The Cauchy transform in the slice hyperholomorphic setting and related topics

In this paper we study the additive splitting associated to the quaternionic Cauchy transform defined by the Cauchy formula of slice hyperholomorphic functions. Moreover, we introduce and study the analogue of the fundamental solution of the global operator of slice hyperholomorphic functions. We state our results in the quaternionic setting but several results hold for Clifford algebra-valued function with minor changes in the proofs

CHRONOBIOLOGY IN DIVERGENT THINKING: HOW DESIGNERS ARE AFFECTED BY TIME OF DAY

Chronobiology is the science that studies the role of time in biology. The study of time in human bodies revealed the presence of internal rhythms related to the time of day. Considering divergent thinking as one of the essential cognitive activities of conceptual design, this paper presents the results of investigating the effect of time of day on designers’ brain activity while performing divergent thinking tasks. An experiment was run with a revised Alternative Uses Task, measuring brain activity with an electroencephalogram (EEG) device. Students with different educational backgrounds were recruited for this experiment, including engineering and industrial design students, to determine if the time of day affected them differently. The brain waves and related power results show significant differences with respect to the time of day and educational background. The differences are particularly evident considering the interaction of these factors. Further studies are required to understand the relationship between the differences detected and the designers’ behavioral performance and to identify which time of day is most effective for idea-generation activities for designers

High‐strength Si–SiC lattices prepared by powder bed fusion, infiltration‐pyrolysis, and reactive silicon infiltration

This study focuses on the design, additive manufacturing, and characterization of silicon carbide-based components with complex geometries. These parts were produced using a novel hybrid technique, previously developed: powder bed fusion of polyamide was used to 3D print two different templates with complex architectures. Preceramic polymer infiltrations and pyrolysis with polycarbosilane and furan resin were performed to obtain the ceramic parts. The final densification was achieved with reactive or nonreactive silicon infiltrations according to four different strategies, producing ceramics comprised of crystalline βSiC, reaction-bonded βSiC, and low residual silicon. The final gyroid samples (∼70 vol% macroporosity) exhibited a maximum compressive strength of 24.7 ± 2.2 MPa, with a skeleton density of 3.173 ± 0.022 g/cm3, and a relative density of 0.935 ± 0.016. These findings underscore the potential of this manufacturing approach and showcase its effectiveness in fabricating intricate ceramic structures for engineering applications as heat exchangers and catalytic supports

Work-related stress in agricultural industry: a preliminary investigation

The present paper aims to investigate the social aspects of the agricultural industry, particularly those related to farmers. Starting with an analysis of the literature and official reports, the work describes the current problematic situation for the farmers' well-being. The research focuses on identifying the leading causes of their psychological stress through qualitative analyses made through personal interviews and questionnaires. Several reasons for stress were detected. The most prominent one was found to be harvest uncertainty. Finally, some solutions for actions to tackle the problem are discussed and suggested for further studies and applications

Dynamics of disease characteristics and clinical management of critically ill COVID-19 patients over the time course of the pandemic: an analysis of the prospective, international, multicentre RISC-19-ICU registry.

BACKGROUND It remains elusive how the characteristics, the course of disease, the clinical management and the outcomes of critically ill COVID-19 patients admitted to intensive care units (ICU) worldwide have changed over the course of the pandemic. METHODS Prospective, observational registry constituted by 90 ICUs across 22 countries worldwide including patients with a laboratory-confirmed, critical presentation of COVID-19 requiring advanced organ support. Hierarchical, generalized linear mixed-effect models accounting for hospital and country variability were employed to analyse the continuous evolution of the studied variables over the pandemic. RESULTS Four thousand forty-one patients were included from March 2020 to September 2021. Over this period, the age of the admitted patients (62 [95% CI 60-63] years vs 64 [62-66] years, p < 0.001) and the severity of organ dysfunction at ICU admission decreased (Sequential Organ Failure Assessment 8.2 [7.6-9.0] vs 5.8 [5.3-6.4], p < 0.001) and increased, while more female patients (26 [23-29]% vs 41 [35-48]%, p < 0.001) were admitted. The time span between symptom onset and hospitalization as well as ICU admission became longer later in the pandemic (6.7 [6.2-7.2| days vs 9.7 [8.9-10.5] days, p < 0.001). The PaO2/FiO2 at admission was lower (132 [123-141] mmHg vs 101 [91-113] mmHg, p < 0.001) but showed faster improvements over the initial 5 days of ICU stay in late 2021 compared to early 2020 (34 [20-48] mmHg vs 70 [41-100] mmHg, p = 0.05). The number of patients treated with steroids and tocilizumab increased, while the use of therapeutic anticoagulation presented an inverse U-shaped behaviour over the course of the pandemic. The proportion of patients treated with high-flow oxygen (5 [4-7]% vs 20 [14-29], p < 0.001) and non-invasive mechanical ventilation (14 [11-18]% vs 24 [17-33]%, p < 0.001) throughout the pandemic increased concomitant to a decrease in invasive mechanical ventilation (82 [76-86]% vs 74 [64-82]%, p < 0.001). The ICU mortality (23 [19-26]% vs 17 [12-25]%, p < 0.001) and length of stay (14 [13-16] days vs 11 [10-13] days, p < 0.001) decreased over 19 months of the pandemic. CONCLUSION Characteristics and disease course of critically ill COVID-19 patients have continuously evolved, concomitant to the clinical management, throughout the pandemic leading to a younger, less severely ill ICU population with distinctly different clinical, pulmonary and inflammatory presentations than at the onset of the pandemic

