Large Research Groups Research Articles

თანამედროვე მონეტარული თეორიის შესახებ

თანამედროვე მონეტარული თეორიის შესახებ

1.Q. Workshop: Summarising research evidence related to COVID-19 impact

Abstract After the first SARS-CoV-2 infections surge in late 2019, and its spreading worldwide, COVID-19 rapidly became a pandemic by March 2020. Facing a new public health crisis, the scientific community deployed research efforts to study this new disease, generating a large amount of scientific evidence in a very fast way. This research was developed in several directions, for instance, describing how COVID-19 impacts the population's health and well-being. Specifically, the research aimed at describing and evaluating the risk factors either for being infected or evolving toward adverse outcomes, such as hospitalisation or death. Moreover, the effectiveness of implemented public health measures was assessed since countries’ governments rapidly implemented them to mitigate the pandemic.Therefore, several literature reviews have been performed within the European Project ‘Population Health Information Research Infrastructure (PHIRI)’ to summarise and share the published COVID-19 evidence through a health information portal, where researchers and other stakeholders can exchange best practices and expertise. This workshop aims at sharing the collaborative work and experience of a large group of European researchers within the PHIRI consortium, consisting in preliminary results and lessons learnt with the scientific community. The workshop format consists of five presentations by PHIRI members, each one presenting their literature review work, followed by a discussion among the presenters and with the audience. The first workshop presentation will describe the methodological aspects of research conducted to assess the COVID-19 impact on the population's health and well-being, including research methods and statistical methods. The subject for the second talk will show a representative sample of health indicators used to evaluate the direct impact of COVID-19 in the scientific literature. The third presentation will elaborate on a short and long-term impact of COVID-19 crisis on population with frailty, multimorbidity or with different socioeconomic status; evidence derived from systematic literature reviews of population-based studies. The fourth presentation will describe the effectiveness and impact of tracking COVID-19 patients using digital contact tracing tools. The last presentation describes the methodological aspects of a systematic literature review conducted to gain an overview of the foresight studies that have been done throughout the World about COVID-19. Key messages • During the pandemic, a literature reviews provide an important tool to summarise the large amount of scientific evidence that was generated. • This workshop aims at sharing the collaborative work and experience of a large group of European researchers participating at PHIRI, the results and lessons learned with the scientific community.

Genome assembly and annotation of the European earwig Forficula auricularia (subspecies B).

The European earwig Forficula auricularia is an important model for studies of maternal care, sexual selection, sociality, and host–parasite interactions. However, detailed genetic investigations of this species are hindered by a lack of genomic resources. Here, we present a high-quality hybrid genome assembly for Forficula auricularia using Nanopore long-reads and 10× linked-reads. The final assembly is 1.06 Gb in length with 31.03% GC content. It consists of 919 scaffolds with an N50 of 12.55 Mb. Half of the genome is present in only 20 scaffolds. Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs scores are ∼90% from 3 sets of single-copy orthologs (eukaryotic, insect, and arthropod). The total repeat elements in the genome are 64.62%. The MAKER2 pipeline annotated 12,876 protein-coding genes and 21,031 mRNAs. Phylogenetic analysis revealed the assembled genome as that of species B, one of the 2 known genetic subspecies of Forficula auricularia. The genome assembly, annotation, and associated resources will be of high value to a large and diverse group of researchers working on dermapterans.

Emerging Trends and Hotspots in Tai Chi Fall Prevention: Analysis and Visualization.

Recently, substantial studies have increased around the topic of the tai chi fall-prevention field. Few studies, however, have revealed the current progress and hotspots under a bibliometric analysis. Therefore, the present study aimed to conduct Citespace, a significant application for bibliometric analysis, to carry out the situation and trend in this field. This study has identified the core countries are the United States, China, Australia, and England, which are also the origins of the core institutions. Besides this, we also have found two large research groups led by Li and Sherrington. Moreover, the result has revealed that J Aging Phys Act and J Am Geriatr Soc are the primary journals. Geriatrics and gerontology, sport sciences, rehabilitation, and gerontology are the leading categories. Furthermore, one of the more important findings to come out in this study are that “elderly”, “Parkinson’s disease”, “vestibular rehabilitation”, “frail patient”, and “community fall prevention” are the research hotspots. “Women”, “proprioception”, “cognitive impairment”, “dementia”, “osteoarthritis”, and “stroke” are the potential research trend in the future. These findings suggest that the tai chi fall-prevention field has a broad research prospect. Although several questions remain uncertain currently, it is worthy for scholars to do further study.

