Incidence of administrative management in labor disputes of administrative workers at the Sierra Centro Sur special project in Ayacucho, 2018 [Incidencia de la gestión administrativa en los conflictos laborales de trabajadores administrativos del proyecto especial Sierra Centro Sur en Ayacucho, 2018]

Administrative management, which resides in projecting, structuring, carrying out and inspecting a specific task to achieve goals through the use of individuals and other resources is a key element within any company. Therefore, effective administration allows many goals to be achieved. In relation to labor disputes, these are born from different perspectives when discrepancies cannot be resolved. From there, it is important to recognize the types of problems that can generate a conflict to prevent and not affect the performance and welfare of its members. For this reason, companies have begun to use alternative conflict resolution processes, especially mediation, to process conflicts and prosper labor ties. From the above, the need was born to know how administrative management had an impact on labor disputes; as well as knowing how the administrative management influences the dimensions of differentiation of activities, shared resources and interdependent activities in a way that leads to an effective administration and optimal performance and well-being of the staff, leading to financial and resource gains within the Project under study. The research presented a non-experimental, quantitative, basic design and was multivariable causal. The population was 110 administrative workers. Surveys were used as techniques and had likert questionnaires as instruments. Coming to conclude that administrative management has a significant impact on labor disputes (less than 1,852 times than if management were not efficient and less than 1,135 times if it was not good); The aforementioned variable also affects the differentiation dimensions of activities, shared resources and independent activities

Implementation model of spinoff incubator in non institutionalized universities [Modelo de implementación de incubadora spin off en universidades no institucionales]

This paper aims to discuss the implementation of a business incubator model within non-institutionalized state universities that allow the development of companies managed by students. The proposal is the result of a descriptive and proactive study. For this, we have taken into account successful incubation models that can be adapted to our academic and pedagogical reality within the university system. Based on this adaptation, we can argue that it is applied

Improving ICT and renewable energy for environmental sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa

The study investigates the role of information and communication technology (ICT) and renewable energy on environmental sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa. The system generalized method of moments (GMM) was employed to estimate data of 45 sub-Saharan countries that cover the 2008 -2016 period. Result reveals that increasing ICT penetration and renewable energy use reduce CO2 emissions and improves environmental sustainability. Economic growth and population growth also mitigate CO2 emissions while education and trade openness have a neutral impact. These findings imply that increasing penetration of ICT facilities and renewable energy in the region will promote inclusive environmental sustainability. The interactive estimation of ICT variables was further considered to determine net effects and the ICT threshold that is relevant for policy implication

Starting parenting in isolation a qualitative user-initiated study of parents’ experiences with hospitalization in Neonatal Intensive Care units during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background Worldwide, strict infection control measures including visitation regulations were implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic at Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs). These regulations gave restricted access for parents to their hospitalized infants. The consequence was limited ability to involve in the care of their infants. At Oslo University Hospital entry to NICU was denied to all except healthy mothers in March 2020. The absolute access ban for fathers lasted for 10 weeks. The aim of this study was to explore parental experiences with an infant hospitalized in the NICU during this absolute visitation ban period. Methods We invited post discharge all parents of surviving infants that had been hospitalized for at least 14 days to participate. They were interviewed during autumn 2020 using an explorative semi-structured interview approach. Data were analyzed via inductive thematic analysis. Results Nine mothers and four fathers participated. The COVID-19 regulations strongly impacted the parent’s experiences of their stay. The fathers’ limited access felt life-impacting. Parents struggled to become a family and raised their voices to be heard. Not being able to experience parenthood together led to emotional loneliness. The fathers struggled to learn how to care for their infant. The regulations might lead to a postponed attachment. On the other hand, of positive aspect the parents got some quietness. Being hospitalized during this first wave was experienced as exceptional and made parents seeking alliances by other parents. Social media was used to keep in contact with the outside world. Conclusions The regulations had strong negative impact on parental experiences during the NICU hospitalization. The restriction to fathers’ access to the NICU acted as a significant obstacle to early infant-father bonding and led to loneliness and isolation by the mothers. Thus, these COVID-19 measures might have had adverse consequences for families.publishedVersio

Knowledge Sharing and Creative Confidence in Promoting Employees’ Creative Behavior

The purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of knowledge sharing and creative confidence on the relationship between organizations’ creative environment and employees’ creative behavior. This study individually assesses the relationship between factors from heterogeneous survey participant data and compares the result for two groups; engineers and non-engineers. A theoretical framework is adopted to explain how a creative climate stimulates an individual’s creative behavior and how this relationship is moderated and mediated by knowledge sharing and creative confidence. This is a relatively unexplored concept in the current literature. The results demonstrated that knowledge sharing and creative confidence significantly jointly mediate the relationship between creative climate (the independent variable) and creative behavior (the dependent variable), furthermore moderation analysis results indicate that knowledge sharing and creative confidence do not significantly and jointly moderate the relationship between creative climate and creative behavior. This research supports the existing body of literature relating to organizational behavior in technical environments

The Economics of Sexual and Mental Health

In recent years, sexual and mental health have become increasingly important in both national discourse and policymaking. These shifting priorities present unique opportunities for economists to study the market contexts, incentives, and trade-offs faced by those making choices about their sexual and mental health. This dissertation’s chapters utilize a mix of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to examine how changes in the health policy landscape affect choices about the treatment and prevention of sexually transmitted illnesses (STIs), and how patterns of discrimination affect access to mental healthcare markets. Chapter 1 estimates the causal effect of a major eligibility expansion of a major expansion of eligibility for high-quality public health insurance on utilization of medications used to treat and prevent the viral STIs: Human Papilloma Virus, Genital Herpes, and viral Hepatitis. I find a significant increase in uptake of prescriptions used to treat viral STIs, principally driven by uptake in prescriptions to treat genital herpes. These increases appear to be driven primarily by these eligibility expansions, and not by trends of incidence of the illnesses themselves, suggesting pent-up demand for the treatment and prevention of common viral STIs. Chapter 2 similarly estimates the causal effect of the same public health insurance eligibility expansion on the incidence of HIV and AIDS, mortality, and prescriptions for specialty combination drugs used to treat and prevent these diseases. Using matched data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, I find that while Medicaid expansions had an ambiguous effect on the actual incidence and mortality of HIV and AIDS, it led to a modest uptake in prescriptions for these combination drugs. Chapter 3 details the results of a field experiment aimed at detecting evidence of discrimination against transgender individuals, racial, and ethnic minorities in access to mental health appointments. Constructing a nationally-representative sample of mental health providers, we conduct an audit study in which fictitious prospective patients request mental health appointments. We find evidence of discrimination against both racial and ethnic minorities and transgender individuals, especially along intersectional lines

Back to plants for drug discovery: from ethnomedicine to more conventional approaches

