12508 research outputs found
Sort by
Between wellness and fairness: the mediating role of autonomous human choice and social capital in OECD countries
Get PDFYesAims: Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence have been provided in the literature for the role of fairness in wellness. In this paper we explore the role of two potential mediating variables: autonomous human choice and social capital. Methods: Using aggregated panel data across countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) we compared the OECD Social Justice Index with data on life satisfaction to test whether fairness has direct and indirect effects on wellness. Results: Results from a series of Manifest Path Analyses with time as fixed effect, support the hypothesis that the OECD Social Justice Index is directly linked to country-level life satisfaction and also reveal that its indirect effect operates primarily through people’s autonomous choices in life and their country’s level of social capital. Conclusions: Our results contribute to two distinct bodies of knowledge. With respect to community psychology, the findings offer empirical evidence for the synergistic effect of personal, relational, and collective factors in well-being. With respect to the impact of economic inequality on wellness, we extend the literature by using social justice as a more comprehensive measure. Limitation and recommendations for future studies are discussed.Research Development Fund Publication Prize Award winner, Jan 2022
The future is yesterday: Use of AI-driven facial recognition to enhance value in the travel and tourism industry
Get PDFYesThis study aims to investigate the role of artificial intelligence (AI) driven facial recognition to enhance a value proposition by influencing different areas of services in the travel and tourism industry. We adopted semi-structured interviews to derive insights from 26 respondents. Thematic analysis reveals the development of four main themes (personalization, data-driven service offering, security and safety, and seamless payments). Further, we mapped the impact of AI- driven facial recognition to enhance value and experience for corporate guests. Findings indicate that AI-based facial recognition can facilitate the travel and tourism industry in understanding travelers' needs, optimization of service offers, and value-based services, whereas data-driven services can be realized in the form of customized trip planning, email, and calendar integration, and quick bill summarization. This contributes to strengthening the tourism literature through the lens of organizational information processing theory.Area of Excellence AI, Data Science & Business at NEOMA Business School, France under the fund number 41600
Foxes who want to be hedgehogs: Is ethical pluralism possible in psychology's replication crisis?
Get PDFYesIn this article, we draw attention to public-private dilemmas among psychologists that make sense of the debates around the replication crisis, citation practices and networking practices. We argue that the values of justice and caring map onto the public sphere and private sphere respectively and create the horns of a dilemma for academics. While bureaucratic justice is a publicly revered value of modernity in psychological research that underpins ethics, validity, reliability and equality of opportunity, ‘caring’ is a more subtle value of traditionalism that runs in parallel and is detected only by our psychological practices. In particular, we argue that it is detected by practices such as disputes between the replicated and their replicators in replication studies (understood as a dramatic counter reality) as to who is more ‘careless’ with procedure; citation (including the self-care of self-citation) as thanksgiving and incantation of powerful others in enchantment rituals, and the system of professional indebtedness that accrues in ‘kinship’ networks – where kinship is understood broadly as adoption into a research group and its network. The clashes between these values can lead to a sense of hypocrisy and irony in academic life, as incommensurate values split between private and public expression. From this position, we delve into Isaiah Berlin's work on incommensurate values to suggest that ethical pluralism, involving more public recognition of the equal but different ethical demands of these values can help overcome these everyday dilemmas in the public sphere
A high gain multiband offset MIMO antenna based on a planar log-periodic array for Ku/K-band applications
Get PDFYesAn offset quad-element, two-port, high-gain, and multiband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) planar antenna based on a log-periodic dipole array (LPDA) for Ku/K-band wireless communications is proposed, in this paper. A single element antenna has been designed starting from Carrel's theory and then optimized with a 50-Ω microstrip feed-line with two orthogonal branches that results mainly in a broadside radiation pattern and improves diversity parameters. For experimental confirmation, the designed structure is printed on an RT-5880 substrate with a thickness of 1.57 mm. The total substrate dimensions of the MIMO antenna are 55 × 45 mm2. According to the measured results, the designed structure is capable of working at 1.3% (12.82-12.98 GHz), 3.1% (13.54-13.96 GHz), 2.3% (14.81-15.15 GHz), 4.5% (17.7-18.52 GHz), and 4.6% (21.1-22.1 GHz) frequency bands. Additionally, the proposed MIMO antenna attains a peak gain of 4.2-10.7 dBi with maximum element isolation of 23.5 dB, without the use of any decoupling structure. Furthermore, the analysis of MIMO performance metrics such as the envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) and mean effective gain (MEG) validates good characteristics, and field correlation performance over the operating band. The proposed design is an appropriate option for multiband MIMO applications for various wireless systems in Ku/K-bands
Machine Learning for Botnet Detection: An Optimized Feature Selection Approach
Get PDFYesTechnological advancements have been evolving for so long, particularly
Internet of Things (IoT) technology that has seen an increase
in the number of connected devices surpass non IoT connections.