Association between state Medicaid policies and accrual of Black participants to cancer clinical trials.

1501 Background: Black individuals remain underrepresented in U.S. cancer clinical trials, partly due to financial barriers to participation. While coverage of the routine costs of trial participation has long been mandatory for Medicare and the commercially insured, only 16 states have enacted similar mandates for Medicaid enrollees. Given the disproportionate representation of Black individuals in state Medicaid programs, we hypothesized that such mandates may have led to improved accrual of Black participants to cancer clinical trials. Methods: We conducted a retrospective, quasi-experimental study using de-identified data from the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group to evaluate changes in the accrual of Black participants to cancer clinical trials associated with state-mandated Medicaid coverage of routine trial costs. The study population included non-elderly adults enrolled in therapeutic clinical trials for breast, colorectal, lung, or prostate cancer from 2000-2019. We employed a difference-in-differences approach with event-study specification to compare outcomes in states that mandated Medicaid coverage of routine trial costs relative to states that did not, before and after mandates were enacted. Outcomes included the proportion of trial participants who had Medicaid insurance (vs. non-Medicaid) and the proportion who were Black (vs. non-Black). Models adjusted for age, sex, cancer type, cancer stage, study phase, and study site (community vs. academic). Results: Among 24,321 trial participants (mean age 52.0 [SD 8.2] years, 82.8% female), 7.2% had Medicaid coverage and 10.5% were Black. Compared to states without Medicaid coverage mandates, states with mandates had a statistically significant increase in the proportion of Black trial participants in the first year following the mandate (+6.4 percentage points [95%CI 1.8% to 11.0%]) but not in subsequent years. There was no association between state mandates and the proportion of trial participants enrolled in Medicaid (effects ranged from -0.7 percentage points [95%CI -4.6% to 3.3%] in the first year after mandates to -3.9% [95%CI -8.6% to 0.8%] in the third year). Conclusions: State-mandated Medicaid coverage of the routine costs of trial participation was associated with a short-term increase in the proportion of Black trial participants. These findings suggest that Medicaid policies have the potential to improve representation of racial minority groups in cancer clinical trials, and support recent federal legislation mandating state Medicaid programs to cover trial participation costs as of January 2022. Our study was limited by use of data from only one large cancer research group, focus on only four common cancers, and limited power to analyze the policy impact for other racial and ethnic minority groups. Additional work is needed to replicate these findings in larger cohorts of trial participants.

Burnout and the role of authentic leadership in academic medicine

BackgroundRecently, there has been increasing evidence that reducing burnout in healthcare providers requires significant organizational efforts that include the integration of leadership strategies.MethodsFocus groups were conducted across four health systems within the University of Colorado Department of Medicine in four affinity groups (administrative staff, medical trainees, research faculty, and clinical faculty). Authentic leadership theory was used for analysis to advance the understanding of the role of leadership style upon participants’ work experiences and preferences, and to identify opportunities for translation of site-specific results to other academic medical settings.ResultsStudy participants from each affinity group believed their clinical leaders lacked objectivity with decision-making (lacking “balancing processing”), which contributed to their overall feeling of powerlessness. The experience of increasing work demands was salient throughout all twelve focus groups, and participants identified leadership that interacted in a more open and self-disclosing manner (“relational transparency”) as alleviating at least some of this burden. Strong preference discernable alignment between their leaders’ decision-making and their internal moral compass of values (demonstrating “internalized moral perspective”) was described, as was clinical leaders demonstrating “self-awareness” (having a self-reflective process that informs the leader’s decision-making). Comparing affinity group experiences within each authentic leadership theory construct identified the relevance of contextual factors, such as work setting and roles, upon employees’ perceptions and expectations of their leaders.ConclusionsUse of authentic leadership theory advanced the understanding of the association between leadership traits and experiences of burnout amongst a large group of academic clinicians, researchers, trainees, and administrative staff. Leadership styles that promoted relationship transparency, openness, and support were preferred and fostering these traits may help address the demands in academic medicine, including symptoms of burnout.

