Serum Cytokine Alterations Associated with Age of Patients with Nephropathia Epidemica

Nephropathia epidemica (NE) is a zoonotic disease caused by hantaviruses transmitted from rodents, endemic in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. The disease presents clinically with mild, moderate, and severe forms, and time-dependent febrile, oliguric, and polyuric stages of the disease are also recognized. The patient’s cytokine responses have been suggested to play a central role in disease pathogenesis; however, little is known about the different patterns of cytokine expression in NE in cohorts of different ages and sexes. Serum samples and clinical records were collected from 139 patients and 57 controls (healthy donors) and were used to analyze 48 analytes with the Bio-Plex multiplex magnetic bead-based antibody detection kits. Principal component analysis of 137 patient and 55 controls (for which there was full data) identified two components that individually accounted for >15% of the total variance in results and together for 38% of the total variance. PC1 represented a proinflammatory TH17/TH2 cell antiviral cytokine profile and PC2 a more antiviral cytokine profile with patients tending to display one or the other of these. Severity of disease and stage of illness did not show any correlation with PC1 profiles; however, significant differences were seen in patients with high PC1 profiles vs. lower for a number of individual clinical parameters: High PC1 patients showed a reduced number of febrile days, but higher maximum urine output, higher creatinine levels, and lower platelet levels. Overall, the results of this study point towards a stronger proinflammatory profile occurring in younger NE patients, this being associated with markers of acute kidney injury and low levels of high-density cholesterol. This is consistent with previous work indicating that the pathology of NE is immune driven, with an inflammatory immune response being associated with disease and that this immune response is more extreme in younger patients.

Decomposing variance in co-rumination using dyadic daily diary data

Co-rumination is the process of perseverating on problems, negative thoughts, or feelings with another person. Still unknown is how co-rumination unfolds within the daily lives of romantic couples. Using a variance decomposition procedure on data from a 14-day dyadic daily diary, we assess how much co-rumination varies over time and whether it is a couple- or individual-level process. Results revealed that within-person fluctuations in co-rumination contributed most (~33%) to the total variance and that these fluctuations could be reliably assessed using multi-item summary scores. Although time-invariant between-couple differences account significantly for the total variance (~14%) and can be reliably assessed, there is little within-couple agreement on the extent to which co-rumination fluctuates on a daily level. More research is needed to understand when and why perceptions of daily co-rumination diverge within couples, and how this informs theory on co-rumination and similar ostensibly dyadic constructs.

Foreign Language Anxiety: Translating and Validating a Scale

The purpose of this study was to validate one of the most frequently used tools for assessing anxiety associated with foreign languages. The researcher translated it into Arabic because there was no Arabic literature on such an instrument. To achieve the goal, a committee approach was followed (Brislin, 1980) to ensure the validity of the translation. A sample of 102 students was purposefully selected from International Islamic University Malaysia. The instrument consists of 33 items to measure communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was run to validate the instrument; initially, the PCA produced ten-factor solutions, accounting for 71% of the total variance explained. However, the last nine factors had only two or three loadings each, and they had cross-loading as well. Therefore, only one factor was used in the final, which accounted for 51% of the total variance. The researcher took this factor due to its importance for the Arabic literature, which is also in need of a valid instrument to measure communication apprehension. Due to the lack of convergent validity in the other items, the researcher suggests validating the original instrument.

Estimation of soil temperature by Harmonic analysis

Soil temperatures recorded at 5.10 and 20 cm depth at Anand station of Gujarat state for the period of 1982-93 were analyzed by harmonic analysis and tested it for the year 1998. The amplitude of the soil temperature wave for the various depths decreases from a maximum of 5.76° C in the first harmonic to 0.96°C in the third harmonic. First, second and third harmonic explained 55 to 76 percent, 18 to 37 percent and 2 to 4 percent of the total variance, respectively. Total percentage of total variance covered by the three harmonics at different depths are in the range of 95 to 97 percentage for the period of 1982-93 normalized data series which shows the applicability of harmonic analysis in describing soil temperatures. The weekly observed and computed soil temperatures by harmonic analysis were in agreement and their differences were non significant by Chi-Square test.

