Ion Popa, Sorina-Geanina Stănescu, Anișoara Duică
et al.
The food industry faces complex challenges in managing supply chains, significantly
affecting operational performance and costs. This paper explores the critical factors
influencing the efficiency of food supply chains, such as product perishability, seasonality,
climate change, and high logistics costs. The study uses an applied approach based on
modelling a cost function that integrates the main components of supply chain expenses —
procurement, transportation, warehousing, production and distribution — and how they are
affected by industry-specific challenges. The proposed cost function allows for assessing the
impact of these variables on total costs and identifying critical areas for optimisation. The
results obtained demonstrate that monitoring logistical conditions, adjusting stocks based on
seasonal forecasts and optimising transport routes are essential measures to reduce losses and
increase the competitiveness of companies in the food industry. The study's applied impact
consists of providing a practical cost optimisation tool applicable to manufacturers and
distributors. The conclusions emphasise the importance of an integrated approach to risk and
cost management in the food industry, providing recommendations for sustainable practices
and strategies to increase long-term competitiveness.
Mauro Marino-Jiménez, Norma Sánchez-Chávez, Yenny Rivero-Fortón
et al.
Student performance, disciplinary innovation and teaching methodology occupy the main concerns of educational research. Therefore, there is a greater interest in gamification strategies, where digital tools facilitate the development of competitive activities and strengthening of learning. One example of this idea is the use of video games created for non-educational purposes, where disciplinary strategies and/or social skills can be developed. In this paper, the game Among Us is used to develop an educational experience at higher education. Its use helps to develop a methodology for the identification and analysis of fallacies, according to their recurrency and effectiveness. The result of this learning experience led to a greater comprehension about the use of fallacies, favorable perceptions about the use of games for educational experience, and a deeper reflection about social intelligence in the students.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
Diego D. Díaz-Guerra, Marena de la C. Hernández-Lugo, Yunier Broche-Pérez
et al.
IntroductionEvaluating neurocognitive functions and diagnosing psychiatric disorders in older adults is challenging due to the complexity of symptoms and individual differences. An innovative approach that combines the accuracy of artificial intelligence (AI) with the depth of neuropsychological assessments is needed.ObjectivesThis paper presents a novel protocol for AI-assisted neurocognitive assessment aimed at addressing the cognitive, emotional, and functional dimensions of older adults with psychiatric disorders. It also explores potential compensatory mechanisms.MethodologyThe proposed protocol incorporates a comprehensive, personalized approach to neurocognitive evaluation. It integrates a series of standardized and validated psychometric tests with individualized interpretation tailored to the patient’s specific conditions. The protocol utilizes AI to enhance diagnostic accuracy by analyzing data from these tests and supplementing observations made by researchers.Anticipated resultsThe AI-assisted protocol offers several advantages, including a thorough and customized evaluation of neurocognitive functions. It employs machine learning algorithms to analyze test results, generating an individualized neurocognitive profile that highlights patterns and trends useful for clinical decision-making. The integration of AI allows for a deeper understanding of the patient’s cognitive and emotional state, as well as potential compensatory strategies.ConclusionsBy integrating AI with neuro-psychological evaluation, this protocol aims to significantly improve the quality of neurocognitive assessments. It provides a more precise and individualized analysis, which has the potential to enhance clinical decision-making and overall patient care for older adults with psychiatric disorders.
Nadya Carissa Fernanda Putri, Nabila Kharimah Vedy
This study aims to examine the effects of service quality, customer perceived value, and trust on customer satisfaction, while also analyzing the meditating role of trust. Consumer shopping behavior has shifted alongside the growth of internet usage, leading to the rapid development of online food delivery (OFD) services. Online food delivery enables customers to conveniently order meals online and receive delivery directly to their address. In this highly competitive business environment, understanding the determinants of customer satisfaction is crucial. This study aims to examine service quality, customer perceived value, and trust in relation to customer satisfaction, both directly and to investigate the role of trust as a mediator. A quantitative research design was adopted and analyzed using PLS-SEM with the SmartPLS software. Data were collected through an online survey of 175 ShopeeFood users. The results reveal that service quality, customer perceived value, and trust significantly and positively influence customer satisfaction. Furthermore, trust is confirmed as a significant mediator in the relationship between service quality and customer perceived value toward customer satisfaction.
