Digital Commons Network^™

Job Satisfaction And Its Associated Factors Among Optometrists In Ghana: A Cross-Sectional Study, Kwadwo Owusu Akufo, Eldad Agyei-Manu, David Ben Kumah, Anthony Danso-Appiah, Abubakar Sadik Mohammed, Akosua Kesewah Asare, Emmanuel Kofi Addo

Articles

Job satisfaction describes an employee’s motivation and/or feeling of satisfaction towards his/her work. Globally, healthcare professionals’ turnover and retention play a critical role in the delivery of essential health services. In Ghana, however, little has been done to ascertain job satisfaction levels among human resources for eyehealth. The objective of this study therefore was to assess job satisfaction and its associated factors among optom‑ etrists in Ghana.

The Risks And Benefits Of Myopia Control, Mark A. Bullimore, Eric R. Ritchey, Sunil Shah,, Nicolas Leveziel, Rupert Bourne, Daniel Ian Flitcroft

Articles

The prevalence of myopia is increasing around the world, stimulating interest in 3 methods to slow its progression. The primary justification for slowing myopia progression is to 4 reduce the risk of vision loss through sight-threatening ocular pathology in later life. The paper 5 analyzes whether the potential benefits of slowing myopia progression by one diopter justify the 6 potential risks associated with treatments.

Mdl Drano: Rule 23-Based Solutions To Mass Tort Buildup, Myriam E. Gilles, Gary Friedman

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It has been taken as gospel, over the past quarter century, that class action procedures are unavailable in mass tort cases. This Article examines two distinct challenges to that assumption-one resting on Rule 23(c)(4)'s issue class procedure and the other on an innovation advanced by Francis McGovern, in whose honor this Article and symposium are dedicated.

Multinationality Of Uk Firms – A Longitudinal Study Based On Sales And Subsidiaries Data, Pearlean Chadha, Jenny Berrill

Articles

Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the regionalisation–globalisation debate in international business (IB) by providing a longitudinal analysis of firm-level multinationality. The analysis uses a unique hand-collected data set of both accounting (sales) and non-accounting (subsidiaries) data. The percentage of foreign sales is also used as an additional measure of multinationality.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper categorises constituent firms of the Financial Times Stock Exchange 350 index over an 18-year time period from 1998 to 2015. Firms are categorised using the multinationality classification system developed by Aggarwal et al. (2011). The paper also conducts an industrial analysis across ten …

Clearing Opacity Through Machine Learning, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Arti K. Rai

Articles

Artificial intelligence and machine learning represent powerful tools in many fields, ranging from criminal justice to human biology to climate change. Part of the power of these tools arises from their ability to make predictions and glean useful information about complex real-world systems without the need to understand the workings of those systems.

Addressing Health Literacy For Improved Outcomes: A Focus On Pregnancy, S.L. Killeen, I. Brown, A.A. Geraghty, F.M. Mcauliffe

Articles

Health literacy influences how messages are received and understood by patient or population groups. In Europe, incomprehension of health information is common, affecting the ability of many individuals to make informed decisions about their health. In addition, incomprehension of health information may impact the effectiveness of interventions and subsequently, health outcomes. In this article, we illustrate the importance of health literacy in the context of maternity services, a time during which, health interventions affect both maternal and child health. Through this, we suggest that health literacy should be recognised in healthcare settings as a tool to facilitate behaviour change. To …

Associations Between Home Environment, Children’S And Parents’ Characteristics And Children’S Tv Screen Time Behavior, Carolina Bassu, Clare Corish, John Kearney

Articles

In Ireland, television (TV) screen time is a highly prevalent sedentary behavior among children aged less than five years. Little is known about the influence of parental rules and policies or screen time availability and accessibility within the home on children's TV screen time behaviors. This cross-sectional study aimed to examine the extent to which parents' sociodemographic and sedentary behaviors are associated with children's TV screen time; and to determine the associations between parents' rules and practices, home physical environment and children's daily TV viewing. Three hundred and thirty-two children aged 3-5 years and their parents participated in the study. …

Inactivation Efficacy Of Atmospheric Air Plasma And Airborne Acoustic Ultrasound Against Bacterial Bioflms, Apurva Patange, Jeremy Simpson, James Curtin, Catherine Burgess, P.J. Cullen, Brijesh Tiwari

