Purpose: The airport infrastructure plays capital importance in the development of national trade. It facilitates the flow of people, goods, and services more quickly. Thus, given its importance, ...this study seeks to analyze the impact of the Angolan investment in airport infrastructure between 2000 – 2020.Design/methodology/approach: this article presents the results of quantitative and qualitative research, based on narrative review and output of the Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique, which aimed to analyze the impact of investment in airport infrastructure on the growth of Angola GDP per capita.Findings: The results of the stationarity tests performed shows mixed integration in both I(0) and I(1), which justifies the used ARDL. Similarly, the bounds test showed that there is a very strong relationship between airport infrastructure investment and GDP per capita growth in the short and long run. However, in the Angola case study, the impact that exists is negative, meaning that airport infrastructure negatively impacts per capita GDP growth in both the short run and in the long run.Research limitations/implications: this research has been among the first to analyze the impact of investment in airport infrastructure on the growth of Angola GDP per capita. Besides the contribution of this research, some limitations are the difficulty to find data of investment and the literature about transportation infrastructure in Angola.Originality/value: the analyze of the impact of investment in airport infrastructure in the growth of Angola GDP per capita is a fundamental step that can help public and private entities in making decisions that aim to improve the management of the Angola transport infrastructure.
Exploiting temporal context has been proved to be an effective approach to improve recommendation performance, as shown, e.g. in the Netflix Prize competition. Time-aware recommender systems (TARS) ...are indeed receiving increasing attention. A wide range of approaches dealing with the time dimension in user modeling and recommendation strategies have been proposed. In the literature, however, reported results and conclusions about how to incorporate and exploit time information within the recommendation processes seem to be contradictory in some cases. Aiming to clarify and address existing discrepancies, in this paper we present a comprehensive survey and analysis of the state of the art on TARS. The analysis show that meaningful divergences appear in the evaluation protocols used—metrics and methodologies. We identify a number of key conditions on offline evaluation of TARS, and based on these conditions, we provide a comprehensive classification of evaluation protocols for TARS. Moreover, we propose a methodological description framework aimed to make the evaluation process fair and reproducible. We also present an empirical study on the impact of different evaluation protocols on measuring relative performances of well-known TARS. The results obtained show that different uses of the above evaluation conditions yield to remarkably distinct performance and relative ranking values of the recommendation approaches. They reveal the need of clearly stating the evaluation conditions used to ensure comparability and reproducibility of reported results. From our analysis and experiments, we finally conclude with methodological issues a robust evaluation of TARS should take into consideration. Furthermore we provide a number of general guidelines to select proper conditions for evaluating particular TARS.
Formation of carbon‐carbon bonds through cross‐coupling reactions using readily available substrates, like alcohols, is crucial for modern organic chemistry. Recently, direct alkyl alcohol ...functionalization has been achieved by the use of N‐Heterocyclic Carbene (NHC) salts via in situ formation of an alcohol‐NHC adduct and its activation by a photoredox catalyst to generate carbon‐centered alkyl radicals. Experimentally, only electron deficient NHC activators work but the reasons of this behavior remain underexplored. Herein, a DFT computational study of the mechanism of alcohol activation using up to seven NHC salts is performed to shed light into the influence of their electronic properties in the alkyl radical formation. This study demonstrates that four reaction steps are involved in the transformation and characterizes how the electronic properties of the NHC salt affect each step. A fine balance of the NHC electron‐richness is proved to be determinant for this transformation.
The mechanism of carbon centered radical generation from alkyl alcohols mediated by N‐heterocyclic carbene salts has been explored computationally for 7 different NHCs. The influence of the electronic properties for each mechanistic step is rationalized and has been proven to be key for reactivity.
PurposeTo present the latest available research assessing the actual impact of reminder and guidance technologies for daily activities in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia’s patients, ...outlining design implications for these technologies.Materials and methodsThe search was conducted in the ACM Digital Library, IEEExplore, ScienceDirect, PubMed, Cochrane Library, Sage Journal, ResearchGate, and SemanticScholar. An iteratively-developed Boolean search string was built including up to 18 AND/OR terms across Four categories (Memory Aids, Technology, Daily Activities, Memory Impairment). We qualitatively analyzed the findings and discussions of the findings reported in 40 studies in our corpus to determine common barriers to, and facilitators of, effective intervention implementation and adoption.ResultsForty studies fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria. In existing studies, individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias understand the usefulness of different functions that can be provided within an app to assist with everyday tasks. There was a high level of heterogeneity regarding the studies’ location, duration, and evaluation methodology.ConclusionsThere is a need for assistive reminder and guidance technologies to be tailored towards autonomy, identity and personalization. Future work should include motivating features to aid during mood changes and feelings of insecurity.