“I find this really entertaining” – first look of the relationship between vocational school students and various media

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study how young vocational school students in Finland frame themselves and their participation in society and whether they are seen in various media. The explorative research, with n = 213 vocational school and prepatory VALMA students as co-researchers, tells us that young vocational school students use value framing to create understandings of themselves as participants in society and in media. The purpose is this to present the breadth of their thinking and to draw conclusions from the empirical data produced solely by the co-researchers.Design/methodology/approachExplorative multidisciplinary research was done as co-research with n = 213 vocational school students in Finland. Research includes theoretical background and focuses on empirical qualitative data to further illustrate the explorative nature and results of the study.FindingsThe findings of the explorative co-research tell us that young vocational school students use value framing to create understandings of themselves as participants in society and in media. Co-researchers view themselves as missing in traditional media but find freedom on social media. Content from various media is viewed as reliable and trustworthy but also as problematic propaganda based on personal value framing. The relationship with traditional print media is strained because young people feel that media has othered them and continues to frame them negatively. While they look for that entertaining content across the media spectrum, bullying is an ever-present concern.Research limitations/implicationsThis study focused only on vocational school students in Finland. A broader sample of young people, or of minorities, could produce profound results on media literacy, relationships and power relations in the society. Also, framings of the various international media would provide content for analysis. More profound analysis of the data shall be done in the next phase of the research.Practical implicationsStudy time was limited. More in-depth study will follow. Implications to future research, media consumption and framing should be done with a larger group of researchers and youth.Social implicationsSocial implications towards framing of youth in various media and the transfer of these framing as knowledge in larger society. This includes notions of power of various actors in media and in society at large.Originality/valueMultidisciplinary explorative co-research on the topic is largely missing from academia. Additionally, the voices of those in the fringes of society is muted, whilst also those youth studying the vocational schools.

Performance analysis and offshore applications of the diffuser augmented tidal turbines

ABSTRACT Diffuser-augmented tidal turbines (DATTs) are determined and regarded as efficient in converting tidal energy. In this paper, which is stipulated by a large group of researchers, the highly established module performance of a diffuser turbine is numerically studied by the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Numerical analysis shows that the pressure distributions near the blade tip gradually change for a DATT than a non-diffuser augmented tidal turbine (NDATT), which indicates that the diffuser can effectively reduce the loss of blade tip. The practical assessment through anticipated and assured procedure in the application of this turbine was conducted offshore at Daishan Island and observed to have slightly higher energy efficiency than the experimental model.

A Multinational Longitudinal Study Incorporating Intensive Methods to Examine Caregiver Experiences in the Context of Chronic Health Conditions: Protocol of the ENTWINE-iCohort.

Informal caregivers are those who provide unpaid care to a relative or friend with a chronic illness, disability or other long-lasting health or care need. Providing informal care in the context of chronic health conditions presents a significant global challenge. Examination of the determinants of informal caregivers’ behaviour, especially in terms of motivations and willingness to provide/receive care, is crucial to understanding the nature of caregiver and care recipient experiences. A large group of international researchers have co-operated to execute the ENTWINE iCohort-a multinational, transdisciplinary, longitudinal study incorporating intensive methods to examine caregiver experiences in the context of chronic health conditions. The aim of ENTWINE-iCohort is to investigate the broad spectrum of factors, i.e., cultural, personal, geographical, relational, psychological, and economic that may affect motivations, willingness to provide or receive care, among diverse groups of informal caregivers and their care recipients, in different countries that have different care systems. Study questionnaires will be disseminated on-line in nine countries: Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and the UK. Cross-sectional and longitudinal multivariate analysis, including intensive longitudinal and dyadic data analysis will be applied to examine the relative contribution of the above factors to caregiver or care recipient wellbeing.

