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"Decolonizing Geography: An Introduction" by Sarah A. Radcliffe explores the decolonization of Anglophone geographical curricula. The book emphasizes the importance of approaching fieldwork with humility, respecting local knowledge, and avoiding the imposition of Western paradigms. It calls for action to avoid blinders, respect counternarratives, question official histories, acknowledge privilege, employ collaborative research, and entertain alternative epistemologies. The book also highlights the significance of indigenous environmental knowledge in physical geography and addresses the lack of diversity in the discipline. Overall, "Decolonizing Geography" offers a comprehensive exploration of decolonial approaches in geography and provides practical examples and suggestions for further research. [Extracted from the article]

"Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest" by Kevin Patrick is a book that explores the natural and cultural phenomena of White's Woods, a 500-acre stand of mixed hardwood forest near Indiana, Pennsylvania. The author, who has lived in the area for three decades, highlights the beauty and richness of this local sylvan gem, emphasizing the importance of appreciating and exploring the forests in our own backyards. The book combines geomorphological, natural historical, and physical and cultural geographic background to provide a comprehensive understanding of the area. Through vivid prose and stunning photography, Patrick invites readers to stop, listen, and interpret the wonders of nature. [Extracted from the article]

The capitalisation on and transfer of technological, engineering and scientific knowledge associated with empirical know-how is an important issue for the sustainability and development of manufacturing. Indeed, certain sectors of industry are facing the increasing ageing of the labour force, recruitment difficulties and high staff turnover, leading to a loss of knowledge and know-how. In a context of numerical and digital transition and the migration of processes to industry 4.0, one of major challenges manufacturers face today is their capacity to build intelligent platforms for acquiring, storing and transferring their know-how and knowledge. It is crucial to create new media and tools for staff training and development capable of capturing knowledge and reusing it to create a project history through expertise and data collection. This paper presents the methodology and guidelines for implementing electronic knowledge books (eK-Books), along with their uses. The eK-Book is a semantic web-based hypertext medium (channel) allowing stakeholders to capitalise on, structure and transfer knowledge by using concept maps, process maps, influence graphs, downloadable documents, web pages and hypermedia knowledge sheets. They are intended for engineers, expert or novice technicians, manufacturers, sector coordinators and plant managers, as well as trainers and learners. They are usable and manageable in all types of environments and with different levels of accessibility. This paper highlights (1) the transfer knowledge capacity of eK-Books and (2) their usability in two agri-food sectors namely (1) the cheese sector with protected designation of origin (PDO) and protected geographical indication (PGI), and (2) the butchery and cold meat sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a novel loss function, the boundary Gaussian distance loss, designed to enhance character segmentation in high-resolution scans of old metal-type printed documents. Despite various printing defects caused by low-quality printing technology in the 14th and 15th centuries, the proposed loss function allows the segmentation network to accurately extract character strokes that can be attributed to the typeface of the movable metal type used for printing. Our method calculates deviation between the boundary of predicted character strokes and the counterpart of the ground-truth strokes. Diverging from traditional Euclidean distance metrics, our approach determines the deviation indirectly utilizing boundary pixel-value difference over a Gaussian-smoothed version of the stroke boundary. This approach helps extract characters with smooth boundaries efficiently. Through experiments, it is confirmed that the proposed method not only smoothens stroke boundaries in character extraction, but also effectively eliminates noise and outliers, significantly improving the clarity and accuracy of the segmentation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There are marked inequalities in palliative care provision. Research is needed to understand how such inequalities can be addressed, so that everyone living with advanced illness can receive the care they need, when they need it. Research into inequalities in palliative care should be guided by Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) that includes people from diverse backgrounds, who are less likely to receive specialist services. Multi-disciplinary research partnerships, bringing together primary care (the main providers of palliative care to diverse communities) and specialist palliative care, have the potential to work together in new ways to do research to address inequalities and improve palliative care in practice. This report describes a research partnership between primary care and palliative care that aimed to: (1) create opportunities for more inclusive PPI in palliative care research, (2) co-design new resources to support more equitable, diverse and inclusive PPI for palliative care, (3) propose a new framework for inclusive PPI in palliative care research. Methods: PPI members were recruited via primary care and palliative