213 research outputs found
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The effect of green tea polyphenols on Drosophila melanogaster lifespan and healthspan
No full textGreen tea is a popular beverage believed to have many health benefits including reducing the risks of neurodegenerative disorders, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. As such, it has been suggested as a candidate life-extending natural product. Rich in polyphenolic compounds known as catechins, green tea has been shown to increase the lifespan of various animal models including the fruit fly,Drosophila melanogaster. Despite this, inconsistencies in reported data have been cited. In this dissertation, green tea’s life extension mechanisms were explored in a standard laboratory Drosophila strain, w1118. Green tea was found to increase male Drosophila lifespan by 19%, but had no effect on female lifespan. Interestingly, this effect was associated with a reduction in male fly fertility. This is important as impairments in reproduction can modulate fruit fly lifespan. Moreover,green tea showed a modest protection against iron-induced oxidative stress, likely by its ability to bind iron. Since iron has been evidenced to play an essential role in male fly fertility, this dissertation explored the unique interplay of green tea on iron homeostasis, fertility and Drosophila lifespan. Processes that can modulate fly healthspan,such as development and reproduction, were evaluated. Green tea was found to delay larval development, reduce offspring sizes, and atrophied reproductive organs. From this it was suggested that green tea is toxic to Drosophila’s physiological processes. Green tea’s ability to chelate iron and modulate iron metabolism was evaluated using hypomorph mutants of iron-regulating proteins. Specifically, the lifespan and fertility of mitoferrin, a mitochondrial iron transporter, transferrin, an extracellular iron binding protein, and Malvolio, the fly homolog of the divalent-metal transporter-1, were characterized. Hypomorph flies displayed increased lifespans and reduced fertility than normal flies. Interestingly, green tea could no longer increase the lifespan of mitoferrin and Malvolio flies but did rescue the reduced male fertility phenotype. This was associated with an up-regulation of mitoferrin and Malvolio expression. Combined, these results support the possibility that green tea increases male Drosophila lifespan in part by the modulation of iron homeostasis that is essential for male fly fertility
Studying the Administrative Corruption Based on 3-Ramifications Analytical Model in the Pathology Theory and Suggesting Several Strategies for Controlling It (A Case Study: Administrations of Tehran Province)
No full textAdministrative corruption is largely influenced by economic, political, social, cultural, and judicial systems and also, it has negative impacts on the legitimacy of political systems and the performance of administrative systems. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to identify the causes of the emergence and the prevalence of administrative corruption and to provide appropriate strategies for controlling and restricting the scope of administrative corruption. Hence, this research is of descriptive-analytical type and it is based on data collected by field methods. It should be noted that consistency and validity of the questionnaire has been examined with Cronbach's alpha and factor analysis, respectively. Then, non-parametric tests including binomial test and Friedman test have been used for testing the hypothesis. Ultimately, the results of this study showed that there are several factors such as lack of professional conscience, lack of adherence to ethics in the society, the sense of economic inequality in government employees in comparison with those in the other sectors, complexity of laws, etc., have significant influence on the emergence of administrative corruption. Also, some other factors such as existence of an efficient financial control system, effective administrative control, establishing some independent agencies for resolving the administrative corruption, intensification of the penalties, depoliticizing the administrative system, and applying efficient regulations can be effective in controlling and preventing the administrative corruption.Keywords: Administrative Corruption, Controlling the Administrative Corruption, Pathology Theory, 3-Ramifications Analytical Model, Administrations of Tehran Province
A unique degree program for pre-pharmacy education: An undergraduate degree in pharmaceutical sciences
No full textBACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:Within the coming decade, the demand for well-trained pharmacists is expected to only increase, especially with the aging of the United States (US) population. EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY AND SETTING:To help fill this growing demand, the University of California, Irvine (UCI) aims to offer a unique pre-pharmacy degree program and has developed a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences to help achieve this goal. In this commentary, we share our experience with our curriculum and highlight its features in an effort to encourage other institutions to enhance the learning experience of their pre-pharmacy students. FINDINGS:The efforts of the UCI Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences has resulted in UCI being consistently ranked as one of the top feeder institutions by the Pharmacy College Application Service (PharmCAS) in recent years. DISCUSSION AND SUMMARY:The UCI Pharmaceutical Sciences Bachelor of Science offers a unique pre-pharmacy educational experience in an effort to better prepare undergraduates for the rigors of the doctorate of pharmacy curriculum
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERFORMANCE OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM AND NATIONAL AUTHORITY OF GOVERNMENTS: AN ISLAMIC POINT OF VIEW
No full textEach government consists of two dimensions: 1) a structural dimension that involves policy- and decision-making bodies and, 2) a functional dimension that is a set of government institutions and administrations. Also, the national authority in a country is an outcome of three components, including legitimacy, acceptance, and efficiency of its government. The authority of governments is not merely limited to their structural legitimacy and acceptance; but, their functional dimension and the performance of their administrations also play a crucial role in building and strengthening their legitimacy. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate how the administrative system of a government affects its national authority, with an emphasis on the Islamic point of view. To do this, this research has been carried out within the framework of theoretical research with a practical purpose. The research method of the current study was the descriptive and analytical. In this study, the relationship between two variables – namely, “administrative system” and “national authority” – has been investigated within the framework of the causal research. Due to the theoretical nature of this study, the resources used mostly include documents and library sources. The results of this study indicate that there is a direct and causal relationship between the national authority of governments (effect) and the performance of their administrative system (cause). Also, this relationship reveals how the administrative system affects national authority
Investigating the role of tourism in the conservation and sustainable development of the environment: a geographic approach
No full textTourism is always embracing economy, social and environmental impacts. For this reason, the policy of sustainable development of tourism is necessary. The general approach is that governments have paid attention to tourism ecologically in the long run. This is approved and financially self-sufficient, and from the perspective of social and moral for local communities is beneficial and promising. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of wetland ecosystem conservation and environmental sustainability of tourism in rural areas. The purpose of applied research and in terms of data collection is descriptive and analytical. The study population consists of 3 villages’ khawmirabad rural district, Sarkol Zarivar which in the whole 93 villages of this area, a number of villages was selected. Sample households of the village and randomly classified and 12 villages were selected. Cochran formula used to determine the sample size and questionnaire to 330 randomly selected villages were selected among heads of households. The validity of the test Cronbach's alpha was 0.77 percent. For statistical analysis of data from one sample -t- test, chi-square test and ANOVA test in spss software is used. The results show that tourism in economic and socio-cultural aspects have a positive impact on the wetland ecosystem conservation and sustainable rural environment.
