“I don’t Teach Violence, I Teach Self-Control”; The Framing of Mixed Martial Arts Between Mental Health and Well-Being

This paper draws on conceptual and analytical tools from cultural sociology to analyze media representations of the MMA right after the murder of a twenty-year-old boy, that took place in a small village in central Italy by a gang of young men, two of whom frequented a MMA gym. While often characterized as violent and uncivilized, MMA has a core following of fans who watch and practice MMA out of an interest in the effects of the sport in terms of health and well-being. Through in depth qualitative analysis of MMA media discourse offered by traditional and new media, this paper explores the way the MMA media constructs symbolic boundaries around different kinds of fights inside and outside the gym, through aesthetic and moral evaluations based on the hierarchical ‘distinctions’ between “violence” and “health” as possible outcomes of the MMA training process. Particularly, we carry out a discourse analysis based on Italian Newspapers, Magazines and Facebook groups dedicated to MMA, through which we frame the multiple representations of the discursive production built around the MMA in Italy. Our aim is to identify the different ways in which the discussion about this event provided narrative paths and points of view about the meaning of MMA, focusing on the reputational consequences concerning health, especially in its physical and mental expressions. This research may prove useful for scholars interested in MMA, culture, and sports media studies.

Project risk management in Iranian small construction firms

The objective of this study is to evaluate RM in small projects in Iran using identification of status, barriers, and the impact of RM on project performance. In this study, theoretical foundations and research literature were first developed through library, and then a questionnaire about these variables was designed and distributed among a number of experts in the active construction companies. Data were collected from 40 projects submitted by 25 experts from 5 executive companies. According to the studies, 10 barriers are identified as major obstacles to RM implementation in such projects, prioritized as follows: (1) lack of potential benefits, (2) not economical, (3) lack of time, (4) lack of budget, (5) lack of knowledge, (6) lack of government legislation, (7) lack of manpower, (8) low profit margin, (9) complexity of analytical tools, and (10) competition among SMCs. The findings of this research can provide an in-depth understanding of RM in small projects in Iran and make benefits of RM convincing to the participants of small projects.

Design and Evaluation of a Lactate Microbiosensor: Toward Multianalyte Monitoring of Neurometabolic Markers In Vivo in the Brain

Direct in vivo measurements of neurometabolic markers in the brain with high spatio-temporal resolution, sensitivity, and selectivity is highly important to understand neurometabolism. Electrochemical biosensors based on microelectrodes are very attractive analytical tools for continuous monitoring of neurometabolic markers, such as lactate and glucose in the brain extracellular space at resting and following neuronal activation. Here, we assess the merits of a platinized carbon fiber microelectrode (CFM/Pt) as a sensing platform for developing enzyme oxidase-based microbiosensors to measure extracellular lactate in the brain. Lactate oxidase was immobilized on the CFM/Pt surface by crosslinking with glutaraldehyde. The CFM/Pt-based lactate microbiosensor exhibited high sensitivity and selectivity, good operational stability, and low dependence on oxygen, temperature, and pH. An array consisting of a glucose and lactate microbiosensors, including a null sensor, was used for concurrent measurement of both neurometabolic substrates in vivo in the anesthetized rat brain. Rapid changes of lactate and glucose were observed in the cortex and hippocampus in response to local glucose and lactate application and upon insulin-induced fluctuations of systemic glucose. Overall, these results indicate that microbiosensors are a valuable tool to investigate neurometabolism and to better understand the role of major neurometabolic markers, such as lactate and glucose.

Fermatean Fuzzy DEMATEL and MMDE Algorithm for Modelling the Barriers of Implementing Education 4.0: Insights from the Philippines

Technological transitions in the education sector of developing economies are faced with a range of barriers, involving resource scarcity, socio-cultural concerns, and issues related to management and policy. The popularity of Industry 4.0 has prompted Education 4.0 (EDUC4), an approach to learning that involves transformation using advanced technologies. While a recent work reported a comprehensive list of barriers to EDUC4 implementation, particularly in developing economies, further analysis to identify those priority barriers remains a gap. Thus, this work addresses this gap by introducing a novel methodological extension of the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method following the integration of Fermatean fuzzy sets (FFS). The FFS, compared to other fuzzy environments, could capture higher levels of uncertainties that are associated when eliciting judgments necessary for the DEMATEL. Such integration is aided by the maximum mean de-entropy (MMDE) algorithm, which analytically determines the threshold value crucial for constructing the prominence-relation map of the DEMATEL. Following its application in evaluating the implementation of EDUC4 in Philippine universities, the critical barriers are the lack of training resources, costs, insufficiency of available technologies, skills gap of human resources, knowledge gap, and the complexity of the learning platforms. Among this set, barriers related to cost and lack of training resources are deemed the most prominent ones. The statistical test on the impact of addressing the two prominent barriers shows that addressing the barrier related to costs yields statistically more favorable results regarding the mitigation of other EDUC4 implementation barriers. Although these insights may contain idiosyncrasies, they can serve as starting points of discussion in other relevant developing economies. These methodological and practical contributions advance the development of analytical tools under uncertainty that can handle pressing problems such as the EDUC4 implementation.

