Immersive virtual environments (IVEs) have been extensively investigated for applications in education and man-power training because of the benefits of immersion-driven experiences as immersion becomes a factor that can both accelerate and hamper learning depending on the user's area of focus, which supports the importance of engagement. In this paper, two fundamental approaches to visual engagement in IVE are compared discipline and guidance. The approaches aim to foster the learner's engagement to predefined area to be focused by either subtracting visual stimuli (discipline) or appending visual indicators pointing to the area (guidance). The experimental results showed no significant improvement in memory recall accuracy and time. However, the guidance group showed superior performances in usability metrics. Interestingly, a significant difference was found in the objective measure of the participants' gaze pattern revealing that the discipline makes the user's gaze consistent and stable.Are male and female immigrants viewed similarly or differently? Consistent with an evolutionary threat management perspective, we suggest that the answer to this question depends upon what types of threats immigrant groups are perceived as posing. In the present study, we compared attitudes toward male and female immigrants from either a violent ecology (e.g., Syria) or a pathogen-rich ecology (e.g., Liberia). We hypothesized that people would have more negative attitudes toward male than female immigrants from a violent ecology, but that attitudes would be similar toward male and female immigrants from a pathogen-rich ecology. Internal meta-analyses of three studies (total N = 1,488) were in line with our hypothesis. They showed that attitudes toward male immigrants from a violent ecology were more negative than attitudes toward female immigrants from the same ecology. Epacadostat In contrast, attitudes toward male and female immigrants were similar when those immigrants came from a pathogen-rich ecology. Our findings are consistent with an evolutionary threat management perspective on outgroup prejudice and are aligned with the male warrior hypothesis Attitudes toward male versus female outgroup members vary with the potential threats these outgroups pose.Communication technologies should be considered as a means available for people to pursue the objectives of supporting the development of equality, freedom, solidarity and socialisation. In this case, Infant and Primary Education teachers play an important role in the acquisition of digital competences by their students. In this article we ask to what extent the university degrees of Early Childhood and Primary Education Teachers in Spain, where students are trained in subjects related to the use and learning of ICT applied to Education, address digital competences from the ethical dimension. We present here some of the results of a research project carried out in Spain, using the method of content analysis, in which a total of 118 study plans for the 2019-20 university degrees were reviewed. The research results indicated that, although digital competences were present in most of the assessed plans (78%), through a subject related to the learning and use of ICT in education, only 26.1% of the teaching guides incorporated the ethical dimension of this subject. This leads us to conclude that future teachers currently receive little training in ethics regarding the development of digital competences.In the context of South Africa, what we do know is that huge amount of healthcare data does exist and that they are consciously and unconsciously scattered in bits and pieces across facilities within the country. This has directly or indirectly resulted to underutilisation of data, which affects service delivery to the community. For example, many patients have been wrongly diagnosed, and some others have been given wrong medications due to duplication of prescriptions, which were influenced by lack of real-time information. Consequently, there have been loss and damages to lives, contributing to the mortality rate in the country. This study was undertaken on the premise of these challenges, to develop a conceptual framework that can guide how data could be managed towards improved services within the South African healthcare facilities. The interpretive approach was employed. Qualitative data were gathered from existing works. Structuration theory was applied as a lens to guide the analysis of the data. From the findings, a framework was developed, primarily to guide and advance the waysin which data are stored, retrieved, managed, and used for healthcare improved services.Gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) is the most common mesenchymal tumor, and surgical resection is the first choice for the treatment of the disease, but since the advent of tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) such as imatinib (IM), the prognosis of the disease has undergone revolutionary changes. According to the current version of the guidelines, most GIST patients receive a fixed dose without taking into account their own individual differences, resulting in a wide difference in blood concentration, adverse reactions and prognosis. With more studies on the relationship between blood drug concentrations and prognosis, the concept of individualized therapy has been paid more attention by researchers. Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) has also been made available for the research field of GIST targeted therapy. How to reduce the incidence of drug resistance and adverse reactions in patients with GISTs has become the focus of the current research. This article reviews the common monitoring methods and timing of TKIs blood concentration, the reasonable range of blood drug concentration, the toxic or adverse effects caused by high blood drug concentration, some possible factors affecting blood drug concentration and recent research progress, in order to discuss and summarize the treatment strategy of individual blood drug concentration, improve the prognosis of patients and reduce the adverse effects as much as possible.
There is still a big challenge to achieve a balance between mechanical characteristics and biological properties in biphasic calcium phosphate (BCP) ceramics.
The present study focused on the in-situ whisker growth on BCP ceramics via different hydrothermal treatments and investigated the influences of these whiskers on the mechanical property and biological performance of the ceramics.
