Perception of spiritual health: A qualitative content analysis in Iranian older adults

The present study was performed with the aim to explain older people’s perceptions of spiritual health. It was conducted using the conventional content analysis method. Twelve individuals aged 60 years or older with normal cognition participated in the study using purposive sampling. Data were collected by in-depth interviews. Data analysis performed using standard method of thematic analysis.The average age of the study participants was 71.25 ± 9.48. The data analysis resulted in three main categories of spiritual insight, spiritual function, and spiritual affection. The spiritual insight included cognition of God and belief in Him, understanding of the divine religions and belief in them, self-cognition, cognition of the creation, and belief in the hereafter. This category included the two subcategories of spiritual cognition and spiritual belief. Spiritual function represented the interactions that the older people experienced in relations with God, themselves, and others. This category consisted of the subcategories of relationship with God, relationship with others, and self-cultivation. The spiritual affection included loving God and other humans and consisted of the three subcategories of spiritual affections to God, others, and oneself. This study presents in-depth data on the concept of spiritual health from older people’s viewpoints. These findings would help healthcare teams in designing appropriate interventions for older people’s health promotion. Also, by using the results of this research, health researchers design more appropriate tools for measuring spiritual health based on older people’s perception of the concept of spiritual health.     

A systematic review of research on cheating in online exams from 2010 to 2021

Education and Information Technologies - In recent years, online learning has received more attention than ever before. One of the most challenging aspects of online education is the students'...     

We have been living with this pain: enquiry-based language learning in Iranian higher education

This article explores an understanding of learning as authentic enquiry and language as a social practice of meaning construction as the theoretical perspectives underlying an educational initiation beyond mainstream tertiary language education. With a general ethnographic approach and relying on multiple data sources, we investigate critical practices of teaching medical English in an Iranian university and illustrate a contextualized instance of enquiry-based language learning that embodies enquiry and discovery in two senses: students’ research and learning about the content for oneself, and moving away from spoon-feeding views of academic language education to experience language in real social contexts. On this basis, we argue for stepping beyond predetermined content-based approaches to university language teaching and call for living the language that is being learned, which involves enquiring, experiencing, discovering, challenging, and owning it.     

Development and validation of the elder’s spiritual health scale

ABSTRACT

Spiritual health is one of the most important aspects of the elders’ health. The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate psychometric properties of a scale for evaluating spiritual health of older adults in Iran. This is a mixed research, consisted of two phases. First, the perception of elder people regarding the spiritual health was explored, using directed content analysis, and the scale items generated based on the results. Second, the content, face and construct validity were determined. Exploratory factor analysis was used for the construct validity. To determine the reliability, Cronbach’s alpha and test-retest were used. Preliminary designed questionnaire included 94 items, which were reduced to 38 following the content and face validity processes. Exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that 20 items loaded on five factors determined about 66% of variance. The total internal consistency of the scale was 0.89. Results of test-retest indicated a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.85 while intra-class correlation coefficient of scale was 0.92. The ESHS is a short, user-friendly valid and reliable tool which can be used for assessing the spiritual health of older adults.     

Who shares health and medical scholarly articles on Facebook?

Over a million journal articles had been shared on public Facebook pages by 2017, but little is known about who is sharing (posting links to) these papers and whether mention counts could be an impact indicator. This study classified users who had posted about 749 links on Facebook before October 2017 mentioning 500 medical and health‐related research articles, obtained using altmetric.com data. Most accounts (68%) belonged to groups, including online communities, journals, academic organizations, and societies. Of individual profiles, academics accounted for only 4%, but the largest group were health care professionals (16%). More than half (58%) of all Facebook accounts examined were not academic. The non‐academic dominance suggests that public Facebook posts linking to health‐related articles are mostly used to facilitate scientific knowledge flow between non‐academic professionals and the public. Therefore, Facebook mention counts may be a combined academic and non‐academic attention indicator in the health and medical domains.     

A new Legendre wavelet operational matrix of derivative and its applications in solving the singular ordinary differential equations

In the present paper, a new Legendre wavelet operational matrix of derivative is presented. Shifted Legendre polynomials and their properties are employed for deriving a general procedure for forming this matrix. The application of the proposed operational matrix for solving initial and boundary value problems is explained. Then the scheme is tested for linear and nonlinear singular examples. The obtained results demonstrate efficiency and capability of the proposed method.     

Reliability assessment of networks-on-chip based on analytical models

As technology scales down, the reliability issues are becoming more crucial, especially for networks-on-chip （NoCs） that provide the communication requirements of multi-processor systems-on-chip. Reliability evaluation based on analytical models is a precise method for dependability analysis before and after designing the fault-tolerant systems. In this paper, we accurately formulate the inherent reliability and vulnerability of some popular NoC architectures against permanent faults, also depending on the employed routing algorithm and traffic model. Based on this analysis, effects of failures in the links, switches and network interfaces on the packet delivery of NoCs are determined. Besides, some extensions to evaluate a fault-tolerant method and some routing algorithms are described. The analyses are validated through appropriate simulations. The results thus obtained are exactly the same as or very close to the analytical ones.     

A comparative study of numerical methods for solving quadratic Riccati differential equations

In this paper, we use Legendre wavelet method for solving quadratic Riccati differential equations and perform a comparative study between the proposed method and other existing methods. Our results show that in comparison with other existing methods, the Legendre wavelet method provides a fast convergent series of easily computable components. The present study is illustrated by exploring two kinds of nonlinear Riccati differential equations that shows the pertinent features of the Legendre wavelet method.     

Social inclusion of newly arrived female asylum seekers and refugees through a community sport initiative: the case of Bike Bridge

Abstract

This study examines the potential and limitations of a community sport initiative in fostering social inclusion of newly arrived adult female asylum seekers and refugees in Germany. It contains three parts: the first and second part aim to assess the perceived opportunities and barriers of riding a bicycle in the participants’ homeland and Germany and to provide empirical evidence about the outcomes of the project at a micro level by prioritising the participants’ accounts and experiences. In the third section, through an examination of the programme’s structure and provision, its perceived impact is investigated. Bourdieu’s theory of practice was deployed as an analytical tool in the study. The findings revealed the importance of need-based, informal and intercultural provisions and practices to foster participation of physical recreation of the target group in their new setting. However, to facilitate social inclusion, the participants’ prolonged and sustained engagement in the programme as volunteers was crucial.     

Low-cost fault tolerance in evolvable multiprocessor systems: a graceful degradation approach

The evolvable multiprocessor （EvoMP）, as a novel multiprocessor system-on-chip （MPSoC） machine with evolvable task decomposition and scheduling, claims a major feature of low-cost and efficient fault tolerance. Non-centralized control and adaptive distribution of the program among the available processors are two major capabilities of this platform, which remarkably help to achieve an efficient fault tolerance scheme. This letter presents the operational as well as architectural details of this fault tolerance scheme. In this method, when a processor becomes faulty, it will be eliminated of contribution in program execution in remaining run-time. This method also utilizes dynamic rescheduling capability of the system to achieve the maximum possible efficiency after processor reduction. The results confirm the efficiency and remarkable advantages of the proposed approach over common redundancy based techniques in similar systems.