Sebastian Leitner, Michael Landesmann, Judith Kohlenberger
et al.
Given the exposure to stressors in their home countries, during migration and after arrival, refugees are vulnerable to mental health problems. Their access to adequate health care and other social infrastructures, however, is hampered. This reduces, in addition to other factors, their ability to take part in social and economic activities. We examine the prevalence of mental disorders among the refugee population that arrived in Austria mainly between 2013 and 2018, drawing on data from a refugee survey. We found a high share of refugees (32%) to have moderate or severe mental health problems. When investigating the effects of stressors on the mental health situation, we found a positive association with experienced discrimination in Austria and the fear for partners and children left behind, and a negative correlation with proficiency in the German language, being employed (including volunteer work), having more supportive relationships, and satisfaction with the housing situation.
Understanding and predicting user behavior on social media platforms is crucial for content recommendation and platform design. While existing approaches focus primarily on common actions like retweeting and liking, the prediction of rare but significant behaviors remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a hybrid methodology for social media user behavior prediction that addresses both frequent and infrequent actions across a diverse action vocabulary. We evaluate our approach on a large-scale Bluesky dataset containing 6.4 million conversation threads spanning 12 distinct user actions across 25 persona clusters. Our methodology combines four complementary approaches: (i) a lookup database system based on historical response patterns; (ii) persona-specific LightGBM models with engineered temporal and semantic features for common actions; (iii) a specialized hybrid neural architecture fusing textual and temporal representations for rare action classification; and (iv) generation of text replies. Our persona-specific models achieve an average macro F1-score of 0.64 for common action prediction, while our rare action classifier achieves 0.56 macro F1-score across 10 rare actions. These results demonstrate that effective social media behavior prediction requires tailored modeling strategies recognizing fundamental differences between action types. Our approach achieved first place in the SocialSim: Social-Media Based Personas challenge organized at the Social Simulation with LLMs workshop at COLM 2025.
Domenico Palmisano, Giuseppe Palestra, Berardina Nadja De Carolis
As artificial intelligence continues to advance and becomes more integrated into sensitive areas like healthcare, education, and everyday life, it's crucial for these systems to be both resilient and robust. This paper shows how resilience is a fundamental characteristic of social robots, which, through it, ensure trust in the robot itself-an essential element especially when operating in contexts with elderly people, who often have low trust in these systems. Resilience is therefore the ability to operate under adverse or stressful conditions, even when degraded or weakened, while maintaining essential operational capabilities.
This article responds to recent criticism regarding the application of consequentialism and rational choice theory in the social and moral sciences. It clarifies the limited scope of the presented criticism and its overly simplistic view of social scientific inquiry that, together, lead to the presentation of an argument that claims more than it warrants. Moreover, I argue that the criticism overlooks one of the most important uses of instrumentalism in moral theory that may be considered the most challenging case for the application of rational choice theory.
Caterina Conigliani, Martina Iorio, Salvatore Monni
According to the UN's Sustainable Development Agenda, to effectively achieve sustainable development, strategies for building economic growth should also address social needs, including access to essential services. Sustainable integrated management of water resources for both primary use and energy production is crucial, especially in territories such as the Amazonian State of Pará, where a primary good like fresh water is also the main source of electricity. However, the territorial transformations occurring in Pará over installing new hydroelectric plants have jeopardised local development. This was mainly caused by the top-down approach underlying national strategic projects that have paid little attention to local needs, thus paving the way for detrimental conditions for implementing the UN's 2030 Agenda. This paper aims to analyse the relationship between a municipality's level of development and quality of life and the most relevant key determinants of sustainable development in Pará. To this end, we consider a spatial regression analysis, with particular attention devoted to the role of access to both energy and water. The presence of significant spillover effects implies that providing public services on a geographically broad basis could induce self-reinforcing benefits.
