Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptation and Reliability of the Arabic Version of Alzheimer’s Disease Knowledge Scale (ADKS) among Sample of Middle aged and Elderly Egyptians Attending Outpatient Clinics in Mansoura University Hospital

Background: As Egypt is expected to maintain the highest rank of old populations in the region; the increased understanding of public views to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) becomes a priority. Objective: To assess the reliability of Alzheimer’s disease Knowledge Scale (ADKS) and the level of knowledge about the disease among a sample of middle aged and elderly people in Mansoura, Egypt. Methods: A cross-sectional survey conducted in two stages. The first stage was the adaptation of the Arabic Alzheimer’s disease Knowledge Scale (ADKS-A) from the original English form by the translation process followed by a pilot testing. The second stage was to test the reliability of the ADKS-A among a sample of 442 apparently healthy middle aged and elderly in Mansoura, Egypt. Results: reliability statistics for the overall scale were accepted: Cronbach’s alpha = 0.710 and the interclass correlation for the test-retest statistic was statistically significant (p=0.01). The corrected inter-item correlation for the test–retest scores ranged from 0.31-0.77. Item analysis didn't necessitate any omissions. The overall mean score of knowledge among the studied elderly was 11.7±3.02 ranging from 3-28 with 38.9% accuracy on the scale. Younger age, urban residence, higher education and living with family were significant predictors for better knowledge on ADKS in Linear regression model (F=12.2, R 2 =0.406, P<0.001). Conclusions: The ADKS-A was found to be reliable and acceptable tool. Further study to complete validation of this scale was needed. Also, poor general knowledge about AD among Egyptian middle aged and elderly points to an urgent need for educational outreach programs and campaigns to improve AD knowledge.
Consumer experience : An exploratory study of why consumers chose to buy groceries online

Traditional grocery shopping has been the only option for Swedish consumers to purchase groceries for a long time. However, the relatively new format, online grocery shopping is rapidly growing in popularity. Hence, consumers are presented with a completely new grocery shopping experience which has different advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of this thesis is to explore which advantages and disadvantages consumers experience with offline, and online grocery shopping to answer the question why consumers chose to buy groceries online. A conceptual model has been developed based on earlier research on grocery shopping, consumer experience and the four dimensions of the marketing mix; product, place, price and promotion. Qualitative data has been collected from two focus groups and five semi-structured interviews to explore what advantages and disadvantages consumers experience connected to offline and online grocery shopping and to understand why consumers chose to buy groceries online. All respondents shared most of the experienced advantages of online grocery shopping. The main reasons why consumers chose to purchase groceries online was to save both time and effort. Moreover, consumers experienced that they saved money due to less spontaneous purchases and fewer shopping trips per week. Online grocery shopping is growing in popularity. Hence, this thesis gives insights relevant to practitioners and academics on why consumers experience a desire to purchase groceries online. The findings of this thesis could help online grocery retailers to respond more efficiently to consumers’ needs and preferences.
Urban Subsurface Planning and Management Week , SUB-URBAN 2017 , 13-16 March 2017 , Bucharest , Romania An overview of ground surface displacements generated by groundwater dynamics , revealed by InSAR techniques

One of the main activities causing subsidence in the urban environment is the dynamics of groundwater due to abstraction and recharge as well as its interaction with subsurface infrastructure systems. For a sustainable spatial planning, the complexity of urban environment demands the utilisation of new methods for monitoring and quantifying the effects of the underground processes. One of the remote sensing methods developed in the last decades, offering the opportunity for early detection of land subsidence in urban areas is the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). By its different techniques, this method started to be used in correlation with several underground and ground measurements for revealing diverse parameters characterizing the dynamics of groundwater, including seasonal and long-term aquifer-system response. Considering both groundwater and underground structures, an overview of several studies realised in different sites, based on InSAR techniques, is presented. © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Urban Subsurface Planning and Management Week.
Cancer prevalence in the United Kingdom : current estimates, future projections and health service utilisation among cancer survivors

