The Impact of Linguistic Concordance and the Active Offer of French Language Services on Patient Satisfaction

Communication is essential to providing quality primary care. Linguistic concordance between patients and physicians has been linked to improved health outcomes and greater patient satisfaction. Although Canadian Francophones often struggle to access linguistics concordant health services, the concept of the active offer of French Language Services (FLS) has emerged as a means of ensuring the availability of such services and improving the francophone patient experience. However, the impact of language concordance and the active offer of FLS on patient satisfaction among Ontario Francophones remain largely unknown. Patient satisfaction surveys were collected as part of a continuing education program targeted at family physicians in Northeastern Ontario. Participating physicians distributed patient surveys consisting of select patient satisfaction questions from the Physicians Achievement Review (PAR) and select questions from the Active Offer of French Language Services in Minority Context Measure. Valid surveys were received from 235 patients. Just under half of these (44%) identified as Francophones, 62.6% had a French-speaking family physician; however, only 17.2% reported regularly speaking in French with their family physician. As hypothesized, there was a consistent tendency for Francophones who experience stronger linguistic concordance with their family physician to report higher satisfaction scores. Francophones who regularly speak French with their family physicians were more satisfied ( = 4.63) than those who rarely/never speak French ( = 4.29, F(1; 83) = 4.852; p < 0.05). There was also a statistically significant interaction between the patients' language of preference and the service language. Francophones who prefer French and regularly speak it with their family physician (linguistic concordance; adj= 4.82) were significantly more satisfied than those who prefer French yet rarely/never speak it (linguistic discordance; adj= 4.06, F(1; 75) = 11.950; p < 0.001). Furthermore, a positive correlation between patient satisfaction and the active offer was observed in Francophones (r = 0.49, p<0.001). The present findings provide evidence of the impact of linguistically adapted health care services on the satisfaction of Ontario Francophones and suggest that patient satisfaction may be improved through the active offer of FLS. A larger and more diverse sample is required to confirm these findings.

No pervasive relationship between species size and local abundance trends

Although there is some evidence that larger species could be more prone to population declines, the potential role of size traits in determining changes in community composition has been underexplored in global-scale analyses. Here, we combine a large cross-taxon assemblage time series database (BioTIME) with multiple trait databases to show that there is no clear correlation within communities between size traits and changes in abundance over time, suggesting that there is no consistent tendency for larger species to be doing proportionally better or worse than smaller species at local scales.

Co-occurrence network of TV advertisements revealing Japanese lifestyle

The relationship between culture and the appeals in TV advertisements has been extensively studied. We attempted to reveal the image structure produced by TV commercials in Japan, which may show the cultural features of the country, and to evaluate its temporal change. For this purpose, we constructed and analysed a co-occurrence network of keywords related to TV commercials by using immense data that include the records of all TV commercials aired in the Kanto area in Japan including Tokyo for a period of 15 years. We found a strong heterogeneity of the co-occurrence relationship, where a few keywords, e.g., ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘animation’, and ‘logo’, co-occur with a huge number of other keywords every year. A community on a co-occurrence network can be regarded as a set of keywords that are mutually associated with each other through TV commercials. We examined the characteristics of the communities by associating them with categories of advertised products and found a temporal change in which the relationship between the communities possessing the image of entertainment and children and the category of PC and A/V gradually increases in strength. However, there was a consistent tendency in the examined period for the product categories related to communities that include ‘man’ to be less associated with those that include ‘woman’ and vice versa, which implicates a gender role inequality underlying the various appeals in TV commercials.

Is Meta-Accuracy Consistent Across Levels of Acquaintanceship?

Some people tend to be especially accurate about the personality impressions they make, but is meta-accuracy a consistent tendency that spans levels of acquaintanceship, or is it only observed within levels of acquaintanceship? Three studies suggested that meta-accuracy is consistent among close others but not across new acquaintances and close others. This pattern was observed for observable and unobservable traits and when accounting for people who made more consistent impressions on others (i.e., high consensus). Overall, meta-accuracy seems to be circumscribed within levels of acquaintanceship. The major implication of these results is that the mechanisms for meta-accuracy and the attributes of good meta-perceivers likely differ across levels of acquaintanceship.

The Changing Extreme Values of Summer Relative Humidity in the Tarim Basin in Northwestern China

Relative Humidity (RH) in the arid region of the Tarim Basin is crucial for many reasons. The Tarim Basin has experienced a tendency to become wetter in recent decades, and the RH here also shows an increase over the past decade. However, there has been little examination of these RH changes and especially the changes to the extremes. This study investigates the changes in extreme values and the probability distribution function (PDF) of summer RH using quantile regression during 2006-2018 to understand the possible reasons for the increase in the summer RH anomaly. We find that extremely high values of RH show a consistent significant increase, while extremely low values have no regionally consistent tendency. The overall average value of RH in the Tarim Basin becomes higher, driven by the upper half of the PDF. To explore the physical mechanism for these changes, we examine the corresponding regional meteorological anomaly patterns. The patterns indicate that the anomalous southwesterly airflow at 500hPa brings ample moisture into the basin and the ground in the middle of the basin significantly cools down when an extreme wet event occurs, promoting the occurrence of the extreme high RH. In this process, the contributions of water vapor transport and temperature are of equal significance though with different relative timing. These corresponding regional meteorological patterns occur more often in the most recent decade, which coincides with the recent increase in RH extremes in this region.

