This paper presents a fully-integrated optical sensor IC with SPAD, quenching/resetting circuit, and novel sensing stage based on a tunable-threshold inverter optimized for 0.35-μm high-voltage CMOS technology. The presented quencher features a controllable excess bias voltage and an adjustable total dead time. The excess bias voltage ranges from 10 V to a maximum of 22 V. The dead time ranges from 8 ns to 50 ns, which corresponds to a saturation count rate range from 20 Mcps to 125 Mcps. The quencher is optimized for the SPAD with a capacitance of 150 fF in the HV CMOS technology used. Using our recently published photon detection probability (PDP) model and fitting it to measured results up to a PDP of 68.8% at 9.9 V excess bias from our previous tapeout, a peak PDP of 90.1% (saturation PDP) at 650 nm for VEX=17.9 V is estimated and a PDP over 50% at 850 nm comes into reach for the same excess bias voltage. To the authors’ best knowledge, PDP saturation has never been reached before for an integrated SPAD.

Linguistic racism explores the varied ideologies that may generate and endorse monolingual, native, and normative language practices, while reinforcing the discrimination and injustice directed towards language users whose language and communicative repertoires are not necessarily perceived as standard and normal. This article, thus, investigates linguistic racism, as a form of existing, but newly defined, racism against unconventional ethnic language practices experienced by Eastern-European immigrant women in the Australian workplace. Our ethnographic study shows that, once these women directly or subtly exhibit their non-nativism, through a limited encounter with local expressions, non-native language skills, and ethnic accents, they become victims of covert and overt linguistic racism in the form of social exclusion, mockery, mimicking, and malicious sarcasm in the hierarchical power environment of the workplace. As a result, these migrants can suffer from long-lasting psychological trauma and distress, emotional hurdles, loss of credibility, and language-based inferiority complexes. We, as researchers, need to highlight the importance of combatting workplace linguistic racism and revealing language realities of underprivileged communities. In that way, we can assist them in adapting to host societies and help them regain some degree of power equality in their institutional environments.

The rapid production of a large volume of literature during the early phase of the COVID-19 outbreak created a substantial burden for clinicians and scientists. Therefore, this manuscript aims to identify and describe the scientific literature addressing COVID-19 from a dental research perspective, in terms of the manuscript origin, research domain, study type, and level of evidence (LoE). Data were retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed. A descriptive analysis of bibliographic data, collaboration network, and keyword co-occurrence analysis were performed. Articles were further classified according to the field of interest, main research question, type of study, and LoE. The present study identified 296 dental scientific COVID-19 original papers, published in 89 journals, and co-authored by 1331 individuals affiliated with 429 institutions from 53 countries. Although 81.4% were single-country papers, extensive collaboration among the institutions of single countries (Italian, British, and Brazilian institutions) was observed. The main research areas were as follows: the potential use of saliva and other oral fluids as promising samples for COVID-19 testing, dental education, and guidelines for the prevention of COVID-19 transmission in dental practice. The majority of articles were narrative reviews, cross-sectional studies, and short communications. The overall LoE in the analyzed dental literature was low, with only two systematic reviews with the highest LoE I. The dental literature on the COVID-19 pandemic does not provide data relevant to the evidence-based decision-making process. Future studies with a high LoE are essential to gain precise knowledge on COVID-19 infection within the various fields of Dentistry. The published dental literature on COVID-19 consists principally of articles with a low level of scientific evidence which do not provide sufficient reliable high-quality evidence that is essential for decision making in clinical dental practice.