Foreign experience in using Earth remote sensing data in studying urban development

Earth remote sensing data are actively used in studying the development of cities abroad and much less in Russia. The aim of the study was to generalize the foreign experience of using Earth remote sensing data in the study of urban development in social geography and related studies. The experience of predecessors is analyzed. Practically absence of the use of Earth remote sensing data by domestic geographers and social scientists in the study of cities has been revealed. Two types of use of Earth remote sensing data in studying cities abroad are singled out: independent processing of satellite images of specific territories and the use of ready-made sets of processed Earth remote sensing data from large research groups. Both options for using Earth remote sensing data make it possible to compare the territories of the Earth, avoid administrative boundaries and the complexity of statistical accounting, and use longer time series. The differences lie in the depth of the information received and accessibility for the average user. Self-processed Earth remote sensing data are more informative, while ready-made sets are easier to use by ordinary users and with their help it is easier to compare different territories due to the universal methodology. Of the ready-made sets, the data of the Global Human Settlement Layer project from the European Commission stand out for the best quality, as well as the frequency of use.

Scott William Sloan 1954–2019

Scott Sloan (1954–2019) was a leader of academic engineering in Australia and beyond, as evidenced by his numerous professional accolades and important research achievements, which have had significant impact on his chosen profession of geotechnical engineering. Educated in Australia and the United Kingdom, he returned to Australia in 1984 and developed a large and active research group at the University of Newcastle, and tackled a wide range of important problems in civil and mining engineering. These include the development of computational methods to predict the mechanical behaviour of soil and rock masses, and his pioneering methods to predict the collapse states of structures made of, on, and in, earth materials, allowing engineers to design cheaper and safer civil infrastructure around the globe. Sloan established long-standing international collaborations and was awarded many honours for his research achievements. He was also a keen and skilful fisherman and a more than competent blues guitar player.

The personality maturity of managers and their effectiveness in performing their role

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to present the relationship between the level of a manager’s maturity and their effectiveness in performing their role. Design/methodology/approach: This article is an overview that presents a new perspective in the perception and assessment of managers’ effectiveness, namely managers’ personality maturity. Findings: The conducted considerations show that the maturity of a manager’s personality determines the maturity level of their personal behaviour, which creates space for effective managerial activities. Research limitations/implications: It is recommended to continue empirical investigations using strong diagnostic tools, including personality diagnostics in a large research group of managers. Practical implications: The relationship presented in this article between the level of managers’ maturity and their ability to perform effective managerial behaviours at the organizational level creates a research area for determining the relationship between personality predispositions and their usefulness in the effective achievement of the tasks entrusted to managers. As a result, it is possible to shape the desired self-development conditions that are conducive to building and strengthening a mature personality. Social implications: If introduced as a permanent category in assessing managers’ effectiveness, personality maturity, understood as the ability to assume responsibility for one’s personal self-development, can significantly incentivise organizations to create space for managers’ psychological responsibility for the development of themselves and their employees. Originality/value: A close relationship has been identified between personality traits and their development and managers’ efficiency and effectiveness in achieving assumed goals. It is shown that a manager’s mature personality increases their chances of fulfilling expectations regarding the ever-increasing and more complex demands of their role.

How to Study Globalization? (On the Discussion Started in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte)

The author answers the question posed in the title by analysing four articles published in the journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte of the Institute of Contemporary History (Munich) in 2020. All four articles differ from each other conceptually. Nevertheless, their authors advocate the “historicisation of globalization”, or in other words, an in-depth study and subsequent analysis of the facts, phenomena, and processes associated with globalisation. Almost unanimously, they also prioritise reflection on the term “globalization”. This approach leads to taking the history of globalisation out of the context of global history. The aim of this essay is to analyse, summarise, and systematise the approaches presented by the authors of the articles and to identify possible directions for further research. This goal also determines the academic novelty of the study presented below. The essay comprises five sections. The first section outlines hypotheses concerning the phenomenon and process of globalisation understood as one of the variants of world and regional cohesion and illustrates possible research intertwining. In the following sections, three interconnected lines of research are highlighted and two approaches, procedural and phenomenological, are validated. The author believes that the study of globalisation is a unique opportunity to ensure the long-term fruitful work of large research groups and to establish international cooperation in new formats. The article has open to debate. In the article, the author refrains from discussing the connections between globalization and global history in detail.

