Group recommender systems (GRSs) identify items to recommend to a group of people by aggregating group members’ individual preferences into a group profile and selecting the items that have the largest score in the group profile. The GRS predicts that these recommendations would be chosen by the group by assuming that the group is applying the same preference aggregation strategy as the one adopted by the GRS. However, predicting the choice of a group is more complex since the GRS is not aware of the exact preference aggregation strategy that is going to be used by the group. To this end, the aim of this article is to validate the research hypothesis that, by using a machine learning approach and a dataset of observed group choices, it is possible to predict a group’s final choice better than by using a standard preference aggregation strategy. Inspired by the Decision Scheme theory, which first tried to address the group choice prediction problem, we search for a group profile definition that, in conjunction with a machine learning model, can be used to accurately predict a group choice. Moreover, to cope with the data scarcity problem, we propose two data augmentation methods, which add synthetic group profiles to the training data, and we hypothesize that they can further improve the choice prediction accuracy. We validate our research hypotheses by using a dataset containing 282 participants organized in 79 groups. The experiments indicate that the proposed method outperforms baseline aggregation strategies when used for group choice prediction. The method we propose is robust with the presence of missing preference data and achieves a performance superior to what humans can achieve on the group choice prediction task. Finally, the proposed data augmentation method can also improve the prediction accuracy. Our approach can be exploited in novel GRSs to identify the items that the group is likely to choose and to help groups to make even better and fairer choices.

Carbohydrate sulfotransferases (CHST) catalyse the biosynthesis of proteoglycans that enable physical interactions and signalling between different neighbouring cells in physiological and pathological states. The study aim was to provide an overview of emerging diagnostic and prognostic applications of CHST. PubMed database search was conducted using the keywords “carbohydrate sulfotransferase” together with appropriate inclusion and exclusion criteria, whereby 41 publications were selected. Additionally, 40 records on CHST genetic and biochemical properties were hand-picked from UniProt, GeneCards, InterPro, and neXtProt databases. Carbohydrate sulfotransferases have been applied mainly in diagnostics of connective tissue disorders, cancer and inflammations. The lack of CHST activity was found in congenital connective tissue disorders while CHST overexpression was detected in different malignancies. Mutations of CHST3 gene cause skeletal dysplasia, chondrodysplasia, and autosomal recessive multiple joint dislocations while increased tissue expression of CHST11, CHST12 and CHST15 is an unfavourable prognostic factor in ovarian cancer, glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer, respectively. Recently, CHST11 and CHST15 overexpression in the vascular smooth muscle cells was linked to the severe lung pathology in COVID-19 patients. Promising CHST diagnostic and prognostic applications have been described but larger clinical studies and robust analytical procedures are required for the more reliable diagnostic performance estimations.

Spirodiclofen is characterized by a relatively slow acaricidal action against adult females of the two-spotted spider mite, Tetranychus urticae Koch (Acari: Tetranychidae), with reduction of their fecundity (eggs laid/female) and fertility (eggs hatched/female). Exposure of pre-ovipositing T. urticae females to the acaricide may affect population growth, considering that a high reproduction of young females is crucial in the population biology of this colonizing species. Effects of spirodiclofen on life-history traits and population parameters of T. urticae were evaluated in demographic bioassay using the age-stage two-sex life table, constructed in fecundity-based and fertility-based variants. The acaricide was applied against pre-ovipositing females in a series of nine concentrations, starting from the recommended field rate (96 mg/l). The treatments with concentrations ranging from 12 - 96 mg/l significantly reduced fecundity and longevity, while 27 - 40% of females didn’t lay eggs. Exposure was lethal to 2 - 21% of the females, of whom a large majority didn’t lay eggs. A considerable part of surviving females also failed to lay eggs within the first four post-treatment days (when around 50% of all eggs in the control were laid) i.e., they were sterilized by the acaricide. At the same time, the percentage of dead females rose to 17 - 55%, mainly due to the mortality of sterilized females. The three highest concentrations (24 – 96 mg/l) significantly reduced the net reproductive rate (R0), intrinsic rate of increase (r) and finite rate of increase (λ), by 49-72%, 20-34%, and 4-6%, respectively, compared to the control. This reduction was mainly the result of sterilization and high mortality of treated females, in combination with reduced fecundity and longevity of reproductive ones. Application of the fertility-based life table showed significant decrease of r and λ (by 23-40%, and 4-7%, respectively, compared to the control), in the treatments with the three highest concentrations. The short-lived transovarial toxic effect observed in the fertility-based life table was not sufficient to cause a significant reduction in population parameters, compared to those acquired by the fecundity-based life table.

