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Introduction This study applies a novel algorithm to longitudinal amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to identify age‐heterogeneous amyloid trajectory groups, estimate the age and duration (chronicity) of amyloid positivity, and investigate chronicity in relation to cognitive decline and tau burden. Methods Cognitively unimpaired participants (n = 257) underwent one to four amyloid PET scans (Pittsburgh Compound B, PiB). Group‐based trajectory modeling was applied to participants with longitudinal scans (n = 171) to identify and model amyloid trajectory groups, which were combined with Bayes theorem to estimate age and chronicity of amyloid positivity. Relationships between chronicity, cognition, clinical progression, and tau PET (MK‐6240) were investigated using regression models. Results Chronicity explained more heterogeneity in amyloid burden than age and binary amyloid status. Chronicity was associated with faster cognitive decline, increased risk of abnormal cognition, and higher entorhinal tau. Discussion Amyloid chronicity provides unique information about cognitive decline and neurofibrillary tangle development and may be useful to investigate preclinical Alzheimer's disease.

This study investigates 3 unexplored issues regarding Second Language (L2) Motivational Self System theory. It further validates the theory using multiple structural equation modeling (SEM) along with a procedure comparing the strength of corresponding paths. Japanese university freshmen (N = 2,631) responded to a questionnaire and took the TOEFL-ITP test. Results showed the following: (a) Stronger Ideal and Ought-to L2 self visions led to intended effort, accounting in turn for higher levels of objectively measured proficiency. (b) Two types of learner beliefs reflecting L2 learning experience—Communication Orientation (the tendency to value extensive use of language) and Grammar-Translation Orientation (the tendency to value learning grammar explicitly)—influenced the 2 future selves differently. The former affected Ideal self more than Ought-to self, while the reverse was true of the latter, (c) Women's greater tendency to value communication activities influenced their stronger vision of Ideal L2 self. A stronger link between Grammar-Translation Orientation and Ought-to self in male students than in female students was found. Finally, the etic approach using SEM allowed for a comparison of studies conducted in different sociocultural contexts, showing stronger motivating power for Ought-to self in Japan along with gender differences, a finding with context-specific explanations.

Objective The objective of the study was to characterize the longitudinal, dynamic intracranial pressure (ICP) trajectory in acute brain injury (ABI) patients admitted to intensive care unit (ICU) and explore whether it added sights over traditional thresholds in predicting outcomes. Methods ABI patients with ICP monitoring were identified from two public databases named Medical Information Mart for the Intensive Care (MIMIC)‐IV and eICU Collaborative Research Database (eICU‐CRD). Group‐based trajectory modeling (GBTM) was employed to identify 4‐h ICP trajectories in days 0–5 post‐ICU admission. Then, logistic regression was used to compare clinical outcomes across distinct groups. To further validate previously reported thresholds, we created the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve in our dataset. Results A total of 810 eligible patients were ultimately enrolled in the study. GBTM analyses generated 6 distinct ICP trajectories, differing in the initial ICP, evolution pattern, and number/proportion of spikes >20/22 mmHg. Compared with patients in “the highest, declined then rose” trajectory, those belonging to the “lowest, stable,” “low, stable,” and “medium, stable” ICP trajectories were at lower risks of 30‐day mortality (odds ratio [OR] 0.04; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01, 0.21), (OR 0.04; 95% CI 0.01, 0.19), (OR 0.08; 95% CI 0.01, 0.42), respectively. ROC analysis demonstrated an unfavorable result, for example, 30‐day mortality in total cohort: an area under the curve (AUC): 0.528, sensitivity: 0.11, and specificity: 0.94. Conclusions This study identified three ICP trajectories associated with elevated risk, three with reduced risks for mortality during ICU hospitalization. Notably, a fixed ICP threshold should not be applied to all kinds of patients. GBTM, a granular method for describing ICP evolution and their association with clinical outcomes, may add to the current knowledge in intracranial hypertension treatment. To summarize, a novel ICP trajectory that could enable us to move the treatment of ABI from a fixed threshold approach to a more individualized treatment was proposed. ICP values and variability differed across these six identified trajectory groups with favorable vs. unfavorable outcomes. The epidemiological shift toward a larger proportion of physiologically fragile elderly patients calls for more attention.

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) relies on effective coordination among agents to maximize team performance in complex environments. However, existing coordination graph-based approaches often overlook dynamic group structures and struggle to accurately capture fine-grained inter-agent dependencies. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called the Group Attention Aware Coordination Graph (G2ACG), which builds upon the group modeling capabilities of the Group-Aware Coordination Graph (GACG). G2ACG incorporates a dynamic attention mechanism to dynamically compute edge weights in the coordination graph, enabling a more flexible and fine-grained representation of agent interactions. These learned edge weights guide a Graph Attention Network (GAT) to perform message passing and representation learning, and the resulting features are integrated into a global policy via QMIX for cooperative decision-making. Experimental results on the StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) benchmark show that G2ACG consistently outperforms strong baselines, including QMIX, DICG, and GACG, across various scenarios with diverse agent types and population sizes. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed attention mechanism, demonstrating that both the number of attention heads and the number of GAT layers significantly affect performance, with a two-layer GAT and multi-head attention configuration yielding the best results.