Position guidelines and evidence base concerning determinants of childhood obesity with a European perspective.

Childhood obesity is one of the most pressing global public health issues, with rates increasing fastest in countries at low levels of income. Obesity occurring during childhood is likely to persist throughout the life course, and it is a cause of increased disease risk from the early years of life. This supplement is the result of collaborations involving a large and multidisciplinary group of researchers that were established in the context of the ongoing European Horizon 2020 project Science and Technology in childhood Obesity Policy (STOP). The aim, as in the entire STOP project, is to generate evidence that can support better policies to tackle the problem of childhood obesity in Europe and elsewhere. Quality of life and health well-being concerning children needs to consider personalized, population, and planetary facets to tackle childhood obesity at early stages of life, for in-deep phenotyping, integrating personalized medicine and precision public health interventions at global levels. This supplement contributes to this aim.

The gender gap in highly prestigious international research awards, 2001–2020

AbstractThis study examines gender disparities in the world’s 141 most prestigious international research awards. I find that (a) from 2001 to 2020 these awards were received 3,445 times by 2,011 men and 262 women; (b) women’s share increased from an annual average of 6% during 2001–2005 to an annual average of 19% during 2016–2020; (c) 49 of the 141 awards were not received by women during 2016–2020; and (d) when the numbers of female full professors are taken into consideration, the gender gap remains highly disproportionate in biological and life sciences, computer science, and mathematics. Overall, women would be expected to increase their share of awards by nearly 50% to achieve parity with men today. The study shows great similarities between men and women award recipients in journal articles per author, the average number of authors per article, the proportion of articles in top journals, citations per article, and participation in large research groups and international collaborations. I conclude that the gender gap in highly prestigious research awards is largely a result of demographic inertia and other factors that deserve further investigation.

UCSCXenaShiny: an R/CRAN package for interactive analysis of UCSC Xena data.

SummaryUCSC Xena platform provides huge amounts of processed cancer omics data from large cancer research projects (e.g. TCGA, CCLE and PCAWG) or individual research groups and enables unprecedented research opportunities. However, a graphical user interface-based tool for interactively analyzing UCSC Xena data and generating elegant plots is still lacking, especially for cancer researchers and clinicians with limited programming experience. Here, we present UCSCXenaShiny, an R Shiny package for quickly searching, downloading, exploring, analyzing and visualizing data from UCSC Xena data hubs. This tool could effectively promote the practical use of public data, and can serve as an important complement to the current Xena genomics explorer. Availability and implementationUCSCXenaShiny is an open source R package under GPLv3 license and it is freely available at https://github.com/openbiox/UCSCXenaShiny or https://cran.r-project.org/package=UCSCXenaShiny. The docker image is available at https://hub.docker.com/r/shixiangwang/ucscxenashiny.Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The ironic effect of older adults' increased task motivation: Implications for neurocognitive aging.

Recent work suggests that most older adults who volunteer to take part in cognitive experiments are more motivated to do well than are undergraduate students. This empirical evidence is echoed by the impressions of cognitive aging researchers. We surveyed a large group (N = 88) of researchers asking about their perceptions of younger and older adults' motivation to take part in lab-based research. Not only were older adults seen as more motivated than younger adults, but researchers thought that the two groups participate for different reasons: younger adults to obtain course credit or monetary compensation, older adults to get a sense of their cognitive health, to further science, and out of curiosity. However, older adults' greater motivation to do well on cognitive tasks may leave them vulnerable to stereotype threat, the phenomenon by which individuals underperform when they are put in a position to either confirm or deny a negative stereotype about their group. In this opinion piece, we argue that most cognitive experiments, not just those designed to measure stereotype threat, likely induce some form of performance-related anxiety in older adults. This anxiety likely leads to greater task-related interference, or thoughts about how one is doing on the task, resulting in poorer performance. We discuss some of the potential implications for our understanding of neurocognitive aging.

