Public Production Research Articles

Impaired Emotional Processing in Major Depressive Disorder. Accuracy versus Processing Speed

Depression is one of the most frequent conditions within the general population, ranking among the most burdensome in terms of public health expenses, productivity loss and social costs. The condition has been linked with cognitive deficits that may even continue in remission phases, social cognition being one potentially affected cognitive function. In our study, the Penn’s Emotional Acuity Test included in the CogtestTM battery was used to assess emotion recognition accuracy and processing speed. The Structured Clinical Interview for the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale was used to assess the intensity of the symptomatology. A total of 48 depressed individual individuals (65% females), with a mean age of 49.8 ± 10.4 years, and 40 healthy controls (75% females), with a mean age of 35.2 ± 6.9 years were included. As compared to controls, depressive participants recorded significantly less correct answers (9.3 ± 3.8 vs. 11.2 ± 3.6, p = 0.019 – Student’s t test) and slower processing speeds (6795 ± 3366 vs. 4042 ± 1623, p 0.001 – Mann-Whitney U test) in emotion processing. Furthermore, symptom severity significantly influences only processing speed and not accuracy in emotion recognition tasks. Thus, we conclude that depressive individuals have a significant deficit in processing speed and accuracy when identifying the intensity of other peoples’ emotions.

Making valuable energy: Public forums, municipal futures, and infrastructural pathways

This article analyzes public discussions and engagements with Philadelphia’s energy system to highlight the degrees of tension between diverse ethical frames and energy-based strategies of value production. Looking at three different instances and genres of energy-transition planning and expression, we argue that any such tensions or alignments turn on the specific units, categories, and scales of analysis used to construct and understand them. Our first section investigates the spatial and temporal frames of “energy security” embedded in Philadelphia’s infrastructure improvement plan, showing how the meaning and political purchase of the concept of “security” changes across quotidian and infrastructural timescales and across the spatial scale of the household, city, state, and the nation. Section two considers the categories with which the City framed its study of potential decarbonization scenarios, pointing towards the way this schema produced its own seemingly intractable ethical and economic impasses. The third and final section looks at the way diverse members of the public successfully de- and re-constructed the study’s categories, scales, and units of analysis, successfully undermining the study’s “grid of intelligibility” and replacing it with their own more equity-centered alternative. Across these three ethnographic engagements, this article brings the anthropologies of ethics and value together in a novel way, showing their mediated entanglement with and within the sphere of public knowledge production. This, we argue, illustrates the seemingly mundane scalar choices that deeply inform our ethical frames and that, in the end, ultimately allow us to make energy valuable.

Bibliometric Mapping of the Scientific Production of Lasers in Endodontics: Collaborative Networks, Impact, and Trends

Abstract Aim: The objective of this study is to perform a bibliometric mapping of the scientific production of lasers in endodontics using collaborative networks, impact, and trends. Materials and Methods: This retrospective and descriptive study used a bibliometric design to analyze laser use in endodontics in Scopus from 2018 to 2024. In total, 877 documents were identified using key terms and MeSH. Bibliometric indicators were used to explore scientific activity and impact, and VOSviewer was used for data analysis. Results: It was found that the year with the highest number of publications was 2023, with 166, and the quartiles with the highest productivity were Q1 (40.3%) and Q2 (31.1%). Among the top 5 countries with the highest publications production, Brazil led the group with 125, followed by India (111). Among the institutions with the highest production, the Universidade de São Paulo tops the list with 51 research papers, closely followed by the Tehran University of Medical Sciences with 32 and the Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho with 30. Among the most outstanding authors, we have Chiniforush Nasim, who has 20 papers; however, Duarte Marco has an h-index of 48, and Sivieri-Araújo Gustavo has the highest number of citations. Conclusion: This bibliometric mapping reaffirmed the vision and trends of lasers in endodontics, with 2023 being the most relevant in terms of scientific production and, among the countries with the highest number of publications, Brazil stood out.

