T-Cadherin and the Ratio of Its Ligands as Predictors of Carotid Atherosclerosis: A Pilot Study

In the cardiovascular system, atherogenic low-density lipoproteins (LDL) and the protective hormone adiponectin bind to the same receptor, T-cadherin. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the ratio of circulating LDL to high-molecular weight (HMW) adiponectin could predict the development of atherosclerosis. Using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, we measured the level of circulating HMW adiponectin in the blood of donors together with ultrasound measuring of intima-media thickness (IMT) of carotid arteries. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the T-cadherin gene were identified using polymerase chain reaction. We found that carotid artery IMT is inversely correlated with the level of HMW in male subjects. We also found that the G allele of rs12444338 SNP in the T-cadherin gene correlates with a lower level of circulating T-cadherin and thinner IMT and therefore could be considered as an atheroprotective genotype. Despite our data, we could not provide direct evidence for the initial study hypothesis. However, we did uncover an important correlation between circulating T-cadherin and thinner carotid IMT.

Bacteriological Characteristics of Contemporary Wood During Soil Deposition in Anoxia Conditions at the Biskupin Archaeological Site (Poland) - Petrifilms™ as an Alternative for Conventional Bacteriological Media

The paper presents results of quantitative and qualitative analyses of the composition of saprophytic and pathogenic microflora colonising contemporary wood of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) and oak (Quercus sp.), deposited for eight years in peat soil, under anoxia conditions at two measuring stations located at the fortified settlement of the Lusatian culture in Biskupin. Qualitative determinations of bacteria were performed based on the analyses of their cultural, morphological, physiological, and bio-chemical characteristics. Petrifilms™ and conventional bacteriological media were used for quantitative analyses. Bacteria in the examined wood and surrounding soil were identified as belonging to species, including those of the genera Pseudomonas, Clostridium (Cl. butyricum/beierinckii, Cl. perfringens), Bacillus, Corynebacterium, bacteria from the family Enterobacteriaceae, as well as aerobic and anaerobic cellulolytic bacteria. An important correlation between the standard pour plate method and PetrifilmTM was observed. Petrifilms are an effective alternative, in comparison with traditional methods, for the determination of total bacterial counts for wood samples.

Examining Gender Differences in the Factors Affecting Ethical Leadership

This paper examines the gender differences in the statements measuring ethical leadership and to explore the factors affecting ethical leadership. The questionnaire has been distributed among the various government senior secondary schools of Punjab, India. Independent t-test is applied to know the perception of males and females. The result reveals that females have higher perception in many of the statements in the ethical leadership scale as compared to male staff members. On the other hand, there are three factors that are affecting the ethical leadership showing the important correlation among them.

ONLINE EDUCATION – ENGINEERING STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVE

With online learning moving into the long term, the mental and academic impacts on students arelikely to be challenging. Preliminary results obtained from three different student surveys are presented and analyzed for different cohorts of undergraduate engineering students enrolled in an engineering program at the Université de Moncton. The first survey was administered during the last week of the Winter semester, before the final exams period. This survey was administered by the Engineering Faculty and created to get an overview of students experience during their online learning sessions. Specifically, the goal of this survey was to get information on which technical tools work best for distance learning during their online sessions and to improve future online learning sessions. Another survey was completed at the end of the Fall 2020 online learning semester. About half of all engineering students completed the surveys and a preliminary analysis was conducted. Finally, a third survey was administered during the Winter 2021 online learning semester. The aim of this study is to evaluate and analyze the results of these surveys using educational data mining. This work will provide an overview of the online learning experience during the end of the Winter 2020 semester and the academic year 2020-2021 and establish relations between classroom and online learning environments. New data analysis may help to accelerate and improve future hybrid classroom-online learning pedagogy since permanent changes are expected in the near future for many engineering programs. This study shows that students vary in their abilities to adapt to this new reality. Most prefer recorded audio clipsof PowerPoint presentations beforehand combined with online synchronous learning using video conferencing software. This suggests that effective online learning requires extra time from educators to better prepare class sessions. Furthermore, there is an important correlation between the level of student motivation and their appreciation level of online learning.

COVID-19 news in USA and in China: Which is suitable in explaining the nexus among Bitcoin and Gold?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the impact of COVID-19 pandemic news in USA and in China on the dynamic conditional correlation between Bitcoin and Gold. Design/methodology/approach This paper offers a crucial viewpoint to the predictive capacity of COVID-19 surprises and production pronouncements for the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) among Bitcoin and Gold returns and volatilities using generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity-DCC-(1,1) through the period of study since July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020. To assess the unexpected impact of COVID-19, this study pursues the Kuttner’s (2001) methodology. Findings The empirical findings indicate strong important correlation among Bitcoin and Gold if COVID-19 surprises are integrated in variance. This study validates the financialization hypothesis of Bitcoin and Gold. The correlation between Bitcoin and Gold begin to react significantly further in the case of COVID-19 surprises in USA than those in China. Originality/value This paper contributes to the literature on assessing the impact of COVID-19 confirmed cases surprises on the correlation between Bitcoin and Gold. This paper gives for the first time an approach to capture the COVID-19 surprise component. Also, this study helps to improve financial backers and policymakers' comprehension of the digital currencies' market elements, particularly in the hours of amazingly unpleasant and inconspicuous occasions.

