Workforce pDEI: Productivity Coupled with DEI

Ranking pertaining to the human-centered tasks -- underscoring their paramount significance in these domains such as evaluation and hiring process -- exhibits widespread prevalence across various industries. Consequently, decision-makers are taking proactive measurements to promote diversity, underscore equity, and advance inclusion. Their unwavering commitment to these ideals emanates from the following convictions: (i) Diversity encompasses a broad spectrum of differences; (ii) Equity involves the assurance of equitable opportunities; and (iii) Inclusion revolves around the cultivation of a sense of value and impartiality, concurrently empowering individuals. Data-driven AI tools have been used for screening and ranking processes. However, there is a growing concern that the presence of pre-existing biases in databases may be exacerbated, particularly in the context of imbalanced datasets or the black-box-schema. In this research, we propose a model-driven recruitment decision support tool that addresses fairness together with equity in the screening phase. We introduce the term ``pDEI" to represent the output-input oriented production efficiency adjusted by socioeconomic disparity. Taking into account various aspects of interpreting socioeconomic disparity, our goals are (i) maximizing the relative efficiency of underrepresented groups and (ii) understanding how socioeconomic disparity affects the cultivation of a DEI-positive workplace

The Art NFTs and Their Marketplaces

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are crypto assets with a unique digital identifier for ownership, powered by blockchain technology. Technically speaking, anything digital could be minted and sold as an NFT, which provides proof of ownership and authenticity of a digital file. For this reason, it helps us distinguish between the originals and their copies, making it possible to trade them. This paper focuses on art NFTs that change how artists can sell their products. It also changes how the art trade market works since NFT technology cuts out the middleman. Recently, the utility of NFTs has become an essential issue in the NFT ecosystem, which refers to the owners' usefulness, profitability, and benefits. Using recent major art NFT marketplace datasets, we summarize and interpret the current market trends and patterns in a way that brings insight into the future art market. Numerical examples are presented

An Autonomous Large Language Model Agent for Chemical Literature Data Mining

Chemical synthesis, which is crucial for advancing material synthesis and drug discovery, impacts various sectors including environmental science and healthcare. The rise of technology in chemistry has generated extensive chemical data, challenging researchers to discern patterns and refine synthesis processes. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps by analyzing data to optimize synthesis and increase yields. However, AI faces challenges in processing literature data due to the unstructured format and diverse writing style of chemical literature. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce an end-to-end AI agent framework capable of high-fidelity extraction from extensive chemical literature. This AI agent employs large language models (LLMs) for prompt generation and iterative optimization. It functions as a chemistry assistant, automating data collection and analysis, thereby saving manpower and enhancing performance. Our framework's efficacy is evaluated using accuracy, recall, and F1 score of reaction condition data, and we compared our method with human experts in terms of content correctness and time efficiency. The proposed approach marks a significant advancement in automating chemical literature extraction and demonstrates the potential for AI to revolutionize data management and utilization in chemistry

Lactate Dehydrogenase is involved in but not the Target Antigen in Children with Kawasaki Disease

Background: Kawasaki disease (KD) is an acute vasculitis often complicating coronary arterial lesions, and gradually becomes the leading cause of acquired heart disease instead of rheumatism. Previous studies often regards elevation of serum lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) level as an auxiliary diagnosis marker when judging myocardial diseases.Methods: We analyzed the serum LDH levels in newly confirmed KD patients, compared with febrile non-KD patients and healthy donors as controls. Then a subtype of LDH protein (LDHA) were over-expressed and purified for antigenicity analysis of potential anti-LDHA autoantibodies in IgA, IgM and IgG isotype by homemade ELISA, respectively.Results: An obvious elevation serum levels of LDH was found in 5/27 KD patients (19%, p&lt;0.05) and 16/27 febrile non-KD patients (59%, p&lt;0.001). None of IgA or IgM isotype of anti-LDHA antibodies were detected in all cases, and only low titer IgG antibodies were detected in KD patients (7%) and febrile non-KD patients (11%).Conclusions: Our results demonstrated the LDH was associated but not the main autoimmune target in children with KD.</p

Synthesis and Evaluation of LaBaCo_2−<i>x</i>Mo<i>_x</i>O_5+<i>δ</i> Cathode for Intermediate-Temperature Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

