Past Situation Research Articles

Revived Role of Pulmonary Artery Band in Management of Heart Failure in Pediatric Dilated Cardiomyopathy.

Lack of appropriate durable Ventricular Assist Devices (VADs) that can be managed at home for very young children, and long wait times for transplant have led to search for alternate easily reproducible therapies. In the past decade or more, pulmonary artery banding (PAB), as a new indication of an old technology, has been gradually carried out worldwide as an alternative to mechanical circulatory support in children with end-stage left ventricular dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) complicated with heart failure(HF), and has achieved encouraging early and mid-term outcomes. Technically, PAB is simple, safe, and effective. This is a promising therapeutic strategy, especially in developing countries where heart transplantation is difficult to implement. As a transition before transplantation, and even a potential treatment, PAB brings more options and hope for children with heart failure who are waiting for transplantation and are refractory to drug therapy. This article reviews the past and current situation, the mechanism, the surgical timing, and application prospect of PAB in the treatment of DCM complicated with heart failure.

Experienced emotions, emotion regulation strategies, and regulation depletion in collective team collapse and performance recovery situations

The collective collapse of a team’s performance is typically triggered by a critical event, such as performance failure or scoring of the opponent, evoking unhelpful emotions and their transfer between team members. These changes in emotional states also affect athletes’ cognitive processes and behaviors, maintaining the team collapse and prohibiting the team from recovering its performance. However, not every critical event and the emotions that accompany it evoke a team collapse, which is why athletes’ emotion regulation may play a key role in determining the performance outcome of a critical event for the team. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted a retrospective-online survey study with 69 team sport athletes, assessing the emotion regulation strategies they applied in past team collapse vs. performance recovery situations, and how these strategies impacted them. We used quantitative measures to assess experienced emotions, individual and interpersonal emotion regulation, and depleting effects of emotion regulation in both situations and an open-ended qualitative question to assess interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in more detail. Athletes reported more unhelpful emotions and the increased use of affect-worsening and performance hindering individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in the team collapse compared to the performance recovery situation. Athletes further indicated higher levels of effort regulating emotions and higher depletion levels in the team collapse situation. Our results highlight the importance of individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in team collapse situations and indicate the use of more effective and less depleting strategies for sport teams to mitigate against a team collapse. Lay summary: This correlational study explored experienced emotions, individual and interpersonal emotion regulation, and its depleting effects in team collapse situations vs. situations where teams recovered their performance after a critical event. Athletes used inefficient, affect-worsening strategies, experienced more unhelpful emotions, and felt more depleted in team collapse vs. performance recovery situations.

From Teaching with Cases to Teaching through Case Development: Making Purchasing Managers and Students the Designers of Learning Journeys

The prevailing approach to producing and teaching case studies in purchasing and supply management (PSM) education involves faculty members’ creating and providing finished cases for course participants to work with. This traditional approach still has merit; but PSM education also must evolve to meet the increasing and changing demands that PSM executives face in practice. We offer an advanced and experiential learning method, wherein participants both in degree courses and in executive education programs develop a case study and the accompanying teaching material based on their engagement with real-life PSM challenges. In particular, the process of crafting a teaching note requires participants to adopt a teacher’s mindset and competencies, enhancing their effectiveness in practice as facilitators of ecosystems and as change managers. We also encourage faculty members to broaden the application of case studies beyond working on past situations. Case studies can be the end-product of field projects (consulting cases), and their development and use can be an integral part of a change management process when they become the means to gain employee commitment for ongoing strategic initiatives (implementation cases). The latter approach is particularly fruitful when case development is used in customized executive education programs because it allows the participants’ learning to feed directly into major ongoing change projects in their company. As such, cases and the case development process have the potential to develop participants’ competencies and to create direct business impact in far broader ways than traditional case study pedagogy allows.

