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The ARLE GPS tool provides computer-aided design support for solving problems with the spatial planning and design of houses, using a robust design model with physical-biological and cost strategies. This enables architects to eliminate uncertainties and to make robust decisions by applying computational thinking to decision making and action implementation. This support enables the architect to deal with the complexity arising from the interrelationships between the design variables and transforms the spatial planning problem, which is conceptualized as illdefined, into a well-defined problem. A scientific method is used, based on mathematical modeling of the action-decision field of design geometric variables, rather than a drawn method involving sketches. This tool acts as an aid mechanism, an assembler, a simulator, and an evaluator of geometric prototypes (virtual or graphical) and can be used to systematize the assembly or modeling of the FPL structure, particularly with respect to the performance required of a house. This candidate solution, provided by the tool, defines the spatial dimensions of the rooms in the house, the topological data of the assembly sequence, and the connections between rooms. The architect converts this virtual prototype into a graphical FPL prototype, which is then modeled, refined and evaluated continuously and objectively with the aid of ARLE GPS until a solution is obtained that satisfies the requirements, constraints and objectives of the problem. In this way, a solution to the problem (i.e., the project) can be captured and generated.
The Brazilian Worker’s Food Program (WFP) is a public policy initiative that focuses on nutritional assistance for low-income formal workers (less than five minimum wages). Currently, it serves more than 25 million formal workers (around 54%). This systematic review aimed to assess the nutritional quality of meals offered and/or consumed by beneficiaries of the WFP. Observational studies conducted with workers from companies registered in the programme were eligible, with no restrictions on the period of publication. The nutritional quality was assessed according to the guidelines of the programme (Normative Ordinance No. 66/2006). Twenty cross-sectional studies and one cohort study met the inclusion criteria. Most of the participants were male, from manufacturing industries, and their average age was 35.0 years. The results of the analysis showed that fibre, sodium, calories, and proteins were the nutrients that most exceeded the recommended amounts, whereas carbohydrate was the nutrient that had the least amount. The results showed that the nutritional quality of the food offered to or consumed by workers did not fully meet the required guidelines and, in some companies, did not promote an adequate and healthy diet. The WFP has great potential and needs to be reformulated to make it a programme that contributes to strengthening the realisation of the human right to adequate food.
To map out evidence on instruments for evaluating organisational food environments of workplaces and the components and dimensions considered in the identified instruments.
Design:
Scoping review that includes studies published as of January 2005, the year of publication of the model developed by Glanz et al. (2005). The databases consulted were PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Google Scholar until November 2024, without language restrictions. Studies were included if they evaluated the food environment of workplaces such as companies/factories, universities/post-secondary institutions/technical colleges, and hospitals/health care units. The conceptual model of Castro and Canella (2022), considering its components and dimensions, was used to synthesize the data.
Results:
After full reading, 54 articles were selected. Most were conducted in the United States and Brazil, although there were studies from 16 countries. A total of 36 instruments were identified: 19 were used in universities, 8 in hospitals, and 11 in companies. No instrument included all components and dimensions of the conceptual model; however, 3 instruments included most of them. The most evaluated component was the internal level of eating spaces, and the most evaluated dimensions were availability and quality of foods/beverages in eating spaces. Of the 36 instruments, 29 reported some measure of validity or reproducibility. The limitation most reported by the studies was the non-generalization of results because samples are limited.
Conclusions:
Evaluations of the organisational food environment of workplaces can be used for monitoring, planning interventions and formulating public policies for such places, thereby enhancing workers’ health.
Introductions of new crops can provide alternate market opportunities, but also pose ecological risks. New crops lack established management, have uncertain performance issues, and may become weedy in their introduced region. The introduction of hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) into southern Florida poses a unique introduction scenario because of the subtropical climate and no commercial production on record, unlike in other eastern and midwest United States. We assessed escape from cultivation for hemp by tracking establishment and reproduction of volunteer plants from the earliest modern hemp planting in Florida. Hemp is a weed across much of the United States matching its historical distribution and has been assessed to be of high invasion risk for Florida because of its biological attributes, history of escape, and colonization in other states and countries. We conducted monitoring of volunteer plants and a seed establishment experiment in southern Florida and found that hemp volunteer plants occurred in pulses over time, with variable and declining germination. Volunteer plants persisted for up to two years and appeared in areas that were disked and mowed according to USDA approved hemp crop termination procedures. In the seed establishment experiment, we found that hemp established in disturbed soils (∼9% of seeds planted) and that mean plant heights and seed counts were positively related to soil disturbance and nutrient addition. These findings show that hemp plantings should be monitored for volunteer establishment, and containment plans should be in place to control the establishment of volunteer hemp plants in agricultural fields. Our study further illustrates the need for multi-year monitoring and repeat termination procedures to ensure containment of hemp volunteers. There was limited evidence of volunteer establishment in surrounding areas and on undisturbed land. However, seed containment, equipment cleaning, and the monitoring of nearby fields and seed transportation routes remains warranted.