LaBaCo2−xMoxO5+δ (LBCMx, x = 0–0.08) cathodes synthesized by a sol-gel method were evaluated for intermediate-temperature solid oxide fuel cells. The limit of the solid solubility of Mo in LBCMx was lower than 0.08. As the content of Mo increased gradually from 0 to 0.06, the thermal expansion coefficient decreased from 20.87 × 10−6 K−1 to 18.47 × 10−6 K−1. The introduction of Mo could increase the conductivity of LBCMx, which varied from 464 S cm−1 to 621 S cm−1 at 800 °C. The polarization resistance of the optimal cathode LBCM0.04 in air at 800 °C was 0.036 Ω cm2, reduced by a factor of 1.67 when compared with the undoped Mo cathode. The corresponding maximum power density of a single cell based on a YSZ electrolyte improved from 165 mW cm−2 to 248 mW cm−2 at 800 °C

Effects of inversion time on inversion recovery prepared ultrashort echo time (IR-UTE) imaging of bound and pore water in cortical bone.

Water is present in cortical bone in different binding states. In this study we aimed to investigate the effects of inversion time (TI) on the signal from bound and pore water in cortical bone using an adiabatic inversion recovery prepared ultrashort echo time (IR-UTE) sequence on a clinical 3 T scanner. In total ten bovine midshaft samples and four human tibial midshaft samples were harvested for this study. Each cortical sample was imaged with the UTE and IR-UTE sequences with a TR of 300 ms and a series of TI values ranging from 10 to 240 ms. Five healthy volunteers were also imaged with the same sequence. Single- and bi-component models were utilized to calculate the T2 * and relative fractions of short and long T2 * components. Bi-component behavior of the signal from cortical bone was seen with the IR-UTE sequence, except with a TI of around 80 ms, where the short T2 * component alone were seen and a mono-exponential decay pattern was observed. In vivo imaging with the IR-UTE sequence provided high contrast-to-noise images with direct visualization of bound water and reduced signal from long T2 muscle and fat. Our preliminary results demonstrate that selective nulling of the pore water component can be achieved with the IR-UTE sequence with an appropriate TI, allowing selective imaging of the bound water component in cortical bone in vivo using clinical MR scanners

Prohibitin Is Involved in Patients with IgG4 Related Disease.

IgG4-related disease (IgG4-RD) is a chronic systemic disease involved in many organs and tissues. As only limited autoantigens have been found since the beginning of this century, the aim of this study was to reveal new candidate autoantigens of IgG4-RD.Multiple cell lines including HT-29, EA.hy926, HEK 293 and HepG2 were used to test the binding ability of circulating autoantibodies from IgG4-RD sera. The amino-acid sequence was then analyzed by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight tandem (MALDI-TOF/TOF) mass spectrometry. After the cloning and expression of recombinant putative autoantigen in a bacterial expression system, the corresponding immuno assay was set up and utilized to observe the prevalence of serum autoantibodies in a large set of confirmed clinical samples.One positive autoantigen was identified as prohibitin. ELISA analysis showed that a majority of patients with IgG4-RD have antibodies against prohibitin. Anti-prohibitin antibodies were present in the sera of patients with definite autoimmune pancreatitis (25/34; 73.5%), Mikulicz's disease (8/15; 53.3%), retroperitoneal fibrosis (6/11; 54.5%), other probable IgG4-RD (26/29; 89.7%) and Sjögren's syndrome (4/30; 13.3%) but not in apparently healthy donors (1/70; 1.4%).An association between prohibitin and patients with some IgG4-RD was observed, although the results were quite heterogeneous among different individuals within autoimmune pancreatitis, Mikulicz's disease and retroperitoneal fibrosis

Secondary metabolic profiling and artemisinin biosynthesis of two genotypes of Artemisia annua L

Artemisinin has been proven to be an effective antimalarial compound, especially for chloroquine-resistant and cerebral malaria. However, its biosynthesis pathway is still not completely clear. In order to get new clues about artemisinin biosynthesis, metabolic profiling by gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was applied to compare the secondary metabolites of two Artemisia annua L., genotype SP18 and 001, for some phenotypic and agricultural trait differences, including artemisinin content, existed between the two genotypes. Samples at 7 time points of three growth stages were studied. The data of profiles were subjected to multivariate analysis with partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). The results indicated that there were clear differences in terpenoids and artemisinin metabolism between different growth stages and genotypes. Twenty-one compounds, including artemisinin and its related precursors, were selected as the market compounds of the PLS-DA between the two genotypes. Among them, artemisinic acid, arteannuin 13, borneol, beta-farnesene and an unidentified sesquiterpenoid (peak 48) were abundant in 001, while camphor, methyl artemisinic acid and lanceol accumulated mainly in SP18. The relationship between these differences and artemisinin biosynthesis in the two genotypes of A. annua were discussed