Digital Commons Network^™

Prevalence Of Thyroid Disorders Among The Diabetic Population In Arar, Saudi Arabia, Haider O. Elmisbah, Riyad Y. Laham, Hafiz O. Almisbah, Hadeel T. Alanazi, Taif A. Alanazi, Raghad M. Alanzi, Wejdan A. Aldahmashi, Anshoo Agarwal, Rashad Q. Othman

Saudi Medical Journal

Objectives: To study the prevalence of thyroid disorders (TDs) among the diabetic population in Arar, Saudi Arabia. Methods: A cross-sectional design study carried out in Arar, northern province of Saudi Arabia, from October 2023 to January 2024. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. From the diabetic population aged over 18 years old. Results: A total of 501 participants were enrolled. Most fall within the 20-35 age range, comprising 36.5% of the sample. Vitamin D deficiency appears to be the most prevalent comorbid condition. Following closely behind is vitamin B12 deficiency; hypertension and high blood lipids also show …

Do Digital Health Information Searches Of Individuals With Chronic Diseases Affect Health Literacy And Patient Empowerment?: A Path Analysis, Şenay Şener, Seda Göger

Saudi Medical Journal

Objectives: To analyze the relationship between chronically ill patients’ behaviors in acquiring and verifying health information from a digital environment with health literacy and patient empowerment using a structural equation modeling approach. Methods: This study was carried out in a public hospital in Turkey between February and May 2023. The study consisted of 365 participants and used descriptive and correlation-based designs for statistical analyses. It also executed computations for descriptive statistics and correlations to carry out a path analysis to assess model fitness and to identify direct and indirect effects. Results: This study identified that Web 1.0 and health information …

Prevalence Of Cea, Ca 125, And Ca 15-3 Serum Tumour Markers In Different Regions Of Saudi Arabia, Abrar Ashi, Marwan Al-Hajeili, Sarah Almaghrabi, Jaudah Al-Maghrabi, Nora Trabulsi, Shmoukh Alghuraibi, Rawaih Alsiary, Nuha Alrayes

Saudi Medical Journal

Objectives: To study the prevalence of tumor marker (TM) carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), cancer antigen 125 (CA 125), and cancer antigen 15-3 (CA 15-3) levels in the Saudi population, based on gender, age, and demographic region, and whether the patients were referred by a hospital or self-referred. Methods: Retrospective analysis was carried out on 7,019 samples gathered from the Western, Northern, Central, Southern, and Eastern regions of Saudi Arabia between 2021-2022. The TMs were categorized into normal and abnormal levels, according to the reference ranges. Statistical analysis was carried out to assess the relations between variants (age groups, gender, and demographic …

Building Bridges: Connecting The Disconnected To God And Others After Counseling, Jonathan W. Terry

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Previous research reveals that building bridges is not a new concept, but most of these topics do not involve the combination of relationships and counseling. Building Bridges is a metaphor for building healthy relationships. All participants were willing volunteers and were ensured anonymity. Twenty-three participants signed up for the workshop, and nineteen received a certificate of completion. The inspection report questionnaire and self-reflection homework assignment were used to introduce some vital tools for spiritual journaling, self-accountability, and self-assessment for each participant. The problem at FBC-GA is the relational disconnection caused by shame, guilt, and unresolved hurt that remains an inward …

The Irreducible Otherness Of Desi And Desire In Singapore’S Gurdwaras: Moral Boundary-Making In The Shadows Of A Multicultural Society, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This article considers the emergence of new multiculturalisms taking root in Asia by exploring how value-based frameworks and moral judgements are deployed to create new lines of difference within co-ethnic communities. These frameworks and judgements cause multiculturalism to become a more subjective, and thus splintered construct that is increasingly decoupled from state discourse. Further, it considers how religious spaces are typically associated with the performance of morally “right” attitudes and behaviours, and therefore provide fertile yet underexplored sites through which multicultural subjectivities are formed and enacted. It illustrates these theoretical ideas through an empirical examination of how moral boundary-making within …