Articles

Bioflms are complex microbial communities that present serious contamination risks to our environment and health. In this study, atmospheric air plasma and airborne acoustic ultrasound technology were applied to inactivate Escherichia coli and Listeria innocua bioflms. Both technologies were efcient in controlling, or completely inactivating, the target bacterial bioflms. Viability and metabolic assays, along with microscopy analysis, revealed that atmospheric air plasma and airborne acoustic ultrasound damaged both the bacterial bioflm cells and its structural integrity. Scanning electron microscopy images highlighted the disruption of the bioflms and pore formation in bacterial cells exposed to both the plasma and acoustic treatments. …

Distinct Chemistries Define The Diverse Biological Effects Of Plasma Activated Water Generated With Spark And Glow Plasma Discharges, Evanthia Tsoukou, Maxime Delit, Louise Treint, Paula Bourke, Daniela Boehm

Articles

The spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria poses a significant threat to human health. Plasma activated liquids (PAL) could be a promising alternative for microbial decontamination, where different PAL can possess diverse antimicrobial efficacies and cytotoxic profiles, depending on the range and concentration of their reactive chemical species. In this research, the biological activity of plasma activated water (PAW) on different biological targets including both microbiological and mammalian cells was investigated in vitro. The aim was to further an understanding of the specific role of distinct plasma reactive species, which is required to tailor plasma activated liquids for use in applications where …

Influence Of Molecular Weight Fractionation On The Antimicrobial And Anticancer Properties Of A Fucoidan Rich-Extract From The Macroalgae Fucus Vesiculosus, Eduarda M. Cabral, Julie Mondala, Márcia Oliveira, Joanna Przyborska, Stephen Fitzpatrick, Dilip K. Rai, Saravana Periaswamy Sivagnanam, Marco Garcia-Vaquero, Denis O'Shea, Michael Devereux, Brijesh K. Tiwari, James Curtin

Articles

The objective of this study was to investigate the antimicrobial and anticancer properties of a fucoidan extract and subsequent fractions isolated from the macroalgae Fucus vesiculosus. The fractions obtained (>300 kDa,kDa,kDa,kDa) could inhibit the growth of B. subtilis, E. coli, L. innocua and P. fluorescens when assayed at concentrations between 12,500 and 25,000 ppm. The bacterial growth was monitored by optical density (OD) measurements (600 nm, 24 h) at 30 °C or 37 °C, depending upon on the strain used. The extracted fractions were also tested for cytotoxicity against brain glioblastoma cancer cells using the Alamar Blue assay for …

Assessing A National Nanotechnology Infrastructure For Enforcing Nanosafety In Consumer Food - Funding The Infrastructure, Gordon Chambers, E. Mccarron

Articles

. Crucial to assessing any national risk assessment infrastructure is the development of keen insights into the funding landscape, the base skill set and expertise levels, risk prioritisation, and stakeholder determination. This paper presents an overview of the first of these criteria with respect to the Irish funding landscape for nanotechnology and nano-agri-food. It examines difficulties with policy enforcement due to a lack of clarity and varying interpretations of the EU definition of nanomaterials and how the funding landscape could potentially facilitate the necessary infrastructure, to underpin regulatory enforcement and risk assessment for nanotechnology in food. In 2008 an assessment …

Rees/Aaee Special Focus On Ethics: Introduction By Guest Editor, Shannon Chance, Shannon Chance

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Today, more than ever, we see the significance of ethics in developing and sustaining the built, social, and natural environments around us. We also recognise the need to develop engineering students’ knowledge, skills, and values regarding engineering, innovation, design, production, and the like. Engineers’ actions can have intended as well as unintended consequences, and we as a community need to become more aware of the outcomes and implications of our work. In response to the many topics presented at the REES 2019, the REEN Board selected ethics as the focus for this special issue and joined with AAEE to publish …

Collaborations In Environmental Initiatives For An Effective Gover- Nance Of Social-Ecological Systems: What The Scientific Literature Suggests., Elena Andriollo, Alberto Caimo, Laura Secco, Elena Pisani

Articles

Moving from the scientific literature on evaluation of environmental projects and programs, this study identifies how and under which conditions collaborations are considered effective for adaptive gover- nance of SES. The method adopted is a systematic literature review based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of 56 articles selected through specific queries on the SCOPUS database and published from 2004 to 2020. Results of the quantitative analysis underline conditions able to make collaborations effective for adaptive governance of SES: the importance of transdisciplinary research tackling both environmental and social sciences, the perceived urgency of stakeholders to tackle environmental challenges and …

Bayesian Dynamic Network Actor Models With Application To South Korean Covid-19 Patient Movement Data, Antonio Arrizza, Alberto Caimo