Cancer prevalence is an important epidemiological measure of the disease burden. It is defined as the number of people in a given population who are alive at a specified point in time (the index date) and who have previously been diagnosed with cancer. It may be expressed as either a count or as a proportion of the population. Members of the prevalent population are known as ‘cancer survivors’ and the time spent as such is known as ‘cancer survivorship’. Complete prevalence includes all survivors regardless of when they were diagnosed, whereas N-year limited duration prevalence includes only those who have received at least one cancer diagnosis in the N years prior to the index date. In the United Kingdom (UK), addressing the needs of cancer survivors is a high priority for the Department of Health, as well as for voluntary sector organisations, and the need for further research into cancer survivorship has been highlighted. Despite this, in recent years little study has focused on cancer prevalence in the UK. The aims in preparing this thesis were to provide up-to-date estimates of cancer prevalence in the UK, to describe levels of acute health service utilisation among cancer survivors in different temporal phases of survivorship and to provide projections of future cancer prevalence. National cancer registry data for the UK were analysed, together with National Health Service hospital activity data for England. It was found that there are currently around two million cancer survivors in the UK, a figure far higher than previously thought. Levels of acute in-patient health service utilisation were, however, generally low among cancer survivors who had survived at least five years and who were not in the final year of their life. A discrete time model for projecting cancer prevalence was derived and used to project cancer prevalence in the UK from 2009 to 2040 under various different scenarios of future cancer incidence and survival. It was shown that in the coming decades cancer prevalence is likely to increase substantially. This thesis contains a detailed description of cancer prevalence and aspects of cancer survivorship in the UK which highlights the need for adequate planning to meet the many and varied needs of those diagnosed with cancer.
Indexing / Abstracting Health Expenditures , Institutional Quality and Economic Growth

The study aims to determine the effect of health expenditures on economic growth while taking into account the quality of health institutions, keeping in view the fact that it’s not just the level, rather quality of expenditures or institutions that matters. Our hypothesis was where institutions are better health investment in health brings more economic growth as compared to those with low quality institutions. To attain that objective the standard neoclassical Solow Growth Model at steady-state level was taken as theoretical framework and made a production function adding institutional quality proxied by government effectiveness along with other variables like health expenditure, primary education completion rate, population growth etc. For estimation purposes, data for the sample of 20 South, East Asian and Pacific developing countries was used for the period 1995-2017. It was found that if health expenditures adjusted for the quality of government expenditures increase by 100%, then the economic growth will increase by 5%.
Workshop-Report : Shape Analysis , Stochastic Mechanics and Optimal Transport

The mathematical and computational analysis of shape and shape changes has, over the last few years, been at the center of focused research efforts, driven by a wide range of applications, from biological imaging to fluid dynamics. Problems in areas as diverse as shape optimisation, functional data analysis and computer graphics can all be formulated in terms of shape analysis. Mathematically, shape analysis combines ideas from infinite-dimensional Riemannian geometry, geometric mechanics, fluid dynamics and, recently, also sub-Riemannian geometry and stochastic analysis. This interplay of different areas continues the historically very fruitful exchange of ideas between geometry, mechanics and applications. In many instances, shape spaces can be endowed with the structure of an infinite-dimensional Riemannian manifold. Examples include the shape space of curves or surfaces in Euclidean space, the space of densities as well as more general spaces of mappings. The diffeomorphism group in particular plays a central role in the field of shape analysis and medical imaging. The main objective of the workshop was to bridge the gap between shape analysis, stochastic geometric mechanics and applied optimal transport communities and to advance research that crosses the boundaries of the three fields in addition to communicating important challenges in shape analysis to researchers in stochastic geometric mechanics and optimal transport.
Terrestrial plant macrofossil records ; possible indicators of past lake-level fl uctuations in north-eastern European Russia and Finnish Lapland ?

Four lake-sediment sequences from north-eastern European Russia and one from Finnish Lapland were studied for plant macrofossils. Basal ages of sediment sequences varied between ca. 12 800 and 6000 radiocarbon years. Plant macrofossil records of terrestrial and telmatic taxa showed a clear declining trend in terrestrial species richness and the relative amount of remains from mid to late Holocene. When these data are examined together with evidence provided by other available proxies (Cladocera, diatom, pollen, chironomid, lithology, LOI), it seems that the declining trend, in addition to refl ecting the general vegetation development (e.g. shifts in treelines), might also refl ect a change in the distance between the sampling point and the shoreline, i.e. changes in past lake levels. Variations detected in the species richness and abundance records are discussed against previous climate reconstructions available from nearby areas.
S Self-Esteem Tracks Mate Value

Sociometer theory (Leary and Baumeister 2000) proposes that self-esteem is an evolved adaptation which functions to monitor the quality and quantity of individuals’ interpersonal relationships, together with their perceived desirability as a relational partner. Kirkpatrick and Ellis (2004) extended this theory, arguing that since different types of relationships present different adaptive challenges, there may be multiple sociometers, each functioning to monitor individuals’ status and desirability in a specific domain. Given that successfully reproducing is a primary adaptive challenge in humans, it is likely that the sociometer system, and thus self-esteem, should be especially sensitive to assessments of individuals’ sexual or romantic desirability, and accordingly, Kirkpatrick and Ellis (2004) suggest that there are specific longand short-term mating sociometers. This perspective predicts that individuals’ self-esteem should reflect both their romantic relational status and their perceived eligibility as a longor short-term partner, which is termed their mate value.
Integration Costs and Missing Women in Firms