Tathwīru Kitābi Al-Jaibi Ka Mushochibi Kitābi Al-Lughah Al-‘Arabiyyah Lī Ash-Shoffi As-Sābi’ Li Tarqiyati Al-Mahārah Al-Lughāwiyyah Fī Madrasah Al-Khamīdiyyah Al-Mutawassithah Al-Islāmiyyah, Aida Zavirah Fayruza, Moh. Khasairi, Mohammad Ahsanuddin

Al-Arabi: Journal of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language

Teaching Arabic at the middle school level has a crucial role in shaping students’ Arabic language skills, especially in the seventh grade. In view of the challenges and needs in the learning process, the researcher tried to improve students’ abilities

Digital Transformation Of Kitabah Learning In Indonesia: A Sinta2-Indexed Journal Analysis, Azzaria Mida Mustika Dewi, Muhammad Jafar Shodiq, Nurhikmah Sani, ⁠Faizmailiatus Sofa

Al-Arabi: Journal of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language

One good way of expressing your thoughts and feelings is by writing. The existence of maharah kitabah learning can help students express their thoughts and feelings. In this digital era, there are many ways to practice writing skills. In this case, it

A Review Of A Ketogenic Diet In The Treatment Of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Eugene Reznik

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Autism Spectrum Disorder effects millions of people every year, however pharmacological and behavioral treatments remain limited. The need for adjunctive therapies such as diet invervention [sic] that target autism spectrum disorder symptoms Is [sic] needed now more than ever. A connection between a ketogenic diet, which is high in fat and low in carbohydrates, and autism spectrum disorder can be made as the diet has shown potential in ameleriotating [sic] common comorbidities within the autism spectrum disorder population such as metabolic dysfunction, gut-microbiome dysfunction, medication resistant epilepsy, and various psychiatric disorders. Hence, this review focuses on the results and methods …

Leading Redemptively: The Heart Of Christian Leadership, Ryan G. Zonnefeld

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

The Challenge Of Creating A Classroom Culture, Alan Bandstra

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Insomnia On Ovarian Cancer Risk And Survival: A Mendelian Randomization Study., Heming Wang, Brett M. Reid, Rebecca C. Richmond, Jacqueline M. Lane, Richa Saxena, Brian D. Gonzalez, Brooke L. Fridley, Susan Redline, Shelley S. Tworoger, Xuefeng Wang

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

BACKGROUND: Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder in patients with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). We investigated the causal association between genetically predicted insomnia and EOC risk and survival through a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study.

METHODS: Insomnia was proxied using genetic variants identified in a genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis of UK Biobank and 23andMe. Using genetic associations with EOC risk and overall survival from the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (OCAC) GWAS in 66,450 women (over 11,000 cases with clinical follow-up), we performed Iterative Mendelian Randomization and Pleiotropy (IMRP) analysis followed by a set of sensitivity analyses. Genetic associations …

Intervisit Reproducibility Of Foveal Cone Density Metrics, Iniya Adhan, Emma Warr, Jenna Grieshop, Joseph Kreis, Danica Nikezic, Ashleigh Walesa, Katherine Hemsworth, Robert F. Cooper, Joseph Carroll

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose: To assess longitudinal reproducibility of metrics of foveal density (peak cone density [PCD], cone density centroid [CDC], and 80th percentile centroid area) in participants with normal vision.

Methods: Participants (n = 19; five male and 14 female) were imaged at two time points (average interval of 3.2 years) using an adaptive optics scanning light ophthalmoscope (AOSLO). Foveally centered regions of interest (ROIs) were extracted from AOSLO montages. Cone coordinate matrices were semiautomatically derived for each ROI, and cone mosaic metrics were calculated.