Zlatanović Dejana, Dukanac Milica, Erić Nielsen Jelena
The new product serves as the foundation for ensuring the long-term survival and growth of the company, as well as being a driving force for the economy and a critical factor in the competitiveness of national economies. The launch of a new product on the market, or its commercialization, is a crucial phase in the development process, requiring a strategic approach to decision-making and activities related to sales. The research subject in the paper are various factors related to the launch of a new product, with a particular emphasis on consumers' perceptions of the product's characteristics and its market acceptance, as well as elements of the marketing mix and marketing activities of the company, and characteristics of the market and its segments. The research objective is to identify the key factors that can influence the level of acceptance of a new product in the market, as well as differences in how users perceive the importance of these factors. An empirical study was conducted from June to August 2023, involving 101 respondents from the Republic of Serbia that use of Apple Iphone. The results of the study indicate that compatibility, complexity, quality of marketing efforts, and market characteristics are the key factors in the successful launch of a new product. Furthermore, there are differences in respondents' perspectives on these factors based on age, type of phone used, and categories of new product adopters.
Chenlu Ma,1 Wen Zhang,1 Shu Da,2 Huan Zhang,3 Xichao Zhang1 1Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, People’s Republic of China; 2School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210024, People’s Republic of China; 3Academy of Global Innovation & Governance, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, 100029, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Xichao Zhang, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, No. 19 XinJieKouWai Street, HaiDian District, Beijing, 100875, People’s Republic of China, Email xchzhang@bnu.edu.cnPurpose: Environmental uncertainty has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. While there is substantial knowledge about the connection between environmental uncertainty and organizational outcomes, limited attention has been devoted to investigating its impact on employees’ depression and anxiety symptoms. Grounded in job demands-resources theory, this study aims to explore the relationship between environmental uncertainty and employees’ depression and anxiety symptoms, and it further investigates the mediating role of work pressure and the moderating role of union practices.Methods: In September 2022, we undertook a cross-sectional survey study, gathering data from 1081 employees across various enterprises situated in Liaoning, China. Throughout this timeframe, notable global occurrences heightened the awareness of environmental uncertainty. Following the exclusion of participants who did not provide information on the main variables, the final valid sample comprised 940 employees. To test all hypotheses, a series of confirmatory factor analyses and path-analytic procedures were conducted using Mplus 7.0.Results: Our results confirm that environmental uncertainty, as a high job demand, increases employees’ work pressure, thereby elevating rates of anxiety and depression; the indirect relationship between environmental uncertainty and employees’ anxiety and depression through work pressure is stronger when union practices are lower.Conclusion: Our findings indicate the detrimental impact of environmental uncertainty on employees’ mental health, and highlight the roles of work pressure and union practices. In light of this, organizations should take steps to mitigate employees’ perceptions of environmental uncertainty and establish mental health programs, in cooperation with union practices, to protect employees’ mental well-being.Keywords: environmental uncertainty, anxiety, depression, union practices, work pressure
Recent studies have outlined the accessibility challenges faced by blind or visually impaired, and less-literate people, in interacting with social networks, in-spite of facilitating technologies such as monotone text-to-speech (TTS) screen readers and audio narration of visual elements such as emojis. Emotional speech generation traditionally relies on human input of the expected emotion together with the text to synthesise, with additional challenges around data simplification (causing information loss) and duration inaccuracy, leading to lack of expressive emotional rendering. In real-life communications, the duration of phonemes can vary since the same sentence might be spoken in a variety of ways depending on the speakers' emotional states or accents (referred to as the one-to-many problem of text to speech generation). As a result, an advanced voice synthesis system is required to account for this unpredictability. We propose an end-to-end context-aware Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis system that derives the conveyed emotion from text input and synthesises audio that focuses on emotions and speaker features for natural and expressive speech, integrating advanced natural language processing (NLP) and speech synthesis techniques for real-time applications. Our system also showcases competitive inference time performance when benchmarked against the state-of-the-art TTS models, making it suitable for real-time accessibility applications.
This article presents the results of the first survey-based study in Portugal about the level of involvement of social workers in social policies, aiming to determine if policy practice is embedded in Portuguese social workers’ professional practice and which factors may enhance or constraint such practice. Combining the Civic Voluntarism Model by Verba and colleagues and the Policy Practice Engagement Model by Gal and Weiss-Gal, which were considered as the main predictors of social workers’ engagement in policy practice, this study followed a quantitative approach, based on 265 valid answers to an online survey obtained through snowball sampling. The findings showed a low level of engagement in policy practice activities among the social workers, especially those requiring a greater public exposure and acting with the media, policymakers, or public officers to share opinions, make a proposition, or report a problem. Considering the main factors of the socio-political context, the professional context, the organisational context, and individual factors, the findings showed that individual factors explained most of the differences in the social workers’ involvement in policy practice, especially when considering interest and efficacy. This study pointed out the need for further research in this area.
