New Bulgarian University

BACKGROUND Still, in most endemic countries, hepatitis A (HA) is a serious socio-medical problem due to high morbidity, leading to frequent hospitalizations and financial burdens on health systems.AIM To find out the clinical spectrum of HA infection in children, the relationship between atypical manifestations and laboratory findings and the outcome of patients with atypical HA virus (HAV) manifestations. METHODS A total of 115 patients aged 0-14 years (mean 5.2 +/- 3.5 years) were admitted to the hospital with symptoms of HA and a positive IgM anti-HAV test result during the period from July 2018 to December 2023. Patients were followed up weekly until they had made a complete recovery. RESULTS Atypical features were present in 30 (26%) children; prolonged cholestasis 11 (9.56%), acute acalculous cholecystitis (AAC) 15 (13.04%), ascites 2 (1.73%), thrombocytopenia 1 (0.86%) and fulminant hepatitis 1 (0.86%) were observed. Pruritus, as well as higher serum total and direct bilirubin levels, were statistically significant in children with atypical manifestations of the disease. Moreover, this group had a prolonged mean duration of jaundice and hospital course. CONCLUSION Atypical manifestations such as protracted cholestasis and AAC are not uncommon in children with HA.

This text contains some notes on the Griesmer bound. In particular, we give a geometric proof of the Griesmer bound for the generalized weights and show that a Solomon–Stiffler type construction attains it if the minimum distance is sufficiently large. We also determine the parameters of optimal binary codes for dimensions at most seven and the optimal ternary codes for dimensions at most five.

This study examines the marketing management of tourist destinations in the context of a sustainable model of their future development. In the context of increasing competition, a dynamic tourist environment and increased environmental and social challenges, sustainability is being established as a key factor for effective management of tourist resources. The emphasis is placed on the collaboration between tourist destination management algorithms and marketing strategies.

Differentiated teaching (DT) is promoted as a means of addressing learner variability in inclusive classrooms, yet there is limited evidence that focuses specifically on students with hearing impairment (HI) in mainstream settings. This study compares teacher-rated educational functioning, screened with the Screening Instrument for Targeting Educational Risk (SIFTER), between students taught by DT-trained teachers and those taught by teachers without DT training. Two cohorts were examined: 10 students taught by DT-trained teachers and 17 students taught by teachers without DT training. Teachers completed the Greek-adapted Primary or Secondary SIFTER, which assess five domains: pre-academics/academics, attention, communication, class participation and school behavior. Across domains and in total scores, the DT-trained cohort outperformed the non-trained cohort. Mean total SIFTER scores were 65.8 for the DT-trained group and 53.4 for the non-trained group. Students taught by DT-trained teachers more frequently achieved scores within the pass range across domains, particularly in class participation and communication, indicating stronger engagement and language-related functioning. By contrast, the non-trained cohort displayed more marginal or failing scores, especially in attention and behavior. These findings suggest that DT training is associated with improved participation, communication, attention and behavior alongside academic performance for students with HI. The results support DT-focused professional development for mainstream teachers working with this population and the routine use of concise screening tools such as SIFTER to monitor educational risk.

Emotion recognition is traditionally modeled using lexical, semantic, and prosodic cues. While effective, such approaches rely on language-specific resources and high-level representations. This study investigates whether sublexical sound structure may contribute to affective processing independently of lexical meaning and prosody, focusing on biphones—sequences of two adjacent phonemes—as minimal dynamic units of linguistic signal. We present a controlled web-based experiment examining cross-modal mapping between visual and auditory stimuli. Participants were shown emotionally valenced images and, for each image, selected one of two synthesized pseudowords with opposing emotional valence. Auditory stimuli were generated using a monotonic synthesized voice, eliminating prosodic and semantic cues. Recognition accuracy, defined as valence correspondence between the image and the selected pseudoword, served as the primary outcome measure. Results show a strong and consistent effect of visual stimulus valence, with significantly higher accuracy for negatively valenced images across conditions, consistent with a well-established negativity bias in affective processing. No reliable effects of participant gender or image category were observed. These findings provide experimental evidence that biphones may contribute to affective processing as interpretable sublexical correlates of emotional valence, complementing prior corpus-based observations. This motivates further investigation of biphones as interpretable, low-level features for affective processing, particularly in language-agnostic or resource-constrained settings.