16119 research outputs found
Sort by
Factors associated with breastfeeding knowledge and attitudes among non-pregnant, nulliparous women of reproductive age: A scoping review
Get PDFProblem and background
Although breastfeeding has well-established benefits for both mothers and infants, global rates remain suboptimal. Knowledge and attitudes are key factors associated with breastfeeding outcomes and identifying the factors that shape these before pregnancy can guide initiatives to improve breastfeeding rates.
Aim
This scoping review aimed to map factors associated with breastfeeding knowledge and attitudes in non-pregnant, nulliparous women of reproductive age.
Method
In line with PRISMA-ScR and the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology, the Population, Concept, and Context framework was applied to identify factors affecting breastfeeding knowledge and attitudes. A comprehensive search across SCOPUS, MEDLINE, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, and Embase was conducted. Data were extracted using a standardised form, and methodological quality was assessed. A narrative synthesis was performed to summarise the findings.
Findings
The review included 37 studies from 22 countries, primarily focusing on university students. Breastfeeding knowledge varied, with some studies reporting moderate to high levels, while others reported lower levels. Most participants had positive attitudes, though a few were neutral or negative. Key associated factors included education, exposure to breastfeeding, age, cultural norms, and socioeconomic status. Higher education and exposure to breastfeeding information were associated with better knowledge and attitudes, while the relationship with socioeconomic status showed mixed results.
Conclusion
This review highlights the multifactorial nature of breastfeeding knowledge and attitudes. Interventions before pregnancy are crucial to improving breastfeeding outcomes. Further research is needed, particularly in regions with low breastfeeding rates
Foraging with your eyes: A novel task to study cognitive strategies involved in (visual) foraging behaviour
Get PDFIn this study we introduce a new gaze-contingent visual foraging task in which participants searched through an environment by looking at trees displayed on a computer screen. If the looked-at tree contained a fruit item, the item became visible and was collected. In each trial, the participant’s task was to forage for a defined number of fruit items. In two experiments, fruit items were either randomly distributed about the trees (dispersed condition) or organised in one large patch (patchy condition). In the second experiment, we addressed the role of memory for foraging by including a condition that did not require memorising which trees had already been visited by changing their appearance (tree fading). Foraging performance was superior in the patchy as compared to the dispersed condition and benefited from tree-fading. In addition, with further analyses on search behaviour, these results suggest (1) that participants were sensitive to the distribution of resources, (2) that they adapted their search/foraging strategy accordingly, and (3) that foraging behaviour is in line with predictions derived from foraging theories, specifically area-restricted search, developed for large scale spatial foraging. We therefore argue that the visual search task presented shares characteristics and cognitive mechanisms involved in successful large-scale search and foraging behaviour and can therefore be successfully employed to study these mechanisms
Second Victim Phenomenon: Impact on Healthcare Professionals, Organizational Responsibility, and Support Strategies
Get PDFHighlights
- The Second Victim phenomenon affects healthcare teams globally, yet it often remains invisible to executives and society.
- The occurrence of errors triggers psychological, cognitive, and/or physical reactions in the professionals involved; recovery depends on individual, organizational, and leadership factors.
- Healthcare institutions and leaders should adopt policies and practices that promote a safety culture, encouraging non-punitive error reporting with appropriate emotional and psychological support for Second Victims.
- Training and preparing healthcare teams to understand the Second Victim phenomenon, and offering support to these professionals are just as important as reporting errors.
Unsafe practices and incidents that result in negative patient outcomes can lead to potential victims. While patients are the primary and most apparent victims, healthcare workers also suffer from their mistakes, in that they experience trauma following the event (1) and are deemed the second victims (2). The term "second victim" (SV) was first described by Wu (2000), who proposed that physicians who make mistakes also need help. Later, Scott expanded the concept, defining SVs as professionals involved in a health error (3). More recently, an international consensus proposed that an SV can be any healthcare worker—whether directly or indirectly involved in an adverse event (AE), unintentional error, or patient-related injury—who is also negatively impacted by the experience of becoming a victim (4)
Body posture aftereffects—does viewing slouched bodies change people’s perception of normal posture?
