Silver Lining Research Articles

A silver lining to a busted forecast? Building relationships after the storm through humanising messages

AbstractGrounded in the quiet weather communication typology, we conducted two between‐subjects experiments comparing humanising to organisational voice messages in predicting disaster organisation‐public relationships, publics' message passing intentions, and publics' community resilience perceptions in the U.S. tornado context. Study 1 examines these relationships in the missed event context, where a tornado was not forecasted, but occurred. Study 2 examines these relationships in the false alarm context, where a tornado was forecasted, but did not occur. Results show differing processes across the two studies, with Study 1 results showing direct message effects, but no indirect effects. Study 2 results show indirect effects of the experimental condition on the outcomes via perceptions of conversational human voice. The discussion extends the quiet weather communication typology by theorising how context influences message strategy effectiveness.

Community leaders’ sensemaking of environmental jolts: Stabilizing and silver lining framing of disruption

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has been a defining catastrophe for many communities across the world. This study focuses on a small, urban community in the United States at the regional epicenter of the pandemic with high rates of illness, death, financial hardships, and a halt to in-person school and services that lasted over a year. Drawing on institutional theory with a focus on environmental jolts and leadership sensemaking, we conducted a thematic analysis of 20 interviews with cross-sector community leaders, including city officials, school district administrators, directors of community-based organizations, and church leaders to evaluate how they made sense of COVID-19 disruptions and framed their responses to the environmental jolt caused by the pandemic in Spring, 2021. Findings illustrate how leaders framed the jolt as highlighting existing issues, maintained a focus on priorities and purpose pre-dating disruptions, and emphasized opportunities emerging from the crisis. We discuss how leaders engaged in sensemaking both as a form of stabilization, providing a rationale for maintaining pre-pandemic priorities, and as a way to motivate and leverage opportunity through an emphasis on the silver lining of the jolt. We close with implications of these findings for ongoing and future responses to environmental jolts and crises.

Silver Linings: Building Sustainable Improvement Capacity.

Silver Linings: Building Sustainable Improvement Capacity.

Is Project ECHO the transformational silver lining for interprofessional and interorganizational collaboration?

ABSTRACT The globally disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on both healthcare systems and health profession education has created an opportunity for a reassessment of methods for delivering interprofessional practice education (IPE). A good candidate for consideration is Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes). Its unique combination of structural design in connecting specialist and community-based clinical sites, foundational education theories, and didactic and case-based learning methods present an innovative and promising new method of promoting both interprofessional and interorganizational collaboration. This paper first provides a description of Project ECHO, its major features, recent expansion during the pandemic, and IPE-related research history. Second, the educational concepts and theories underlying its use and their implications for interprofessional and interorganizational collaboration are reviewed. These include community of practice and single and double-loop learning. Third, the expression of these concepts in how key elements of ECHO are utilized – including the didactic presentation; the case study presentation, discussion, and tele-mentoring; and the power of community and tele-networking – will be explored. Finally, implications and applications for the expansion of ECHO into promoting competency-based education and innovative interprofessional and interorganizational collaboration will be presented.

Metagenomic investigations into the microbial consortia, degradation pathways, and enzyme systems involved in the biodegradation of plastics in a tropical lentic pond sediment.