Healthcare professionals' experience with nutritional care beyond formal quality systems — A qualitative study

BackgroundNumerous formal strategies, screening tools, and interventions have been used to prevent malnutrition in long-term care patients. Despite these efforts, the proportion of screened patients is low, and a large proportion are malnourished. Previous research has revealed that healthcare professionals use a broad approach in their nutritional care but has also emphasised the need for further investigation into these approaches. ObjectiveTo explore how healthcare professionals working in long-term care experience and apply nutritional care. DesignA descriptive, exploratory, qualitative design containing 240 h of participant observation, 12 focus groups and 2 individual interviews. Setting(s)Twelve nursing homes and home care units in three Norwegian municipalities. ParticipantsParticipant observation of interactions between healthcare professionals and patients. Forty-three registered nurses participated in focus group or individual interviews. MethodsThe data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. ResultsThe analysis identified three themes: The first theme, limited significance of nutritional screening, showed that healthcare professionals experienced the limited value of nutritional screening, as it often did not capture patients' nutritional challenges. They also perceived nutritional screening as unsuitable for patients at the end of their lives, those with overweight-related complications, or undergoing rehabilitation. In addition, nutritional screening was perceived as something healthcare professionals did for their managers or administrators, not because it was crucial to providing good nutritional care. The second theme, provision of individualised food, captures the healthcare professionals' efforts in adapting and preparing food according to the patient's preferences. Facilitation to enable patients to make individual food choices and the use of food cards or lists were two approaches to individualising nutrition care. The third theme, making meals more than about food, elucidated how healthcare professionals used meals to help patients cope with their situations and experience social belonging. Conversations about or around meals were used to provide patients with a sense of belonging to their past or present situation. The meals were also used as a diversion strategy for patients with unrest, as arenas for daily activity training, and for meaningful social interactions between patients around the tables. ConclusionsNutritional screening and prevention of malnutrition are only one part of healthcare professionals' nutritional care. Individualised food and meals that create coping, a sense of belonging, and social experiences are equally important parts of their care. Emphasising healthcare professional's person-centred approach to nutritional care would be beneficial, as it could strengthen and further develop long-term nutritional care services.

The inclination of the Sri Lankan Sinhalese Village Community Towards Hela Medicine and Traditional Food and Drinks During the Post-COVID Pandemic Period

The ancient village society lived with a focus on local Hela medicine and traditional food and drinks. The current village society is a group of people who live collectively while maintaining their ancient identity claiming a self-sufficient lifestyle. Against this background, the objective is to study the past situation and the modern nature and the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on it. Relevant information was obtained by using the data obtained through interviews with 58 rural households in Alagalla village belonging to Hatharaliyadda Divisional Secretariat Division and from the records of the village officer and the records of the local medical hall. According to these data, it was revealed that there is a wide knowledge and use of the traditional hand medicine of the past villagers in the sample of 10 people over 60 years old. But in the later period, it is possible to identify the distance from this due to leaning towards the Western medicine system, focusing on fast food, and not paying much attention to local medicines. With the after-effects of the Corona epidemic and people's attention being focused on local medicines and food and drinks, the focus was again on this. This is 100% according to the data. The temptation to grow local foods of the past can be identified. It is 80 days according to the data. Among those crops, turmeric, figs, dandila, milk yam, cassava, herbs, and vegetables are the main ones. In the post-COVID pandemic period, trust in local food and Hela medicine has been gained due to Western doctors advising on the use of local herbs, rural people turning to Hela medicine due to the side effects of vaccinations, and increased media awareness. Among the local medicines, the use of a decoction of katupila, Nelli, Aralu, Bulu, Rasakinda, Honey, Nika, Tumba, etc. can be mentioned. Based on this background, introducing Hela medicine as a successful treatment method in the post-Corona period and improving local medicine are the main tasks to be done here. It is correct to say that there is a timely need to discuss the preservation of this valuable wealth of knowledge in Hela medicine as an intangible cultural heritage and its use in current practices. The study revealed that in the wake of the post-COVID epidemic, there is a renewed understanding of Hela medicine and local food and drinks among the rural people.