Maladaptive daydreaming is a distinct syndrome in which the main symptom is excessive vivid fantasising that causes clinically significant distress and functional impairment in academic, vocational and social domains. Unlike normal daydreaming, maladaptive daydreaming is persistent, compulsive and detrimental to one’s life. It involves detachment from reality in favour of intense emotional engagement with alternative realities and often includes specific features such as psychomotor stereotypies (e.g. pacing in circles, jumping or shaking one’s hands), mouthing dialogues, facial gestures or enacting fantasy events. Comorbidity is common, but existing disorders do not account for the phenomenology of the symptoms. Whereas non-specific therapy is ineffective, targeted treatment seems promising. Thus, we propose that maladaptive daydreaming be considered a formal syndrome in psychiatric taxonomies, positioned within the dissociative disorders category. Maladaptive daydreaming satisfactorily meets criteria for conceptualisation as a psychiatric syndrome, including reliable discrimination from other disorders and solid interrater agreement. It involves significant dissociative aspects, such as disconnection from perception, behaviour and sense of self, and has some commonalities with but is not subsumed under existing dissociative disorders. Formal recognition of maladaptive daydreaming as a dissociative disorder will encourage awareness of a growing problem and spur theoretical, research and clinical developments.
This study is the first to attempt to isolate a relationship between cognitive activity and equilibration to a Nash Equilibrium. Subjects, while undergoing fMRI scans of brain activity, participated in second price auctions against a single competitor following predetermined strategy that was unknown to the subject. For this auction there is a unique strategy that will maximize the subjects’ earnings, which is also a Nash equilibrium of the associated game theoretic model of the auction. As is the case with all games, the bidding strategies of subjects participating in second price auctions most often do not reflect the equilibrium bidding strategy at first but with experience, typically exhibit a process of equilibration, or convergence toward the equilibrium. This research is focused on the process of convergence.
In the data reported here subjects participated in sixteen auctions, after which all subjects were told the strategy that will maximize their revenues, the theoretical equilibrium. Following that announcement, sixteen more auctions were performed. The question posed by the research concerns the mental activity that might accompany equilibration as it is observed in the bidding behavior. Does brain activation differ between being equilibrated and non-equilibrated in the sense of a bidding strategy? If so, are their differences in the location of activation during and after equilibration? We found significant activation in the frontal pole especially in Brodmann's area 10, the anterior cingulate cortex, the amygdala and the basal forebrain. There was significantly more activation in the basal forebrain and the anterior cingulate cortex during the first sixteen auctions than in the second sixteen. The activity in the amygdala shifted from the right side to the left after the solution was given.
To investigate whether attention responds rationally to strategic incentives, we experimentally implement a buyer-seller game in which a fully informed seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to a buyer who faces cognitive costs to process information about the offer's value. We isolate the impact of seller strategies on buyer attention by exogenously varying the seller's outside option, which leads sellers to price high more often. We find that buyers respond by making fewer mistakes conditional on value, which suggests that buyers exert higher attentional effort in response to the increased strategic incentives for paying attention. We show that a standard model of rational inattention based on Shannon mutual information cannot fully explain this change in buyer behavior. However, we identify another class of rational inattention models consistent with this behavioral pattern.
We study the effect of group size on cooperation in voluntary contribution mechanism games. As in previous experiments, we study four- and eight-person groups in high and low marginal per capita return (MPCR) conditions. We find a positive effect of group size in the low MPCR condition, as in previous experiments. However, in the high MPCR condition we observe a negative group size effect. We extend the design to investigate two- and three-person groups in the high MPCR condition, and find that cooperation is highest of all in two-person groups. The findings in the high MPCR condition are consistent with those from n-person prisoner’s dilemma and oligopoly experiments that suggest it is more difficult to sustain cooperation in larger groups. The findings from the low MPCR condition suggest that this effect can be overridden. In particular, when cooperation is low other factors, such as considerations of the social benefits of contributing (which increase with group size), may dominate any negative group size effect.
Site-specific herbicide applications with remotely piloted aerial application systems (RPAASs) offer the potential for reducing herbicide inputs in turfgrass systems. However, information on spray nozzle selection and application volume for this approach is lacking. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of nozzle type and spray volume on the efficacy of site-specific herbicide application to turf using an RPAAS, focusing on large crabgrass control with quinclorac. The research was conducted in 2022 at two sites in College Station, TX. The treatments were combinations of three nozzle types (XR 80-015 [conventional, extended range], DG 80-015 [drift guard], and AI 80-015 [air induction] flat-fan nozzles) and two spray volumes (10 and 15 L ha−1), applied with a single-nozzle RPAAS. A spray volume of 102 L ha−1 applied with a CO2-pressurized four-nozzle boom backpack sprayer served as a check for comparison. Two additional treatments were also included: a pure formulated herbicide application (without dilution in water) using an RPAAS equipped with an XR 80-005 flat-fan nozzle at 4.6 L ha−1, and an untreated control. The backpack sprayer application resulted in the highest spray solution deposits on large crabgrass plants (12 times more on average), compared to the RPAAS applications. Nevertheless, applications using the RPAAS with the DG and AI nozzles at 10 or 15 L ha−1 provided similar levels of weed control as that of the backpack sprayer at 102 L ha−1, indicating that RPAAS can be effectively used for site-specific herbicide applications to turf. This study also suggests that large crabgrass can be controlled using RPAAS with a range of spray nozzle types at low application volumes to turfgrass. Further research is needed to assess the efficacy of RPAAS-based herbicide applications across a range of herbicides, weed species, and environmental conditions.