Ozark hellbenders (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis bishopi) have undergone marked population declines across their entire distribution. A variety of ecological life history research has been conducted to determine the cause(s) of the declines. Historically, hellbender diet studies used stomach content examination methods; however, alternative approaches such as less intrusive stable isotope analyses are now options for researchers. The goals of our study were to conduct stable isotope analysis on live and formalin-preserved museum specimen Ozark hellbender tissues to identify diet composition in the Eleven Point and Spring rivers, Arkansas. Also, we used stable isotope analysis to investigate if Spring River hellbender diets have changed over time. We sampled fish, live hellbenders (non-destructively), and formalin-preserved hellbender tissues from museum collections for stable isotope analysis. We sampled crayfish for assemblage composition and stable isotope analysis. The results of our stable isotope study revealed three main findings: (1) there were no statistically significant differences between hellbender δ13C and δ15N values among sites and hellbender stable C and N isotopes were correlated with body length; (2) traditional δ13C versus δ15N bi-plots and trophic discrimination values did not provide complete discernment in hellbender diets; however, Bayesian MixSIAR models revealed hellbenders to be generalists, and (3) the use of δ13C and δ15N values adjusted historic formalin-fixed and ethanol preserved hellbenders matched well with current crayfish and fish stable isotope values based on Bayesian MixSIAR models. These findings provide important diet information and a possible tool to examine dietary patterns from preserved specimens that may be used for hellbender conservation and management.

The advantages of microwave technology over conventionally conducted experiments are numerous. Some of them are reduction in reaction time, a higher degree of process control, repeatability, and work safety. Microwave synthesis routes require a complete description of the experimental details, instrumentation, and design program of a microwave oven used in the experiments. In this work, microwave-assisted hydrothermal synthesis of hematite (α-Fe2O3) particles from 0.1 M FeCl3 solution in highly alkaline media with heating in a microwave oven at continuous microwave emission of 800 W at 150 °C, 200 °C, and 250 °C for 20 min are presented. Also, the influence of the percentage of the addition of a cationic surfactant, cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) on the composition, size, and shape of the final product was investigated. The samples precipitated at 150 °C formed a final product consisting of goethite (α-FeOOH) and hematite particles in contrast to the those precipitated at 200 °C and 250 °C where pure hematite phase was obtained. In these synthesis routes, the CTAB caused to slow down the rate of the goethite-to-hematite transformation process at temperatures at 200 °C but did not affect the transformation at 250 °C.

Conventional magnetic resonance imaging (cMRI) in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients provides measures of focal brain damage and activity, which are fundamental for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and the evaluation of response to therapy. However, cMRI is insensitive to the damage to the microenvironment of the brain tissue and the heterogeneity of MS lesions. In contrast, the damaged tissue can be characterized by mathematical models on multishell diffusion imaging data, which measure different compartmental water diffusion. In this work, we obtained 12 diffusion measures from eight diffusion models, and we applied a deep-learning attention-based convolutional neural network (CNN) (GAMER-MRI) to select the most discriminating measures in the classification of MS lesions and the perilesional tissue by attention weights. Furthermore, we provided clinical and biological validation of the chosen metrics—and of their most discriminative combinations—by correlating their respective mean values in MS patients with the corresponding Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) and the serum level of neurofilament light chain (sNfL), which are measures of disability and neuroaxonal damage. Our results show that the neurite density index from neurite orientation and dispersion density imaging (NODDI), the measures of the intra-axonal and isotropic compartments from microstructural Bayesian approach, and the measure of the intra-axonal compartment from the spherical mean technique NODDI were the most discriminating (respective attention weights were 0.12, 0.12, 0.15, and 0.13). In addition, the combination of the neurite density index from NODDI and the measures for the intra-axonal and isotropic compartments from the microstructural Bayesian approach exhibited a stronger correlation with EDSS and sNfL than the individual measures. This work demonstrates that the proposed method might be useful to select the microstructural measures that are most discriminative of focal tissue damage and that may also be combined to a unique contrast to achieve stronger correlations to clinical disability and neuroaxonal damage.

The high-energy tails of charged- and neutral-current Drell-Yan processes provide important constraints on the light quark and anti-quark parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the large-x region. At the same time, short-distance new physics effects such as those encoded by the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) would induce smooth distortions to the same high-energy Drell-Yan tails. In this work, we assess for the first time the interplay between PDFs and EFT effects for high-mass Drell-Yan processes at the LHC and quantify the impact that the consistent joint determination of PDFs and Wilson coefficients has on the bounds derived for the latter. We consider two well-motivated new physics scenarios: 1) electroweak oblique corrections (Ŵ,Ŷ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$ \hat{W},\hat{Y} $$\end{document}) and 2) four-fermion interactions potentially related to the LHCb anomalies in R(K(*)). We account for available Drell-Yan data, both from unfolded cross sections and from searches, and carry out dedicated projections for the High-Luminosity LHC. Our main finding is that, while the interplay between PDFs and EFT effects remains moderate for the current dataset, it will become a significant challenge for EFT analyses at the HL-LHC.