The exploitation of exciting features of plastics for diverse applications has resulted in significant plastic waste generation, which negatively impacts environmental compartments, metabolic processes, and the well-being of aquatic ecosystems biota. A shotgun metagenomic approach was deployed to investigate the microbial consortia, degradation pathways, and enzyme systems involved in the degradation of plastics in a tropical lentic pond sediment (APS). Functional annotation of the APS proteome (ORFs) using the PlasticDB database revealed annotation of 1015 proteins of enzymes such as depolymerase, esterase, lipase, hydrolase, nitrobenzylesterase, chitinase, carboxylesterase, polyesterase, oxidoreductase, polyamidase, PETase, MHETase, laccase, alkane monooxygenase, among others involved in the depolymerization of the plastic polymers. It also revealed that polyethylene glycol (PEG), polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), polylactic acid (PLA), polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and nylon have the highest number of annotated enzymes. Further annotation using the KEGG GhostKOALA revealed that except for terephthalate, all the other degradation products of the plastic polymers depolymerization such as glyoxylate, adipate, succinate, 1,4-butanediol, ethylene glycol, lactate, and acetaldehyde were further metabolized to intermediates of the tricarboxylic acid cycle. Taxonomic characterization of the annotated proteins using the AAI Profiler and BLASTP revealed that Pseudomonadota members dominate most plastic types, followed by Actinomycetota and Acidobacteriota. The study reveals novel plastic degraders from diverse phyla hitherto not reported to be involved in plastic degradation. This suggests that plastic pollution in aquatic environments is prevalent with well-adapted degrading communities and could be the silver lining in mitigating the impacts of plastic pollution in aquatic environments.

Exam Assessor Tool: An Automated System for Efficient Answer Sheet Evaluation

With Education 4.0 and four quadrant approach number of innovations have gone into academics for efficient, experiential, and outcome-based education however assessment schemes are still very much dependent on manual assessment methods which are time-consuming and cumbersome. The grading system can sometimes be irrational, with diversified schemes for the same course and can also be biased. Covid 19 pandemic caused a global economic avalanche like we’ve never experienced in our lifetime. Many countries have implemented control measures such as blockades and curfews. The education system in this chaos saw a silver lining with academics shifting to online mode, with paradigm shift in teaching, assessment techniques too need to evolve. Work done is an effort to ease the process of assessment, a machine learning assisted model is developed that automates subjective answer evaluation in the education sector. Our project involved several crucial steps, including grayscale conversion, Natural Language Processing (NLP) for data cleansing, data splitting, and training an artificial neural network (ANN) to predict scores based on extracted features. ANN-based system grades subjective responses without human intervention, reducing the workload of teachers and professors. Model constructed an ANN architecture with three layers using Rectified Linear Activation Unit (ReLU) and Sigmoid activation functions. Trained model was incorporated into a user-friendly web application using the Streamlit library. Model design gives a major boost in grading efficiency and accuracy while providing valuable feedback to students. Research surveys were conducted, and a dataset was constructed for training and testing the model. study yielded an accuracy of 83.14% after employing techniques such as text cleaning, preprocessing, and feature extraction.

Electronic shopping cart abandonment: What do we know and where should we be heading?

This paper aims to systematically review the literature on electronic shopping cart abandonment (ESCA). It analyzes the development of ESCA literature in terms of publication trends, publication outlets, number of citations, methodologies, and theoretical underpinnings. Furthermore, based on the literature synthesis, this review proposes a conceptual framework integrating the widely used antecedents, mediators, and moderators that influence ESCA. The antecedents include customer attributes and website-related factors while research and comparison mediate the relationship between these antecedents and ESCA. Using lexicometric analysis, this SLR identified key themes studied in ESCA literature over time, including customer decision-making criteria, motives and characteristics, online shopping environment, and website attributes. Further, this SLR suggests future research directions to advance ESCA literature from theoretical, contextual, and methodological perspectives. This SLR also suggests strategies for e-retailers and marketers to overcome ESCA. Overall, this review is a silver line in ESCA literature.

"Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining": How Three Rare Diseases Defend Themselves from COVID-19 and What We Have Learnt from It.

The process of SARS-CoV-2 infection, responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is carried out through different steps, with the interaction between ACE2 and Spike protein (S) being crucial. Besides of that, the acidic environment of endosomes seems to play a relevant role in the virus uptake into cells and its intracellular replication. Patients affected by two rare genetic tubulopathies, Gitelman's and Bartter's Syndromes, and a rare genetic metabolic disease, Fabry Disease, have shown intrinsic protection from SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 on account of specific intrinsic features that interfere with the virus uptake into cells and its intracellular replication, which will be reported and discussed in this paper, providing interesting insights for present and future research.

