FreeForAll: Free Articles to Those in Need

FreeForAll is an international collaboration of libraries whose mission is to provide underserved nations with health science journal articles for free and to foster lending between nations through the creation of a database of international libraries’ (non–North American) holdings.     

Performance monitoring of university research: A perspective from Australia

The purpose of this paper is to report on who creates branding within institutions of higher learning, and what impact branding has on core institutional activities such as student recruitment and fundraising, as well as on socio‐psychological factors such as community respect and national prestige. Eighty‐nine tertiary education experts covering three world regions were surveyed in order to gather information to fulfil the paper’s objectives. The nature and extent of involvement of enrolled students, alumni, higher management, external consultants, civic leaders and the business community were investigated to identify the part each plays, if any, in the development of an institutional brand. Findings indicate that institutions have a tendency to brand from the top down rather than from the bottom up.     

The performance status of higher educational institutions: A transfer of knowledge perspective

Education and Information Technologies - The study is the empirical application of Gul and Jamal's (2021) Transfer of Knowledge Index. The study presents the ranking of 17 public sector HEI by...     

Development and validation of Online Classroom Learning Environment Inventory (OCLEI): The case of Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Learning Environments Research - This paper reports the development and validation of a new questionnaire to assess students' perceptions of the online learning environment in Indonesia during...     

Improved protocol for plasma microRNA extraction and comparison of commercial kits

IntroductionMicroRNAs are small, non-coding RNA molecules that are becoming popular biomarkers in several diseases. However, their low abundance in serum/plasma poses a challenge in exploiting their potential in clinics. Several commercial kits are available for rapid isolation of microRNA from plasma. However, reports guiding the selection of appropriate kits to study downstream assays are scarce. Hence, we compared four commercial kits to evaluate microRNA-extraction from plasma and provided a modified protocol that further improved the superior kit’s performance.Materials and methodsWe compared four kits (miRNeasy Serum/Plasma, miRNeasy Mini Kit from Qiagen; RNA-isolation, and Absolutely-RNA MicroRNA Kit from Agilent technologies) for quality and quantity of microRNA isolated, extraction efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Bioanalyzer-based Agilent Small RNA kit was used to evaluate quality and quantity of microRNA. Extraction efficiency was evaluated by detection of four endogenous control microRNA using real-time-PCR. Further, we modified the manufacturer’s protocol for miRNeasy Serum/Plasma kit to improve yield.ResultsmiRNeasy Serum/Plasma kit outperformed the other three kits in microRNA-quality (P < 0.005) and yielded maximum microRNA-quantity. Recovery of endogenous control microRNA i.e. hsa-miR-24-3p, hsa-miR-191-5p, hsa-miR-423-5p and hsa-miR-484 was higher as well. Modification with the inclusion of a double elution step enhanced yield of microRNA extracted with miRNeasy Serum/Plasma kit significantly (P < 0.001).ConclusionWe demonstrated that miRNeasy Serum/Plasma kit outperforms other kits and can be reliably used with a limited plasma quantity. We have provided a modified microRNA-extraction protocol with improved microRNA output for downstream analyses.     

Functional observer based controller for stabilizing Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy systems with time-delays

This paper investigates the construction of a fuzzy functional observer for nonlinear systems with time-delays, and the application of the observer to estimate the state functions of the parallel distributed compensation controller for stabilizing the system. Two types of time-delays are considered: constant and time-varying delays with bounded time derivative. Stability conditions are obtained using Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional approach; and the conditions are transformed into linear matrix inequalities with equality constraints so that observer parameters can be calculated using the solution of these inequalities. Functional observer construction procedures are presented considering both constant and time-varying time-delays. Two examples, including one for obtaining a power system stabilizer for a single machine infinite bus system, are presented to illustrate effectiveness of the proposed design procedures.     

Interaction between prey and mutually interfering predator in prey reserve habitat: Pattern formation and the Turing–Hopf bifurcation

In this paper, we propose a diffusive prey-predator system with mutually interfering predator (Crowley–Martin functional response) and prey reserve. In particular, we develop and analyze both spatially homogeneous model based on ordinary differential equations and reaction-diffusion model. We mainly investigate the global existence and boundedness of positive solution, stability properties of homogeneous steady state, non-existence of non-constant positive steady state, conditions for Turing instability and Hopf bifurcation of the diffusive system analytically. Conventional stability properties of the non-spatial counterpart of the system are also studied. The analysis ensures that the prey reserve leaves stabilizing effect on the stability of temporal system. The prey reserve and diffusive parameters leave parallel impact on the stability of the spatio-temporal system. Furthermore, we illustrate the spatial patterns via numerical simulations, which show that the model dynamics exhibits diffusion controlled pattern formation by different interesting patterns.