Reappraising a Parent can Occur With Non-suggestive Questions: Changing Emotions and Memories of Emotion.

Whether it is possible to reappraise parents using non-suggestive questions, and whether this has an impact on emotions and memories, is of great interest in both life and psychotherapy. Past research has shown reappraisals of past situations is associated with changes in memories of emotions. In previous work we showed memories of love could be affected by reappraisals, but did not analyze that dataset on other memories of emotion. The current paper investigates the effect of reappraisals toward participants' mothers on the emotions: happiness, interest, sadness, and anger (and on memories of those emotions in childhood). Results show that emotions appeared to be significantly changed by reappraisals. In Experiment 1 (N = 301; Mage = 36), we found memories of emotion were affected, especially memory of happiness in childhood, but to a lesser degree compared to current emotions. This offered some confirmation of the cognitive appraisal view of memories of emotions. Experiment 2 (N = 202; Mage = 36) with pretest and posttest measures showed some similar patterns, but with slightly muted effects. Therapists and clients should be aware that non-suggestive prompts might lead to reappraisals of parents, with knock on effects on emotions and memories. Whether this should be part of informed consent in therapy is open to debate.

Working Memory Workload When Making Complex Decisions: A Behavioral and EEG Study.

Working memory (WM) is crucial for adequate performance execution in effective decision-making, enabling individuals to identify patterns and link information by focusing on current and past situations. This work explored behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) WM correlates through a novel decision-making task, based on real-life situations, assessing WM workload related to contextual variables. A total of 24 participants performed three task phases (encoding, retrieval, and metacognition) while their EEG activity (delta, theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands) was continuously recorded. From the three phases, three main behavioral indices were computed: Efficiency in complex Decision-making, Tolerance of Decisional Complexity, and Metacognition of Difficulties. Results showed the central role of alpha and beta bands during encoding and retrieval: decreased alpha/beta activity in temporoparietal areas during encoding might indicate activation of regions related to verbal WM performance and a load-related effect, while decreased alpha activity in the same areas and increased beta activity over posterior areas during retrieval might indicate, respectively, active information processing and focused attention. Evidence from correlational analysis between the three indices and EEG bands are also discussed. Integration of behavioral and metacognitive data gathered through this novel task and their interrelation with EEG correlates during task performance proves useful to assess WM workload during complex managerial decision-making.

Empirical Analysis of the Relationship Between Debt Level and Business Performance of List Companies in the A-share Real Estate Industry

Since China's reform and opening, the real estate industry has moved towards marketization, with rapid development with the help of market opportunities and financial leverage. However, in recent years, China has continued to promote industrial structure transformation and deleveraging, and affected by the world economy, the epidemic, and other factors, the market has continued to cool, and the past development situation is no longer applicable to the present, and the change in the real estate industry is imminent. Taking the real estate enterprises listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares as the analysis object, this paper uses the data from three consecutive years from 2019 to 2021, uses the Stata data analysis tool to conduct empirical analysis, and analyzes the relationship between the debt level and business performance of enterprises in the real estate industry in different regions through descriptive statistical analysis and multiple linear regression analysis. The results show that the results vary in different regions, and there is a significant positive correlation between the operating performance and debt level of real estate enterprises in other regions, while the north, Shanghai, and Guangzhou regions do not. The state should strengthen supervision, encourage new financing channels, promote the transformation of enterprise asset structure, optimize the level of assets and liabilities, and then reduce financial risks and ensure the benign development of the market.