Omnichannel is not just a marketing, e-commerce, or customer support buzzword. This future customer engagement platform helps businesses communicate with customers through centralized channels on a smart interface. It is difficult to achieve customer loyalty when the risk in online transactions, which creates anxiety, exists in all transaction processes in an omnichannel system. Hence, the purpose of this research was to analyze the influence of anxiety on relationships when clients purchase from an omnichannel platform using the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) paradigm. To fulfill study aims, qualitative and quantitative research approaches were used. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were used to acquire qualitative data, while survey responses from 485 participants were used to collect quantitative data. This study’s results revealed relationships between consumer psychology factors such as perceived mental benefits, hedonic value, and anxiety. Moreover, customer anxiety in omnichannel can be measured as a novel and exact concept in marketing science and have a moderating role in the effect of perceived mental benefits on electronic loyalty and perceived mental benefits on hedonic value in omnichannel systems. As a result, enterprises were also offered various managerial implications to develop their omnichannel system.
Systems thinking can shed light on important relationships and conditions that affect community engagement activities. While robust tools like the community capitals framework and the sustainable livelihoods approach provide valuable context for engagement projects, additional insights can stem from models that describe the ebb and flow of different types of capital. This paper uses a well-studied ecosystem model called adaptive renewal (AR) to contextualize heritage-related challenges and opportunities in four rural communities on the Canadian prairies. Based on a reflective case-study analysis, we applied the AR model to focus group and semistructured interview data collected as part of a Museums Association of Saskatchewan (MAS) project aimed at using local heritage assets to build sociocultural and environmental capacity and attract investment. The MAS project identified four themes that could be addressed through training and policy changes, including concerns about funding, limited human resources, a lack of public services, and a desire to preserve and build on memories. By mapping each community onto the AR model, we uncovered additional insights about community resilience and other heritage-related challenges and opportunities. The AR model is likely to be a valuable tool for planning or assessing community engagement projects because it reflects the dynamic nature of socioeconomic and cultural relationships that affect community dynamics and local well-being.
Anna Loenenbach, Viktoria Schönfeld, Anja Takla
et al.
BackgroundInfections with human papillomaviruses (HPV) are sexually transmitted and can cause cancer. In Germany, vaccination against HPV is recommended for girls and boys aged 9–17 years. We aimed to investigate HPV DNA prevalence, genotype distribution and vaccine effectiveness (VE) in women aged 20–25 years 10 years after the introduction of HPV vaccination in Germany (2018–2019), and compared these data to an equally designed study from 2010–2012.MethodsSeventy six geographical clusters were randomly selected, followed by random selection of 61 women aged 20–25 years per cluster. Participants performed cervicovaginal self-sampling and answered questions on demographics, sexual behaviour and HPV vaccination. Samples were tested for 18 high risk and nine low risk HPV genotypes. We performed chi-square tests, Fisher’s exact test, unpaired Student’s t-test and proportion t-test, and calculated crude and adjusted prevalence ratios (PR) and 95% CIs.ResultsOf 7,858 contacted women a total of 1,226 agreed to participate. Of these, 94 women were positive for HPV types 16 and/or 18. HPV16 prevalence was 7.0% (95% CI 5.6–8.6) and HPV18 prevalence was 0.8% (95% CI 0.4–1.5). HPV6 and HPV11 were rare with only five (0.4%; 0.1–0.9) and one (0%; 95% CI 0.0–0.5) positive tests. Seven hundred fifty-seven women (62%) had received at least one HPV vaccine dose and 348 (28%) were vaccinated as currently recommended. Confounder-adjusted VE was 46.4% (95% CI 4.2–70.1) against HPV16/18 infection and 49.1% (95% CI 8.2–71.8) against infection with at least one HPV genotype covered by the quadrivalent HPV vaccine. Compared with the 2010–2012 study results, HPV16/18 prevalence dropped from 22.5% (95% CI 19.0–26.3) to 10.3% (95% CI 7.5–13.9; p < 0.0001) in unvaccinated participants.ConclusionVaccine-covered HPV genotypes were rare among 20–25 years old women in Germany and decreased compared to the time point shortly after the start of the HPV vaccination program. HPV prevalence of almost all vaccine-covered genotypes was strongly reduced in vaccinated participants. A decrease of HPV16 and HPV18 was even observed in unvaccinated participants, compared to 2010–2012 data, suggesting indirect protection of unvaccinated women. Low VE against HPV16/18 and HPV6/11/16/18 in our study might be attributable to study design in combination with the endpoint selection of (mainly transient) HPV DNA positivity.