Since Bosnia and Herzegovina’s declaration of independence in 1995, its path has been a rocky one. Unwillingness by the international community to stand by the central government and stand in the way of the neighboring states of Serbia and Croatia’s territorial pretensions, produced a succession of ceasefire agreements, culminating in the final, Dayton Peace Agreement. Each of these agreements espoused the ethnic principle as the guiding philosophy for the organization of the state. The post-war period demonstrates that despite the passage of time, the principle of organization of multi-ethnic state along ethnic lines presents a stumbling block to the functioning of the political, economic and social life in the country. The political history of post-independence Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) therefore reads as a history of protracted political paralysis, with no hope of rectifying the problems without another forceful intervention of the international community.

Remaining true to the spirit and logic of the war-torn territories, the Dayton Peace Agreement highlights the interdependence of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (B&H) 'local' problems with the wider region’s problems,  and indeed, global problems. 25 years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, we have gained a democracy without a people, a democracy with MP’s defined by their ethnicity, who, at their discretion, interpret the will of the people and dispose of the mandate entrusted to them by their convictions. This paper aims to open up the question of whether the Dayton Constitution alienated B&H’s citizens from their political community. Pointing to the process of alienation from citizenship, which is, among other things, caused by a constitutional architecture that does not conceive of the citizen as an abstract category, the author focuses more on the conditions in which voters are denied real political participation. In theoretical terms, this participation would mean not only resistance to ethnonationalism, but also the creation of opportunities for citizens to unite and make political-strategic, and long-term decisions important for the future of B&H.

Abstract Objectives The WHO Access, Watch and Reserve (AWaRe) classification has been developed to support countries and hospitals in promoting rational use of antibiotics while improving access to these essential medicines. We aimed to describe patterns of worldwide antibiotic use according to the AWaRe classification in the adult inpatient population. Methods The Global Point Prevalence Survey on Antimicrobial Consumption and Resistance (Global-PPS) collects hospital antibiotic use data using a standardized PPS methodology. Global-PPS 2015, 2017 and 2018 data, collected by 664 hospitals in 69 countries, were categorized into AWaRe groups to calculate proportional AWaRe use, Access-to-Watch ratios and the most common indications for treatment with selected Watch antibiotics. Only prescriptions for systemic antibiotics on adult inpatient wards were analysed. Results Regional Access use ranged from 28.4% in West and Central Asia to 57.7% in Oceania, whereas Watch use was lowest in Oceania (41.3%) and highest in West and Central Asia (66.1%). Reserve use ranged from 0.03% in sub-Saharan Africa to 4.7% in Latin America. There were large differences in AWaRe prescribing at country level. Watch antibiotics were prescribed for a range of very different indications worldwide, both for therapeutic and prophylactic use. Conclusions We observed considerable variations in AWaRe prescribing and high use of Watch antibiotics, particularly in lower- and upper-middle-income countries, followed by high-income countries. The WHO AWaRe classification has an instrumental role to play in local and national stewardship activities to assess prescribing patterns and to inform and evaluate stewardship activities.

While individual analytic therapy is still in its early stages of development, group analytic therapy and group psychotherapy in general are considerably advanced in comparison to other talking therapies, and are often used in healthcare settings and in private practice. All forms of psychotherapy offered in healthcare institutions are covered by health insurance. Most activities related to providing psychotherapy or undergoing training in various therapeutic modalities are not regulated by adequate laws or other regulations, nor does a definitive registry of psychotherapists exist. A majority of psychotherapists in healthcare institutions are (neuro)psychiatrists, but other helping professions are also often involved in providing therapies, with psychologists usually preferring cognitive-behavioural therapy.