Five kinds of BCP ceramics with in-situ whisker growth, ie, BCP-C, BCP-HNO
, BCP-Citric, BCP-NaOH, BCP-CaCl
and BCP-Na
PO
were fabricated by different hydrothermal treatments. The phase compositions, morphologies, crystal structures and mechanical strengths of the obtained BCP ceramics were firstly characterized. Then, the in vitro cell adhesion, proliferation and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity of bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) on the BCP ceramics were evaluated. Lastly, the effects of in-situ whisker growth on the bone-like apatite formation abilities of BCP ceramics were also investigated by immersing theuirements of regenerative medicine.
Due to the growth of in-situ whiskers, the mechanical property and biological performance of the obtained BCP ceramics could increase simultaneously. Therefore, in-situ whiskers growth offers a promising strategy for the expanded application of BCP ceramics to meet the requirements of regenerative medicine.
We aimed to determine the efficacy of interferential current transcutaneous electrical sensory stimulation (IFC-TESS) in patients with dementia who were being treated for dysphagia in nursing homes under normal living conditions.
This study recruited 54 nursing home residents (13 males, 41 females; mean age, 84.5 ± 10.7 years) with dysphagia and dementia. IFC-TESS was performed with Gentle Stim
(Careido Co. Ltd., Kanagawa, Japan) for 15 minutes. Two sessions per day were administered 5 days per week, for 3 weeks. The outcomes included the improvement of the patients' cough reflexes and nutritional states across the 3 weeks of intervention; the former was evaluated with the cough test based on the changes in cough latency time and cough frequency, while the latter was assessed based on changes in the functional oral intake scale (FOIS) score and oral calorie intake.
The cough latency times before and after the 3-week intervention were 15.8 (7.0-60.0) and 6.7 (3.6-30.7) s/min, respectively; the cough fr. As it has previously been difficult to perform active rehabilitation with dementia patients, IFC-TESS may be effective and practicable for the rehabilitation of this patient population.
To study the visual outcomes and identify the predictive factors for visual outcomes in patients with eye injuries and retained intraocular foreign bodies (IOFBs).
The medical records of 359 consecutive patients with eye injuries and retained IOFBs were retrospectively reviewed during 2009-2018. Demographic data, clinical findings, treatment and visual outcomes were studied. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to identify the predictive factors.
Most of the patients were male and the average age was 36.4 years old. The three most common causes of eye injuries were grass trimming (25.07%), chiseling (23.12%) and hammering (13.93%). Most of the patients (79.39%) presented with poor initial best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) (<3/60). Pars plana vitrectomy with IOFB removal was done in 273 eyes (76.04%). After treatment, eyes with poor BCVA (<3/60) decreased from 79.39% to 62.95% and eyes with good BCVA (≥3/60) increased from 20.61% to 37.05%. Poor initial best-corrected visual acuity (oddt surgical intervention for the patients. Causes of IOFBs were mostly work-related and could be preventable. Education and activation of using appropriate protective safety glasses during work are necessary to avoid serious eye injuries and blindness.Researchers often report a measure to several decimal places more than what is sensible or realistic. Rounding involves replacing a number with a value of lesser accuracy while minimizing the practical loss of validity. This practice is generally acceptable to simplify data presentation and to facilitate the communication and comparison of research results. Rounding also may reduce spurious accuracy when the extraneous digits are not justified by the exactness of the recording instrument or data collection procedure. However, substituting a more explicit or simpler representation for an original measure may not be practicable or acceptable if an adequate degree of accuracy is not retained. The error introduced by rounding exact numbers may result in misleading conclusions and the interpretation of study findings. For example, rounding the upper confidence interval for a relative effect estimate of 0.996 to 2 decimal places may obscure the statistical significance of the result. When presenting the findings of a study, authors need to be careful that they do not report numbers that contain too few significant digits. Equally important, they should avoid providing more significant figures than are warranted to convey the underlying meaning of the result.
Climatic factors have been shown to influence communicable disease dynamics especially in tropical regions where temperature could swing from extreme heat and dryness to wet and cold within a short period of time. This is more pronounced in the spread of airborne diseases. In this study, the effect of some local weather variables (average temperature, average relative humidity, average wind speed and average atmospheric pressure) on the risk of Severe Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Ghana is investigated. The daily confirmed new COVID-19 cases were compiled from the Ghana Health Service and the weather data extracted from Weatherbase. The type of relationship between the climatic variable and risk of spread were explored using the Generalized Additive Model (GAM).
Results obtained showed that wind speed and atmospheric pressure have positive linear relationship with the spread of infection an increase in the risk of COVID-19 spread. In addition, the risk of spread fluctuates for temperature between 24 and 29°C but sharply decreases when average temperature exceeds 29°C.Epacadostat