The Past Has Ears at Notre-Dame: Acoustic digital twins for research and narration

The recent fire at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris has motivated a series of studies attempting to understand better the acoustics of Notre-Dame, its evolution over the centuries, and its influence on music, extending to projections in aid of its restoration. To accomplish these, a digital twin of the cathedral, reflecting the acoustic conditions, was created and subsequently varied to reconstruct the buildings' historical and possible future states. While fundamentally employed for various research studies, the project's cultural importance obliged consideration of means to share and disseminate its efforts to the general public. Highlighting this aspect, the methodology and details of two completed public productions realised in this work are presented here, exposing how the research tools developed and the scientific results previously obtained were transformed into mediatisation productions through different methods of narration.

Epigenomic Dysregulation in Youth Vapers: Implications for Disease Risk Assessment.

Despite the ongoing epidemic of youth vaping, the long-term health consequences of electronic cigarette use are largely unknown. We report the effects of vaping versus smoking on the oral cell methylome of healthy young vapers and smokers relative to non-users. Whereas vapers and smokers differ in number of differentially methylated regions (DMRs) (831 vs 2,863), they share striking similarities in the distribution and patterns of DNA methylation, chromatin states, transcription factor binding motifs, and pathways. There is substantial overlap in DMR-associated genes between vapers and smokers, with the shared subset of genes enriched for transcriptional regulation, signaling, tobacco use disorders, and cancer-related pathways. Of significance is the identification of a common hypermethylated DMR at the promoter of "Hypermethylated In Cancer 1" (HIC1), a tumor suppressor gene frequently silenced in smoking-related cancers. Our data support a potential link between epigenomic dysregulation in youth vapers and disease risk. These novel findings have significant implications for public health and tobacco product regulation.

Factors Determining the Risks of an Insurance Contract

The process of public production is interrupted or disrupted as a result of the destructive action of natural forces or as a result of various negative situations. The creation of such undesirable situations is a regular process and is connected with the contradictory nature of public production. The risk indicators should also be discussed. In order to overcome the existing negative situations, as well as to provide unconditional compensation for the caused damage, insurance certainly plays a crucial role. Insurance expresses what kind of economic relations act as economic categories. The essence of the insurance is that the damage will be distributed among many insurers, and their contribution will be relatively small for each of them. Moreover, Insurance is a set of economic relations between its participants, caused by the formation of a target insurance fund and its use in order to cover losses and pay insurance sums. Insurance risk lies in the basis of insurance. Keywords: Economic relationship, insurance amount, insurance payment, insurance rate.

Topic-aware Masked Attentive Network for Information Cascade Prediction

Predicting information cascades holds significant practical implications, including applications in public opinion analysis, rumor control, and product recommendation. Existing approaches have generally overlooked the significance of semantic topics in information cascades or disregarded the dissemination relations. Such models are inadequate in capturing the intricate diffusion process within an information network inundated with diverse topics. To address such problems, we propose a neural-based model using Topic-Aware Masked Attentive Network for Information Cascade Prediction (ICP-TMAN) to predict the next infected node of an information cascade. First, we encode the topical text into user representation to perceive the user-topic dependency. Next, we employ a masked attentive network to devise the diffusion context to capture the user-context dependency. Finally, we exploit a deep attention mechanism to model historical infected nodes for user embedding enhancement to capture user-history dependency. The results of extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of ICP-TMAN over existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Evaluating the Effects of Public Debt on Sri Lanka’s Economic Growth: A Short-term and Long-term Perspective