Flow and its Relationship to Happiness Among Students of Law and Fine Arts Faculties at Damascus University: التدفق النفسي وعلاقته بالسعادة لدى طلبة كليتي الحقوق والفنون الجميلة بجامعة دمشق

The aim of current research is to study the relationship between psychological flow and happiness among a sample of Damascus University students (Faculties of Law and Fine Arts), in addition to knowing the differences in happiness and psychological flow due to variables (gender, faculty). The research used the descriptive correlative approach. the researcher used Jackson and Elkland flow questionnaire, and the Oxford happiness questionnaire prepared by Argyle and Hills; which applied to a sample of (300) students of the third year. The results showed that there is, a statistically significant correlation between psychological flow and happiness (0.70) and there is a statistically significant correlation between Happiness and each loss of self-consciousness, Merging of action and awareness, and sense of control with (0.63, 0.59, 0.47) respectively. Also, the results showed there are no statistically significant differences in the psychological flow or in happiness among the members of the research sample due to the variable (sex) at level (0.05≥α). While there were statistically significant differences in the psychological flow among the members of the sample due to the variable of (faculty), in favor of the students of Fine Arts faculty. According to the results of research, psychological flow explains about 70% of the total variance in happiness. Based on the results, the researcher presented a number of recommendations to improve the psychological growth and happiness among the two colleges.

Exploring Lean Production System Adoption in the Moroccan Manufacturing and Non-Manufacturing Industries: Awareness, Benefits and Barriers

Although lean manufacturing emerged in the 1990s, and since then, it has become known and recognised worldwide, companies still struggle to implement it successfully, especially in less developed countries. The purpose of this paper is to assess the level of maturity of lean production within small and medium-sized companies, identify what the benefits of lean implementation are, and present an exploration and analysis of the barriers that influence the implementation of lean production in these companies.To achieve this objective, items from previous studies were extracted through a systematic literature review and then validated by interviews with Moroccan experts in the manufacturing and non-manufacturing industry; on the other hand, a questionnaire survey was conducted with 78 small and medium enterprises in Morocco. Subsequently, all collected responses were statistically analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS V21.0). The results show that the lean approach is unfortunately not yet adopted and applied by all Moroccan SMEs (24% of our respondents have not yet tried to apply lean). In addition, the most significant benefits announced by Moroccan small and medium enterprises are ‘the elimination of waste (82.1%)’, ‘the reduction of costs (78.2%)’, and ‘the improvement of efficiency and performance of production units (70.5%)’. Finally, the principal component analysis indicated that the two main difficulties that need to be maintained are poor management (with 63.6 % of the total variance) and lack of financial resources, monitoring, and skilled labours (with 7.7 % of the total variance).

Total Variance Approach on Commercial Vehicle Handling Dynamics

The suspension roll motion can produce roll steer, which are functions of roll angle, thus producing extra lateral forces. This paper develops the total variance approach to analyze the effect of suspension roll on commercial vehicle handling dynamics. The side-slip angle unified transfer function, reaction time, transition time, damping ratio and total variance are introduced with the effect of suspension. The vehicle designers could use this approach to get optimization design parameters of vehicle without numerical calculation. For the two-axle commercial vehicles, the total variance approach is useful and could serve as an important tool for evaluating the effect of vehicle suspension roll on commercial vehicle dynamics.

Denoising Diffusion MRI via Graph Total Variance in Spatioangular Domain

Diffusion MRI (DMRI) plays an essential role in diagnosing brain disorders related to white matter abnormalities. However, it suffers from heavy noise, which restricts its quantitative analysis. The total variance (TV) regularization is an effective noise reduction technique that penalizes noise-induced variances. However, existing TV-based denoising methods only focus on the spatial domain, overlooking that DMRI data lives in a combined spatioangular domain. It eventually results in an unsatisfactory noise reduction effect. To resolve this issue, we propose to remove the noise in DMRI using graph total variance (GTV) in the spatioangular domain. Expressly, we first represent the DMRI data using a graph, which encodes the geometric information of sampling points in the spatioangular domain. We then perform effective noise reduction using the powerful GTV regularization, which penalizes the noise-induced variances on the graph. GTV effectively resolves the limitation in existing methods, which only rely on spatial information for removing the noise. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real DMRI data demonstrate that GTV can remove the noise effectively and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

APLIKASI K-MEANS DAN FUZY CLUSTERING DALAM PENGELOMPOKAN KECAMATAN DI KABUPATEN BANYUMAS

Clustering N objects into c clusters can be used to get information about data observation. Among the clustering methods are K-Means (KMC) and Fuzzy C-means (FCM) methods. In the K-means method, objects are members or not members of the cluster, while in the FCM method, objects are included in the cluster based on the degree of membership. This study discusses the implementation of KMC and FCM in the custering of sub-districts in Banyumas Regency based on total of population, the number of health workers and the number of health facilities and infrastructure. The results showed that the KMC and FCM methods produced the same cluster membership. Furthermore, the analysis of clustering based on the number of population, the number of health workers and the number of health facilities and infrastructure (scenario 1) and based on the number of health workers and the number of health facilities and infrastructure which have been corrected by population (scenario 2). The percentage of the variance ratio between clusters to the total variance in scenario 1 is 69% while in scenario 2 it is 85%. Clustering based on scenario 2 is better than scenario 1.