Where social norms favor gender segregation, firms may find it costly to employ both men and women. If the costs of integration are largely fixed, firms will integrate only if their expected number of female employees under integration exceeds some threshold. Motivated by a simple model of firm hiring, we develop a methodology that uses the distribution of female employment across firms to estimate the share of firms with binding integration costs and counterfactual female employment at all-male firms. We validate our approach using administrative data and unique policy variation from Saudi Arabia. We provide suggestive evidence that integration costs reduce aggregate female employment. Using survey data on manufacturing firms in 65 countries, we find significant integration costs in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia but not in other regions.
Children ’ s Academic Ability and Family Background : Findings from the Japan Child Panel Survey 2011

【Abstract】 This paper reports findings about the relationship between children’s academic ability and family background using the “Japan Child Panel Survey 2011 (JCPS2011)” to serve as a follow-up of Akabayashi et al. (2011) that described the results of the JCPS2010. For this analysis, we pay particular attention to how the child’s gender, birth month, presence of siblings, parents’ educational attainment, and level of household income impact scores in mathematics, Japanese, and reasoning tests. The results of this study are the followings: (1) Father’s educational attainment of a college degree or higher positively influences the scores in mathematics and Japanese; (2) Mother’s educational attainment of a college degree or higher positively influences the scores in mathematics, Japanese, and reasoning; (3) Child’s birth month between January 1 and April 1 negatively influences the scores in mathematics; (4) Household annual income positively influences the scores in mathematics, Japanese, and reasoning
Kreisel’s ‘shift of emphasis’ and contemporary proof mining ∗

Starting in the early 50’s, Kreisel argued that proof-theoretic methods that had been developed in the course of Hilbert’s consistency program could be used for concrete mathematical goals different and independent from their original foundational motivation. Kreisel’s writings on this topic, in particular in connection with his concept of ‘unwinding of proofs’, span over a period of 60 years and contain numerous important insights and suggestions on how such a reorientation of traditional proof theory from foundational aims to applications in core mathematics could be achieved. In this paper, we revisit some of Kreisel’s main themes from the perspective of the current ‘proof mining’ program which has been pursued e.g. by the present author and many collaborators as a modern and more systematic version of Kreisel’s original ‘unwinding’ program and which has the area of nonlinear analysis as its prominent field for applications (see [57] for a recent survey). As we will see, the importance of Kreisel’s insights for the development of the proof mining paradigm can hardly be overstated.
1 Piezoelectric Vibrations Energy Harvesters Power Optimization Using the Finite Element Method

This paper presents a computational model using the finite element (FE) method to simulate piezoelectric vibrations energy harvesters for power optimization in the context of small size applications. A version of the simulated annealing algorithm is used to optimize power. Four common configurations, viz; longitudinal generator, transverse generator, unimorph and bimorph are considered. The electrical machine linked to the harvester is represented by a resistance. In the first part of the study, the FE model is validated. In the second part, the harvested power is optimized varying material orientation and changing piezoelectric material between BaTiO3 and PZT-5H in non-resonance for different 1Hz loadings. It is observed that the best material orientation & best material can change with the loading type and the results are discussed. In the third part, the material orientation optimization is performed near resonance frequency for unimorph and bimorph configurations. The need to include material's hysteretic damping is demonstrated. Moreover, the optimal orientation near resonance excitation can be different from those obtained for 1 Hz. Results are shown and discussed. Next the power sensibility to resistance is presented for resonance maximum power orientations; results are discussed. Finally unimorph harvested power is optimized for a collection of frequencies near resonance; results are discussed.
Faecal Progesterone Assay and Its Use in Comparing Reproductive Status in Four Groups of Captive Asian Elephants

We tested and validated a non-invasive reproductive monitoring technique using blood and faecal samples from captive elephants in Sri Lanka (n = 24) and USA (n = 18). Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was performed to determine the reproductive status utilizing progesterone antibodies. Correlation between faecal and serum progesterone values were significant. Management of elephants as herds significantly favoured higher oestrous cyclicity than management as individuals. The reproductively active proportions of elephants among the tested groups in Sri Lanka and in USA were 85% and 81% respectively. Therefore, the country elephants were living in, did not make a significant difference in reproductive status. Manuscript Editor: Prithiviraj Fernando 5 We examined the reproductive status of privately owned captive female Asian elephants, which were managed at the Millennium Elephant Foundation (MEF; keeping a total of 9 females) and the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage (PEO; 50 females) in Sri Lanka, and those in the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation (CEC; 18 females) and the Blue Unit of Ringling Bros. Circus (BU; 4 females) in Florida, USA. Females below 8 years of age were not included in the study. The MEF and CEC elephants were managed as non-herds (no sexually mature animals together) and those in PEO and BU were managed as herds (always more than one sexually mature female
Systematic investigation of a new nanoscale bioactive glass on wound healing in vivo in comparison with the clinically applied 45S5 Bioglass