Strigolactones (SLs) are important ex‐planta signalling molecules in the rhizosphere, promoting the association with beneficial microorganisms, but also affecting plant interactions with harmful ...organisms. They are also plant hormones in‐planta, acting as modulators of plant responses under nutrient‐deficient conditions, mainly phosphate (Pi) starvation. In the present work, we investigate the potential role of SLs as regulators of early Pi starvation signalling in plants. A short‐term pulse of the synthetic SL analogue 2′‐epi‐GR24 promoted SL accumulation and the expression of Pi starvation markers in tomato and wheat under Pi deprivation. 2′‐epi‐GR24 application also increased SL production and the expression of Pi starvation markers under normal Pi conditions, being its effect dependent on the endogenous SL levels. Remarkably, 2′‐epi‐GR24 also impacted the root metabolic profile under these conditions, promoting the levels of metabolites associated to plant responses to Pi limitation, thus partially mimicking the pattern observed under Pi deprivation. The results suggest an endogenous role for SLs as Pi starvation signals. In agreement with this idea, SL‐deficient plants were less sensitive to this stress. Based on the results, we propose that SLs may act as early modulators of plant responses to P starvation.
The current work provides evidences supporting that the phytohormone strigolactones are early modulators of plant responses to low Pi availability and that they impact metabolic profiles in the roots. This knowledge may help to develop new strategies to optimize plant Pi acquisition efficiency and use.
Skin cancer incidence has been increasing in the last decades, but most of the commercial formulations used as sunscreens are designed to protect only against solar erythema. Many of the active ...components present in sunscreens show critical weaknesses, such as low stability and toxicity. Thus, the development of more efficient components is an urgent health necessity and an attractive industrial target. We have rationally designed core moieties with increased photoprotective capacities and a new energy dissipation mechanism. Using these scaffolds, we have synthesized a series of compounds with tunable properties suitable for their use in sunscreens, and enhanced properties in terms of stability, light energy dissipation, and toxicity. Moreover, some representative compounds were included in final sunscreen formulations and a relevant solar protection factor boost was measured.
Soak up some rays: Inspired by naturally occurring compounds, a new family of efficient sunscreens was rationally designed and synthesized. Their properties as sunscreens were tested and found to boost the solar protection factor in real samples.
Normalization is a crucial step in proteomics data analysis as it enables data adjustment and enhances comparability between datasets by minimizing multiple sources of variability, such as sampling, ...sample handling, storage, treatment, and mass spectrometry measurements. In this study, we investigated different normalization methods, including Z-score normalization, median divide normalization, and quantile normalization, to evaluate their performance using a case study based on renal cell carcinoma datasets. Our results demonstrate that when comparing datasets by pairs, both the Z-score and quantile normalization methods consistently provide better results in terms of the number of proteins identified and quantified as well as in identifying statistically significant up or down-regulated proteins. However, when three or more datasets are compared at the same time the differences are found to be negligible.
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•Implications for advancing biomarker identification in renal carcinomas and analytical proteomics studies.•Comprehensive comparison of three normalization methods for proteomics datasets.•Rigorous analysis benchmarked against a validated method using immunohistochemistry.•Choice of normalization method loses criticality with more than two datasets.•Total protein approach demonstrated superior efficacy in biomarker discovery.
Inorganic phosphorus (Pi) fertilizers are expected to become scarce in the near future; so, breeding for improved Pi acquisition-related root traits would decrease the need for fertilizer ...application. This work aimed to decipher the physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying the differences between two commercial wheat cultivars (Crac and Tukan) with contrasting Pi acquisition efficiencies (PAE). For that, four independent experiments with different growth conditions were conducted. When grown under non-limiting Pi conditions, both cultivars performed similarly. Crac was less affected by Pi starvation than Tukan, presenting higher biomass production, and an enhanced root development, root:shoot ratio, and root efficiency for Pi uptake under this condition. Higher PAE in Crac correlated with enhanced expression of the Pi transporter genes TaPht1;2 and TaPht1;10. Crac also presented a faster and higher modulation of the IPS1-miR399-PHO2 pathway upon Pi starvation. Interestingly, Crac showed increased levels of strigolactones, suggesting a direct relationship between this phytohormone and plant P responses. Based on these findings, we propose that higher PAE of the cultivar Crac is associated with an improved P signalling through a fine-tuning modulation of PHO2 activity, which seems to be regulated by strigolactones. This knowledge will help to develop new strategies for improved plant performance under P stress conditions.
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