Conservative Bias and Endowment Effect in Investment Decision-Making Process: Development and Validation of Scale

Objective: This work aims to investigate two biases - conservatism and endowment effect - to then build an instrument capable of measuring them. Theoretical Framework: The advancement of studies in behavioral finance has led to the conclusion that individuals evaluate their gains and losses based on individual references. Thus, the perception from which they make decisions is individual and, therefore, subjective. Method: Based on a literature review, the main characteristics of both biases were collected and then a questionnaire was applied to a sample of 150 managers. The data collected from the answers to the questionnaire were subjected to exploratory factor analysis and Cronbach reliability test. Results and Discussion: The findings of this research highlighted three components to the conservatism bias. These components are: Conservatism in investment decisions, Conservatism and security, Conservatism in financing decisions. For the endowment effect, a component was identified and named with the same name as the effect. Research Implications: The indicators of the factor Conservatism in Investment Decisions show that managers are attached to information and past situations, so that they feel uncomfortable in the face of new scenarios. The indicators Conservatism and security and Conservatism in financing decisions indicated the preference for safer investments. The endowment effect indicators were lower, however, they were still able to highlight the indirect influence on the managers in the sample. This problem may arise from the nature of the assets managed by managers, in which established ownership is not perceived. Originality/Value: This study contributes to the literature by develop an instrument capable of identifying and measuring the conservatism and endowment effect biases of managers to pave the way for a discussion about the topic.

Reliving Situation in Learning Literary Text: The Initial Part of E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake”

Theories concerning the situational factor in learning, SLT and situated cognition for instances, attach emphasis to the role of contextualization played in the effective learning. Based on a brief discussion of reliving situation, this paper probes into its application in learning literary text. The initial part of E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” serves as the material for the case study. It proves that in composing this autobiographical White makes full use of linguistic devices to recreate a vivid but past situation to relive specific part of his life experiences, involving his journeys to a Maine lake as child in the past and as a father now. Then, there is an implication that a learner of literary text should create continuous situations in reading so as to achieve a deeper understanding of an author, including his or her particular temperament and artistic style.

Property registration of the ownership right to the agricultural land

The paper highlights the existing legal, doctrinal, and practical state in Georgia and other countries abroad in the context of registration of ownership rights to agricultural plots by legitimate owners. Hence, the paper is a synthesis of theory and practice dealing with the social and state significance of agricultural land and voices several problems that arise in the process of recognizing the right to ownership of agricultural land plots legally owned by individuals or legal entities. In addition, it also emphasizes the reasons that lead to these problems both at the legislative and doctrinal levels. This article reviews the approach of Georgian law in terms of obtaining rights to agricultural land, especially the mechanisms of registration of property rights by legitimate owners. Historical, and comparative legal research methods used in the paper, cover the past, present, and future situation in terms of legal development of the agricultural field.

The Past and Present Situation of Opisthorchis viverrini Infection in Thailand

Opisthorchis viverrini, a major foodborne trematode, remains a major public health concern in Thailand, particularly in the northern and northeastern provinces. O. viverrini can be transferred to people and reservoir hosts through the consumption of uncooked cyprinid fish with metacercariae. Chronic infection with O. viverrini can lead to a severe condition known as cholangiocarcinoma (CCA). According to the Nationwide Hospital Admission Database, Thailand has experienced the highest incidence of CCA globally in recent years. Particularly, between 2009 and 2013, there was an incidence rate of 14.6 cases per 100,000 individuals within the population and a corresponding mortality rate (MR) of 14%. In addition, high incidence rates of CCA were reported in Khon Kaen Province from 1989 to 2018, with a rate of 36.1 per 100,000 person-years in men and 14.4 per 100,000 person-years in women. Despite the reduction in the overall prevalence of O. viverrini at the national level, several studies have indicated that the infection remains highly prevalent in some communities in the northeastern and northern regions. Some communities have demonstrated a prevalence of O. viverrini exceeding 20%, and rates reaching as high as 45.7%. Therefore, in populations with a high prevalence, programs to control this parasite should be implemented, including monitoring eating habits. This review article provides a comprehensive overview of the current distribution of O. viverrini in Thailand, outlining its pathophysiology, background, and preventive and control strategies. In addition, this review suggests that individuals in high-risk communities should act to eradicate liver fluke, as this is crucial for the overall health of the community.