Results: On average, there were no significant changes in cone mosaic metrics between visits. The average …

We Cannot Police Systemic Racism And Systemic Poverty: Why Policing Is Not A Solution To Our Public Health Crisis, Semir Bulle

Utah Law Review

From drug addiction to issues with homelessness, the mental health crisis, community disputes, traffic violations and more, there does not seem to be any evidence that increased police budgets and spending are the best use of limited resources. Criminalization in substitution for measured and targeted interventions has not worked in structurally vulnerable and marginalized communities and it is far past the time to accept tangible alternatives, such as funding initiatives like TCCS. Instead of perpetually increasing our police budget, let’s instead invest in healing our communities. Let’s invest this money in education, recreation, childcare, housing, health; measures that are proven …

Panel Presentation, The Criminalization Of Trans Lives And Health Care: Provider And Patient Perspective, Dana N. Johns

Utah Law Review

Bans on gender affirming care are going to take a group of individuals who, as a whole, are already marginalized and already at risk. And then within that group, it’s going to segregate them even more because you’re going to have the people who can do that. You’re going to the families who can take their kids eight hours to another state. Then you’re going to the family that can’t because they can’t pay out of pocket, or they can’t take off work or they can’t make it to a state where their child can get care. These laws will …

Postural Control In Adults With Age-Related Hearing Loss, Elizabeth Tobener

Alternative Theses and Dissertations (AETDs)

The present study investigated postural control measures in adults with age-related hearing loss (ARHL). Individuals between the age of 50 and 70 were recruited (10 with normal hearing, 32 with ARHL) and evaluated using pure-tone audiometry, vestibular function assessments, and postural control measures. Results of this study revealed significant correlations between ARHL and cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potential (VEMPs) and ocular VEMPs. As ARHL increased, amplitude of cervical VEMPs and ocular VEMPs decreased. There were no significant correlations for ARHL and video head impulse test (vHIT) gain. Single leg stance with head tilt was significantly associated with ARHL. As ARHL …

Evaluation Of Sphingolipid Biosynthetic Inhibitor L-Cycloserine To Prevent Retinal Degeneration, Faiza Tahia

Alternative Theses and Dissertations (AETDs)

Retinal degenerative diseases, affecting millions worldwide, are caused by irreversible photoreceptor cell death. These conditions lead to irreversible vision loss or blindness, presenting significant economic challenges. Retinal degenerative diseases result from a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors, such as light exposure and oxidative stress. Effective treatments are currently limited, which underscores the urgent need for comprehensive solutions. Ceramide, a bioactive sphingolipid, has emerged as a pivotal mediator in the apoptotic cascade associated with retinal degeneration, presenting a promising target for therapeutic intervention. This research explores the therapeutic potential of L-Cycloserine, a small molecule inhibitor of de novo ceramide …

Representation Of Nouns And Verbs During Play Between Caregivers And Children With Developmental Language Disorder, Alaina Grissom

Alternative Theses and Dissertations (AETDs)

Purpose. This project compared how children and caregivers use gestures and objects to contribute to the representation of nouns and verbs during play interactions between children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and their caregivers. Observations were used to determine if there was any differentiation in how children or caregivers used gestures and/or objects when nouns and verbs were presented within the play context.

Methods. Observations of parent-child dyads were recorded at a local children’s museum. All dyads included children with DLD between four and six years of age. The child and caregiver’s use of gestures and objects within the interaction …

Targeting Trpc3: A Promising Therapeutic Strategy For Alzheimer's Disease, Jiaxing Wang

Alternative Theses and Dissertations (AETDs)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disorder characterized by extracellular β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques and intracellular tau tangles. The calcium (Ca2+) hypothesis of AD proposes that disrupted intracellular Ca2+ regulation underlies AD pathology, contributing to inflammation, oxidative stress, impaired autophagy, neurodegeneration, and cognitive dysfunction. Store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE) maintains ER Ca2+ stores, involving transient receptor potential canonical (TRPC) and Orai channels. Specifically, we speculated that dysregulated functions of TRPC3 contribute to the pathogenesis of AD. We believe that targeting TRPC3 with a pharmacologically feasible agent could prove beneficial in halting cognitive decline. We previously reported compound JW-65, a novel, metabolically …

Kartu Prakerja Program And Youth Employment: Gender-Specific Outcomes In Indonesia, Rizki Tri Anggara

Economics and Finance in Indonesia

The Kartu Prakerja Program is a form of the active labor market policy in Indonesia, serving as a significant initiative to enhance competencies and job opportunities, including for vulnerable groups such as the young and female labor force. This study aims to analyze the program’s impact on youth employment, with a focus on gender differences. Using Propensity Score Matching (PSM), the results show a significant positive effect on employment probability, particularly for women. The findings suggest that skills training and financial incentives play a crucial role in enhancing employability. The study recommends expanding program access to vulnerable groups and continuously …

