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Development and validation of an Ambulatory Care Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire to assess pharmacy services in Malaysia
No full textBackground Assessing patient satisfaction regarding a pharmacy ambulatory care service is important as patient satisfaction is a determinant of the viability and sustainability of the service provided. Objective To develop and validate the Ambulatory Care Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire in Malaysia. Setting A public hospital in Malaysia with two outpatient pharmacies. The main outpatient pharmacy has an average waiting time of 1–2 h; whilst PharmCARE (which prepares repeat prescriptions in advance) has an average waiting time of 5–15 min. Method Our instrument was developed based on literature review, a theoretical framework and an expert panel. The initial version consisted of 20 Likert-type items (where a higher score indicates higher satisfaction) was administered to patients/carers who were ≥ 21 years, from November 2015 to June 2016 at baseline and 2 weeks later. Main outcome measure The psychometric properties of the instrument. Results A total of 200/220 participants agreed to participate (response rate = 90.9%): main outpatient pharmacy = 114, PharmCARE = 86. Flesch reading ease was 51.9. The final version consists of 17 items with five domains measuring information (4 items), accessibility (4 items), relationship (4 items), outcomes (2 items) and continuity of care (3 items). Participants who collected their medications from PharmCARE [78.0% (72.8–81.3)] were significantly more satisfied than participants from the main outpatient pharmacy [72.0% (68.0–76.0), p < 0.001]. The overall Cronbach’s alpha value was 0.839. Kappa values ranged from 0.681 to 0.914. Conclusion Our instrument was found to be a valid and reliable instrument to assess satisfaction of patients towards an ambulatory care pharmacy service in Malaysia
The spectrum of eigenvalues for certain subgraphs of the k -point fixing graph
No full textLet Sn be the symmetric group on n-points. The k-point fixing graph F(n,k) is defined to be the graph with vertex set Sn and two vertices g, h of F(n,k) are joined if and only if gh−1 fixes exactly k points. In this paper, we give a recurrence formula for the eigenvalues of a class of regular subgraphs of F(n,k). By using this recurrence formula, we will determine the smallest eigenvalues for this class of regular subgraphs of F(n,1) for sufficiently large n
Effects of temperature on extracellular hydrolase enzymes from soil microfungi
No full textSoil microbes play important roles in global carbon and nutrient cycling. Soil microfungi are generally amongst the most important contributors. They produce various extracellular hydrolase enzymes that break down the complex organic molecules in the soil into simpler form. In this study, we investigated patterns of amylase and cellulase (which are responsible for breaking down starch and cellulose, respectively) relative activity (RA) on solid media at different culture temperatures in fungal strains from Arctic, Antarctic and tropical soils. Fungal isolates from all three regions were inoculated onto R2A media supplemented with starch for amylase and carboxymethylcellulose and trypan blue for cellulase screening. The isolates were then incubated at 4, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 °C and examined for activity after 5 and 10 days, for tropical and polar isolates, respectively. The data obtained indicate that the polar fungal strains exhibited similar patterns of amylase and cellulase RA. Both Arctic and Antarctic fungi showed highest RA for amylase and cellulase at 35 °C, while colony growth was maximised at 15 °C. Colony growth and RA of the polar isolates were negatively correlated suggesting that, as temperatures increase, the cells become stressed and have fewer resources available to invest in growth. Unlike polar isolates, tropical isolates did not exhibit any trend of colony growth with temperature, rather having idiosyncratic patterns in each isolate. The low enzyme production and RA levels in the tropical strains may suggest both a low ability to respond to temperature variation in their natural thermally stable tropical habitats, as well as a level of thermal stress limiting their enzyme production ability
Consumption of water from ex-mining ponds in Klang Valley and Melaka, Malaysia: A health risk study
No full textEvaluation of health risks due to heavy metals exposure via drinking water from ex-mining ponds in Klang Valley and Melaka has been conducted. Measurements of As, Cd, Pb, Mn, Fe, Na, Mg, Ca, and dissolved oxygen, pH, electrical conductivity, total dissolved solid, ammoniacal nitrogen, total suspended solid, biological oxygen demand were collected from 12 ex-mining ponds and 9 non-ex-mining lakes. Exploratory analysis identified As, Cd, and Pb as the most representative water quality parameters in the studied areas. The metal exposures were simulated using Monte Carlo methods and the associated health risks were estimated at 95th and 99th percentile. The results revealed that As was the major risk factor which might have originated from the previous mining activity. For Klang Valley, adults that ingested water from those ponds are at both non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic risks, while children are vulnerable to non-carcinogenic risk; for Melaka, only children are vulnerable to As complications. However, dermal exposure showed no potential health consequences on both adult and children groups
Granular-based dense crowd density estimation