Acting out as criminal impulse. History, Definitions, Forensic aspects

The present article aims to conduct a comprehensive review of the existing scientific literature on this human behavioral modality, impulsive and transient, which escapes the conscious control of the subject, from a psychopathological and forensic approach. To achieve this, historical points about the different nuances of the topic will be made, supplying a panoramic and critical overview of it. It can be said that these are implicit memories about past traumatic situations that, because of a present reenactment of the unpleasant event through a dissociative mechanism, generate in the individual an impulsive aggressive reaction, over which the person has no control or awareness. This type of behavior opens the debate, within the framework of Forensic Psychology and Psychiatry, about the defendants' ability, under these circumstances, to understand the criminality of the act and direct their actions, posing a controversial challenge to the criteria of different courts. Similarly, it is necessary to understand these behaviors, develop more proper prevention strategies, propose new therapeutic approaches to psychological trauma, and intervene in these criminal behaviors that endanger society's safety and well-being.

Whose questions? Ventriloquation in entrepreneurial podcasts

While interaction is a signature feature of podcasts, new research on selected entrepreneurial podcasts has shown how they are de-dramatized as part of the leadership branding project, indexing the genre’s transition from a homespun to a corporate medium and echoing the notion of media re-colonization. This article reports on a case study of the use of questions in a single entrepreneur’s six-episode podcast series. We set out to identify and analyse what we see as ‘re-dramatization’ strategies, creating a sense of interaction and heteroglossia in what is essentially a monologue. Next, triangulating with insights from multimodal discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography, our analysis points to ventriloquation. Through questions that are presented as reported (i.e. referring back to questions that were raised on some earlier occasion), the entrepreneur makes himself or others say something, staging a specific past situation (real or imagined) where questions were asked and thus creating an enhanced sense of author-ity. As for questions that are presented as asked at the moment of speaking (we call them direct questions), the results of our inquiry indicate that the entrepreneur is ventriloquating either what he believes the listener might want to ask him or what he himself was previously asked by the podcast producer. We suggest that the entrepreneur is accommodating more actively to his listenership than it seems at first sight and conclude by reflecting on how this sheds new light on the entrepreneurial podcast as a tool of leadership communication as part of the wider digital mediascape, on the interactive use of questions in general and on the potential of our multi-method approach.

Commentary on Pardo et al.: Whatever the past situation, drug precursor chemicals may in future represent an important source for synthetic drug production in Afghanistan and surrounding countries.

Commentary on Pardo et al.: Whatever the past situation, drug precursor chemicals may in future represent an important source for synthetic drug production in Afghanistan and surrounding countries.

The medial prefrontal cortex leaves the hippocampus when it prepares for the future.

Our memories help us plan for the future. In some cases, we use memories to repeat the choices that led to preferable outcomes in the past. The success of these memory-guided decisions depends on close interactions between the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex. In other cases, we need to use our memories to deduce hidden connections between the present and past situations to decide the best choice of action based on the expected outcome. Our recent study investigated neural underpinnings of such inferential decisions by monitoring neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus in rats. We identified several neural activity patterns indicating awake memory trace reactivation and restructuring of functional connectivity among multiple neurons. We also found that these patterns occurred concurrently with the ongoing hippocampal activity when rats recalled past events but not when they planned new adaptive actions. Here, we discussed how these computational properties might contribute to success in inferential decision-making and propose a working model on how the medial prefrontal cortex changes its interaction with the hippocampus depending on whether it reflects on the past or looks into the future.