Over the last years, there is rekindling of interest in drug discovery from botanical resources. This thesis proposed two different approaches (from ethnomedicine to scholarly strategies) for drug discovery from medicinal plants, identifying the areas of knowledge involved and addressing the challenges encountered, with the aim of enhancing the chance of success of the overarching process. The first approach consists to review the literature to increase understanding of a plant of interest and generate strong hypotheses for future drug development research on this plant. Illustrating such an approach, we focused on Tithonia diversifolia (Hemsl.) A. Gray (TD). Knowledge about TD was collected from both online databases and non-electronic resources. Overall, a total of 1,804 reports have been collected. After subsequent duplicates removal and screening for relevant titles and abstracts, a total of 119 text articles were obtained and assessed for eligibility. Finally, 168 articles were selected, of which forty-nine were added after analyses of the reference lists of the included papers. We found that all parts of the plant are valued in several cultures for a wide scope of ailments ranging from topical issues \u2014wounds, skeleto-muscular disorders, abscesses, dermatological conditions, and stomach pains\u2014 to systemic disorders such as diabetes, malaria, fever, hepatitis and infectious diseases. Importantly, most of the ethnomedical claims of TD have been substantiated in several studies conducted in vitro and in vivo in animals. Sometimes, findings were conflicting and thanks to this review, we were able to assess the weight of evidence for each pharmacological effect of TD. The anti-inflammatory, antimalarial, antidiabetic, antioxidant and anticancer effects do stand out but there is also a stunning array of other relevant pharmacological effects. Chemically, a hundred of chemicals, mainly terpenoids and phenols, have been isolated from various TD extracts so far. Of these, some compounds including Tagitinin C have been linked to the pharmacology of TD. About the toxicological profile, we were able to conclude based on evidence that short-term oral administration of TD is relatively well-tolerated in animals when taken at doses less than 100 mg/kg. The second approach consists to screen the ethnomedical knowledge of indigenous people to select the best plant candidate to launch a drug discovery campaign. So, we carried out a 6-month cross-sectional questionnaire-based survey to explore the use of medicinal plants (MP) in People living with HIV (PLHIV) in the city of Dschang (West Region, Cameroon). Of the 247 HIV-infected respondents, 54.9% reported to use plants. MP users were then kindly invited to provide photographs and/or specimens of plants for botanical identification. A total of 70 MP, chiefly the herbs, were mentioned by informants (82.2% of total MP users, mean\ub1SEM: 2.2\ub10.2 MP/subject, min 1, max 11), of which forty-nine have been botanically identified. Commonly reported pathological conditions or symptoms treated with MP included malaria (n = 27, 18.4% of total citations), cough (n = 20, 13.6%) and abdominal pain (n = 16, 10.9%). The benefits of using MP reportedly ranged from moderate (n = 60, 57.7%) to complete (n = 35, 33.7%) relief, while only 8 subjects (7.7% of MP users) reported no change in their terms. Interestingly, 2 subjects (33.3 % of respondents) denounced fatigue and weight loss. We also observed that THPs were the main advisors of PLHIV on the use of MP. Thus, in the rest of our study, their knowledge and attitudes towards HIV/AIDS were surveyed aiming at understanding whether they may be an appropriate resource to assist in the scaling up of HIV prevention and treatment delivery services in Cameroon. 16 THPs were recruited by the chairperson of the Cooperative Society of Producers of Medicinal Plants of West Region based on their good reputation in traditional healing practice. Three of them acknowledged the use of MP to manage HIV diseases in their clients. All THPs who agreed to participate in the survey were also evaluated for their knowledge of HIV transmission, prevention and diagnosis. We found that their knowledge related to HIV was relatively low raising concern about their aptitude to effectively assist conventional health practitioners in fighting against HIV/AIDS. Resulting from literature mining and ethnomedical claims is the adoption of a relevant pharmacological testing system. In any case, the testing systems should represent the biological activities that best match the ethnomedical uses of the selected plant species. In addition, it is important to bear in mind that plant extracts are complex mixtures containing various components and, therefore, their overall activity results from interactions between their naturally occurring ingredients. It is with this background that we conducted a study of comparison of the effects of a whole extract of a particular strain of Cannabis sativa L. to that of cannabidiol (CBD). We knew cannabis is endowed with a potent anti-inflammatory effect attributable mainly to CBD, but also to its entourage. This mechanism by which other compounds occurring in cannabis may contribute to its clinical effects has been espoused as an \u201centourage effect\u201d. The concept of entourage effect was first introduced in 1998 by Ben-Shabat and Raphael Mechoulam but still, there was no hard evidence that the entourage effect is real. So, thanks to a collaboration with a pharmaceutical company, we grew a particular strain of cannabis deprived of THC and standardized in 5% CBD (CM5). Then, we tested the effects of an extract of CM5 in parallel to that of pure CBD at equimolar concentrations on neutrophil functions including oxidative metabolism, migration and production of proinflammatory cytokines. Results show that CM5 0.05-50 \u3bcg/mL and CBD 10-8-10-5 M inhibit the neutrophil functions including ROS production, cell migration, mRNA levels of proinflammatory cytokines (but at the protein level, only TNF-a was inhibited) to a comparable extent, indicating that CBD may be the main responsible of the anti-inflammatory effects of Cannabis. The effects of CBD and CM5 show however remarkable differences in terms of potency and efficacy, suggesting that beyond CBD, other components of cannabis may contribute to its biological effects. As a whole, such results support the use of cannabis and CBD to stem inflammation, however also warrant in-depth investigation of the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms to better exploit their therapeutic potential

