Sociodemographic and Clinical Characteristics Associated with Improvements in Quality of Life for Participants with Opioid Use Disorder

Background: The Houston Emergency Opioid Engagement System was established to create an access pathway into long-term recovery for individuals with opioid use disorder. The program determines effectiveness across multiple dimensions, one of which is by measuring the participant’s reported quality of life (QoL) at the beginning of the program and at successive intervals. Methods: A visual analog scale was used to measure the change in QoL among participants after joining the program. We then identified sociodemographic and clinical characteristics associated with changes in QoL. Results: 71% of the participants (n = 494) experienced an increase in their QoL scores, with an average improvement of 15.8 ± 29 points out of a hundred. We identified 10 factors associated with a significant change in QoL. Participants who relapsed during treatment experienced minor increases in QoL, and participants who attended professional counseling experienced the largest increases in QoL compared with those who did not. Conclusions: Insight into significant factors associated with increases in QoL may inform programs on areas of focus. The inclusion of counseling and other services that address factors such as psychological distress were found to increase participants’ QoL and success in recovery.

Is the quest to eat healthy a route to enhancing consumer’s food security?

Background On an individual level, food security has multiple dimensions and consumers exhibit heterogeneity in the extent to which different attributes matter in their quest for enhanced food security. The aim of this paper is to explain how the quest for individual food security arises and its dynamic nature and its implications for how food security-enhancing attributes are defined and how they are signaled, and for the role of regulators and food supply chains in establishing credible signals. Results The paper finds that the quest for enhanced individual food security is a dynamic process that responds to the disequilibrium that change brings. The changing role of standards and grades as signals in food markets is discussed as a precursor to considering the implications for both market and non-market (regulatory) failure in determining the appropriate role for the public sector in regulating food safety and quality standards and labeling. The rise of private standards is examined, along with a consideration of how these standards differ in terms of scope and objective and their implications for international trade in increasingly globalized food supply chains. Conclusions Despite the growth of private standards, a clear role remains for mandatory public standards, yet challenges arise when these standards differ across countries.

An Arithmetic-Trigonometric Optimization Algorithm with Application for Control of Real-Time Pressure Process Plant

This paper proposes a novel hybrid arithmetic–trigonometric optimization algorithm (ATOA) using different trigonometric functions for complex and continuously evolving real-time problems. The proposed algorithm adopts different trigonometric functions, namely sin, cos, and tan, with the conventional sine cosine algorithm (SCA) and arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA) to improve the convergence rate and optimal search area in the exploration and exploitation phases. The proposed algorithm is simulated with 33 distinct optimization test problems consisting of multiple dimensions to showcase the effectiveness of ATOA. Furthermore, the different variants of the ATOA optimization technique are used to obtain the controller parameters for the real-time pressure process plant to investigate its performance. The obtained results have shown a remarkable performance improvement compared with the existing algorithms.

A theory of cortical map formation in the visual brain

The cerebral cortex receives multiple afferents from the thalamus that segregate by stimulus modality forming cortical maps for each sense. In vision, the primary visual cortex also maps the multiple dimensions of the stimulus in patterns that vary across species for reasons unknown. Here we introduce a general theory of cortical map formation, which proposes that map diversity emerges from variations in sampling density of sensory space across species. In the theory, increasing afferent sampling density enlarges the cortical domains representing the same visual point allowing the segregation of afferents and cortical targets by additional stimulus dimensions. We illustrate the theory with a computational model that accurately replicates the maps of different species through afferent segregation followed by thalamocortical convergence pruned by visual experience. Because thalamocortical pathways use similar mechanisms for axon sorting and pruning, the theory may extend to other sensory areas of the mammalian brain.

