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The purpose of this project was to develop a systematic, objective procedure to evaluate the potential to outsource functions and activities currently performed by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (LaDOTD). A computer-based model was developed which evaluates the qualitative and cost aspects of contracting out activities and functions. The model was applied to three activities in the LaDOTD; highway markers, highway striping, and maintenance of rest areas. The results were in line with the expectations of officials who have experienced actual outsourcing of these activities. The model was constructed so that the perspectives it considers and the criterion on which outsourcing is assessed may be altered by the user to allow its use in a variety of settings.

This study aims to investigate the association between vitamin D measured in serum 25 hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] and outcomes of COVID-19 patients in Bahrain. This paper hypothesized that lower serum 25(OH)D concentration in COVID 19 patients is associated with longer viral clearance time (VCT) and higher risk of admission to the intensive care unit (ICU).

This study used a retrospective cohort design of patients admitted to Salmaniya Medical Complex, Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain, from February to June 2020. This study included patients with positive, confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis made using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), World Health Organization diagnosis manual and local diagnostic guidelines. Primary outcome measures were: VCT measured as the time in days between the first positive RT-PCR test result and the first of two consecutive negative RT-PCR results on recovery and admission need to ICU.

A total of 450 patients were analyzed; mean age was 46.4 ± 12.4 years and 349 (78%) were men. Mean 25(OH)D concentration was 41.7 ± 23.7 nmol/L for the entire sample. Severe vitamin D deficiency (<25 nmol/L) was present in 20%, mild-to-moderate deficiency (25–50 nmol/L) in 55%, insufficiency (50 to <75 nmol/L) in 18% and sufficiency (=75 nmol/L) in 7%. The mean VCT was 12.9 ± 8.2 days. Multivariate linear regression analysis showed that severe vitamin D deficiency was associated with longer VCT, with an average of three extra days after correction for age and sex (β = 3.1; p = 0.001). Multinomial regression analysis showed that vitamin D deficiency was associated with an 83% increased risk of admission to ICU after correction for age and sex (odds ratio = 1.8; p = 0.03).

The results showed that severe vitamin D deficiency was associated with longer recovery time from COVID-19. Low serum 25(OH)D is associated with increased need for critical care in an ICU. Large-scale randomized controlled trials are necessary to further investigate the complex association between vitamin D and COVID-19 infection.

This paper aims to focus on the accurate analysis of the fractional heat transfer in a two-dimensional (2D) rectangular monolayer tissue with three different kinds of lateral boundary conditions and the quantitative evaluation of the degree of thermal damage and burn depth.

A symplectic method is used to analytically solve the fractional heat transfer dual equation in the frequency domain (s-domain). Explicit expressions of the dual vector can be constructed by superposing the symplectic eigensolutions. The solution procedure is rigorously rational without any trial functions. And the accurate predictions of temperature and heat flux in the time domain (t-domain) are derived through numerical inverse Laplace transform.

Comparison study shows that the maximum relative error is less than 0.16%, which verifies the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results indicate that the model and heat source parameters have a significant effect on temperature and thermal damage. The pulse duration (Δt) of the laser heat source can effectively control the time to reach the peak temperature and the peak slope of the thermal damage curve. The burn depth is closely correlated with exposure temperature and duration. And there exists the delayed effect of fractional order on burn depth.

A symplectic approach is presented for the thermal analysis of 2D fractional heat transfer. A unified time-fractional heat transfer model is proposed to describe the anomalous thermal behavior of biological tissue. New findings might provide guidance for temperature prediction and thermal damage assessment of biological tissues during hyperthermia.

To understand the meaning of a sentence, humans can focus on important words in the sentence, which reflects our eyes staying on each word in different gaze time or times. Thus, some studies utilize eye-tracking values to optimize the attention mechanism in deep learning models. But these studies lack to explain the rationality of this approach. Whether the attention mechanism possesses this feature of human reading needs to be explored.

The authors conducted experiments on a sentiment classification task. Firstly, they obtained eye-tracking values from two open-source eye-tracking corpora to describe the feature of human reading. Then, the machine attention values of each sentence were learned from a sentiment classification model. Finally, a comparison was conducted to analyze machine attention values and eye-tracking values.

Through experiments, the authors found the attention mechanism can focus on important words, such as adjectives, adverbs and sentiment words, which are valuable for judging the sentiment of sentences on the sentiment classification task. It possesses the feature of human reading, focusing on important words in sentences when reading. Due to the insufficient learning of the attention mechanism, some words are wrongly focused. The eye-tracking values can help the attention mechanism correct this error and improve the model performance.

Our research not only provides a reasonable explanation for the study of using eye-tracking values to optimize the attention mechanism but also provides new inspiration for the interpretability of attention mechanism.

The role of women entrepreneurs in family businesses is becoming increasingly important, a fact that is reflected in the scientific literature. The purpose of this study is to identify the key research areas that address this issue. To this end, a bibliometric analysis has been carried out to obtain a perspective of the current situation in this field of research and to identify the key areas of research in recent years.

In this study, the analysis is performed using a literature review and bibliometric analysis techniques. The bibliographic source supporting this analysis resulted from a Scopus search of the terms gender, entrepreneurship and family business. VOSviewer was used to facilitate the analysis.