Smart mobility is a central issue in the recent discourse about urban development policy towards smart cities. The design of innovative and sustainable mobility infrastructures as well as public policies require cooperation and innovations between various stakeholders—businesses as well as policy makers—of the business ecosystems that emerge around smart city initiatives. This poses a challenge for deploying instruments and approaches for the proactive management of such business ecosystems. In this article, we report on findings from a smart city initiative we have used as a case study to inform the development, implementation, and prototypical deployment of a visual analytic system (VAS). As results of our design science research we present an agile framework to collaboratively collect, aggregate and map data about the ecosystem. The VAS and the agile framework are intended to inform and stimulate knowledge flows between ecosystem stakeholders in order to reflect on viable business and policy strategies. Agile processes and roles to collaboratively manage and adapt business ecosystem models and visualizations are defined. We further introduce basic categories for identifying, assessing and selecting Internet data sources that provide the data for ecosystem models and we detail the ecosystem data and view models developed in our case study. Our model represents a first explication of categories for visualizing business ecosystem models in a smart city mobility context.

Background Adolescent depression prevention research has focused on mean intervention outcomes, but has not considered heterogeneity in symptom course. Here, we empirically identify subgroups with distinct trajectories of depressive symptom change among adolescents enrolled in two indicated depression prevention trials and examine how cognitive‐behavioral (CB) interventions and baseline predictors relate to trajectory membership. Methods Six hundred thirty‐one participants were assigned to one of three conditions: CB group intervention, CB bibliotherapy, and brochure control. We used group‐based trajectory modeling to identify trajectories of depressive symptoms from pretest to 2‐year follow‐up. We examined associations between class membership and conditions using chi‐square tests and baseline predictors using multinomial regressions. Results We identified four trajectories in the full sample. Qualitatively similar trajectories were found in each condition separately. Two trajectories of positive symptom course (low‐declining, high‐declining) had declining symptoms and were distinguished by baseline symptom severity. Two trajectories of negative course (high‐persistent, resurging), respectively, showed no decline in symptoms or decline followed by symptom reappearance. Participants in the brochure control condition were significantly more likely to populate the high‐persistent trajectory relative to either CB condition and were significantly less likely to populate the low‐declining trajectory relative to CB group. Several baseline factors predicted trajectory classes, but gender was the most informative prognostic factor, with males having increased odds of membership in a high‐persistent trajectory relative to other trajectories. Conclusions Findings suggest that CB preventive interventions do not alter the nature of trajectories, but reduce the risk that adolescents follow a trajectory of chronically elevated symptoms.

In the management of protected nature areas, arguments are being raised for increasingly integrated approaches. Despite an explicit ambition from the responsible managing governmental agencies, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and Swedish National Heritage Board, attempts to initiate and increase the degree of integrated nature and cultural heritage conservation management in the Swedish mountains are failing. The delivery of environmental policy through the Swedish National Environmental Objective called Magnificent Mountains is dependent on increased collaboration between the state and local stakeholders. This study, using a group model building approach, maps out the system’s dynamic interactions between nature perceptions, values and the objectives of managing agencies and local stakeholders. It is identified that the dominance of a wilderness discourse influences both the objectives and management of the protected areas. This wilderness discourse functions as a barrier against including cultural heritage conservation aspects and local stakeholders in management, as wilderness-influenced objectives are defining protected areas as environments “untouched” by humans. A wilderness objective reduces the need for local knowledge and participation in environmental management. In reality, protected areas depend, to varying degrees, on the continuation of traditional land-use practices.

Capacity for autonomous self-fertilization provides reproductive assurance, has evolved repeatedly in the plant kingdom, and typically involves several changes in flower morphology and development (the selfing syndrome). Yet, the relative importance of different traits and trait combinations for efficient selfing and reproductive success in pollinator-poor environments is poorly known. In a series of experiments, we tested the importance of anther–stigma distance and the less studied trait anther orientation for efficiency of selfing in the perennial herb Arabis alpina. Variation in flower morphology among eight self-compatible European populations was correlated with efficiency of self-pollination and with pollen limitation in a common-garden experiment. To examine whether anther–stigma distance and anther orientation are subject to directional and/or correlational selection, and whether this is because these traits affect pollination success, we planted a segregating F2 population at two native field sites. Selection strongly favored a combination of introrse anthers and reduced anther–stigma distance at a site where pollinator activity was low, and supplemental hand-pollination demonstrated that this was largely because of their effect on securing self-pollination. The results suggest that concurrent shifts in more than one trait can be crucial for the evolution of efficient self-pollination and reproductive assurance in pollinator-poor habitats.

Given the increasing amount of neuroimaging studies, there is a growing need to summarize published results. Coordinate-based meta-analyses use the locations of statistically significant local maxima with possibly the associated effect sizes to aggregate studies. In this paper, we investigate the influence of key characteristics of a coordinate-based meta-analysis on (1) the balance between false and true positives and (2) the activation reliability of the outcome from a coordinate-based meta-analysis. More particularly, we consider the influence of the chosen group level model at the study level [fixed effects, ordinary least squares (OLS), or mixed effects models], the type of coordinate-based meta-analysis [Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) that only uses peak locations, fixed effects, and random effects meta-analysis that take into account both peak location and height] and the amount of studies included in the analysis (from 10 to 35). To do this, we apply a resampling scheme on a large dataset ( = 1,400) to create a test condition and compare this with an independent evaluation condition. The test condition corresponds to subsampling participants into studies and combine these using meta-analyses. The evaluation condition corresponds to a high-powered group analysis. We observe the best performance when using mixed effects models in individual studies combined with a random effects meta-analysis. Moreover the performance increases with the number of studies included in the meta-analysis. When peak height is not taken into consideration, we show that the popular ALE procedure is a good alternative in terms of the balance between type I and II errors. However, it requires more studies compared to other procedures in terms of activation reliability. Finally, we discuss the differences, interpretations, and limitations of our results.