Aims: The objective of this paper is to examine whether public debt enhances economic growth in Sri Lanka by separating debt into domestic and external debt. Study Design: The paper adopts the Keynesian demand-side model to estimate GDP on demand-side and supply-side factors such as domestic debt, external debt, gross fixed capital formation (investment in short), labour force, general price level, money supply, government spending and trade openness. In a model where debt causes investment, public debt effects are netted out from investment by removing the estimated investment effects of domestic and external debt. Duration of Study: quarterly data from Q1 2010 to Q1 2023 are utilized to trace the long-term and the short-term effects of domestic and external debt on GDP. Methodology: The ARDL method of estimation is used and the model is estimated in double log form so that estimated parameters reflect output elasticities. A general to specific modelling approach is adopted to find the best suited model. Results: Variables such as government spending, money supply, general price level and labour force are not relevant while domestic debt, external debt, investment (debt effects netted out) and trade openness are significant in describing GDP. The long-term domestic debt elasticity of GDP is 0.588 while short-term domestic debt elasticity (sum of contemporaneous and lag effects) is about 0.63. The cumulative effects of domestic debt on GDP tappers off to 0.60 in the long-run. The result suggests negative impacts (-0.272 and -0.254) of external debt on the economic growth in short-term and long-term respectively. The negative effect of external debt can be justified if recent external borrowings have been used to repay loans taken to finance war and unproductive projects. Conclusion: The paper finds that the domestic public debt creates relatively strong positive effects on GDP in the short-term and the long-term. Contrary to the expectations, the effects of external debt on GDP have become negative both in the short-term and the long-term. The paper also finds that debt effects on GDP have been significantly reduced when debt effect-ridden investment variable is included in the regression in place of debt-effect netted out investment. Thus, this study recommends researchers to carry out further research on why the effects of external debt on GDP become negative. Further, it recommends policy makers to use both domestic and external debt to finance public investment and productivity enhancement projects rather than borrowing merely for the purpose of consumption and repaying of existing debt.

A spatial scientometric analysis of urban planning publications from 2010–2020: geographic disparities in urban planning knowledge production

PurposeThis paper analyzes and illustrates the spatial distribution of publications in international urban planning journals from 2010 to 2020.Design/methodology/approachThe study employs the Biblioshiny bibliometrix package in R to analyze 44,123 articles from 95 international planning journals. To conduct the spatial scientometric analysis, we adopted the United Nations’ geoscheme focusing on three geographical scales: country, subregion, and region. Collaboration patterns at the country and subregional levels were examined using the VOSviewer tool.FindingsThe study found evidence of a spatial polarization of urban planning scholarly knowledge production. Scholars based in the United States and the United Kingdom consistently published at higher rates than any other country in our data set. The region producing the largest number of publications was Europe, consisting of 39.92% of the total publication count. However, urban planning scholars from the Global South authored only 20.96% of planning publications from 2010–2020. Centralization of planning research is also evident within each region and subregion. As such, both the Global North and the Global South should not be framed as homogenous entities and spatial patterns of knowledge production should not be generalized. The analysis also established the emerging role of Northern America as a major collaborator in inter-country and inter-subregional research collaborations. Co-authorship patterns indicate low intra-regional collaboration in planning research, except for Europe.Originality/valueThis article argues that a culture of exclusivity may be occurring in urban planning publication production. By highlighting the spatial disparities in knowledge production, we emphasize the need to examine the structural and institutional barriers that exclude urban planning knowledge emerging from the peripheries in international planning journals.

On corporate total factor productivity: public procurement

PurposeThis study attempts to uncover the nonlinear relationship between public procurement and corporate total factor productivity (CTFP), and investigates the mediating roles of R&D investment and rent-seeking cost. Additionally, it conducts a heterogeneity analysis for firms with varying levels of political connections and corporate social responsibility (CSR).Design/methodology/approachEmploying Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Olley-Pakes (OP) methods, the authors gauge CTFP and manually identify government customers to quantify public procurement. Leveraging panel data from Chinese listed companies, this study explores the relationship between public procurement and CTFP.FindingsThis study unveils a U-shaped relationship between public procurement and CTFP, highlighting R&D investment and rent-seeking costs as potential mechanisms. Furthermore, it identifies heterogeneous effects among companies with varying levels of political connections and CSR on the relationship between public procurement and CTFP, including their mediating effects.Practical implicationsThis research enhances understanding of demand-side policies and provides crucial insights for the government to further improve public procurement policies.Originality/valueBy offering empirical evidence of how public procurement impacts CTFP, this paper enriches the literature on the behavioral repercussions of public procurement and the determinants of CTFP. It also overcomes the “black box” of the mechanism between public procurement and CTFP, based on the government’s dual role as a pathfinder and customer of enterprises. It broadens the application scenarios of institutional theory and principal-agent theory. Additionally, the heterogeneity analysis of firms with varying political connections and CSR extends the frontiers of related research.