This bibliometric analysis studies the evolutionary trend of publications on gender, entrepreneurship and family business and identifies current research trends. It also identifies authors, journals and countries with the highest impact levels to enhance collaboration and learning.

It would be advisable to conduct further research with a broader bibliographic base and with other search criteria covering other aspects related to the role of women entrepreneurs in family businesses. This work can serve as a valuable source of information for future research in this field and to assist in the development of effective equality policies to address existing social stereotypes.

This research illustrates, using VOSviewer, the current growth of studies in the field of women entrepreneurship in family businesses.

This paper aims to investigate the dyeability of tussah silk fabric with lotus seedpod extract as the source of nontoxic and eco-friendly dyestuffs and functional agent.

Mordant free dyeing method was carried out using citric acid (CA) as the cross-linking agent to link the fibre and dye molecules. First, the natural pigment of oligomeric procyanidins was extracted from the lotus seedpod and then used to dye the tussah silk fabric. After the dyeing process, the dyed samples were treated with CA solution under different concentrations to improve the colour fastness.

The tussah silk fabric was successfully coloured in reddish brown through the dyeing process and charactered by using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy spectrometer. Moreover, lotus seedpod extract could impart excellent UV protection ability to the dyed samples, and UPF values reached up to 2000. CA dosage influenced the colour characteristics, UV protection and anti-wrinkling performance. The optimum dosage of CA was 7% (Wt.%). In addition, dyed silk fabric showed good antibacterial activity and the calculated bacteriostatic rate against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus were 83.27 and 60.2%, respectively.

This bio-dyeing strategy provided a simple and effective method for sustainable tussah silk fabric dyeing process.

This paper provides a novel dyeing strategy for mordant free dyeing and functionalization of tussah silk fabric, with lotus seedpod extract as natural pigment and CA as cross-linking agent to link the fibre and dye molecules.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) combined with multi-user massive MIMO has been a well-known approach for high spectral efficiency in wideband systems, and it was targeted to detect the MIMO signals. The increasing data rates with multiple antennas and multiple users that share the communication channel simultaneously lead to higher capacity requirements and increased complexity. Thus, different detection algorithms were developed for the Massive MIMO.

This paper focuses on the various literature analyzes on various detection algorithms and techniques for MIMO detectors. Here, it reviews several research papers and exhibits the significance of each detection method.

This paper provides the details of the performance analysis of the MIMO detectors and reveals the best value in the case of each performance measure. Finally, it widens the research issues that can be useful for future researchers to be accomplished in MIMO massive detectors

This paper has presented a detailed review of the detection of massive MIMO on different algorithms and techniques. The survey mainly focuses on different types of channels used in MIMO detections, the number of antennas used in transmitting signals from the source to destination, and vice-versa. The performance measures and the best performance of each of the detectors are described.

People's conciliation is a grass‐roots effort for conflict management in China. It settles civil disputes without characterizing them as conflicts between blameworthy adversaries. It does not take legal effect. But with support from the people's court and government, it is generally honored as an institution to maintain and promote mutual confidence and reciprocal relations among rural villagers, urban residents, and work unit employees. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive description and analysis of people's conciliation. The origin, development, and organization are approached in relation to conciliation in Chinese history as well as other forms of intervention such as self‐conducted, lawyer‐assisted, administrative, and judicial conciliation. Case variety, principle, prohibition, strategy, procedure, and conciliator training are examined Illustrative cases are provided. Ideological and institutional aspects are analyzed in light of Maoism, political economy, culture and community, and public attitude in China.

The S-MCSRM is a two-phase excited switched reluctance motor (SRM), with the short flux path and mutual inductance coupling, which is suitable for the oil submersible pump application owing to large torque and three-wire connection with the standard full-bridge power converter. However, there is not literature to disclose its model due to the complicated mutual inductance coupling. The FEM model is a time-consuming method to analyze this motor. For the first time, this paper aims to propose an S-MCSRM model for performance analysis and control method developing. The proposed model would save simulation time and be a theoretical fundamental for further implementing control algorithm.

The S-MCSRM's operating principle is analyzed, and the voltage equation and the generated torque are deduced. The FEM is utilized to obtain the five typical magnetization curves that describe the S-MCSRM's magnetic path characteristic. The magnetic co-energy equation, phase torque and total torque equations are obtained. From the basic voltage equation, the S-MCSRM's state space model is built for the dynamic analysis and control purpose. The S-MCSRM is widely analyzed in detail by using the proposed model and comparison with the conventional SRM. JMAG finite element package is used to verify the proposed model.

The proposed modeling method is validated by the identical results to those from FEM-based JMAG software. The proposed model just takes second-level time, which is far less than minute-level time consuming of FEM method. The S-MCSRM generates larger torque than the conventional SRM, with three-wire and standard full bridge power converter, and it is confirmed that the S-MCSRM is suitable for the oil submersible pump applications.

This paper proposes a new modeling method for the S-MCSRM to exactly analyze the motor's operating performances, and also it is a theoretical fundamental for developing control algorithm. The proposed model saves much time in analysis, calculation, and simulation, when compared to the FEM method. The completed analysis including flux linkages, torque, torque-ripple, and torque-speed characteristic discloses the S-MCSRM's steady-state operating performances, which provides the deep insight for this kind of motor's applications.