Planck intermediate results XXIV : Constraints on variations in fundamental constants

Any variation in the fundamental physical constants, more particularly in the fine structure constant, a, or in the mass of the electron, me, affects the recombination history of the Universe and cause an imprint on the cosmic microwave background angular power spectra. We show that the Planck data allow one to improve the constraint on the time variation of the fine structure constant at redshift z - 10(3) by about a factor of 5 compared to WMAP data, as well as to break the degeneracy with the Hubble constant, H-0. In addition to a, we can set a constraint on the variation in the mass of the electron, me, and in the simultaneous variation of the two constants. We examine in detail the degeneracies between fundamental constants and the cosmological parameters, in order to compare the limits obtained from Planck and WMAP and to determine the constraining power gained by including other cosmological probes. We conclude that independent time variations of the fine structure constant and of the mass of the electron are constrained by Planck to Delta alpha/alpha = (3.6 +/- 3.7) x 10(-3) and Delta m(e)/m(e) = (4 +/- 11) x 10(-3) at the 68% confidence level. We also investigate the possibility of a spatial variation of the fine structure constant. The relative amplitude of a dipolar spatial variation in a (corresponding to a gradient across our Hubble volume) is constrained to be delta alpha/alpha = (-2.4 +/- 3.7) x 10(-2).Peer reviewe

Planck Intermediate Results. XXXVI. Optical identification and redshifts of Planck SZ sources with telescopes at the Canary Islands Observatories

We present the results of approximately three years of observations of Planck Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) sources with telescopes at the Canary Islands observatories as part of the general optical follow-up programme undertaken by the Planck collaboration. In total, 78 SZ sources are discussed. Deep-imaging observations were obtained for most of these sources; spectroscopic observations in either in long-slit or multi-object modes were obtained for many. We effectively used 37.5 clear nights. We found optical counterparts for 73 of the 78 candidates. This sample includes 53 spectroscopic redshift determinations, 20 of them obtained with a multi-object spectroscopic mode. The sample contains new redshifts for 27 Planck clusters that were not included in the first Planck SZ source catalogue (PSZ1).Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in A&

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Antidiabetic Drug Prescription Pattern in Hospitalized Older Patients with Diabetes

Objective: To describe the prescription pattern of antidiabetic and cardiovascular drugs in a cohort of hospitalized older patients with diabetes. Methods: Patients with diabetes aged 65 years or older hospitalized in internal medicine and/or geriatric wards throughout Italy and enrolled in the REPOSI (REgistro POliterapuie SIMI—Società Italiana di Medicina Interna) registry from 2010 to 2019 and discharged alive were included. Results: Among 1703 patients with diabetes, 1433 (84.2%) were on treatment with at least one antidiabetic drug at hospital admission, mainly prescribed as monotherapy with insulin (28.3%) or metformin (19.2%). The proportion of treated patients decreased at discharge (N = 1309, 76.9%), with a significant reduction over time. Among those prescribed, the proportion of those with insulin alone increased over time (p = 0.0066), while the proportion of those prescribed sulfonylureas decreased (p &lt; 0.0001). Among patients receiving antidiabetic therapy at discharge, 1063 (81.2%) were also prescribed cardiovascular drugs, mainly with an antihypertensive drug alone or in combination (N = 777, 73.1%). Conclusion: The management of older patients with diabetes in a hospital setting is often sub-optimal, as shown by the increasing trend in insulin at discharge, even if an overall improvement has been highlighted by the prevalent decrease in sulfonylureas prescription