Data analysis with different variables and credit risk assessment

Nowadays, credit payment is a very common way to pay, such as credit cards, loans, many people can use their credit as a guarantee to borrow money from the bank, however some people will default. So we have to predict whether the borrower will pay on time, it is known as credit risk assessment. In this paper, we analyze a data set on credit risk to predict whether individuals will be late on their payments, helping financial firms improve their earnings and reduce their losses. We not only made predictions on the data, but also analyzed the relationship between the variables that affect the overdue probability to find some specific associations. Specifically, we performed ANOVA analysis and found that married people borrowed significantly more than other groups, and the delinquency rate of people with higher education was lower, and the delinquency rate of married people was higher than that of unmarried people. In addition, we conducted a binary logistic regression and found that gender had no significant impact on the prediction results, but an individuals amount of bill statement, amount of previous payment, past repayment situation and Amount of the given credit had an impact on the prediction results. Other variables, such as marital status and education, can also impact the predicted results. Our research puts forward more factors affecting credit risk and also different angles that can be used to analyzes individual credit risk. This has a guiding role for financial firms like banks and other companies in the financial industry, providing more ways to help them analyze the credit risk of borrowers.

Reliability updating for lateral failure of historic quay walls

ABSTRACT The historic canal walls of Amsterdam, stretching 200 km in total, are constructed as a masonry wall on a timber deck supported by vertical timber piles. Understanding the resistance against lateral failure of these quays has been challenging due to uncertainties in their working principles, geometry, soil and structural properties. This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to include evidence from past loading situations and corresponding deformations into the reliability assessment. This approach enables refinement of the reliability predictions and parameter distribution uncertainties, leading to a more accurate prediction of the resistance against the lateral failure of historic quay wall. Depending on the type of evidence, an a-priori reliability prediction for a quay wall that fails to meet safety standards can be updated to any of the three consequence classes outlined in NEN8700. In a case study, a quay wall with an a-priori reliability of β = 1.5 has been increased to β = 3.2 by including evidence of an extreme survived load of 10 kN/m2 that resulted in displacements of less than 4 mm. This is a decrease in failure probability by two orders of magnitude, showing the potential impact of using observational information in combination with Bayesian updating.

Evaluation of master’s degree programmes in project and construction management: an agglomerative hierarchical clustering study

This study examines master's degree programmes in project and construction management in Turkey and the TRNC until 2022. It covers 16 master's degree programmes and represents their current status. The study groups courses to evaluate and develop the contents of the master's degree programmes. It creates course knowledge areas through course grouping and provides the numerical data necessary for the clustering process. The study clusters similar and related master's degree programmes using the AHC method and proposes new programme names for the classes obtained with AHC. This paper intends to serve as a guide for research on active master's degree programmes in project and construction management, to update and/or develop such programmes, and to evaluate the past and present situation for future studies.

Distributed Artificial Intelligence Application in Agri-food Supply Chains 4.0

Supply Chain 4.0 is characterized by various factors, including seamless integration and connectivity, the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, AI participation, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), flexibility, adaptability, and customer-centricity across different parts of the supply chain. The application of Distributed AI (DAI) systems like Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) opens new horizons to enhance the efficiency, responsiveness, and intelligence of these supply chains. DAI facilitates advanced autonomous decision-making and real-time optimization at different stages of the agri-food supply chain, such as demand forecasting, inventory management, production planning, logistics optimization, and quality assurance and control. This article, by focusing on the case of scheduling through the entire supply chain, examines how DAI initiatives, including Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) enhanced with Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), enable the distribution of intelligence across smart, interconnected elements of the supply chain network. It is shown that through the use of DAI in SCM, the performance of the entire supply chain optimizes consistently and adaptively through the use of MAS, in which different parts of SCM collaborate as agents. Supply Chain 4.0 can gain autonomy, self-organization, self-optimization, self-adaptation, robustness, and flexibility, and its knowledge base can be enriched over time by using CBR to learn from past situations. It also discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with the adoption of DAI in Supply Chain 4.0, including operational efficiency, cost reduction, agility enhancement, and improved customer satisfaction. However, several concerns, such as data security, privacy issues, and interoperability, must be addressed.