Articles

Motivated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this article intro- duces Bayesian dynamic network actor models for the analysis of infected individuals’ movements in South Korea during the first three months of 2020. The relational event data modelling framework makes use of network statistics capturing the structure of movement events from and to several country’s municipalities. The fully probabilistic Bayesian approach allows to quantify the uncertainty associated to the relational tendencies explaining where and when movement events are established and where they are directed. The observed patient movements’ patterns at an early stage of the pandemic can provide interesting insights about …

From Overt Threat To Invisible Presence: Discursive Shifts In Representations Of Gender In Menstrual Product Advertising, Valerie Gannon, Olivia Freeman, Rachel Campbell

Articles

The menstrual product brand ‘Always’ and its #LikeAGirl campaign has made headlines for being at the forefront of a menstrual liberation, championing female empowerment and gender equality. This paper utilises a visual discourse analysis approach (Rose, 2016) to explore the discursive shifts in ‘Always’ advertisements over the past four decades. Specifically, the question as to how the construction of menstruation has changed over time in the advertising discourse of the ‘Always’ brand is addressed. Three dominant discourses of menstruation are identified: overt threat, uncontrollable and invisible. These discourses function as strong claims to truth as they reach the everyday life …

Green Fractionation Of 2g And 3g Feedstocks For Ethanol Production: Advances, Incentives And Barriers, Behzad Satari, Amit Jaiswal

Articles

Efficient release of fermentable sugars from the complex biomass structure such as second-generation or third-generation feedstocks by an appropriate enzymatic hydrolysis needs a prior biomass fractionation. This process facilitates the exposure of more cellulose and hemicelluloses for enzymatic hydrolysis. This review focused on ‘green fractionation’ of biomass by applying the principles of green chemistry for bioethanol production. Besides, the recent technological achievements in applying these principles for the fractionation have been discussed. For green fractionation, energy delivery systems are referred to as microwave and ultrasound. Besides, green cellulose solvents, biomass-derived solvents, and supercritical carbon dioxide play an important role in …

A Call For An Intersectional Feminist Restorative Justice Approach To Addressing The Criminalization Of Black Girls, Donna Coker, Thalia Gonzalez

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No abstract provided.

Fabrication And Qualitative Analysis Of An Optical Fibre Efpi-Based Temperature Sensor, Fintan Mcguinness, Aidan Clooney, Mohamed Oubaha, Dinesh Babu Duraibabu, M. Mahmood Ali, Gerald Kilkelly, Emma Tobin, Gabriel Leen

Articles

The following presents a comparison of an extrinsic Fabry–Perot interferometer (EFPI)- based temperature sensor, constructed using a novel diaphragm manufacturing technique, with a reference all-glass EFPI temperature sensor. The novel diaphragm was manufactured using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). The novel sensor fabrication involved fusing a single-mode fibre (SMF) to a length of fused quartz capillary, which has an inner diameter of 132 µm and a 220 µm outer diameter. The capillary was subsequently polished until the distal face of the capillary extended approximately 60 µm beyond that of the single mode fibre. Upon completion of polishing, the assembly is immersed in …

Above And Beyond: Ethics And Responsibility In Civil Engineering, Shannon Chance, Rob Lawlor, Inês Direito Direito, John Mitchell

Articles

This exploratory study investigates how nine London-based civil engineers have enacted ‘global responsibility’ and how their efforts involve ethics and professionalism. The study assesses moral philosophies related to ethics, as well as professional engineering bodies’ visions, accreditation standards, and requirements for continuing professional development. Regarding ethics, the study questions where the line falls between what an engineer ‘must do’ and what ‘would be good to do’. Although the term ethics did not spring to mind when participants were asked about making decisions related to global responsibility, participants’ concern for protecting the environment and making life better for people did, nonetheless, …

Effect Of Mutation And Vaccination On Spread, Severity, And Mortality Of Covid-19 Disease, Dr Hossam Zawbaa, Hasnaa Osama, Ahmed El‐Gendy, Haitham Saeed, Hadeer S. Harb, Yasmin M. Madney, Mona Abdelrahman, Marwa Mohsen, Ahmed M.A. Ali, Mina Nicola, Marwa O. Elgendy, Ihab A. Ibrahim, Mohamed E.A. Abdelrahim

Articles

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had different waves within the same country. The spread rate and severity showed different properties within the COVID-19 different waves. The present work aims to compare the spread and the severity of the different waves using the available data of confirmed COVID-19 cases and death cases. Real-data sets collected from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science were used to perform a comparative study between COVID-19 different waves in 12 countries with the highest total performed tests for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 detection in the world (Italy, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Spain, India, …