Unveiling The Impact Of Jkn: Easing Financial Burdens For Pregnant Women In Indonesia, Januar Sulaeman, Riatu Mariatul Qibthiyyah

Economics and Finance in Indonesia

Indonesia’s maternal mortality rate is the second highest in the ASEAN, partly due to financial barriers preventing adequate care during pregnancy and childbirth. The National Health Insurance (JKN) scheme, which is the embodiment of universal health coverage (UHC), was designed by the Indonesian government to reduce the financial risk of its participants. However, its impact on out-of-pocket health spending for pregnant women is under-researched. Using propensity score matching (PSM) and 2019 SUSENAS data, this study found that JKN membership significantly reduced out-of-pocket health spending for pregnant women—especially in eastern Indonesia, where poverty and healthcare access represent critical issues.

Improving Interpretable Embeddings For Ad-Hoc Video Search With Generative Captions And Multi-Word Concept Bank, Jiaxin Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aligning a user query and video clips in cross-modal latent space and that with semantic concepts are two mainstream approaches for ad-hoc video search (AVS). However, the effectiveness of existing approaches is bottlenecked by the small sizes of available video-text datasets and the low quality of concept banks, which results in the failures of unseen queries and the out-of-vocabulary problem. This paper addresses these two problems by constructing a new dataset and developing a multi-word concept bank. Specifically, capitalizing on a generative model, we construct a new dataset consisting of 7 million generated text and video pairs for pre-training. To …

Imitating Cost-Constrained Behaviors In Reinforcement Learning, Qian Shao, Pradeep Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Complex planning and scheduling problems have long been solved using various optimization or heuristic approaches. In recent years, imitation learning that aims to learn from expert demonstrations has been proposed as a viable alternative to solving these problems. Generally speaking, imitation learning is designed to learn either the reward (or preference) model or directly the behavioral policy by observing the behavior of an expert. Existing work in imitation learning and inverse reinforcement learning has focused on imitation primarily in unconstrained settings (e.g., no limit on fuel consumed by the vehicle). However, in many real-world domains, the behavior of an expert …

Mix-Initiative Response Generation With Dynamic Prefix Tuning, Yuxiang Nie, Heyan Huang, Xian-Ling Mao, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mixed initiative serves as one of the key factors in controlling conversation directions. For a speaker, responding passively or leading proactively would result in rather different responses. However, most dialogue systems focus on training a holistic response generation model without any distinction among different initiatives. It leads to the cross-contamination problem, where the model confuses different initiatives and generates inappropriate responses. Moreover, obtaining plenty of human annotations for initiative labels can be expensive. To address this issue, we propose a general mix-Initiative Dynamic Prefix Tuning framework (IDPT) to decouple different initiatives from the generation model, which learns initiative-aware prefixes in …

Learning With Unreliability : Fast Few-Shot Voxel Radiance Fields With Relative Geometric Consistency, Yingjie Xu, Bangzhen Liu, Hao Tang, Bailin Deng, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a voxel-based optimization framework, Re VoRF, for few-shot radiance fields that strategically ad-dress the unreliability in pseudo novel view synthesis. Our method pivots on the insight that relative depth relationships within neighboring regions are more reliable than the ab-solute color values in disoccluded areas. Consequently, we devise a bilateral geometric consistency loss that carefully navigates the trade-off between color fidelity and geometric accuracy in the context of depth consistency for uncertain regions. Moreover, we present a reliability-guided learning strategy to discern and utilize the variable quality across syn-thesized views, complemented by a reliability-aware voxel smoothing algorithm that smoothens …

Consistent3d: Towards Consistent High-Fidelity Text-To-3d Generation With Deterministic Sampling Prior, Zike Wu, Pan Zhou, Xuanyu Yi, Xiaoding Yuan, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Score distillation sampling (SDS) and its variants have greatly boosted the development of text-to-3D generation, but are vulnerable to geometry collapse and poor textures yet. To solve this issue, we first deeply analyze the SDS and find that its distillation sampling process indeed corresponds to the trajectory sampling of a stochastic differential equation (SDE): SDS samples along an SDE trajectory to yield a less noisy sample which then serves as a guidance to optimize a 3D model. However, the randomness in SDE sampling often leads to a diverse and unpredictable sample which is not always less noisy, and thus is …