Abdominal actinomycosis remains an uncommon condition that mimics a wide range of intra-abdominal conditions ranging from acute inflammatory pathologies such as appendicitis to colonic or gynecological malignancies. Any abdominal organ can be affected. Preoperative diagnosis is often difficult and radiological imaging is unlikely to provide a definitive diagnosis. Surgical resection is often required in combination with long-term high-dose antibiotic therapy.

In the field of science, human rights and environmental protection are multidisciplinary fields. Hence different approaches to their interaction. In the context of the historical development of human rights, the right to a healthy environment belongs to the third generation of human rights. Due to the increase in industrialization around the world and the use of technologies which main feature is the easy availability and low cost of raw materials and processes, a number of global environmental problems have appeared (ozone depletion, global warming, climate change, etc.) which required a global response. The previous approaches (Stockholm Conference, etc.) were not enough, a new concept was needed that prevents the emergence of problems. A new concept, called sustainable development, implies economic development without permanent impact on the environment. Through the principle of sustainable development, the last UN concept for environmental protection and improvement of society in all segments was formulated, called Agenda 2030. BiH is a signatory to the agenda, but main driver of progress in the field of environmental protection and human rights is BiH’s aspiration to join the EU. One of the key meeting points of human rights and environmental protection should be the rights of activists for environmental protection, resolving their legal status through a law that will recognize their importance. The EU is specifically working on this, so it is expected that BiH will also make progress in the field of better status of activists for environmental protection, through the process of joining EU.

No abstract available.

This paper researches the decisions of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina as general sub-laws and compares them with regulations of governments on other levels of government in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The comparison of the decisions of the Council of Ministers is carried out with the regulations of the Government of the Federation and the Government of Sarajevo Canton, with the intention to determine that decisions of the Council of Ministers have in essence the same scope and subject of regulating as the aforementioned government regulations, placing emphasis on the constitutional distribution of competencies between state, entities and cantons. The original research has determined that the Council of Ministers carries out the majority of legislative activities with their decisions, but rulebooks and instructions also appear as sub-laws, which isn’t the case on federal and cantonal levels, where rulebooks and instructions are exclusively adopted by administrative bodies, although administrative bodies on the level of Bosnia and Herzegovina also adopt these types of legislation. It has been determined that most decisions, rulebooks and instructions of the Council of Ministers, as well as regulations of governments are adopted for the purpose of executing the law, therefore as classical sub-laws, although different examples also appear. Finally, an amendment to the law is proposed in the sense that the Council of Ministers adopts regulations as sub-laws, with the cessation of adoption of rulebooks and instructions, which would be more appropriate from the aspect of our administrative law and bring about more order and would systematise this area.

Obtaining versions of deep neural networks that are both highly-accurate and highly-sparse is one of the main challenges in the area of model compression, and several high-performance pruning techniques have been investigated by the community. Yet, much less is known about the interaction between sparsity and the standard stochastic optimization techniques used for training sparse networks, and most existing work uses standard dense schedules and hyperparameters for training sparse networks. In this work, we examine the impact of high sparsity on model training using the standard computer vision and natural language processing sparsity benchmarks. We begin by showing that using standard dense training recipes for sparse training is suboptimal, and results in under-training. We provide new approaches for mitigating this issue for both sparse pre-training of vision models (e.g. ResNet50/ImageNet) and sparse fine-tuning of language models (e.g. BERT/GLUE), achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings in the high-sparsity regime, and providing detailed analyses for the difficulty of sparse training in both scenarios. Our work sets a new threshold in terms of the accuracies that can be achieved under high sparsity, and should inspire further research into improving sparse model training, to reach higher accuracies under high sparsity, but also to do so efficiently.

Abstract Work intensification is a psychosocial risk that has been increasing in recent decades and may have been accentuated after the COVID-19 pandemic. Its effects on health are negative, but they can be moderated by contextual and personal factors. The aim of this study was twofold: to analyze the effect of work intensification on workers’ stress, anxiety, and depression and to explore the role of workplace curiosity in these relationships. The study design was cross-sectional, and a total of 766 Spanish workers (58.9% female) with different occupations completed the survey. The results showed that work intensification was associated with the symptomatology of stress, anxiety, and depression, with a medium effect size. Women workers showed higher work intensification, but its association with mental health was equally strong for both genders. Workers with higher levels of the workplace curiosity dimension “stress tolerance” showed less impaired mental health in the presence of work intensification. However, workers with higher levels of the workplace curiosity dimension “deprivation sensitivity” showed more symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression when faced with high work intensification. The results were discussed in terms of their contributions to the field of study of work intensification, the future research they could inspire, and the prevention and intervention measures they could motivate.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera (LSSTCam) pixel response has been characterized using laboratory measurements with a grid of artificial stars. We quantify the contributions to photometry, centroid, point-spread function size, and shape measurement errors due to small anomalies in the LSSTCam CCDs. The main sources of those anomalies are quantum efficiency variations and pixel area variations induced by the amplifier segmentation boundaries and “tree-rings”—circular variations in silicon doping concentration. This laboratory study using artificial stars projected on the sensors shows overall small effects. The residual effects on point-spread function (PSF) size and shape are below 0.1%, meeting the ten-year LSST survey science requirements. However, the CCD mid-line presents distortions that can have a moderate impact on PSF measurements. This feature can be avoided by masking the affected regions. Effects of tree-rings are observed on centroids and PSFs of the artificial stars and the nature of the effect is confirmed by a study of the flat-field response. Nevertheless, further studies of the full-focal plane with stellar data should more completely probe variations and might reveal new features, e.g., wavelength-dependent effects. The results of this study can be used as a guide for the on-sky operation of LSSTCam.

