Research works

To tip or not to tip: How tip jars impact tipping in the digital tipping era

Digital tipping has become more prevalent in limited-service environments such as coffee shops, yet an interesting phenomenon is observed: many businesses still use physical tip jars while digital tipping prompts already exist. But why is that? This dissertation investigates tip...

International best practice in the cessation of vaping and non-combustible nicotine use, and barriers, facilitators and treatment preferences: A rapid review

Introduction: Increasing use of e-cigarettes and forms of non-combustible nicotine consumption, especially among children and young people who do not smoke, is an emerging challenge for traditional services oriented to stop smoking care. However, as services struggle to manage th...

Jordan-like invariant representations of scalar-tensor gravity and the return of imperfect-fluid thermodynamics

It has been shown that the thermodynamics of frame-invariant scalar-tensor gravity admits an Einstein-frame-like invariant representation, in which the scalar sector is minimally coupled and behaves as a perfect fluid with vanishing temperature. We show that this is not the only...

Measuring Organizational Constructs in Large-Scale Text: An interpretive framework combining topic modeling and BERT

Measuring organizational constructs in large-scale unstructured text requires methods that preserve interpretive depth while enabling systematic, per-document classification. Structural Topic Modeling (STM) supports interpretive depth by surfacing patterns that inform construct o...

PHOTO AND ELECTROCHEMICAL INTERVENTIONS FOR ORGANIC CONTAMINANT REMOVAL: DEGRADATION, SORPTION AND KINETIC CHARACTERIZATION

While conventional drinking water treatment strategies can help mitigate physical, chemical and biological water quality challenges, the process itself may introduce or fail to adequately remove contaminants, thereby exceeding regulatory guidelines and posing compliance challenge...

Associations between iron-status and folate-status in US women of child-bearing age: A possible path to understanding birth defect risk in overweight/obese mothers

Iron and folate are two metabolically interwoven nutrients necessary for normal development and cell growth. Among the important consequences of deficiencies of one or both nutrients are increased risk of infertility in both males and females, increased risk of early pregnancy lo...

A comprehensive phylogenomic framework for brachiopod evolution among lophotrochozoans

Brachiopods appeared early in the Cambrian radiation and represent an important clade for understanding the origin of animal body plans and the evolution of biomineralized structures. A robust phylogenetic framework of the living representatives is needed to answer persistent que...

DEVELOPING MORE EFFECTIVE IRON BIOFORTIFICATION OF MAIZE BY TARGETED OVEREXPRESSION OF ENDOGENOUS GENES.

Iron deficiency remains one of the most widespread micronutrient deficiencies worldwide. Biofortification of crops through genetic manipulation of iron uptake, transport, and storage pathways offers a promising strategy to combat these deficiencies; however, success has been limi...

DO PRIOR R&D PROJECT OUTCOMES IMPACT THE PURSUIT OF INNOVATION? IT DEPENDS ON THE R&D ACCOUNTING METHOD

I experimentally investigate how the economic outcome (i.e., successful development or failed development) of a prior Research & Development (R&D) project affects the willingness of managers to invest in a related, but distinct project, conditional on the accounting method. Consi...

The Closer, the Better: Engineering RGB Thermometric Performance in Tb3+,Eu3+-Doped MOFs

Abstract The effectiveness of luminescence thermometry, which exploits temperature-induced changes in the spectroscopic properties of phosphor materials for temperature sensing, has been extensively demonstrated. However, from a practical perspective, monitoring temperature-induc...

Thermodynamics of Lorentzian Taub-NUT spacetimes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet AdS gravity

We study the thermodynamics of Lorentzian Taub--NUT spacetimes in Einstein--Gauss--Bonnet AdS gravity in arbitrary even dimensions, constructed as $U(1)$ fibrations over Einstein--Kähler base manifolds. We compute the temperature from the surface gravity and the energy as the con...

Reliability and validity of the Japanese version of the Sleep Problem Acceptance Questionnaire

This study aimed to develop a Japanese version of the Sleep Problem Acceptance Questionnaire (SPAQ-J) and assess its reliability and validity. The SPAQ-J was developed through a forward-backward translation procedure with permission from the original authors. The sample included...

Using podcasts to forward Universal Design for Learning in civil engineering education

The author declare no conflicts of interest. No GenAI/LLM tools were used in any part of the research or writing of this article. Research data are not shared.

Tracing the Cosmic Origins: Machine Learning Reconstruction of the Primordial Density Field from EoR Observations

Abstract Reconstructing the initial conditions of the Universe from late-time tracers would unlock cosmological information buried by non-linear structure formation and astrophysics. We reconstruct the initial density field corresponding to z = 300, with its linear amplitude extr...

AI-driven whole-life costing for decision-ready UK public building retrofits

Abstract Public-sector building retrofits in the United Kingdom require decisions that balance whole-life cost, carbon reduction, service continuity and auditability under limited data and constrained capital budgets. This paper develops a decision-ready whole-life costing (WLC)...

ZSH: Rank-Weighted Profiling of Bitcoin Transactions and a Pre-Specified Evaluation of What the Profiles Capture

Bitcoin’s ledger records what each transaction moves but not what it does; unsupervised profiles describe it without labels, but are rarely tested against information the clustering never saw. We evaluate ZSH, which weights twelve features by the rank of their mutual information...

Survival Benefits and Treatment-Related Toxicities of Definitive Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials

Background: Definitive concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CRT) is a standard-of-care treatment for multiple locally advanced solid malignancies, including head and neck, cervical, esophageal, and non-small cell lung cancers. While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) consistently demon...

Den2Obj: A command-line tool for producing isosurfaces from electron density data files

A command-line tool for generating isosurfaces from electron-density scalar fields. Den2Obj reads VASP CHGCAR, PARCHG, and LOCPOT files as well as Gaussian Cube files, and exports meshes in OBJ, PLY, and STL formats. It also supports conversion to the lossless compressed D2O form...

Cell-intrinsic steroidogenesis regulates mast cell function

Steroid hormones are well-known regulators of mast cell function, but whether mast cells themselves produce steroids de novo and influences their effector function has remained unknown. Here, we show that mast cells constitutively express the steroidogenic enzyme cytochrome P450...

A Spatiotemporal Framework for Quantifying and Projecting Soil Organic Carbon in Grasslands of China

Accurate estimation of grassland soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks is essential for understanding carbon dynamics, yet estimates of soil organic carbon density (SOCD) in China remain uncertain due to differences in data sources and methods. To address this issue, we developed a sp...