Aim: Recently, bioactive glass (BG)-based inorganic biomaterials which differ from polymer wound dressings have become a promising candidate favorable for improving acute wound healing and even some chronic, non-healing wound repair. We developed a new sol–gel-derived BG (Sol-nBG) nanomaterial and evaluated its biological efficacy on wound healing based on the antibacterial and wound-healing accelerating potentials of the specific trace elements in the chemical composition of Sol-nBG. Materials and methods: The sol-nBG powder was prepared by a facile sol–gel route which readily resulted in nanoscale particles after undergoing a low-heat calcination process. The amorphous nature of the SolnBG powder was confirmed by X-ray diffraction analysis, and the biologically-active ions such as calcium, silicon, zinc, and boron could be rapidly released in Tris buffer, similar to the orthopedically and dentally available 45S5 Bioglass@ (45S5 BG). In particular, the Sol-nBG and 45S5 BG particles were well tolerated by the surrounding host wound tissue without causing any chronic inflammation, and appreciably enhanced the wound healing of a deep second-degree scald. Results and Conclusions: The results showed that the Sol-nBG significantly promoted wound healing with increased epidermal and dermal regeneration and collagen deposition in comparison with the 45S5 BG or control treatment. Therefore, it is reasonable to consider that the new Sol-nBG facilitates wound treatment and is a promising candidate for wound healing in future.
Vertical integration and effi ciency : an application to the Italian machine tool industry

This paper analyzes the relationship between firm efficiency and vertical integration in the Italian machine tool (MT) industry. A theoretical model of entry and competition within an industry has been set up: in this model firms can choose either to be vertically integrated or not: the most efficient firms self-select in being vertically integrated, while less efficient firms prefer a disintegrated structure and they both coexist in equilibrium. In the second part of the paper the relationship between efficiency and vertical integration has been tested using a stochastic frontier framework in an novel panel dataset including around 500 MT builders. The theoretical prediction is confirmed: outsourcing seems a rational choice for less efficient firms to make positive operating profits and stay in the market; on the other hand, more efficient firms exploit their efficiency advantage to control a greater part of the production chain, possibly benefiting from greater coordination among different phases and tailored intermediate inputs.
FACTORS INFLUENCING ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS PROCUREMENT IN PUBLIC SERVICE ORGANISATIONS : A SOCIO-TECHNICAL

Enterprise Systems (ES) are often presented as a driver for business by providing business process integration and utilisation of technology in organising. However, the majority of the ES research is centred on the implementation phase and pre-implementation and post-implementation phases remain largely ignored. Another gap in the existing literature is that it usually ignores the implementation context in theorising. This study focuses on the procurement process of a public service organisation and analyses three instances of ES procurement in the case organisation. The data collection and analysis are conducted using the theoretical lens of socio-technical systems (STS) theory. It notes that while the work-system level and organisation-system level factors play some role in the ES procurement, macrosocial level factors (institutional context and the ES market) play a more important role in the public service context. It also notes the demonstrative nature of certain elements of the ES procurement process in public service organisations. In this way, this study brings out the complexity of ES procurement in public service organisations that result from the interplay of factors operating at worksystem, organisational, and macro levels.
Effect of egg yolk on the spermatozoa quality of the botia chromobotia macracanthus (Bleeker, 1852) (cyprinidae) after short-term cryopreservation

The egg yolk effect combined with 10% of methanol to preserve botia, Chromobotia macracanthus spermatozoa for 24 hours in liquid nitrogen has been studied. The concentration of egg yolk used in this study were, 0%, 5%, 7%, 9%, 11%, 13%, 15%, and 17%, respectively. As the positive control, the synthetic cryoprotectant carboxy methyl cellulose (CMC) was used. The sperms were diluted with the combination of 10% methanol, glucose extender and egg yolk (1 part of sample + 4 parts of solvent) and were equilibrated for 2 hours at 4°C before freezed for 24 hours in liquid nitrogen. After freezed, sample (sperms) were thawed for 13 sec at 40°C. Spermatozoa viability, motility, and abnormality, were then observed. Ten percent of methanol combined with 15% of egg yolk could preserve spermatozoa which maintain either sperm motility (96.43±1.49%) or sperm viability (84.25±1.26%) and reduced the abnormality up to 11.50±1.29%, respectively. Besides, the combination of 15% of egg yolk and 10% of methanol showed the highest fertility rate (50.64±4.37%).