It has unlocked a lot of potential across different organisational
settings from healthcare, transportation, smart cities etc. Unfortunately,
these advancements also mean that cybercriminals are
constantly seeking new ways of exploiting vulnerabilities for malicious
and illegal activities. IoT is a technology that presents a
golden opportunity for botnet attacks that take advantage of a
large number of IoT devices and use them to launch more powerful
and sophisticated attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service
(DDoS) attacks. This calls for more research geared towards the detection
and mitigation of botnet attacks in IoT systems. This paper
proposes a feature selection approach that identifies and removes
less influential features as part of botnet attack detection method.
The feature selection is based on the frequency of occurrence of the
value counts in each of the features with respect to total instances.
The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested and evaluated
on a standard IoT dataset. The results reveal that the proposed
feature selection approach has improved the performance of the
botnet attack detection method, in terms of True Positive Rate (TPR)
and False Positive Rate (FPR). The proposed methodology provides
100% TPR, 0% FPR and 99.9976% F-score
Optimisation of hybrid MED-TVC and double reverse osmosis processes for producing different grades of water in a smart city
Get PDFYesThe integration of two or more processes in a hybrid system is one of the most desirable options to provide flexibility, interoperability and data sharing between the connected processes. Various examples of hybrid systems have been developed with coherent seawater desalination systems such as the combination of thermal and membrane technologies. This paper focuses on the simulation and optimisation of an integrated (hybrid) system of multi effect distillation and double Reverse Osmosis (RO) processes to produce different grades of water needed in a smart city from seawater resources. The optimisation-based model investigates five scenarios to obtain the highest productivity of drinking water, irrigation water, water for livestock and power plant water, whilst constraining the product water salinity to be within the required standards and with lowest specific energy consumption. For this purpose, multi objective optimisation problem was formulated using the gPROMS (general Process Modelling System) software. The results confirm the superiority of the developed hybrid system to sustain different grades of water in a smart city
Issues affecting supply of palliative medicines into community pharmacy: A qualitative study of community pharmacist and pharmaceutical wholesaler/distributor perspectives
Get PDFYesackground
Patient access to medicines in the community at end-of-life (pertaining to the last year of life) is vital for symptom control. Supply of such medicines is known to be problematic, but despite this, studies have failed to examine the issues affecting community pharmacy access to palliative medicines.
Objective
To identify community pharmacists' and pharmaceutical wholesalers'/distributors' views on supply chain processes and challenges in providing access to medicines during the last year of life, to characterise supply in this UK context.
Methods
Qualitative design, with telephone interviews analysed using Framework Analysis. Coding frames were developed iteratively with data analysed separately and then triangulated to examine differences in perspectives.
Findings
Thirty-two interviews (24 community pharmacists and 8 wholesalers/distributors) were conducted. To ensure appropriate palliative medicines were available despite occasional shortages, community pharmacists worked tirelessly. They navigated a challenging interface with wholesalers/distributors, the Drug Tariff to ensure reimbursement, and multiple systems. IT infrastructures and logistics provided by wholesalers/distributors were often helpful to supply into community pharmacies resulting in same or next day deliveries. However, the inability of manufacturers to predict operational issues or accurately forecast demand led wholesalers/distributors to encounter shortages with manufactured stock levels, reducing timely access to medicines.