Does every cloud (bubble) have a silver lining? An investigation of ESG financial markets

This paper investigates the presence of financial bubbles in the environmentally friendly investments captured by the ESG markets. By using the log-periodic power law singularity framework, we identified several periods of positive and negative bubbles in the short, medium, and long term. Moreover, we examined the relationship between ESG attention sentiment and financial bubbles. We found an asymmetric effect of ESG sentiment on financial bubbles, i.e., increasing positive and decreasing negative bubbles. Our empirical results provide valuable insights into the stability of environmentally friendly markets, which help risk managers and policymakers respond appropriately to financial and social bubbles.

Could rituximab be a silver lining in refractory bone marrow fibrosis caused by lupus?

Could rituximab be a silver lining in refractory bone marrow fibrosis caused by lupus?

#ProtectOurElders: Analysis of Tweets About Older Asian Americans and Anti-Asian Sentiments During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

A silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic is that it cast a spotlight on a long-underserved group. The barrage of attacks against older Asian Americans during the crisis galvanized society into assisting them in various ways. On Twitter, now known as X, support for them coalesced around the hashtag #ProtectOurElders. To date, discourse surrounding older Asian Americans has escaped the attention of gerontologists-a gap we seek to fill. Our study serves as a reflection of the level of support that has been extended to older Asian Americans, even as it provides timely insights that will ultimately advance equity for them. This study explores the kinds of discourse surrounding older Asian Americans during the COVID-19 crisis, specifically in relation to the surge in anti-Asian sentiments. The following questions guide this study: What types of discourse have emerged in relation to older adults in the Asian American community and the need to support them? How do age and race interact to shape these discourses? What are the implications of these discourses for older Asian Americans? We retrieved tweets (N=6099) through 2 search queries. For the first query, we collated tweets with the hashtag #ProtectOurElders. For the second query, we collected tweets with an age-based term, for example, "elderly" or "old(er) adults(s)" and either the hashtag #StopAAPIHate or #StopAsianHate. Tweets were posted from January 1, 2020, to August 1, 2023. After applying the exclusion criteria, the final data set contained 994 tweets. Inductive and deductive approaches informed our qualitative content analysis. A total of 4 themes emerged, with 50.1% (498/994) of posts framing older Asian Americans as "vulnerable and in need of protection" (theme 1). Tweets in this theme either singled them out as a group in need of protection because of their vulnerable status or discussed initiatives aimed at safeguarding their well-being. Posts in theme 2 (309/994, 31%) positioned them as "heroic and resilient." Relevant tweets celebrated older Asian Americans for displaying tremendous strength in the face of attack or described them as individuals not to be trifled with. Tweets in theme 3 (102/994, 10.2%) depicted them as "immigrants who have made selfless contributions and sacrifices." Posts in this section referenced the immense sacrifices made by older Asian Americans as they migrated to the United States, as well as the systemic barriers they had to overcome. Posts in theme 4 (85/994, 8.5%) venerated older Asian Americans as "worthy of honor." The COVID-19 crisis had the unintended effect of garnering greater support for older Asian Americans. It is consequential that support be extended to this group not so much by virtue of their perceived vulnerability but more so in view of their boundless contributions and sacrifices.

Submodel Enumeration for CTL Is Hard

Expressing system specifications using Computation Tree Logic (CTL) formulas, formalising programs using Kripke structures, and then model checking the system is an established workflow in program verification and has wide applications in AI. In this paper, we consider the task of model enumeration, which asks for a uniform stream of output systems that satisfy the given specification. We show that, given a CTL formula and a system (potentially falsified by the formula), enumerating satisfying submodels is always hard for CTL--regardless of which subset of CTL-operators is considered. As a silver lining on the horizon, we present fragments via restrictions on the allowed Boolean functions that still allow for fast enumeration.