No full textDense crowd density estimation is one of the fundamental tasks in crowd analysis. While tremendous progress has been made to understand crowd scenes along with the rise of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), research work on dense crowd density estimation is still an ongoing process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learn discriminative crowd features from granules, that conforms to the outline between crowd and background (i.e. non-crowd) regions, for density estimation. It shows that by studying the inner statistics of granules for density estimation, this approach is adaptive to arbitrary distribution of crowd (i.e. scene independent). Multiple features fusion is proposed to learn discriminative crowd features from granules. This is to be used as description of the crowd where a direct mapping between the features and crowd density is learned. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel approach for scene independent dense crowd density estimation
Feature Selection of Denial-of-Service Attacks Using Entropy and Granular Computing
No full textRecently, many researchers have paid attention toward denial of services (DoS) and its malicious handling. The Intrusion detection system is one of the most common detection techniques used to detect malicious attack which attempts to compromise the security goals. To deal with such an issue, some of the researchers have used entropy calculation recently to detect malicious attacks. However, it fails to identify the most potential feature for DoS attack which needs to be addressed on its early occurrence. Therefore, this paper focused on identifying some of the potential attributes of a DoS attack based on computed weight for each of the attributes using entropy calculation. In addition, the selection of potential attributes based on user-defined chosen granulation is also given using NSL KDD dataset
Market structure, bank conduct and bank performance: Evidence from ASEAN
No full textWhether banks in a concentrated market increase their profits through monopoly pricing is a question of prime concern for antitrust policies. We explore this question by introducing the role of bank conduct into the structure–performance relationship. We apply Two-step System GMM dynamic panel model to commercial banks in the Association of South East Asian Nations over the period of 1999–2014. The results indicate that the higher profits in concentrated banking industries are partially attributable to the anti-competitive conduct of banks. These findings are robust across alternative measures of market structure and bank conduct, and different time horizons. The implications of these findings require regulators to make sure that the consolidation policy for ASEAN is achieving its purpose – i.e. financial stability – and not allowing the banks to earn monopoly rents
Saccharin and tert-Butyl Nitrite: Cheap and Efficient Reagents for the Synthesis of 1,2,3-Benzotriazine-4-(3H)-ones from 2-Aminobenzamides under Metal-Free Conditions
No full textA mild and eco-friendly protocol for the synthesis of 1,2,3-benzotriazine-4-(3H)-ones is described using saccharin as a cheap and efficient catalyst and tert-butyl nitrite as a diazotization reagent for the first time. The current method has advantages such as cost effectiveness, energy efficiency, and simple experimental procedure, good yield of the desired product, and metal-free and environmentally benign conditions
Impact of water management on fertilizer and tillering dynamics in rice
No full textTiller is an important agronomic trait for rice yield production and its development could have been affected by different water management practices as it influences nutrient availability. This paper aims to evaluate tillering development under varying water depths and different fertilizer dosages from contrasting water management i.e. flooded and aerobic rice. Results showed that tillering development was affected by water depths and the response to fertilizer treatments altered with the change in water management where increase in tillering occurred during the early stages in flooded rice and at later stage in aerobic rice. Additionally, it takes only small percentage of fertilizer increased to boost tiller development in flooded rice whereas tillering in aerobic rice requires large percentage of fertilizer increased for it to be augmented. Therefore, increasing fertilizer dosages was found as ineffective and an alternative approach is needed to boost tiller development in aerobic rice
Polymer electrolyte blends of mono-carboxylic acid-modified epoxidized natural rubber and poly(ethyleneoxide)
No full textNatural rubber with 50% of isoprene units epoxidized (ENR50) was treated with excess of mono-carboxylic acids to completely ring open the epoxide groups. The reaction was carried out by heating ENR50 dissolved in toluene with each of acetic and benzoic acid separately at 105 °C. The ring-opening reaction has produced hydroxyl-OH and ester-O-COR groups, leading to an increase in Tg. The products were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, thermal gravimetric analysis, and differential scanning calorimetry. By the solution casting method, each of the modified ENR50s was blended with poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) in various ratios in toluene, and 2% lithium perchlorate (LiCIO4) was added as the dopant. Results show that the modified ENR and PEO formed incompatible blends. The PEO spherulite growth rate in the blends increased with PEO content. The electrical conductivity was found to increase with the weight fraction of PEO in the blend. At the ratio of 25/75, the acetic acid-modified ENR50/ PEO blend exhibits a conductivity value of 3.1 3 10 × 8 S cm × 1. The benzoic acid-modified ENR50/PEO achieved conductivity of 5.8310 × 7 S cm × 1 at the ratio of 30/70. These blends form conducting polymer electrolytes with potential application in batteries