Evaluation of Apoptotic Marker Bcl2, CD4+, Human Hepatocyte Growth Factor and Metalloproteinase-9 as Tumor Markers for Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma

To examine the possible involvement of human B cell leukemia/lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2), CD4+ cells, hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), and metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9), as biomarkers in early diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), activities of these biomarkers in serum were demonstrated by the method of Enzyme Linked Immunosorbant Assay. Two groups of subjects (60 for each), were examined in this study; healthy controls and patients with HCC. The present results declare that, significant decrease in Bcl-2 (p ≤ 0.0001), and CD 4+ (p ≤ 0.001), while significant increase in HGF and MMP-9 (p ≤ 0.05). These findings imply an influence of these biomarkers by the existence of hepatic carcinoma that might reflect the progression of disease and a distinction between the pathological mechanisms involved in hepatic carcinoma. Since, the serum MMP-9 activity was significantly varied between each stage of HCC. An individual profile of the present investigated parameters was detected that might serve as an easy accessing serum marker to monitor the progression of hepatic cell disorders.     

Modalités de prise de décision chez les filles et les garçons en la présence ou en l’absence de l’enseignant

How girls and boys take decisions in the presence and absence of a teacher – This work is part of an innovative approach to physical and sports education in Tunisia, and team sports in particular. It uses language studies carried out within the framework of this teaching both to generate a reflective attitude on the part of students, and to identify the effect of gender as a variable in the ways in which they make decisions. Discourse analysis highlights the importance of language output by girls and boys in football teaching when a teacher is present or absent. The teacher is an institutional authority who imposes specific uses of language, and when he/she is absent, emotional tensions predominate and may reflect the repression of ideas that occurs when the teacher is present. Although girls appear to take part in the discussion, their utterances are fewer in number, and their analytical statements less effective than those of boys. Girls never gain the upper hand over boys. The study also suggests a redefinition of social role divisions on the basis of gender – masculinity and femininity.     

Designing e-assessment activities appropriate to learner's competency levels: Hybrid pedagogical framework and authoring tool

Education and Information Technologies - E-Assessment, which is a key element in the instructional design process, plays a major role in supporting and enhancing learning. However, the current...     

Trends in the use of affective computing in e-learning environments

Education and Information Technologies - Considering that emotions have a great impact on motivation, reasoning, and decision making, affective computing methods, that were designed to attempt to...     

On the use of benchmarking and good practices for knowledge management for development

Is it possible that less developed societies may learn and profit from the stories and lessons of the developed economies? This paper explores the feasibility of doing so through the use of benchmarking and good practices of knowledge management policies for development. In the era of the knowledge economy, where knowledge is the key determinant of competitiveness, it is posited that it may be desirable to evenly distribute knowledge within and across societies so that trade and cooperation may take place. The study begins with a review of the literature on knowledge societies, their characteristics, the prevalence of knowledge disparities, knowledge policies for development, and the role of benchmarking and good practices in formulating such policies. A framework is proposed for identifying measures that help reduce knowledge disparity and promote development. Using this framework, a detailed analysis with data from the World Bank's Knowledge Assessment Methodology custom scorecards was conducted. A Knowledge Management Index was consequently constructed for the use of policymakers. While quantitative measures were used for benchmarking purposes, the analysis of good practices and lessons learnt was essentially qualitative. Finally, the paper concludes by underscoring the key role of benchmarking knowledge policies and learning from good practices in order to promote development.     

Relationship between split-step timing and leg stiffness in world-class tennis players when returning fast serves

ABSTRACT

This study investigated split-step timing when returning serves and whether this timing is related to neuromechanical capabilities in world-class tennis players. In Experiment 1, the split-step timing of four groups of world-class players (male and female ATP/WTA seniors, and ITF juniors) was measured on court when returning serves of the same level players. The four groups initiated the split-step at a similar time, starting around the time ball-racket contact in the serve stroke and landed when early ball-flight information was available. In Experiment 2, the neuromechanical capabilities (leg stiffness and vertical jump performance) of a group of world-class players and three groups of less-skilled tennis players were examined. The results showed an increase in leg stiffness with an increase in the level of expertise. A cross-experiment analysis in world-class male players (ATP/ITF, n = 10) revealed that the timing of initial foot movement was significantly correlated with the leg stiffness (r² = 0.54), with later lateral step after the serve in the players who had higher stiffness. The findings support the hypothesis that world-class tennis players adapt perceptual-motor control on the basis of their neuromechanical capabilities and maximise the time before initiating their interceptive action to rely on more reliable information.     

