Psychological demands of health professionals in the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic

Recent literature emphasizes how the specific stressors of the COVID-19 outbreak affect the general population and frontline professionals, including those conducting support or backup activities in health units, which can lead to vicarious traumatization. Vicarious traumatization has been used to describe negative emotional reactions in mental health professionals who assist or treat victims of traumatic events. Thus, the aim of this article is to report the actions used in the face of the psychological demands of professionals in a hospital, who were not on the frontline of COVID-19. We collected their sociodemographic information and checked the psychological impact using the depression, anxiety, and stress scale (DASS-21), which was followed by a psychoeducational program (topics related to COVID-19 control and prevention), and individual psychological care for the most severe cases. A total of 118 professionals participated in this study; they were between 20 and 67 years old. Mild to moderate anxiety was observed in 36.5% of the medical teams, 83.3% of the administrative staff, and 65.7% of general service workers, while stress symptoms were observed in 80.2%, 83.3%, and 59.9%, respectively. Depressive symptoms (35.3%) were more frequent in general service workers. The medical teams reported the benefits of primary psychological care, while the other professionals demanded more institutional support services related to the prevention and use of personal protective equipment. This study highlights relevant psychological demands that have repercussions on the daily lives of professionals. The psychoeducational program was considered positive regarding clarification actions. However, it was not perceived as effective in reducing fear, which may result from vicarious traumatization and requires other intervention modalities.

Evaluating the Vocabulary Coverage of EFL Textbooks and Teachers’ Generated Materials in an Indonesian Islamic Universities:A Corpus-Informed Materials Evaluation

The importance of vocabulary in the learning of EFL has been an indisputable matter in ELT. The inclusion of vocabulary in ELT materials is often accompanied with questions such as what type of vocabulary and how many words to be taught for students in diverse ELT contexts. Hence, evaluating the kinds of vocabulary in ELT materials is similarly important. This study demonstrates a considerably unconventional corpus -informed materials evaluation to assess the suitability of the vocabulary content of ELT course books taught at the State Islamic Institute in Manado with its ESP context. Four ELT course books taught at the four schools of the State Islamic Institute were analysed using the corpus-based methods. A special software designed for corpus linguistics studies called e Antwordprofiler was used to count the coverage/frequency of occurrence of three types of Nation’ vocabulary classification. The results showed that the examined course books contain sufficient coverage of English high frequency words as required by theory that they contain a total coverage of 84.14 % of high frequency English word enlisted in the General Service List (GSL). However, in terms of the coverage of academic and technical vocabulary, these course books content were still considered under the theoretically acceptable coverage of at least 12,4 % and 5 % respectively. It is recommended that for ELT course books that are used in ESP teaching such as in a field-specific Islamic studies programs, the course books should fulfil the minimum coverage threshold of high frequency, academic and technical vocabulary.

Self Care Profile of Diabetic Patient during Covid 19 Pandemic in Manggarai Regency, East Nusa Tenggara

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the comorbid diseases commonly found on COVID-19 infected individuals and causing the most death. In the pandemic era, DM patients are needful to execute the care management by themselves due to the social restriction as a part of transmission control. This study aimed to assess the self-care behavior of DM patients during the COVID-19 pandemic era in Manggarai Regency who still carry out various traditional ceremonies even during the pandemic. This study was a quantitative descriptive study. The research data get by the SDSCA (The Summary of Self-Care Activities) questionnaire developed by the General Service Administration (GSA) Regulatory Information Service Center (RISC). This study attends from January to March 2021, with 88 respondents have participated after being recruited using purposive sampling and inclusion criteria. Among the 88 respondents, the respondents were most compliant with eating restrictions on sugar-contained food such as cake, chocolate, biscuit, and ice cream diet. Respondents did not restrict themself to consume carbohydrate contained foods. Self-care behavior is most important to DM patients in the pandemic era due to the social restrictions creating the hesitancy among the patients to come to the health care facilities. Moreover, when DM patients are more prone to develop severe symptoms of covid-19. Health professionals have to improve the health education to the patients by emphasizing the importance of exercise, diabetic foot care, and routine blood sugar monitoring so that the patients are not only focused on dietary management and medicine.