Get PDFPeople lead increasingly sedentary lifestyles and spend extended periods sitting in slouched and head-forward positions, which can lead to health issues. People are so accustomed to seeing slouched posture that they may perceive it as normal and fail to notice their own slouched posture. We aim to investigate this possibility using the visual adaptation paradigm, which has provided insights into the perception of body size and shape in the context of exposure to thin bodies in the media. The experiment was conducted in three phases. First, participants established the posture they perceived as normal by manipulating body stimuli shown in profile view. In the second phase, the adaptation phase, participants viewed bodies with extremely upright or slouched postures before establishing their perceived normal posture again in the third phase. Perceived normal posture differed significantly before versus after adaptation, demonstrating a visual aftereffect. However, this only applied if test and adaptation bodies were presented in the same orientation, suggesting that our representation of posture is retina-centred rather than object-centred. This result reduces the likelihood that visual adaptation influences the increase in slouched posture in the population. These results contribute to understanding visual influences on people’s perception of body posture
Predicting spatio-temporal dynamics in aquaculture networks: An extended Katz index approach
Get PDFThe effective surveillance of the distribution of live fish between aquaculture farms is crucial for maintaining food security and preventing disease outbreaks. However, existing conventional models often assume the network is static and do not incorporate other factors that contribute to movement between farms, lacking the ability to accurately predict future movements, especially given the dynamic interactions within aquaculture networks. This study addresses this gap by developing the Edge-Weighted Katz Index (EWKI), an extension of the traditional Katz index that integrates spatial information to improve the accuracy of predicting fish distribution between farms. Using a comprehensive dataset on the distribution of live fish between farms in England and Wales from the year 2010 and 2023, the study evaluates the performance of the EWKI model in comparison to other similarity-based link prediction methods. The results indicate that the EWKI model significantly outperforms other methods, achieving a precision of 92.89%, a recall of 81.09%, and an F1-score of 86.59%, alongside an AUPR of 93.44% and an AUROC of 99.97%. This research has practical implications, as the developed method can accurately predict the distribution of fish between farms, supporting predictions of disease spread and facilitating targeted interventions. Furthermore, the integration of spatial information into the network analysis has broader applications across various fields where understanding and predicting spatially influenced network dynamics are crucial, including transportation networks
From Encoding to Recognition: Exploring the Shared Neural Signatures of Visual Memory
Get PDFThis study investigated the shared neural dynamics underlying encoding and recognition processes across diverse visual object stimulus types in short term experimental familiarization, using EEG-based representational similarity analysis and multivariate cross-classification. Building upon previous research, we extended our exploration to the encoding phase. We show early visual stimulus category effects around 150 ms post-stimulus onset and old/new effects around 400 to 600 ms. Notably, a divergence in neural responses for encoding, old, and new stimuli emerged around 300 ms, with items encountered during the study phase showing the highest differentiation from old items during the test phase. Cross-category classification demonstrated discernible memory-related effects as early as 150 ms. Anterior regions of interest, particularly in the right hemisphere, did not exhibit differentiation between experimental phases or between study and new items, hinting at similar processing for items first encountered, irrespective of experiment phase. While short-term experimental familiarity did not consistently adhere to the old >new pattern observed in long-term personal familiarity, statistically significant effects are observed specifically for experimentally familiarized faces, suggesting a potential unique phenomenon specific to facial stimuli. Further investigation is warranted to elucidate underlying mechanisms and determine the extent of face-specific effects. Lastly, our findings underscore the utility of multivariate cross-classification and cross-dataset classification as promising tools for probing abstraction and shared neural signatures of cognitive processing
Soil ciliates' response to glyphosate exposure: A microcosm experiment
Get PDFThe widespread use of glyphosate, a broad-spectrum herbicide, in agriculture raises concerns about its impact on non-target organisms and ecosystem functions. Research on glyphosate's effect on soil microorganisms has been inconsistent due to varying methodologies and focuses. To address this, a controlled microcosm study was conducted to investigate glyphosate's impact on soil ciliates, an essential component of soil microbial communities. This study is among the first to examine glyphosate impact on ciliates. The experiment used agricultural soil with glyphosate applied at standard and elevated rates. Ciliate abundance and species richness were monitored in the microcosms at 1-, 7-, and 15-days post-application. Soil ciliates showed remarkable tolerance to glyphosate at standard application rates, with a notable increase in abundance after 15 days, primarily driven by one species' proliferation. This study demonstrates the resilience of ciliate communities to standard glyphosate rates, suggesting their crucial role in maintaining soil functionality in the presence of the herbicide. However, it also highlights potential ecological risks at higher glyphosate concentrations, as evidenced by the loss of ciliate species at the highest rates tested. These findings contribute to our understanding of glyphosate's impact on soil ecosystems and highlights the importance of further research in this area