Cube: An Open-Source Software for Clock Offset Estimation and Precise Point Positioning with Ambiguity Resolution

Precise point positioning (PPP) is a prevalent, high-precision spatial absolution positioning method, and its performance can be enhanced by ambiguity resolution (AR). To fulfill the growing need for high-precision positioning, we developed an open-source GNSS data processing package based on the decoupled clock model called Cube, which integrates decoupled clock offset estimation and precise point positioning with ambiguity resolution (PPP-AR). Cube is a secondary development based on RTKLIB. Besides the decoupled clock model, Cube can also estimate legacy clocks for the International GNSS Service (IGS), as well as clocks with satellite code bias extraction, and perform PPP-AR using the integer-recovered clock model. In this work, we designed satellite clock estimation and PPP-AR experiments with one week of GPS data to validate Cube’s performance. Results show that the software can produce high-precision satellite clock products and positioning results that are adequate for daily scientific study. With Cube, researchers do not need to rely on public PPP-AR products, and they can estimate decoupled clock products and implement PPP-AR anytime.

Unleashing Legal Polycentricity in Europe?

The questioning of the public and monopolistic production of European Union law is extremely little, if at all, addressed by European Union legal theory. The article proposes to divide the reasons for this absence into two classes. The first part of the article explores reasons endogenous to European Union law. The second part is devoted to reasons that are part of the evolutionary context of European Union law, stemming from facts of a historical, political, epistemological and societal nature. The article suggests to refer to the theory of constitutional polycentric order developed by the American legal theorist Randy Barnett, as well as Friedrich Hayek's theory of interstate federation proposed as early as 1939. Despite the apparent difficulties presented by the Union's contemporary organization, mechanisms specific to European Union law and European culture are capable of supporting the rehabilitation of polycentric conception of Union law and Hayekian interstate federation.

The influence of fruit and vegetable mixtures on the organoleptic properties of sorbets

Currently, the quality of school meals plays important role for the parents of schoolchildren. Expanding the range of food with hypoallergenic products is an urgent problem. In our research sorbet was used as a research object. Fruit and vegetable crops were used as the basis for the sorbet prototype. Zucchini, green apple and white currant were selected as the main ingredients of sorbets, taking into account the recommendations of a non-specific hypoallergenic diet. The goal of the research was to develop a recipe and conduct an organoleptic evaluation of a dessert based on zucchini, apples and currants. The task was to conduct an organoleptic evaluation of the prototype sorbet. The study of organoleptic indicators was carried out in accordance with GOST 31986-2012 «Catering services. Method of organoleptic assessment of the quality of public catering products». Test batches of the dessert were carried out at the Volgograd State Agrarian University at the Department of Processing and Food Production Technologies. In terms of organoleptic indicators, the new product met all technical requirements. The appearance of sorbet, a single-layer dessert in the form of a ball without glaze, decorated with mint greens. The consistency was dense. The taste was clean, characteristic of apple and currant, without any foreign tastes or odors. The color was light green, uniform throughout the mass. The product sample met the requirements of GOST R 55624-2013 «Whipped frozen fruit, vegetable and fruit-vegetable desserts. Technical conditions». A tasting evaluation of the sorbet was carried out. Employing the arithmetic mean value, the overall rating of the prototype was the highest. The use of zucchini, green apple and white currant in combination in the production of sorbet has not reduced the quality criteria of this dessert.