David Schoch, Chung-hong Chan, Claudia Wagner
et al.
Replication crises have shaken the scientific landscape during the last decade. As potential solutions, open science practices were heavily discussed and have been implemented with varying success in different disciplines. We argue that computational-x disciplines such as computational social science, are also susceptible for the symptoms of the crises, but in terms of reproducibility. We expand the binary definition of reproducibility into a tier system which allows increasing levels of reproducibility based on external verfiability to counteract the practice of open-washing. We provide solutions for barriers in Computational Social Science that hinder researchers from obtaining the highest level of reproducibility, including the use of alternate data sources and considering reproducibility proactively.
Anish K. Vallapuram, Young D. Kwon, Lik-Hang Lee
et al.
A particular phenomenon of interest in Retail Economics is the spillover effect of anchor stores (specific stores with a reputable brand) to non-anchor stores in terms of customer traffic. Prior works in this area rely on small and survey-based datasets that are often confidential or expensive to collect on a large scale. Also, very few works study the underlying causal mechanisms between factors that underpin the spillover effect. In this work, we analyse the causal relationship between anchor stores and customer traffic to non-anchor stores and employ a propensity score matching framework to investigate this effect more efficiently. First of all, to demonstrate the effect, we leverage open and mobile data from London Datastore and Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) such as Foursquare. We then perform a large-scale empirical analysis on customer visit patterns from anchor stores to non-anchor stores(e.g., non-chain restaurants) located in the Greater London area as a case study. By studying over 600 neighbourhoods in the GreaterLondon Area, we find that anchor stores cause a 14.2-26.5% increase in customer traffic for the non-anchor stores reinforcing the established economic theory. Moreover, we evaluate the efficiency of our methodology by studying the confounder balance, dose difference and performance of matching framework on synthetic data. Through this work, we point decision-makers in the retail industry to a more systematic approach to estimate the anchor store effect and pave the way for further research to discover more complex causal relationships underlying this effect with open data.
Mapula T.P. Hlokwe, Mapotso Kena, David N. Mamphiswana
Seedling production under smallholder farming systems can be negatively affected by both abiotic and biotic factors. Seedling damping-off caused by Rhizoctonia solani is one of the major biotic factors which causes significant yield reduction. Management is mainly based on the application of synthetic fungicides and cultural practices. However, both methods have limitations which result in their inefficiency. Several studies have reported on the use of plant extracts and biological control to manage plant diseases. The aim of this study was to formulate an effective and practical approach to manage tomato seedling damping-off using extracts of Monsonia burkeana and Moringa oleifera and a biological control agent Trichoderma harzianum. The efficacy of both extracts was investigated under laboratory conditions to determine the most suppressive concentration to R. solani growth. Methanolic extracts from both plants significantly suppressed pathogen growth at different concentrations. M. burkeana significantly reduced R. solani growth at 8 g/mL (71%) relative to control whilst Moringa oleifera extract reduced pathogen growth by 60% at a concentration of 6 g/mL. The highest suppressive concentrations were further evaluated under greenhouse conditions to test their efficacy on seedling damping-off. In damping-off treatments, both plant extracts and T. harzianum also significantly reduced (p=0.5) pre- and post-emergence damping-off incidence. M. burkeana recorded the highest suppression at 78%, followed by M. oleifera at 64%. Trichoderma harzianum reduced incidence of damping-off by 60% and this was higher than both plant extract treatments.
Significance:
• The use of M. burkeana and M. oleifera extracts and T. harzianum effectively suppressed pathogen growth and disease incidence and can be used to reduce the use of synthetic pesticides that are harmful to the environment and human health.
• Application of plant extracts and biological control agents as possible alternatives to synthetic fungicides is considered a sustainable and affordable practice for smallholder farmers.