Eliciting End-State Comfort Planning in Children With and Without Developmental Coordination Disorder Using a Hammer Task: A Pilot Study

The end-state comfort (ESC) effect refers to the consistent tendency of healthy adults to end their movements in a comfortable end posture. In children with and without developmental coordination disorder (DCD), the results of studies focusing on ESC planning have been inconclusive, which is likely to be due to differences in task constraints. The present pilot study focused on the question whether children with and without DCD were able to change their planning strategy and were more likely to plan for ESC when demanded by complex object manipulations at the end of a task. To this end, we examined ESC planning in 18 children with and without DCD (aged 5–11years) using the previously used sword-task and the newly developed hammer-task. In the sword-task, children had to insert a sword in a wooden block, which could be relatively easily completed with an uncomfortable end-posture. In the hammer-task, children had to strike down a nail in a wooden pounding bench, which required additional force and speed demands, making it relatively difficult to complete the movement with an uncomfortable end-posture. In line with our hypothesis, the results demonstrated that children with and without DCD were more likely to plan for ESC on the hammer-task compared with the sword-task. Thus, while children with and without DCD show inconsistent ESC planning on many previously used tasks, the present pilot study shows that many of them are able to take into account the end-state of their movements if demanded by task constraints.

The low-frequency improvement with loading soft magnetic ferrite films for multiband antenna applications

This work presents an easy way to improve the low-frequency properties in a small-size LTE/WWAN smartphone antenna by just loading a soft magnetic ferrite film on the strong radiation area. The base non-magnetic antenna, which only takes up an 11 mm × 30 mm no-ground space, can achieve hexa-band operation covering 822–914/1710–3244 MHz bands by co-designing a meandering strip and a T-shaped feeding strip. With loading a small-size ferrite film (2 mm × 15 mm) at the strong radiation strip, the frequencies can be shifted to cover the range of 692–1191/1698–3020 MHz, which shows a fully covering of octa-band operation, especially including the best long-term-evolution band, LTE700, without enlarging the size of base antenna. In addition, the radiation characteristics of the magnetic antenna with ferrite film loading show a limited change at upper bands (1710–2690 MHz) but an acceptable level at lower bands (698–960 MHz). Both experimental and simulated results have been taken out and shown the consistent tendency. This optimization method of low-frequency properties by introducing a commercial ferrite film on the antenna has provided a simple and convenient way to solve the frequency deviation in the practical smartphone applications.

Dynamics Analysis on Planar Articulated Trusses Considering Cubic Nonlinearity of Joints

A large number of joints that make possible the smooth deployment of an articulated truss may lead to the unexpected variation of the whole dynamic characteristics of the truss. In this paper, attention is focused on exploring the joint characteristics and their effects not strictly following the conventional linear assumption. Particularly, the effects of cubic nonlinear characteristics of joints on the dynamic behavior of articulated trusses are investigated. First, the equivalent dynamic model of the truss cell in the frequency domain is developed for enhancing the computational efficiency. With the employment of the describing function method (DFM), the frequency responses of the planar articulated truss considering the cubic nonlinearity of joints are obtained analytically. Moreover, the transient responses of the articulated truss under external shock loads are obtained numerically. Subsequently, the variations in frequency obtained by the fast Fourier transformation (FFT) of the numerical results show consistent tendency compared with those obtained by the equivalent dynamic model of the planar articulated truss. Finally, several conclusions are presented at the end.

Experimental Examination of Electrical Characteristics for Portland Cement Mortar Frost Damage Evaluation

Electrical measurements are promising for evaluation of frost damage of concrete, but the index is still controversial. In this paper, to propose an efficient index, various electrical characteristics were examined to correlate them with the mechanical property degradation of meso-scale mortar samples due to combined effects of sodium chloride and freeze–thaw cycles (FTCs). While the electrical responses of specimens were measured during FTCs, the mechanical properties were obtained from three-point bending tests after FTCs. Typical microstructural change after the damage was also analyzed by using a water absorption test. The results showed that no clear degradation tendency was observed for electrical resistivity at the lowest temperature, the activation energy or the freezing/thawing point change with the FTCs. The reduction in electrical resistivity at reference temperature has a consistent tendency with that of elastic modulus and flexural strength, thus can be an efficient index for quantitative frost damage evaluation. The change due to salt-frost damage is mainly due to the increase of connectivity rather than porosity.

DOMAINS AND MOTIVES OF MUSHARAKAH SPUR IN THE ISLAMIC BANKING INDUSTRY OF PAKISTAN

Participatory financing schemes, including Musharakah and Mudarabah, are theoretically claimed to be the ideal modes of Islamic financing, but their practice is restrained by several factors. That is why Islamic banks have a consistent tendency to avoid participatory financing on the assets side throughout the world. However, recently this trend has started changing in Pakistan and Indonesia where the share of participatory finance has raised significantly in the financing portfolio of Islamic banks. The present paper explores this recent spur of participatory finance in Pakistan in terms of its domains of applications and the responsible factors. The findings lead to a novel posteriori framework which shows that the shift towards participatory financing is primarily characterized by increase in working capital financing and commodity operations financing through Musharakah mode Islamic banks. Moreover, five factors contribute to the spur of participatory financing including: (i) introducing varieties in Musharakah, (ii) enhanced applicability, (iii) high volume projects, (iv) government interventions, and (v) regulator’s role. The framework can significantly advance understanding with respect to the implementation theory of participation financing within Islamic banking and related Shariah compliance and regulation.