Let’S Think Outside The Box: Exploring Leap-Of-Thought In Large Language Models With Multimodal Humor Generation, Shanshan Zhong, Zhongzhan Huang, Shanghua Gao, Wushao Wen, Liang Lin, Marinka Zitnik, Pan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) [2, 3] guides large language models (LLMs) to reason step-by-step, and can motivate their logical reasoning ability. While effective for logical tasks, CoT is not conducive to creative problem-solving which often requires out-of-box thoughts and is crucial for innovation advancements. In this paper, we explore the Leap-of-Thought (LoT) abilities within LLMs — a nonsequential, creative paradigm involving strong associations and knowledge leaps. To this end, we study LLMs on the popular Oogiri game which needs participants to have good creativity and strong associative thinking for responding unexpectedly and humorously to the given image, text, or both, and thus …

Diffusion Time-Step Curriculum For One Image To 3d Generation, Xuanyu Yi, Zike Wu, Qingshan Xu, Pan Zhou, Joo Hwee Lim, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Score distillation sampling (SDS) has been widely adopted to overcome the absence of unseen views in reconstructing 3D objects from a single image. It leverages pretrained 2D diffusion models as teacher to guide the reconstruction of student 3D models. Despite their remarkable success, SDS-based methods often encounter geometric artifacts and texture saturation. We find out the crux is the overlooked indiscriminate treatment of diffusion time-steps during optimization: it unreasonably treats the studentteacher knowledge distillation to be equal at all time-steps and thus entangles coarse-grained and fine-grained modeling. Therefore, we propose the Diffusion Time-step Curriculum one-image-to-3D pipeline (DTC123), which involves both …

Enhancing Code Vulnerability Detection Via Vulnerability-Preserving Data Augmentation, Shangqing Liu, Wei Ma, Jian Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Ruitao Feng, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Source code vulnerability detection aims to identify inherent vulnerabilities to safeguard software systems from potential attacks. Many prior studies overlook diverse vulnerability characteristics, simplifying the problem into a binary (0-1) classification task for example determining whether it is vulnerable or not. This poses a challenge for a single deep-learning based model to effectively learn the wide array of vulnerability characteristics. Furthermore, due to the challenges associated with collecting large-scale vulnerability data, these detectors often overfit limited training datasets, resulting in lower model generalization performance. To address the aforementioned challenges, in this work, we introduce a fine-grained vulnerability detector namely FGVulDet. …

Detecting Foot Strikes During Running With Earbuds, Changshuo Hu, Thivya Kandappu, Jake Stuchbury-Wass, Yang Liu, Anthony Tang, Cecelia Mascolo, Dong Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Running is a widely embraced form of aerobic exercise, offering various physical and mental benefits. However, improper running gaits (i.e., the way of foot landing) can pose safety risks and impact running efficiency. As many runners lack the knowledge or continuous attention to manage their foot strikes during running, in this work, we present a portable and non-invasive running gait monitoring system. Specifically, we leverage the in-ear microphone on wireless earbuds to capture the vibrations generated by foot strikes. Landing with different parts of the foot (e.g., forefoot and heel) generates distinct vibration patterns, and thus we utilize machine learning …

Gts: Gpu-Based Tree Index For Fast Similarity Search, Yifan Zhu, Ruiyao Ma, Baihua Zheng, Xiangyu Ke, Lu Chen, Yunjun Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similarity search, the task of identifying objects most similar to a given query object under a specific metric, has gathered significant attention due to its practical applications. However, the absence of coordinate information to accelerate similarity search and the high computational cost of measuring object similarity hinder the efficiency of existing CPU-based methods. Additionally, these methods struggle to meet the demand for high throughput data management. To address these challenges, we propose GTS, a GPU-based tree index designed for the parallel processing of similarity search in general metric spaces, where only the distance metric for measuring object similarity is known. …