Dialektika Maqasid as-Syari’ah Dalam Metode Istinbath Hukum Islam

Maqashid as-shari'ah is a new trend in the legal istinbath that is undergoing development in the contemporary era. The development of the method of extracting the source of contemporary Islamic law is now considered more promising as using maqashid as-sharia. As a scientific discipline that is the development of fiqh and fiqh rules, maqashid as-shari'ah is now widely studied by experts in Islamic law more deeply. Benefit as the essence of maqashid as-shari'ah, has urgency in determining Islamic law. Because Islamic law is revealed has the purpose and purpose to realize the benefit of the people both in this world and in the Hereafter. Thus the study of maqashid as-shari'ah has a very important correlation in extracting the source of Islamic law, in other words that the excavation of Islamic law based on benefit still refers to the books of qawaid al-fiqhi and ushul al-fiqh. As for the way used by the scholars' in exploring the benefits there are three methods: bayani method (substantive analysis), qiyasi method (analogy analysis), and istishlahi method (benefit analysis)

The Study of Consumption Decision Key Factors in Chinese Wedding Banquet

Marriage is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most people and all new couples want the details to be perfect for a good memory. However, in the Chinese world, it is not up to the new couple to decide all details of a wedding banquet on their own, the opinions of their parents must be considered. Therefore, under the circumstances of many decision makers with different expectations, wedding consumption decisions become onerous and complex. In this study, we used the focus group method to obtain the factors for the selection of the wedding restaurant and confirmed the key facets and criteria of the factors of wedding restaurant selection and the consumption value model through the Delphi method and then looked for the important correlation among the factors and their causal relationship through DANP analysis. The research shows that the most critical facets are “emotional value” and “social value” and that the most critical criteria are “word-of-mouth” and “restaurant evaluation.” Restaurant operators are suggested to consider the needs of customers, strengthen the quality of project package content, pay attention to online comments and voice volume, strengthen staff training and understand consumer demands.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in practitioners of high- impact sports: a systematic literature review

Background: The chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease, in the class of the tauopathies, related to a repetitive exposure to minor head traumas. Manifests severe behavioural changes and cognitive decline, however it is diagnosed posthumously. Researches demonstrate the frequent occurence of the disease in practitioners of high-impact sports such as boxing and american football. Objectives: The review aims to relate the incidence of CTE in practitioners of high-impact sports. Design and setting: Systematic literature review based on neuropathological findings of sports practitioners in the USA. Methods: Systematic literature review based on quantitative and qualitative data from articles found in the Scielo and PubMed plataforms. Results: In boxing 66% of serious injuries are caused by cranioencephalic impacts and the manifestation of symptoms of CTE often appears in retired professionals with more than 50 years. Furthermore, there is na important correlation between the number of matches and tomographic findings from neuropsychological evaluations. As for the american football, a study published in 2017, with a sample of 93 participants, inferred that the risk of neurodeterioration increases with every 1000 impacts (a game season is equivalent to 545 impacts). Conclusion: The studies demonstrated a direct association between CTE and regular concussions in boxing and american football athlets. Considering the relevance of the theme, it is necessary to expand the studies to support care and preventive measures of this disease or even delay the neurodegeneration, ensuring a better life quality for the athletes.

The Research on the Relation between PSD of Park Green Space and Attention Restoration in Dense Urban Areas

Research shows that stress, a common problem in dense cities, can be relieved in the natural environment. As great significance has been attached to the urban environment and public health in the society, this paper aims to study the relation and interaction between the perceived sensory dimension of urban park green space, attention restoration and state empathy. Therefore, we conducted an on-site questionnaire survey in four typical parks in Chengdu in terms of age, sex, daily stress, frequency of access in parks and other basic information of the respondents. The main part consists of perceived dimension, state empathy and attention restoration. The software SPSS24.0 is applied to the test of the validity and reliability of the PSD Scale, and then the important correlation between the perceived sensory dimensions in the parks and visitors' attention restoration is analyzed through multiple linear regression. Finally, the moderation effect of state empathy is tested by PROCESS. The findings show that (1) only seven dimensions in the PSD Scale are effective; (2) Serene and Refuge in the perceived sensory dimensions have significant effect on the restorative components of attention. (3) Except the dimensions of Rich in Species and Refuge, empathy enhanced the moderation effect in the interaction between the other five dimensions the Perceived Restorative Scale(PRS), especially in the interaction between the dimension Social and PRS. However, this study needs to be further explored to provide scientific basis and design strategy guidance for the research on the restoration potential of urban park green space in high-density urban areas.

DeepATT: a hybrid category attention neural network for identifying functional effects of DNA sequences

Quantifying DNA properties is a challenging task in the broad field of human genomics. Since the vast majority of non-coding DNA is still poorly understood in terms of function, this task is particularly important to have enormous benefit for biology research. Various DNA sequences should have a great variety of representations, and specific functions may focus on corresponding features in the front part of learning model. Currently, however, for multi-class prediction of non-coding DNA regulatory functions, most powerful predictive models do not have appropriate feature extraction and selection approaches for specific functional effects, so that it is difficult to gain a better insight into their internal correlations. Hence, we design a category attention layer and category dense layer in order to select efficient features and distinguish different DNA functions. In this study, we propose a hybrid deep neural network method, called DeepATT, for identifying $919$ regulatory functions on nearly $5$ million DNA sequences. Our model has four built-in neural network constructions: convolution layer captures regulatory motifs, recurrent layer captures a regulatory grammar, category attention layer selects corresponding valid features for different functions and category dense layer classifies predictive labels with selected features of regulatory functions. Importantly, we compare our novel method, DeepATT, with existing outstanding prediction tools, DeepSEA and DanQ. DeepATT performs significantly better than other existing tools for identifying DNA functions, at least increasing $1.6\%$ area under precision recall. Furthermore, we can mine the important correlation among different DNA functions according to the category attention module. Moreover, our novel model can greatly reduce the number of parameters by the mechanism of attention and locally connected, on the basis of ensuring accuracy.