Research on Robot Dynamic Path Planning Based on Multiple Linear Reinforcement Learning

Under the background of digital and intelligent transformation, all walks of life are facing the conflict between internal stability and rapidly changing external needs, and the conflict between stable background and dynamic foreground. To solve these conflicts and problems, it needs to take new means to adjust from multiple dimensions. Draw support from the new info and communication operation support system, it could form a digital Internet info support system with the cloud platform, which can effectively establish fast and flexible front-end utilizations and support the rapid development, agile iteration and on-demand adjustment of related businesses. The Internet backbone network needs to make the info open. The new info communication operation support system based on the Internet can enable the info resources to be transmitted as needed. The research and utilization of cloud resource visualization and controllability has gradually become the key to the development of new Internet communication operation system. On the premise of systematically combing the Internet info and communication operation support system, this paper comprehensively studies the utilization of cloud resources, and analyses the utilization scenarios of cloud resources of the new education communication operation system, in order to better ameliorate the more efficient and secure utilization of cloud resources and communication operation system inside and outside the enterprise.

Internationalization of Family Businesses

Worldwide, family businesses are one of the cornerstones of the entrepreneurial fabric, being as a consequence central to growth and development. In a globalized era, these institutions require the attention of businessmen, practitioners, and policymakers. The chapter seeks to examine if the internationalization performance does vary according to firm size, and its link to the innovative performance in multiple dimensions along with conventional characteristics such as age and turnover. Theoretical research evidences the interest in understanding the patterns and determinants of the internationalisation performance, given its importance in firm growth and survival; however, this strategical option brings advantages and problems. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the determinants do change according to firm dimension; estimations provide valuable insights about the connection between globalized operation and innovation, for the different organisations.

Evaluation of Source Rock Quality in Chang-7 Member of Major Oil Fields in Ordos Basin

Petroleum is an important natural resource for human. The demand for petroleum in the next several decades will continue to be high, which requires the exploitation of more petroleum sources. Chang-7 member of the Ordos basin is proven to be the richest among all members, and this research took a focus on making a comparison between the source rock quality of Chang-7 member in four major oil fields in the basin, to provide a simple view of priority oil fields for exploitation in the future. The research analyzed the source rock quality of four oil fields from the TOC, A%, rock type, R0, sedimentary environment, and kerogen type, and found a superiority of source rock quality of Maling and Zhidan oil field in multiple dimensions, mainly triggered by their sedimentary environment. The research concluded that the oil fields that was once in the central-southern region of the basin contains a slightly better source rock quality among the chosen fields, which is related to a more stable sedimentary environment in the early Triassic.

Research on cyber security risk of telematics box in intelligent connected vehicle

With the rapid development of the automotive industry and the wide application of 5G network technology, there are more and more Telematics Box (T-Box) equipped with intelligent operating systems in vehicles and they are becoming more and more complex. Because it is connected to the on-board CAN bus internally and interconnects with mobile phone /PC through the cloud platform externally, the security of T-Box must be fully guaranteed, to make the automotive more secure. T-Box can realize remote control function, so the T-Box information security problem has been paid more and more attention. In this paper, the T-Box were tested from multiple dimensions by using various methods, and the results were statistically analyzed, and the corresponding protection strategies were proposed for the corresponding security risks.

Aspect-Based and Multi-Level Sentiment Information Applying Contrast Dictionary

The customer feedbacks provide alternative and important sources to discover knowledge supporting the marketers and customers to make better decisions. However, the manual process to extract useful information depends on domain experts. This paper focuses on improving the performance of the automatic sentiment information extraction from customer feedbacks. The article proposes a new extraction method that consider multiple dimensions of feedback information, aspect, word, contrast, sentence or phrase, and document levels. The aspect-based sentiment extraction uses a named entity recognition technique to extract the desired aspects of a target product. The aspect-based sentiment combines with sentiment information from multiple levels of feedback contexts resulting in the fused sentiment information improves the extraction performance. We validate the effectiveness by measuring the accuracy of the sentiment and aspect recognition methods comparing with SentiStrength and Word-Count. This information gives some insights on customer satisfaction and can be applied in an alarming tool.