Unveiling the potential: Exploring the predictability of complex exchange rate trends

Forecasting exchange rates is challenging due to its diverse features and complex patterns. Inspired the theory of receptive fields, we proposed two models: the Transformer with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN-Transformer) and the Long Short Term Memory networks with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN-LSTM). These models leverage Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) modules to expand the learnable timestep of Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTM) and reduce the complexity of Transformer. Generally, CNN-LSTM demonstrates the highest predictive accuracy. Furthermore, there is a silver lining: the sentiment in past news is closely linked to future exchange rates. In order to introduce the news sentiment to improve the performance of models, we fine-tune a pre-trained model, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers with Whole Word Masking (BERT-WWM), to extract the sentiment information from news dataset. However, the effectiveness of introducing news sentiment is greatly dependent on the timesteps. Longer timesteps often increase the likelihood of success for this method. We believe this pattern relates to the timeliness of news and the delayed impact of news events. Also, it's important to note that the content of news text significantly influences the forecasting performance.

Unveiling the silver lining: examining the effects of biogenic silver nanoparticles on the growth dynamics of in vitro olive shoots

The current study aimed to evaluate the effects of biogenic silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) on growth behavior and leaf anatomy of in vitro growing shoots of ‘Picual’ and ‘Dolce’ olive cultivars. Biosynthesis of AgNPs was carried out using the cell-free filtrate of Fusarium oxysporum. The dimension and shape of the synthesized AgNPs have been analyzed using spectroscopy and topography analysis tools, confirming that the biosynthesis of AgNPs is a crystalline nanostructure with an average particle size of 37 nm. The shoots of the selected olive cultivars were cultured on Rugini olive medium-supplemented AgNPs at 0, 10, 20, and 30mg L− 1. The effect of genotypes on shoot multiplication was significant, ‘Picual’ recorded higher values of shoot growth parameters compared with ‘Dolce’ cultivar. Adding AgNPs to the culture medium significantly affected the growth of in vitro olive shoots. AgNPs at 20 and 30mg L− 1 produced higher values of the number of shoots, shoot length, and leaf number of Picual cv. compared with the control treatments, but the higher AgNPs concentration harmed the growth parameters of Dolce cv. and recorded lower growth values compared with the lower concentration (10mg L− 1). AgNPs had a significant effect on leaf morphology and their anatomical structure. The current results showed that the stimulatory effect of AgNPs on shoot growth of in vitro olive shoots is highly dependent on plant genotype and nanoparticle concentration.

Advances in Growth-Promoting Rhizobacteria Function on Plant Growth Facilitation and Their Mechanisms

In modern times, agriculture has been a major cause of environmental degradation due to both natural and artificial factors. However, there is a silver lining in the form of Plant Growth-Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR), a beneficial microbial community present in the rhizosphere soil of plants. PGPR can adjust soil pH, reduce the burden on plants, and accelerate their growth, making it an excellent choice for sustainable agriculture. This article delves into the mechanism of how PGPR promotes plant growth and highlights its impact under different environmental conditions. The aim is to promote the use of PGPR biofertilizers, which could revolutionize the field of agriculture and pave the way for a greener future.

Good Governance and the Partisan Wars: The Effects of Divided Government on Administrative Problem Solving and Oversight Agenda Setting in Congress

Abstract Congress’s constitutional responsibility to oversee and investigate the executive branch of government demands that instances of waste, fraud, and abuse in the administrative state be checked via both legislation and nonlegislative committee hearings. In this article, I establish an oversight agenda for Congress using the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office's (GAO) biennial identification of the most vulnerable federal agencies and programs. I then assess whether and how government-wide partisanship affects Congress’s ability to address this slate of issues. I find that, when government is divided, Congress is more legislatively productive on high-risk issues, and the House of Representatives is more likely to prioritize investigative hearings on high-risk issues. My results suggest a silver lining to the reality of partisan agenda control: preexisting administrative problems identified by well-positioned and well-informed observers at GAO may get more attention when there is a partisan incentive for the legislature to investigate an opposition-controlled government.