care research networks from three diverse areas of the UK. A pragmatic, collaborative approach was taken to achieve the partnership aims. Online workshops were carried out to understand barriers to inclusive PPI in palliative care and to co-design resources. Evaluation included a "you said, we did" impact log and a short survey. The approach was informed by good practice principles from previous PPI, and existing theory relating to equity, equality, diversity, and inclusion. Results: In total, 16 PPI members were recruited. Most were White British (n = 10), other ethnicities were Asian (n = 4), Black African (n = 1) and British mixed race (n = 1). The research team co-ordinated communication and activities, leading to honest conversations about barriers to inclusive PPI. Resources were co-designed, including a role description for an Equity, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champion, a "jargon buster", an animation and an online recipe book (http://www.re-equipp.co.uk/) to inform future PPI. Learning from the partnership has been collated into a new framework to inform more inclusive PPI for future palliative care research. Conclusion: Collaboration and reciprocal learning across a multi-disciplinary primary care and palliative care research partnership led to the development of new approaches and resources. Research team commitment, shared vision, adequate resource, careful planning, relationship building and evaluation should underpin approaches to increase equality, diversity and inclusivity in future PPI for palliative care research. Plain Language Summary: Research is needed to understand how inequalities in palliative care can be addressed, so that everyone living with advanced illness can receive the care they need. Research into inequalities in palliative care should be guided by Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) that includes people from diverse backgrounds, who are less likely to receive specialist palliative care. Primary care services are grounded in the community they serve and can be the main providers of palliative care, but this is rarely the focus of research. Primary care and palliative care researchers can work together in new ways to do research to address inequalities and improve palliative care in practice. This paper describes the work of the RE-EQUIPP (REducing inEQUalities through Integration of Primary and Palliative Care) Care Partnership. The partnership involved researchers from primary care and palliative care working with people with lived experience of serious illness as patient or carer from three diverse areas of the United Kingdom: (1) London, (2) inner-city Sheffield and (3) Worthing in Sussex, a rural, coastal setting. The project provided opportunity to develop new ways of working and resources for more inclusive and equitable PPI for future palliative care research. Sixteen PPI members from diverse backgrounds and with a range of experience joined the partnership. Workshops were held to understand the barriers to inclusive PPI. New roles and resources were developed, including an Equity, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champion role, a "jargon buster", an animation, and an online recipe book to inform future PPI. Learning from the partnership was used to develop a new framework, which is presented to inform inclusive PPI for palliative care research in the future. This outlines the need for research team commitment and shared vision, adequate resource, careful planning, relationship building and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The e-books industry is mature, and audiobooks are becoming increasingly popular. More and more publishers are coming to realize that audiobooks could be a potential revenue driver and intend to release audiobooks. Considering that there is a certain substitutability between e-books and audiobooks, publishers need to decide how to release a book in its audible version and its e-book version into the market. In this paper, we incorporate the discount factor and the consumers' acceptance level for audiobooks into the consumer utility by dividing consumers into two types, high-value type and low-value type, and construct two different release models: releasing the audiobook and the e-book simultaneously and releasing the audiobook after the e-book. Using an optimization tool, we investigate pricing strategies of a monopolistic publisher under two different release models. By comparing the theoretical results of the two models, we find that when the consumers' patience exceeds a certain threshold, releasing a book in its audible version after its e-book version is better for the publisher, and the publisher should adopt a skimming (refers to decreasing markups over time) pricing strategy for the e-book in this case. Further, the publisher should set a higher price for the audiobook than the e-book, whether or not they release the audiobook after the e-book. In addition, we conduct a numerical analysis to investigate how the discount factor, the percentage of high-value consumers, and the high-value consumers' acceptance level for audiobooks affect the consumer surplus and the social welfare. This study offers publishers some managerial insights into the complex issues involving pricing and release strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common task in today's transport simulation research is the assessment of on-demand mobility services on a large scale. A framework that is widely used for such tasks is MATSim, which has been applied frequently to study highly dynamic on-demand mobility services. To date, its efficient fleet management implementation does not yet support on-demand requests that are pre-booked in advance. This