Conclusions
The study identifies for the first time how palliative medicines supply into community pharmacy, can be improved. A conceptual model was developed, illustrating how influencing factors affect responsiveness and speed of medicines access for patients. Work is required to strengthen this supply chain via effective relationship-building and information-sharing, to prevent patients facing disruptions in access to palliative medicines at end-of-life
Minimal Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Mental Health and Wellbeing of People Living With Dementia Analysis of Matched Longitudinal Data From the IDEAL Study
Get PDFYesResearch suggests a decline in the mental health and wellbeing of people
with dementia (PwD) during the COVID-19 pandemic; however few studies have
compared data collected pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. Moreover, none have
compared this change with what would be expected due to dementia progression.
We explored whether PwD experienced changes in mental health and wellbeing by
comparing pre-pandemic and pandemic data, and drew comparisons with another
group of PwD questioned on two occasions prior to the pandemic.
Methods: Community-dwelling PwD enrolled in the IDEAL programme were split into
two groups matched for age group, sex, dementia diagnosis, and time since diagnosis.
Although each group was assessed twice, one was assessed prior to and during the
pandemic (pandemic group; n = 115) whereas the other was assessed prior to the
pandemic (pre-pandemic group; n = 230). PwD completed measures of mood, sense
of self, wellbeing, optimism, quality of life, and life satisfaction.
Results: Compared to the pre-pandemic group, the pandemic group were less likely
to report mood problems, or be pessimistic, but more likely to become dissatisfied with
their lives. There were no changes in continuity in sense of self, wellbeing, and quality
of life.
Discussion: Results suggest the pandemic had little effect on the mental health and
wellbeing of PwD, with any changes observed likely to be consistent with expected
rates of decline due to dementia. Although personal accounts attest to the challenges
experienced, PwD appear to have been resilient to the impact of lockdown and social
restrictions during the pandemic.Identifying and mitigating the individual and dyadic impact of COVID-19 and life under physical distancing on people with dementia and carers (INCLUDE) was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through grant ES/V004964/1. Investigators: LC, Victor, C., FM, CQ, Hillman, A., AB, LA, RA, AM, RC, and CP. ESRC is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Improving the experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life: living well with dementia. The IDEAL study was funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) through grant ES/L001853/2. Investigators: LC, I. R. Jones, C. Victor, J. V. Hindle, R. W. Jones, M. Knapp, M. Kopelman, RL, A. Martyr, FM, R. G. Morris, S. M. Nelis, J. A. Pickett, CQ, J. Rusted, and J. Thom. IDEAL data were deposited with the UK data archive in April 2020 and will be available to access from April 2023. Details of how the data can be accessed after that date can be found at: http://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/854293/. Improving the experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life: a longitudinal perspective on living well with dementia. The IDEAL-2 study was funded by Alzheimer’s Society, grant number 348, AS-PR2-16-001. Investigators: LC, I. R. Jones, C. Victor, C. Ballard, A. Hillman, J. V. Hindle, J. Hughes, R. W. Jones, M. Knapp, RL, AM, FM, R. G. Morris, S. M. Nelis, CQ, and J. Rusted
Physicochemical and biopharmaceutical characterization of new sulfonamide derivatives of gallic acid
No full textYesGallic acid (GA) is known for its antioxidant activity which is restricted due to its low oral permeability. In this project the carboxylic group of (GA) was substituted with sulfonamide group and hydroxyl groups were methylated which resulted in significantly (p<0.01) increased permeability of 3,4,5-trimethoxybenzene sulfonamide (TMBS) and 3,4,5-trihydroxybenzenesulfonamide (THBS) over GA, in Parallel Artificial Membrane Permeability Assay studies with simulated gastrointestinal fluids and Human intestinal epithelial cells HIEC-6 cells. Biochemical studies confirmed TMBS was O-demethylated by CYP2D6. THBS and GA had increased antioxidant activity with increased concentration in DPPH assay while TMBS indicated lower activity at all tested concentration. The antioxidant activity of TMBS was greater than GA in HIEC-6 cells which mainly related to its O-demethylation by CYP2D6