Multilayer representation of collaboration networks with higher-order interactions

Collaboration patterns offer important insights into how scientific breakthroughs and innovations emerge in small and large research groups. However, links in traditional networks account only for pairwise interactions, thus making the framework best suited for the description of two-person collaborations, but not for collaborations in larger groups. We therefore study higher-order scientific collaboration networks where a single link can connect more than two individuals, which is a natural description of collaborations entailing three or more people. We also consider different layers of these networks depending on the total number of collaborators, from one upwards. By doing so, we obtain novel microscopic insights into the representativeness of researchers within different teams and their links with others. In particular, we can follow the maturation process of the main topological features of collaboration networks, as we consider the sequence of graphs obtained by progressively merging collaborations from smaller to bigger sizes starting from the single-author ones. We also perform the same analysis by using publications instead of researchers as network nodes, obtaining qualitatively the same insights and thus confirming their robustness. We use data from the arXiv to obtain results specific to the fields of physics, mathematics, and computer science, as well as to the entire coverage of research fields in the database.

Advancing Diagnostic Safety Research: Results of a Systematic Research Priority Setting Exercise

BackgroundDiagnostic errors are a major source of preventable harm but the science of reducing them remains underdeveloped.ObjectiveTo identify and prioritize research questions to advance the field of diagnostic safety in the next 5 years.ParticipantsNinety-seven researchers and 42 stakeholders were involved in the identification of the research priorities.DesignWe used systematic prioritization methods based on the Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative (CHNRI) methodology. We first invited a large international group of expert researchers in various disciplines to submit research questions while considering five prioritization criteria: (1) usefulness, (2) answerability, (3) effectiveness, (4) potential for translation, and (5) maximal potential for effect on diagnostic safety. After consolidation, these questions were prioritized at an in-person expert meeting in April 2019. Top-ranked questions were subsequently reprioritized through scoring on the five prioritization criteria using an online questionnaire. We also invited non-research stakeholders to assign weights to the five criteria and then used these weights to adjust the final prioritization score for each question.Key ResultsOf the 207 invited researchers, 97 researchers responded and 78 submitted 333 research questions which were then consolidated. Expert meeting participants (n = 21) discussed questions in different breakout sessions and prioritized 50, which were subsequently reduced to the top 20 using the online questionnaire. The top 20 questions addressed mostly system factors (e.g., implementation and evaluation of information technologies), teamwork factors (e.g., role of nurses and other health professionals in the diagnostic process), and strategies to engage patients in the diagnostic process.ConclusionsTop research priorities for advancing diagnostic safety in the short-term include strengthening systems and teams and engaging patients to support diagnosis. High-priority areas identified using these systematic methods can inform an actionable research agenda for reducing preventable diagnostic harm.

A Do-It-Yourself Hyperspectral Imager Brought to Practice with Open-Source Python.

Commercial hyperspectral imagers (HSIs) are expensive and thus unobtainable for large audiences or research groups with low funding. In this study, we used an existing do-it-yourself push-broom HSI design for which we provide software to correct for spectral smile aberration without using an optical laboratory. The software also corrects an aberration which we call tilt. The tilt is specific for the particular imager design used, but correcting it may be beneficial for other similar devices. The tilt and spectral smile were reduced to zero in terms of used metrics. The software artifact is available as an open-source Github repository. We also present improved casing for the imager design, and, for those readers interested in building their own HSI, we provide print-ready and modifiable versions of the 3D-models required in manufacturing the imager. To our best knowledge, solving the spectral smile correction problem without an optical laboratory has not been previously reported. This study re-solved the problem with simpler and cheaper tools than those commonly utilized. We hope that this study will promote easier access to hyperspectral imaging for all audiences regardless of their financial status and availability of an optical laboratory.