Knowing the causes of the shortage of physics teachers in primary and secondary schools is necessary for the development of effective educational policies because the shortage of physics teachers is a global and persistent problem with negative consequences for the quality of education, but also for the survival of the physics profession as a whole. The aim of this study was to investigate, for the first time, the opinions of Croatian physics teachers on the causes of the deficit in their profession. For this purpose, we conducted a descriptive cross-sectional study using an online survey with Likert-type items and a constructed response item. A total of 390 respondents from all over Croatia participated in the survey, which is 29% of the total population of Croatian physics teachers in the 2022/2023 school year. According to their opinion, the causes of the shortage of Croatian physics teachers are related to the following: lack of incentives and support from the relevant institutions and bodies, the inadequacy of physics content in the curricula, the lack of motivation and negative attitude of students towards physics, impeded professional development, unequal opportunities, and challenges such as excessive workload. The results obtained provide a concrete basis for the development of an effective policy to solve the problem of the physics teacher shortage in Croatia and beyond by governments, universities, and schools.

Sustainable management of agricultural resources is needed to meet people’s increasing demands for food, fiber and energy while maintaining the quality of the environment and protecting natural resources. With the rapid growth of agriculture and the mechanization of farming, the agricultural sector has become one of the main contributors to the increase in CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases in the world. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the effect, dependence and correlations of CO2 in soil with native vegetation (presence/absence, corn yield) and climatic conditions (soil temperature and moisture) during three years of measurements under different management practices in a classical conventional agroecosystem. This research contains four different treatments: control treatment (CT), dolomite/organic fertilization (DOL/OF), mineral fertilization (MF) and black fallow (BF). During the investigated period, the average overall C-CO2 flux ranged from 7.98 kg ha−1 day−1 on bare soil to 16.26 kg ha−1 day−1 on soil treated with mineral fertilization. No statistically significant difference was observed among different fertilization treatments, except in 2013 and 2015 when comparing different fertilization treatments to bare soil. In all three years, there was a positive correlation between average C-CO2 fluxes and soil temperature. Additionally, in 2013 and 2017, there was a positive correlation between average C-CO2 fluxes and soil moisture, while a negative correlation was observed in 2015. Obtained values of crop yield ranged from 0.89 t ha−1 in the control treatment (in 2015) to 14.81 t ha−1 in the treatment with mineral fertilization (in 2017). Growing global concern about the effects of climate change calls for intensive research on the carbon cycle, and these results will contribute to the understanding of carbon transformation in different crops and soil management practices.

Aim To determine risk factors associated with the development and severity of secondary hyperparathyroidism in dialysis patients. Methods A cross-sectional study at the Clinical Centre of the University of Tuzla (March 2022) included 104 adult patients (males 51.9%, females 48.1%) with chronic kidney diseases under dialysis treatment. Based on parathyroid hormone (PTH) values, patients were divided into two groups: study group (45/104, PTH >792pg/mL) and control group (59/104, PTH 176-792 pg/ mL). The analysis aimed to resolve whether there was a connection between the duration of dialysis, the type of therapy treatment administered, the underlying kidney disease, and the presence of comorbidities with the values of PTH, and a wide spectrum of monitored laboratory parameters. Results The most common causes of chronic renal failure were undefined kidney diseases (32.7%), followed by diabetic nephropathy (18.3%) and chronic glomerulonephritis (16.3%). In the examined biochemical parameters, a significant difference was found in mean values of alkaline phosphatase (p<0.001). The correlation was proved between the duration of dialysis (p=0.028), the values of phosphorus (p=0.031), and alkaline phosphatase (p<0.001) with absolute values of PTH. The most common present comorbidity was hypertension (78.8%), followed by cardiovascular diseases (40.4%) and diabetes (22.1%). Conclusion A number of factors contribute to the development and severity of SHPT. Modulation of therapy and better control of risk parameters can prolong and reduce the frequency of SHPT in dialysis patients, as well as the occurrence of comorbidities.