On A Single Server Queue with Two-Stage First Essential Service Followed by One of the Two Types of Additional Optional Service and Optional Deterministic Server Vacations

We study the steady state behavior of a batch arrival single server queue in which the first service consisting of two stages with general service times G1 and G2 is compulsory. After completion of the two stages of the first essential service, a customer has the option of choosing one of the two types of additional service with respective general service times G1 and G2 . Just after completing both stages of first essential service with or without one of the two types of additional optional service, the server has the choice of taking an optional deterministic vacation of fixed (constant) length of time. We obtain steady state probability generating functions for the queue size for various states of the system at a random epoch of time in explicit and closed forms. The steady state results of some interesting special cases have been derived from the main results.

Polysemy: A Second Language Pedagogical Concern

<p>This thesis is an examination of polysemy and its effects on second language learners, revealing it as a greater concern than it is normally accorded in pedagogical research. Arguing against a reliance on the dictionary to determine the number of senses a given word has, it begins with a thorough exploration of the concept, both from diachronic and synchronic perspectives, by contrasting it with the related concepts of homonymy and monosemy. A monosemic stance is argued for, which does not deny the existence of polysemy but argues for a framework in which contextual variations of a word are not considered discrete meanings. The British National Corpus is consulted for data demonstrating that instances of a word that may appear as discrete units of meanings actually form a single, unified usage. With monosemy redistributed to account for more than it normally does, and with polysemy relegated solely to semantics (factoring out syntax, pragmatics, etc.), polysemy becomes a considerably less sloppy concept, revealing that, at a top-down level, there are essentially only two varieties. The first of these is 'lexical metaphor,' in which there is a clear literalmetaphoric divide between uses, and the second is 'vicariant polysemy' in which senses are discrete but not synchronically explainable by metaphor. Using Hoey's notion of lexical priming, the factored-out elements of syntax, collocation, etc. are returned to, but strictly as effects of the semantic process of sense generation that should not be mistaken for the cause, though they frequently are. The second part of this thesis moves from the theoretical to the applied, reviewing the sparse literature on the subject. Techniques for raising awareness of the issue among students are discussed as are dictionary skills relevant to polysemy and homonymy. Attention is then turned toward homonymy, examining the problem it poses to word lists and providing the beginning of a solution by revealing which words on the General Service List are homonymic and giving the relative frequency of each meaning. A technique to assist learners in acquiring additional meanings of homonyms is examined, as is a technique for guessing new or novel meanings of polysemes in context.</p>

Polysemy: A Second Language Pedagogical Concern

<p>This thesis is an examination of polysemy and its effects on second language learners, revealing it as a greater concern than it is normally accorded in pedagogical research. Arguing against a reliance on the dictionary to determine the number of senses a given word has, it begins with a thorough exploration of the concept, both from diachronic and synchronic perspectives, by contrasting it with the related concepts of homonymy and monosemy. A monosemic stance is argued for, which does not deny the existence of polysemy but argues for a framework in which contextual variations of a word are not considered discrete meanings. The British National Corpus is consulted for data demonstrating that instances of a word that may appear as discrete units of meanings actually form a single, unified usage. With monosemy redistributed to account for more than it normally does, and with polysemy relegated solely to semantics (factoring out syntax, pragmatics, etc.), polysemy becomes a considerably less sloppy concept, revealing that, at a top-down level, there are essentially only two varieties. The first of these is 'lexical metaphor,' in which there is a clear literalmetaphoric divide between uses, and the second is 'vicariant polysemy' in which senses are discrete but not synchronically explainable by metaphor. Using Hoey's notion of lexical priming, the factored-out elements of syntax, collocation, etc. are returned to, but strictly as effects of the semantic process of sense generation that should not be mistaken for the cause, though they frequently are. The second part of this thesis moves from the theoretical to the applied, reviewing the sparse literature on the subject. Techniques for raising awareness of the issue among students are discussed as are dictionary skills relevant to polysemy and homonymy. Attention is then turned toward homonymy, examining the problem it poses to word lists and providing the beginning of a solution by revealing which words on the General Service List are homonymic and giving the relative frequency of each meaning. A technique to assist learners in acquiring additional meanings of homonyms is examined, as is a technique for guessing new or novel meanings of polysemes in context.</p>

On the stability of queues with the dropping function

In this paper, the stability of the queueing system with the dropping function is studied. In such system, every incoming job may be dropped randomly, with the probability being a function of the queue length. The main objective of the work is to find an easy to use condition, sufficient for the instability of the system, under assumption of Poisson arrivals and general service time distribution. Such condition is found and proven using a boundary for the dropping function and analysis of the embedded Markov chain. Applicability of the proven condition is demonstrated on several examples of dropping functions. Additionally, its correctness is confirmed using a discrete-event simulator.