Research and Development of a COVID-19 Tracking System in Order to Implement Analytical Tools to Reduce the Infection Risk

The whole world is currently focused on COVID-19, which causes considerable economic and social damage. The disease is spreading rapidly through the population, and the effort to stop the spread is entirely still failing. In our article, we want to contribute to the improvement of the situation. We propose a tracking system that would identify affected people with greater accuracy than medical staff can. The main goal was to design hardware and construct a device that would track anonymous risky contacts in areas with a highly concentrated population, such as schools, hospitals, large social events, and companies. We have chosen a 2.4 GHz proprietary protocol for contact monitoring and mutual communication of individual devices. The 2.4 GHz proprietary protocol has many advantages such as a low price and higher resistance to interference and thus offers benefits. We conducted a pilot experiment to catch bugs in the system. The device is in the form of a bracelet and captures signals from other bracelets worn at a particular location. In case of contact with an infected person, the alarm is activated. This article describes the concept of the tracking system, the design of the devices, initial tests, and plans for future use.

MicrogliaST: a web server for microglia spatiotemportal pattern analysis in normal and disordered brains

Brain is the most complex organ of living organisms, as the celebrated cells in the brain, microglia play an indispensable role in the brain's immune microenvironment. Microglia have critical roles not only in neural development and homeostasis, but also in neurodegenerative diseases and malignant of the central nervous system. However, little is known about the dynamic characteristics of microglia during development or disease conditions. Recently, the single-cell RNA sequencing technologies have become possible to characterize the heterogeneity of immune system in brain. But it posed computational challenges on integrating and utilizing the massive published datasets to dissect the spatiotemporal characterization of microglia. Here, we present microgliaST (bio-bigdata.hrbmu.edu.cn/MST), a database consisting of single-cell microglia transcriptomes across multiple brain regions and developmental periods. Based on high-quality microglia markers collected from published papers, we annotated and constructed human and mouse transcriptomic profiles of 273,374 microglias, comprising 12 regions, 12 periods and 3 conditions (normal, disease, treatment). In addition, MicrogliaST provides multiple analytical tools to elucidate the landscape of microglia under disorder conditions, conduct personalized difference analysis and spatiotemporal dynamic analysis. More importantly, microgliaST paves an ingenious way to the study of brain environment, and also provides insights into clinical therapy assessments.

LA PALABRA IMAGEN: ESTUDIO SEMIÓTICO-COGNITIVO DE LA POESÍA VISUAL DE FERNANDO MILLÁN, FELIPE BOSO Y CLARA JANÉS

El presente trabajo propone un estudio de la llamada poesía visual mediante un método integrado que hará confluir las herramientas de análisis de la teoría semiótica con las consideraciones de la Poética Cognitiva respecto a este tipo de objetos intermediales. De esta manera, de un estudio teórico inicial que permitirá extraer estas herramientas cognitivo-semióticas de análisis, se pasará a un estudio práctico, mediante el método previamente desarrollado, de obras concretas y variadas de poesía visual, seleccionadas entre la creación de Fernando Millán, Felipe Boso y Clara Janés. Abstract: The present work develops a study on the so-called visual poetry by means of an integrated method which will fuse the analytical tools of the semiotic theory with considerations of Cognitive Poetics about this kind of intermedial objects. Therefore, from a theoretical study which will provide us with this cognitive-semiotic analytical tools, a practical study will follow with the analysis of specific and varied works of visual poetry, which will be selected within the works of Fernando Millán, Felipe Boso and Clara Janés.

Mobility in Unsupervised Word Embeddings for Knowledge Extraction—The Scholars’ Trajectories across Research Topics

In the knowledge discovery field of the Big Data domain the analysis of geographic positioning and mobility information plays a key role. At the same time, in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain pre-trained models such as BERT and word embedding algorithms such as Word2Vec enabled a rich encoding of words that allows mapping textual data into points of an arbitrary multi-dimensional space, in which the notion of proximity reflects an association among terms or topics. The main contribution of this paper is to show how analytical tools, traditionally adopted to deal with geographic data to measure the mobility of an agent in a time interval, can also be effectively applied to extract knowledge in a semantic realm, such as a semantic space of words and topics, looking for latent trajectories that can benefit the properties of neural network latent representations. As a case study, the Scopus database was queried about works of highly cited researchers in recent years. On this basis, we performed a dynamic analysis, for measuring the Radius of Gyration as an index of the mobility of researchers across scientific topics. The semantic space is built from the automatic analysis of the paper abstracts of each author. In particular, we evaluated two different methodologies to build the semantic space and we found that Word2Vec embeddings perform better than the BERT ones for this task. Finally, The scholars’ trajectories show some latent properties of this model, which also represent new scientific contributions of this work. These properties include (i) the correlation between the scientific mobility and the achievement of scientific results, measured through the H-index; (ii) differences in the behavior of researchers working in different countries and subjects; and (iii) some interesting similarities between mobility patterns in this semantic realm and those typically observed in the case of human mobility.

Nanoparticles: tech trends in healthcare

Nanotechnology is the use of matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale for various purposes. Nanotechnology field of application is very much diverse which includes surface science, organic chemistry, molecular biology, semiconductor physics, energy storage, engineering, microfabrication, and molecular engineering. Its medical application ranges from biological devices, nano-electronic biosensors, and to future biological machines. The main issue nowadays for nanomedicine involve understanding the issues related to toxicity and environmental impact of nanoscale materials. Lot more functionalities can be added to nanomaterials by interfacing them with biological structures. The size of nanomaterials is similar most biological molecules and so useful for both in vivo and in vitro biomedical research and applications. The integration of nanomaterials with biology had paved path to the development of diagnostic devices, contrast agents, analytical tools, physical therapy applications and drug delivery vehicles.