Visualizing The Impact Of Europe’S Slow Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout, Mathias Beck, Gail Sheppard

Articles

On 31 March 2021, the WHO Regional Office for Europe issued a formal statement of concern regarding the slow vaccine rollout across Europe [1]. The WHO noted that the “Region remains the second most affected by SARS-CoV-2 of all the world’s regions” which was worrying, especially because the more transmissible B.1.1.7 was now dominant in the region [1]. It further contrasted this with the experiences of the UK, by noting that according to data from Public Health England, “COVID-19 vaccines have saved, at the very least, over 6,000 lives among people over 70 since vaccination started in December 2020”. Beyond …

Let Knowledge Make Recommendations For You, Zhiixue Jiang, Chengying Chi, Yun Yun Zhan

Articles

The knowledge graph can make more accurate personalized recommendations for the recommendation system, but it is also interpretative and has traces to follow. The purpose of the recommendation system is to recommend a series of unobserved items for users. At present, recommendation systems based on knowledge graphs are mainly implemented in two ways: Embedding-based and path based. Embedding methods usually directly use information from the knowledge graph to enrich the representation of an item or user. Still, it failed to introduce multi-hop relations, and it is challenging to use semantic network information. A path-based recommendation algorithm utilizes the knowledge graph …

Feature Fusion Of Raman Chemical Imaging And Digital Histopathology Using Machine Learning For Prostate Cancer Detection, Trevor Doherty, Susan Mckeever, Nebras Al-Attar, Tiarnán Murphy, Claudia Aura, Arman Rahman, Amanda O'Neill,, Stephen P. Finn, Elaine Kay, William M. Gallagher, William G. Watson, Aoife Gowen, Patrick Jackman

Articles

The diagnosis of prostate cancer is challenging due to the heterogeneity of its presentations, leading to the over diagnosis and treatment of non-clinically important disease. Accurate diagnosis can directly benefit a patient’s quality of life and prognosis. Towards addressing this issue, we present a learning model for the automatic identification of prostate cancer. While many prostate cancer studies have adopted Raman spectroscopy approaches, none have utilised the combination of Raman Chemical Imaging (RCI) and other imaging modalities. This study uses multimodal images formed from stained Digital Histopathology (DP) and unstained RCI. The approach was developed and tested on a set …

Climate-Induced Human Displacement And Conservation Lands, Jessica Owley

Articles

As climate change leads to both internal displacement and mass migrations, we need not only new places for people to live but also new locations for infrastructure projects and other public needs. Some of the most attractive areas for these new land uses are currently unoccupied land, including land set aside for conservation. Numerous laws restrict the availability and possible uses of public conservation land. Individual agreements and property restrictions encumber private conservation land, varying in the ease with which the restrictions can be modified. For example, privately protected areas in the United States are often encumbered with perpetual conservation …

Government Speech And First Amendment Capture, Caroline Mala Corbin

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Alarm regarding government speech is not new. In earlier decades, scholars worried that the government's speech might monopolize a marketplace and drown out opposing viewpoints. But today, using a move I term "First Amendment capture," the government need not be the loudest speaker because it can become the only speaker. First Amendment capture has been made possible by the Supreme Court's developing government speech doctrine, which holds that government speech is not subject to the Free Speech Clause. Consequently, once speech is declared governmental, the government may censor viewpoints it does not like. First Amendment capture categorizing contested speech as …

Restorative Approaches To Intimate Partner Violence And Sexual Harm, Donna Coker (Ed.)

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No abstract provided.

Pandemics And International Law: The Need To Strengthen International Legal Frameworks After The Covid-19 Global Health Pandemic [Sierra Leone], Charles C. Jalloh

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No abstract provided.

If Only I Had Known: The Challenges Of Representation, Jenny E. Carroll

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No abstract provided.

The Least Of These: The Case For Nationwide Injunctions In Immigration Cases As A Critical Democratic Institution, Allen Slater, Richard Delgado

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No abstract provided.

Redliking: When Redlining Goes Online, Allyson Gold

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Airbnb's structure, design, and algorithm create a website architecture that allows user discrimination to prevent minority hosts from realizing the same economic benefits from short-term rental platforms as White hosts, a phenomenon this Article refers to as "redliking." For hosts with an unused home, a spare room, or an extra couch, Airbnb provides an opportunity to create new income streams and increase wealth. Airbnb encourages prospective guests to view host photographs, names, and personal information when considering potential accommodations, thereby inviting bias, both implicit and overt, to permeate transactions. This bias has financial consequences. Empirical research on host earning rates …