type of service, however, is seeing increased interest in the context of long-distance, rural, and inclusive mobility. Therefore, the present paper explores how prebooking can be integrated into MATSim and a use case for the city of Melun in France is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Press and the People: Cheap Print & Society in Scotland, 1500-1785" is a comprehensive survey of cheap print and popular literature in early modern Scotland. The book explores the relationship between increased book production and circulation, mass communication, and popular culture. It examines the emergence of a literate society in Scotland and the role of cheap prints in promoting literacy. The book also highlights the contributions of women printers and the importance of caddies and paper criers in sustaining the book trade. Overall, this book provides valuable insights into the history of cheap print in Scotland and its impact on society. [Extracted from the article]

Learning resources are crucial and strategic elements that impact the accessibility of easy, fast, accurate, and affordable information in the era of Society 5.0. Learning resources must be adaptable to technological advancements. The history laboratory is a learning resource that must be transformed and adapted to address the aforementioned needs and problems as a solution. The extensive collection of owned items has the potential to support this. This paper describes the creation of a digital laboratory by utilizing collections from the UM History Department. The research employed the Research and Development (R&D) method, utilizing the ADDIE model, which includes the stages of analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. The study presents findings on the importance of digitizing laboratories as educational resources and digital laboratory products for the UM History Department. This digital laboratory product consists of several features, including an e-book (book catalog), an e-repository (final project catalog), an e-museum (museology collection catalog), tool lending, and graduate assessment. The results of the validation and implementation tests demonstrate that the criteria are highly valid and extremely effective. These results demonstrate that the digital laboratory serves as a more effective and efficient learning resource that is easily accessible and usable for civil society 5.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the ethical challenges posed by the use of text generators, specifically ChatGPT, in scientific publishing. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like texts. While it has the potential to improve language quality and productivity, it also raises concerns about plagiarism and the accuracy of generated texts. The article emphasizes the need for critical evaluation of texts generated by ChatGPT and similar tools, and highlights the importance of implementing policies to regulate their use in scientific papers. It also addresses the limitations of plagiarism detection software in detecting AI-generated texts and suggests the use of watermarks as a potential solution. The article concludes by calling for transparency and critical analysis in the use of ChatGPT in scientific writing to maintain the honesty and accuracy of science. [Extracted from the article]

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Nowadays, e-commerce platforms of hotels have become a new trend to help people book hotels online. Interest modeling aims to automatically construct user interests that are critical for e-commerce platforms. Although interest modeling has achieved noticeable successes in product recommendations, it has not been explored in hotel search, especially in the reranking stage. This paper studies the interest modeling task for reranking hotels, and identifies two key challenges—high behavior sparsity and large interest gap. To address the challenges, we propose the deep click interest network (DCIN). High behavior sparsity keeps us from extracting rich semantics to characterize user interest preference. Accordingly, we propose the deep click concept to model the multi-view semantics of a click and then enrich the semantics of both a single click and a click sequence, so that the difficulty caused by the behavior sparsity can be addressed. To address the interest gap challenge, DCIN models user interests with two cascaded units: (i) Mutual-attention Interest Calibration Unit (ICU), which uses the candidate hotel to calibrate the embedding of every click, since the candidate hotel is selected by the ranking stage and can represent user current interests to some extent. So the gap between the calibrated embedding and user current interests can be diminished; (ii) Multi-attention Interest Aggregation Unit (IAU), which estimates the weight of a calibrated embedding from multiple perspectives, i.e., context, user feedback and interest consistency. So the calibrated embeddings, which are relevant to the current query context and important to the user, dominate user current interests, and thus the interest gap can be further diminished. Offline experiments over two large datasets and online A/B testing over the platform of Meituan-Hotel show that DCIN significantly outperforms the baselines and improved baselines. Notably, DCIN has been deployed in Meituan-Hotel, resulting in an increase of 2.40% in Click Through Conversion Rate (CTCVR) and that of 1.09% in Click Through Rate (CTR). • We study interest modeling for reranking hotels and identify two key challenges. • Deep click concept is formally defined to model the multi-view semantics of a click. • Mutual attention calibration unit is designed to calibrate the embedding of a click. • Multi-attention