Mentoring and Networking as the “Silver Lining” of Being Women Leaders: An Exploratory Study in Top World Forestry Schools

Although there are multiple efforts to increase gender equality in the forest sector, women are still underrepresented in the forest sector workforce, even more so in top leadership of forest sector companies. This underrepresentation is also found in higher education, and many forestry undergraduate programs still struggle to matriculate and graduate women. A way to attract and retain women is through mentoring and networking. Utilizing interviews, we found that it is quite challenging to find a woman mentor/role model in the forest sector because women are still underrepresented. To find a good mentor, young women are encouraged to be proactive in utilizing different channels, both formal and informal. When it comes to gender, our respondents emphasize the different benefits of having a woman vs. man as a mentor. In a men-dominated field such as the forest sector, women mentors enhance social belonging, confidence, and motivation in relatively alienating environments due to “been there-done that” experiences. Same-gender role models might also protect women from negative stereotypes and show how women can advance despite existing gendered barriers.

A silver lining for the excluded: Exploring experiences that micro‐task crowdsourcing affords workers with impaired work access

A silver lining for the excluded: Exploring experiences that micro‐task crowdsourcing affords workers with impaired work access

Turning Lemons into Lemonade: Social Support as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Technostress and Quality of Life Among University Students.

The overuse of internet-based technologies as a means of coping with the stress they generate has resulted in an alarming level of addiction, adversely impacting the quality of life and overall health of younger individuals. This social detachment, in turn, contributes to both physical and mental health deterioration. The potential remedy for this predicament lies in the application of social support as an antidote to internet addiction. In this context, our present study employs the Stress-Strain-Outcome model to explore the indirect effects of internet addiction and the moderating role of social support in relation to the influence of technostress on the quality of life of adults. We adopted a time-lagged design to collect data from university graduates and evaluated our study hypotheses using Mplus. Our empirical findings highlight the significant influence of technostress on internet addiction, with the latter significantly mediating the relationship between technostress and quality of life. Furthermore, our results reveal that social support effectively moderates the indirect effects of technostress on quality of life through its impact on internet addiction. These findings can help researchers and educators better understand the underlying mechanisms between technostress and quality of life with social support as the silver lining. This form of social support holds the potential not only to alleviate internet addiction but also to positively enhance the quality of life and overall wellbeing of individuals facing these challenges. The implications of these findings and avenues for future research are also discussed.

Impact of Mega-Agricultural Projects, Searching the Silver Lining in Cameroon

Purpose: Large-scale projects have created significant positive impacts in different countries around the world. Such impact is less common in Africa and Cameroon's agricultural sector in particular. This study was designed to investigate such impact due to the renewed interest in such projects, whereas, there is a slow rate of development of the agricultural sector in Cameroon.
 Methodology: We examined the experience of actors in the sector and analysed qualitative responses to a survey examining the possible impact of some completed major large-scale projects in Ngoketunjia of the North West Region and the Noun of the Western Region. A total of 45 experts were interviewed and 400 farmers provided answers to survey questions probing ‘silver linings’ they may have experienced from large-scale projects. We analysed these qualitative responses using a thematic analysis approach.
 Findings: Respondents identified a silver lining under two themes social and economic. Socially, skills and knowledge improvement were observed to have improved while access to social facilities (electricity, health, water, schools), as well as integration and interactions amongst villagers, were less visible. Therefore the claim that large-scale agricultural projects led to social impact might be a faulty one as the silver lining in this dimension cannot be directly attributed to such projects. Under the economic domain silver lining was observed in access to employable opportunities, market, and finance access as well as value added to raw materials. However, no silver lining was observed in income-generating activities and production volume increments.
 Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice, and Policy: Major impact disruptions were linked to project design and delays that affected the budget, supply shortages, and efficiency. To create the desired impact, we recommend that, large-scale projects should proactively focus on impact-driven project components as well as reschedule activities to minimize delays, penalties, and cost overruns.