Cropland inundation mapping in a mountain dominated region based on multi-resolution remotely sensed imagery and active learning for semantic segmentation

Accurate and timely mapping of cropland inundated area is critical to loss assessment and recovery plan development. However, existing methods for cropland inundation mapping using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery are primarily designed for plain regions and may not be suitable for mountainous regions. The complex rugged terrain at large scale present challenges such as significant noise from radar shadows, smooth surfaces, floodplains, and permanent water bodies. To remove these noise for effectively mapping of cropland inundation, this study proposes a robust two-stage framework integrating the multi-resolution remotely sensed imageries and semantic segmentation method. First, active learning for cropland extraction is performed with Google Very-High-Resolution (VHR) imagery and Segformer model. Second, the cropland inundation area is obtained using marker-controlled watershed segmentation (MCW) on Sentinel-1 SAR imagery with area-of-interest (AOI) filtering. Results show that the extracted cropland mask are superior to six public cropland data products including ESA, ESRI, FCS30, FROM, GL30, and SLOPE. In addition, with AOI filtering, the F-score of the potential flood identification using MCW was increased from 0.685 to 0.828. At last, the monthly cropland inundation caused by intense rainfall varied approximately from 6.6 km2 to 436.1 km2 during monsoon season of 2017–2022 in Guangdong. Our approach offers a fast and feasible solution for mapping cropland inundation in large and complex mountainous regions, without requiring extensive parameter tuning or additional data.

Взаимодействие коммерческих и государственных цифровых платформ: преимущества и эффекты

In the context of digital transformation in economic development, the attention of business entities is largely focused on the processes of exchanging knowledge, skills, and experience between market participants, while the priority is not the production technologies themselves but the processes of managing them. This task of developing information and communication infrastructures has been successfully solved with the help of digital platforms and digital ecosystems created both in business structures and in the fields of public and municipal administration. Multifunctional digital platforms with a complex system of interactions between their various participants, which combine several types of operational activities (development, manufacture of products, including complementary ones, bringing platform products to the consumer, etc.), are the most effective since they form the processes of sharing company assets and joint value creation. Functional differences between commercial and government digital platforms were shown, as were problems arising in this regard in their interaction in the digital environment and ways to solve them. The analysis of the practical use of digital platforms created with government participation, as exemplified by the ecosystems of PJSC Sberbank and PJSC Gazprom, is carried out. During the development of new digital platforms, oligopolistic competition arises in business, which results in the monopolization of network effects and pricing policies by the creators of the platforms. Interaction in the field of digital business between commercial and government structures makes it possible to coordinate these processes and regulate macroeconomic proportions across the country as a whole. The possible effects of the implementation of commercial digital platforms in public administration functions are determined, and the interdependencies of public and private platforms and ecosystems formed on their basis are established. The possible effects of interaction between the state and business in the course of the development of new digital platform solutions and the prospects and advantages of their joint use are revealed. The interaction of the government and business in the course of the development of new digital platform solutions allows for the growth of citizens’ solvency and creates conditions for the growth of the public product of the state as a whole. The growth of public value from the introduction of government digital platforms is essential, as is their interaction with commercial digital platforms.

Caching or not: An online cost optimization algorithm for geodistributed data analysis in cloud environments

With the wide application of big data technology, a large number of data geographically stored in data centers across various regions are generated everyday, waiting to be analyzed by big data tasks. Examples of such data analysis tasks include weather prediction and intelligent healthcare applications. Clouds are being used by more and more enterprises due to their nearly infinite resources, ease of scaling, and other characteristics. Organizations often rent StaaS (Storage-as-a-Service) storage products offered by cloud providers, such as OSS (Object Storage Service), for massive data storage, while building a big data cluster in cloud environments to analyze the collected data from various regions. However, when the data to be analyzed are not located in the rented cluster, how to efficiently and economically process the distributed input data stored in clouds becomes an urgent problem to be solved. A simple approach is to only cache frequently accessed data rather than all data from other regions into the cluster to reduce total traffic costs. However, it is generally very hard to predict future data access curves. Thus, a rash caching decision may incur more costs. To address this problem, in this paper we propose an online algorithm for guiding cloud users to make cost-effective caching decisions properly, while not requiring any future information. We prove theoretically that the competitive ratio of our online algorithm is less than 2. Finally we verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm through extensive experiments based on the real price of Alibaba’s public IaaS cloud products using both real-world Yahoo S2 data and synthesized datasets.