A computer-vision based framework for virtual 3D garment reconstruction
Get PDFExisting 3D garment reconstruction methods are difficult to implement for online fashion design and e-commerce or special applications. This paper proposes a novel computer-vision framework for 3D garment digital reconstruction, which aims to reconstruct high-quality and realistic virtual 3D garments with fabric mechanic properties for 3D virtual try-on. The new segmentation scheme is proposed to separate the 3D garment point clouds from background points, which is suitable for 3D human shapes and is adaptive for different 3D garment models in different scenes. The new Statistical Outlier Removal algorithm and the learning-based method PointCleanNet are combined to remove noise and outliers in 3D garment point clouds, which provides high-fidelity and high-quality 3D garment point clouds. The 3D garment meshes are then reconstructed from their corresponding point clouds with a modified rolling ball algorithm. Finally, the meshes are improved and converted into physics-based virtual try-on 3D garments with fabric mechanic properties added, which enables the assessment of different body shapes with varied sizes for the same reconstructed 3D garment. Comparison experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves high-quality and realistic 3D garment reconstruction and accurate 3D virtual try-on from 2D garment images. We also demonstrate the proposed framework on a large range of various garments to show this approach has a great potential for garment future technology, such as online garment shopping, garment design and manufacturing
AI-driven competitive advantage: the role of personality traits and organizational culture in key account management
Get PDFPurpose: The importance of key account management (KAM) as a management technique in business-to-business markets has grown in recent years. The success of KAM programmes is highly dependent on the efforts of individual employees, specifically key account managers. Research on KAM at an individual level is important but lacking in the academic domain. This study aims to fill this gap by developing and evaluating a model of key account manager personality traits and how they impact the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The study also depicts the effect of the adoption of AI technologies on competitive advantage and firm performance. Design/methodology/approach: The study examines how the adoption of AI technologies impacts firms’ competitive advantage and performance. The study used competitive advantage as a mediator and organisational culture as a moderator. A mixed-method analysis was used to conduct the study. In the first phase, an exploratory study was conducted using interviews with 26 key account managers from the automobile industry and thematic analysis to establish 9 constructs. In the second phase, which is a confirmatory study, 496 respondents finally responded to the questionnaire. Findings: All constructs are used for confirmatory analysis and validate the data. Our research shows that key account managers’ adoption of AI technologies is influenced significantly by personality traits. Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness have substantial links to adopting AI technologies, which impacts firms’ competitive advantage and performance. Organisational culture significantly moderates the association between agreeableness and the adoption of AI technologies. Practical implications: The findings of this research allow organisations to optimise team composition, customise training programs based on individual traits and incorporate personality assessments into recruitment processes for streamlined technology adoption and improved competitiveness. Overall, these actions aim to enhance AI integration, driving competitive advantage and client satisfaction. Originality/value: This study stands out as one of the limited inquiries examining how the Big-five personality traits of key account managers influence the integration of AI technologies and its resulting impact on company performance. Therefore, this research makes notable contributions to the realms of organisational psychology and technology adoption studies
The Presence of an ESBL-Encoding Plasmid Reported During a Klebsiella pneumoniae Nosocomial Outbreak in the United Kingdom
Get PDFAn EBSL-encoding plasmid, pESBL-PH, was identified during a nosocomial outbreak of Klebsiella pneumoniae ST628 at a United Kingdom general district hospital in 2018. The plasmid from the earliest 2018 K. pneumoniae strain discovered during the outbreak was assembled using both Oxford nanopore long reads and illumina short reads, yielding a fully closed plasmid, pESBL-PH-2018. pESBL-PH-2018 was queried against the complete NCBI RefSeq Plasmid Database, comprising 93,823 plasmids, which was downloaded on 16 July 2024. To identify structurally similar plasmids, strict thresholds were applied, including a mash similarity ≥0.98. This returned 61 plasmids belonging to 13 unique sequence types (STs) hosts. The plasmids were detected from 13 unique countries, dating from 2012 to 2023. The AMR region of the plasmids varied. Interestingly IS26-mediated tandem amplification of resistance genes, including the ESBL gene blaCTX-M-15 was identified in two independent strains, raising their copy number to three. Furthermore, the genomic background of strains carrying a pESBL-PH-2018-like plasmid were analyzed, revealing truncation of the chromosomal ompK36 porin gene and carbapenem resistance gene carriage on accessory plasmids in 17.85% and 26.78% of strains with a complete chromosome available. This analysis reveals the widespread dissemination of an ESBL-encoding plasmid in a background of resistance-encoding strains, requiring active surveillance