Keywords: environment, conservation, sustainable development, geographic approach, touris
Semantically-enhanced topic recommendation systems for software projects
No full textSoftware-related platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow, have enabled their users to collaboratively label software entities with a form of metadata called topics. Tagging software repositories with relevant topics can be exploited for facilitating various downstream tasks. For instance, a correct and complete set of topics assigned to a repository can increase its visibility. Consequently, this improves the outcome of tasks such as browsing, searching, navigation, and organization of repositories. Unfortunately, assigned topics are usually highly noisy, and some repositories do not have well-assigned topics. Thus, there have been efforts on recommending topics for software projects, however, the semantic relationships among these topics have not been exploited so far. In this work, we propose two recommender models for tagging software projects that incorporate the semantic relationship among topics. Our approach has two main phases; (1) we first take a collaborative approach to curate a dataset of quality topics specifically for the domain of software engineering and development. We also enrich this data with the semantic relationships among these topics and encapsulate them in a knowledge graph we call SED-KGraph. Then, (2) we build two recommender systems; The first one operates only based on the list of original topics assigned to a repository and the relationships specified in our knowledge graph. The second predictive model, however, assumes there are no topics available for a repository, hence it proceeds to predict the relevant topics based on both textual information of a software project (such as its README file), and SED-KGraph. We built SED-KGraph in a crowd-sourced project with 170 contributors from both academia and industry. Through their contributions, we constructed SED-KGraph with 2,234 carefully evaluated relationships among 863 community-curated topics. Regarding the recommenders’ performance, the experiment results indicate that our solutions outperform baselines that neglect the semantic relationships among topics by at least 25% and 23% in terms of Average Success Rate and Mean Average Precision metrics, respectively. We share SED-KGraph, as a rich form of knowledge for the community to re-use and build upon. We also release the source code of our two recommender models, KGRec and KGRec+ (https://github.com/mahtab-nejati/KGRec).Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Software Engineerin
How Vulnerable are Bangladesh’s Indigenous People to Climate Change?
No full textThis paper compares the vulnerabilities to climate change and climate variability of the indigenous people with the Bengali population of Bangladesh. It distinguishes between (a) individual vulnerabilities that are related to an individual’s capability to adapt to climate change and; (b) spatial vulnerabilities, that is, vulnerabilities that are related to the location of a person (like the exposure to climate change-induced disasters). While an individual’s capability to adapt to climate change is determined by many factors, some relatively simple approximation is to look at poverty, landlessness, and illiteracy. Spatial vulnerabilities are reviewed by looking at drought hazard maps, flood hazard maps, landslide hazard maps, and cyclone hazard maps. Hence, the paper compares levels of poverty, landlessness, illiteracy, and the more direct though also more subjective exposures to increased droughts, floods, landslides, and cyclones across the two population groups. The paper concludes with some broad suggestions on adaptation strategies of indigenous people as well as suggestions for policy interventions to reduce climate change-induced vulnerabilities for indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT).Bangladesh, climate change, vulnerability
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Life101 Enhances Healthy Lifestyle Choices in Pre-Health Undergraduate Students
No full textStress levels in college students are increasing at an alarmingly fast pace. To combat this rising tide, universities need effective tools to promote student well-being and help them to recognize and manage their stress. One approach is to teach students basic lifestyle skills to cope with stress and achieve wellness. This is important as it not only increases students’ retention within a chosen field of study, but assists them to achieve personal and academic success. To inspire our undergraduate students to adopt healthy lifestyle choices, a once-weekly course titled “Life101” was developed with topics that focused on students’ wellness such as stress management, emotional intelligence, financial management, nutrition, and exercise. Classes were taught through a combination of lecture, multimedia videos, and discussions. Here, we share our observational findings outlining the potential benefits (short- and long-term) for students participating in Life 101. Based on pre- and post-course survey data from students, both in-class and online, Life101 had a significant positive impact on the lifestyle of our students. The main outcomes from this study were: 1) both in-class and online courses resulted in positive lifestyle changes in our students; 2) online students showed greater mastery of course topics compared to their in-class peers; and 3) long-term benefits from the course were reported after a one-year follow-up. Although, this collective positive impact may suggest that offering Life101 to undergraduate students can serve to improve students’ mental and physical health, a prospective study is needed to confirm these findings
Chapter 7 Ethics and Pseudoscience in Our Daily Lives: The Status of the Science Behind Dietary Supplements
No full textA unique degree program for pre-pharmacy education: An undergraduate degree in pharmaceutical sciences
No full text- …