Effects of plyometric jump training on the physical fitness of young male soccer players: Modulation of response by inter-set recovery interval and maturation status

ABSTRACT

The effects of plyometric jump training on the physical fitness of male youth (age = 10–17 years) soccer players was examined in relation to inter-set recovery intervals and the maturity of the players in a single-blind, randomized-and controlled crossover trial. Jumping tests and kicking velocities were measured before (T₀), after a 6 week control period (T₁), after 6 weeks of plyometrics (T₂), after 6 weeks of wash-out (T₃), and after a further 6 weeks of plyometrics (T₄). Subjects were divided into pre- and post- peak-height-velocity (PHV) groups, and were randomly assigned to 30 s or 120 s inter-set intervals during periods T₂ and T₄. Any changes in jumping and maximum kicking velocities during T₁ and T_3, had trivial effect sizes (0.01–0.15), but small to moderate improvements (effect size = 0.20–0.99) were observed in both groups during T₂ and T₄. Gains in pre-PHV players were similar for the two inter-set intervals, but gains in post-PHV players were greater (p < 0.05) with an inter-set recovery of 120 s than with a 30 s recovery. We conclude that plyometric jump training improves the physical fitness of adolescents, irrespective of their maturity, but that in older individuals gains are greater with a longer inter-set recovery interval.     

Promotion and Knowledge of Online Patent Literature Search to Enhance Scientific Output in Tanzania: Case of Two Universities in Zanzibar

Abstract

This study examines the promotion and knowledge of online patent literature search among students, librarians, and instructors to enhance university scientific output in Zanzibar. The study was guided by four key questions: What is the level of awareness of students, instructors and library staff about patent documents as source of information? To what extent do students and instructors access online patent databases? What is the library experience in training students about online patent literature searching?, and what are the challenges facing library and instructors in promoting patent literature search? The study used survey approach whereby questionnaire and interview were used to collect data. The recent literatures regarding online patent literature searching were also critically reviewed. A survey was conducted at two Universities in Zanzibar namely the State University of Zanzibar and Zanzibar University, whereby 20 library staff, 10 instructors and 140 undergraduate students from the School of Computing and the Faculty of Engineering were involved in this study. The findings show that more than three quarters of respondents were either partially aware or not aware at all about the existence of free online patent databases. Likewise, the majority of students had no enough skills of patent literature searching. However, usually the library organizes training on general online literature searching skills but patent literature searching was not effectively taught and a big challenge observed in this study regarding promotion of patent literature searching is inadequate patent searching skills among library and instructors. Based on the findings, the study proposed several recommendations to rectify the existing problem.     

SRL-ESA-TextSum: A text summarization approach based on semantic role labeling and explicit semantic analysis

Automatic text summarization attempts to provide an effective solution to today’s unprecedented growth of textual data. This paper proposes an innovative graph-based text summarization framework for generic single and multi document summarization. The summarizer benefits from two well-established text semantic representation techniques; Semantic Role Labelling (SRL) and Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) as well as the constantly evolving collective human knowledge in Wikipedia. The SRL is used to achieve sentence semantic parsing whose word tokens are represented as a vector of weighted Wikipedia concepts using ESA method. The essence of the developed framework is to construct a unique concept graph representation underpinned by semantic role-based multi-node (under sentence level) vertices for summarization. We have empirically evaluated the summarization system using the standard publicly available dataset from Document Understanding Conference 2002 (DUC 2002). Experimental results indicate that the proposed summarizer outperforms all state-of-the-art related comparators in the single document summarization based on the ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-2 measures, while also ranking second in the ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-SU4 scores for the multi-document summarization. On the other hand, the testing also demonstrates the scalability of the system, i.e., varying the evaluation data size is shown to have little impact on the summarizer performance, particularly for the single document summarization task. In a nutshell, the findings demonstrate the power of the role-based and vectorial semantic representation when combined with the crowd-sourced knowledge base in Wikipedia.