Output index is important to the measurement of public service productivity

Output index is important to the measurement of public service productivity

Public food procurement and production: Evidence of the food acquisition program in Brazil

This study investigates the impact of the Food Purchase Programme (PAA), a Brazilian public food procurement initiative, on the production value of family farmers. Using a combination of Propensity Score Matching and Difference-in-Differences methods for the period spanning from 2007 to 2016, we observe a significant positive effect of 13.1% on the production value of participating family farmers compared to non-participants. This effect is particularly pronounced among farmers operating smaller and lower-income establishments. Our analysis suggests that increased productivity may serve as a potential mechanism explaining our findings. Additionally, we provide evidence that the PAA program contributes to stabilizing rural incomes and expenditures. Our results have significant policy implications for public food procurement policies, including the importance of focusing on small and low-income agricultural establishments, which may enhance production and alleviate poverty while contributing to family income.

The MIMO Data Transfer Line with Seven-Frequency Octonion Carrier

Currently, with the development of public relations and production systems, there is a need to increase the capacity of communication systems and information transmission. It has been shown theoretically that it is possible to increase throughput by using multidimensional signals in space instead of real signals on a plane. It is now accepted that a multidimensional space, MultipleInput Multiple-Output (MIMO), can be formed using multiple antennas to transmit and receive in physical space. However, as physicists point out, such space is three-dimensional, and with the addition of time it is four-dimensional. It is clear that in such a physical space, when using more than 2 antennas for transmission and 2 for reception, it is impossible to obtain a gain in throughput of more than 4 times, since according to the laws of cybernetics, the diversity at the channel input will not be transmitted to the exit. It follows that it is necessary to reconsider existing views on the dimension of physical space. Previously, in the work the MIMO data transfer line with three-frequency quaternion carrier, it was shown that it is possible to use a hypercomplex quaternion number as a model of physical space. In this case, the dimension of space will be equal to 4 with 3 imaginary (spatial) axes and one scalar axis. In addition, combinations of three quaternion angular frequencies on the imaginary axes formed 4 single-frequency channels. Accordingly, the gain in throughput compared to real signals reached 4 in orthogonal axes and 4 in frequencies. In this work, an octonion with 7 imaginary (spatial) axes and one scalar is used as a mathematical model of physical space. It is shown that the dimension of physical space will be 8 with 64 single-frequency channels in the form of combinations of 7 angular frequencies. Hence, the gain in throughput will be 8 in orthogonal axes and 64 in frequencies.

Enhancing Workplace Productivity: The Nexus of Organizational Culture and Policies in Public Institutions

Aim – This study aims to explore the intricate interplay between organizational culture, policies, and productivity within a major public institution in Ghana. The primary purpose is to investigate the relationships between organizational policies, characteristics of organizational culture, and non-financial indicators of organizational productivity. Design/methodology/approach – This study utilizes a descriptive survey design, using a sample of 119 respondents randomly selected from a population of 1489 employees. Advanced statistical techniques, including Pearson Correlation and Multiple Linear Regression, are employed to identify relationships and test hypotheses. Findings – The results indicate positive and statistically significant relation-ships between organizational policies, cultural characteristics, and productivi-ty. Multiple linear regression analysis supported the hypothesis, demonstrat-ing a substantial influence of these factors on productivity. Notably, a moder-ate to strong positive correlation was found, highlighting the critical role of organizational culture in fostering improved performance. Limitations – Reliance on self-reported data raises concerns about social de-sirability bias. Additionally, the descriptive survey design allows for the identification of correlations, but causal relationships between variables can-not be established. Practical implications – This research highlights the importance of strategic policies and a supportive culture for public sector productivity. Clear policy implementation, leadership fostering a positive work environment, and en-gagement in policymaking likely enhance performance, particularly within diverse workforces. However, future research should explore causal relation-ships between these factors and productivity for deeper understanding and continuous optimization. Originality/value – This study investigates the combined effects of organiza-tional culture, policy clarity, and employee participation on productivity in a Ghanaian public institution. It contributes to the literature by confirming the positive influence of a supportive culture and well-defined policies, while emphasizing the importance of employee involvement in policy develop-ment. These findings offer practical insights for leaders seeking to enhance productivity in similar contexts.