, visually reinforces the idea of a holistic interconnected approach and provides a framework that supports the constructive pedagogy of an interdisciplinary sustainability subject.

Multiple Granulation Rough Set Approach to Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Ordered Information Systems

As a further extension of the fuzzy set and the intuitive fuzzy set, the interval-valued intuitive fuzzy set (IIFS) is a more effective tool to deal with uncertain problems. However, the classical rough set is based on the equivalence relation, which do not apply to the IIFS. In this paper, we combine the IIFS with the ordered information system to obtain the interval-valued intuitive fuzzy ordered information system (IIFOIS). On this basis, three types of multiple granulation rough set models based on the dominance relation are established to effectively overcome the limitation mentioned above, which belongs to the interdisciplinary subject of information theory in mathematics and pattern recognition. First, for an IIFOIS, we put forward a multiple granulation rough set (MGRS) model from two completely symmetry positions, which are optimistic and pessimistic, respectively. Furthermore, we discuss the approximation representation and a few essential characteristics for the target concept, besides several significant rough measures about two kinds of MGRS symmetry models are discussed. Furthermore, a more general MGRS model named the generalized MGRS (GMGRS) model is proposed in an IIFOIS, and some important properties and rough measures are also investigated. Finally, the relationships and differences between the single granulation rough set and the three types of MGRS are discussed carefully by comparing the rough measures between them in an IIFOIS. In order to better utilize the theory to realistic problems, an actual case shows the methods of MGRS models in an IIFOIS is given in this paper.