aggregation unit is developed to estimate the weights of clicks from multiple perspectives. • Both offline and online experiments show our model outperforms the SOTA baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published in 2018, 'Re:Print' is an experimental artists' book, edited by Véronique Chance and Duncan Ganley, that brings together images and text by 20 contributors whose work addresses the role and language of the reproducible image. This article by Duncan Ganley discusses the challenges of translating artworks and text originally presented in the context of an exhibition and symposium, into a work of print an artists' book. The range of contributors emphasizes the diverse scope of forms, processes and ideas in the expanded field of Printmaking. Addressing a variety of approaches to integrating and repurposing this visual and textual material for the printed page, the article outlines the theoretical underpinning of the creation of 'Re:Print' and the editorial and design decisions taken to create a hybridized form that is both document and artwork and aims to draw out new agencies of the 'book' in a digital world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Microbiome Protocols eBook (MPB) is a valuable resource that provides standardized wet-lab protocols for microbiome research. The first edition, launched in 2020, received widespread acclaim and featured 152 meticulously curated protocols. The MPB aims to bridge the gaps in microbiome protocols and facilitate progress in the field by addressing challenges in wet experiments and data analysis. The upcoming second edition will incorporate updates from the first edition and expand into new areas, covering innovative methodologies and emerging technologies. The MPB is an open-access resource that is easily accessible to all researchers. [Extracted from the article]

The rapid development of information and communication technology demands the production of digital products. This study aims to produce a digital instructional book based on Balinese local cultures to enhance the learning outcomes of high school students. The development of this book used the ADDIE model. The analysis phase included an analysis of the chemistry curriculum, teachers' and students' opinions about digital books, digital learning, and Balinese local cultures related to the chemistry content. The design phase included creating a framework and preparing a digital instructional book based on Balinese local cultures. The development phase included validation by content, language, and media experts. The implementation phase included testing the practicality and effectiveness of the book. The evaluation phase was carried out at all phases of the ADDIE model. The characteristics of this book were that it was made in a digital form and integrated with local Balinese cultures. It met the criteria of being a very valid category based on content, language, and media aspects. It also met a practical and effective category to improve students' learning outcomes. It is very useful to enhance chemistry learning outcomes in the era of the Industrial Revolution 4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new multimodal reading ecosystem currently contributes to the proposal of forms of mediation that take into account the hybridization of digital and analog paradigms. In this context, illustrated books intended for children can constitute an area of interest, since their discursive and aesthetic codes contribute to the development of multimodal reading strategies and to the positioning of the child reader before the information, at the same time that they generate pleasant reading and knowledge-building experiences. Accordingly, today's publishing market requires a learning process from the mediator in order to develop the corresponding strategies with which to approach children's books. Previous research has focused on the book trailer as a virtual epitext for the promotion of publications, and it has analyzed the identity of this tool to demonstrate its effectiveness in the promotion of reading. Along these lines, and with the purpose of verifying how this tool behaves in the introduction of future teachers to children's books, an intervention is proposed that is based on the creation of book trailers. A total of 860 students from the Early Childhood and Primary Education teaching degree programs participated in the intervention. It included qualitative research that analyzed the documents/epitexts created by the students, written reflections within the framework of this project and the discourse collected a posteriori in interviews and discussion groups on the experience. The results reveal the potential that creating book trailers has for introducing teacher trainees to illustrated children's books within the framework of the digital society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Atlas of Clinical Dermatology in Coloured Skin – A Morphological Approach" is a recent publication edited by PC Das and Piyush Kumar. The book contains 83 chapters and includes 3000 clinical images, with 25 chapters available in the printed version and 58 chapters available online. The book is organized into six sections and diseases are classified based on the site and morphology of lesions, making it easier to formulate differential diagnoses. The book features high-quality images contributed by over 90 contributors from all parts of India, including images of both common and rare clinical conditions. The book is available for purchase online and provides access to both hardcopy and e-chapters. Overall, this atlas is a comprehensive and user-friendly resource for dermatologists in training and practice. [Extracted from the article]