This study compares the design practices and performance of ChatGPT 4.0, a large language model (LLM), against graduate engineering students in a 48-h prototyping hackathon, based on a dataset comprising more than 100 prototypes. The LLM participated by instructing two participants who executed its instructions and provided objective feedback, generated ideas autonomously and made all design decisions without human intervention. The LLM exhibited similar prototyping practices to human participants and finished second among six teams, successfully designing and providing building instructions for functional prototypes. The LLM’s concept generation capabilities were particularly strong. However, the LLM prematurely abandoned promising concepts when facing minor difficulties, added unnecessary complexity to designs, and experienced design fixation. Communication between the LLM and participants was challenging due to vague or unclear descriptions, and the LLM had difficulty maintaining continuity and relevance in answers. Based on these findings, six recommendations for implementing an LLM like ChatGPT in the design process are proposed, including leveraging it for ideation, ensuring human oversight for key decisions, implementing iterative feedback loops, prompting it to consider alternatives, and assigning specific and manageable tasks at a subsystem level.
We present a 1000 km transect of phase-sensitive radar measurements of ice thickness, basal reflection strength, basal melting and ice-column deformation across the Ross Ice Shelf (RIS). Measurements were gathered at varying intervals in austral summer between 2015 and 2020, connecting the grounding line with the distant ice shelf front. We identified changing basal reflection strengths revealing a variety of basal conditions influenced by ice flow and by ice–ocean interaction at the ice base. Reflection strength is lower across the central RIS, while strong reflections in the near-front and near-grounding line regions correspond with higher basal melt rates, up to 0.47 ± 0.02 m a−1 in the north. Melting from atmospherically warmed surface water extends 150–170 km south of the RIS front. Melt rates up to 0.29 ± 0.03 m a−1 and 0.15 ± 0.03 m a−1 are observed near the grounding lines of the Whillans and Kamb Ice Stream, respectively. Although troublesome to compare directly, our surface-based observations generally agree with the basal melt pattern provided by satellite-based methods but provide a distinctly smoother pattern. Our work delivers a precise measurement of basal melt rates across the RIS, a rare insight that also provides an early 21st-century baseline.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the health of millions of people worldwide, and many manifest new or persistent symptoms long after the initial onset of the infection. One of the leading symptoms of long-COVID is cognitive impairment, which includes memory loss, lack of concentration, and brain fog. Understanding the nature and underlying mechanisms of cognitive impairment in long-COVID is important for developing preventive and therapeutic interventions.
Methods
Our present study investigated functional connectivity (FC) changes in patients with long-COVID and their associations with cognitive impairment. Resting-state functional MRI data from 60 long-COVID patients and 52 age- and sex-matched healthy controls were analyzed using seed-based functional connectivity analysis.
Results
We found increased FC between the right caudate nucleus and both the left and right precentral gyri in long-COVID patients compared with healthy controls. In addition, elevated FC was observed between the right anterior globus pallidus and posterior cingulate cortex as well as the right temporal pole in long-COVID patients. Importantly, the magnitude of FC between the caudate and the left precentral gyrus showed a significant negative correlation with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores and a negative correlation with Trail Making Test B performance in the patient group.
Conclusion
Patients with long-COVID present enhanced FC between the caudate and the left precentral gyrus. Furthermore, those FC alterations are related to the severity of cognitive impairment, particularly in the domain of executive functions.
The strategy method (SM) is, in practice, subject to a possibly severe economic-theoretical bias. Although many studies utilize SM to examine responses to rare or off-equilibrium behaviors unattainable through direct elicitation (DE), they ignore the fact that the strategic equivalence between SM and DE holds for the monetary payoff game but not the game participants actually play, which is in terms of utilities. We report three results. First, failing to account for estimation bias when decisions at one information set can influence utility at another may result in significant differences in decision-making. Second, the magnitude of this bias can be substantial, comparable to other measured treatment effects. Third, minor interventions targeting salience can amplify these differences similarly, causing treatment effects to differ significantly between SM and DE, even reversing in direction. These findings emphasize the need for reconsideration of the SM’s reliability for economic research.
This article highlights a potential and significant economic–theoretical bias in the widely used strategy method (SM) technique. Although SM is commonly employed to analyze numerous observations per subject regarding rare or off-equilibrium behaviors unattainable through direct elicitation (DE), researchers often overlook a critical distinction. The strategic equivalence between SM and DE is applicable in the context of monetary payoff games, but not in the actual utility-based games played by participants. This oversight may lead to inaccurate conclusions and demand a reevaluation of existing research in the field. We formalize the mapping from the monetary payoff game to this actual game and delineate necessary and sufficient conditions for strategic equivalence to apply.