Biotechnological production of fungal colorants

Since a global transformation towards circular bioeconomy relies on sustainable processes and environmentally friendly products, alternatives to currently used colorants and dyes are explored in this thesis. The proposed solutions are biotechnologically produced pigments from fungi. Two different species and their potential to produce colorants were investigated: the sulphur shelf (Laetiporus sulphureus) and shaggy bracket (Inonotus hispidus). Both species are known to synthesize colorful molecules in their fruiting bodies and in the mycelium grown in liquid culture. L. sulphureus synthesizes several orange laetiporic acids and I. hispidus produces the yellow hispidin, which is a known antioxidant with several other bioactivities. In this thesis, the cultivation of both species was scaled up from shake flask to a 4 and 7 L bioreactor and nutrition medium was optimized. By comparing four different L. sulphureus strains, the most potent pigment producer was identified and achieved yields of around 1 g/L laetiporic acid. Different physical and chemical influencing factors for improved hispidin yield were tested for the cultivation of I. hispidus. Irradiation and oxidative stress stimulated pigment synthesis, as well as supplemented precursors. The effects were combined in a comparison of two different types of bioreactors and a yield of 5.5 g/L hispidin was achieved. Different product recovery strategies were investigated, from conventional extraction to a biphasic system. The prior poor stability of laetiporic acid extracts was improved by addition of nitrogen and storage at low temperatures. The potential for application in textiles, cosmetics and food was demonstrated. In conclusion, the biotechnological production of fungal colorants was demonstrated using two examples in this thesis. Upscaling from laboratory to pilot scale was reported and optimization of chemical and physical parameters resulted in g/L-scale product titers, which render bioprocesses competitive to conventional production processes for natural colorants.Da eine globale Transformation in Richtung zirkulärer Bioökonomie auf nachhaltige Prozesse und umweltfreundliche Produkte angewiesen ist, werden in dieser Arbeit Alternativen für aktuell eingesetzte Farbstoffe untersucht. Die biotechnologische Produktion von Farbstoffen aus Pilzen wird als Lösungsstrategie vorgeschlagen. Zwei verschiedene Spezies wurden auf ihr Potential als Farbstoff-Produzenten untersucht: der Gemeine Schwefelporling (Laetiporus sulphureus) und der Zottige Schillerporling (Inonotus hispidus). Beide Arten sind bekannt dafür, sowohl im Fruchtkörper als auch im Myzel in flüssiger Nährkultur farbige Moleküle zu synthetisieren. L. sulphureus produziert die orangen Laetiporsäuren und I. hispidus bildet das gelbe Hispidin, ein bekanntes Antioxidant mit vielen weiteren Bioaktivitäten. Die Kultivierung beider Spezies wurde in dieser Arbeit vom Schüttelkolben bis zum 4 bzw. 7 L Maßstab im Bioreaktor vergrößert und die Nährmedien optimiert. Durch den Vergleich vier verschiedener L. sulphureus Stämme wurde der potenteste Produktionsstamm ausgewählt und erzielte Ausbeuten von rund 1 g/L Laetiporsäure. Bei der Kultivierung von I. hispidus wurden verschiedene physikalische und chemische Einflussfaktoren zur Steigerung der Hispidin-Ausbeute getestet. Der Einsatz von Belichtung und oxidativem Stress stimulierte die Farbstoffsynthese, genau wie dem Nährmedium zugesetzte Präkursoren. Alle Effektoren wurden in parallelen Kultivierungen in Bioreaktoren zweier verschiedener Bauarten getestet und eine Ausbeute von 5,5 g/L Hispidin erzielt. Verschiedene Produktaufarbeitungs-Strategien wurden etabliert, von der klassischen Extraktion bis zum Zwei-Phasen-System. Die zuvor geringe Stabilität der Laetiporsäure-Extrakte konnte durch Stickstoff und Lagerung bei niedrigen Temperaturen stabilisiert werden und das Potential für die Anwendung in Textilien, Kosmetika und Lebensmitteln wurde demonstriert. Zusammenfassend wurde in dieser Arbeit anhand von zwei Beispielen gezeigt, dass die biotechnologische Produktion von Pilzfarbstoffen möglich ist. Die Maßstabsvergrößerung vom Labor bis zur Pilotanlage wurde berichtet und die Kombination von chemischen und physikalischen Einflussfaktoren sorgten für Ausbeuten im g/L Bereich, die einen entsprechenden Bioprozess wettbewerbsfähig mit konventionellen Prozessen für natürliche Farbstoffe machen

Empirical development of a scale of patience

Patience is a construct not directly studied in the literature. Studies in the psychological literature have typically spoken of patience only as the converse of impatience. The assumption of these studies is that patience exists in the absence of impatience. However, other research proposes a multidimensional model of patience based on qualitative studies. It follows from the multidimensional model that patience exists on a continuum with the potential for different levels or amounts of patience across different situations. The purpose of this study was to develop an objective measure of patience.;To develop a measure of patience an item pool was constructed and reviewed, and then 347 undergraduate students completed items. Factor analysis of this initial administration identified nine factors. A final measure was developed and administered to 312 undergraduate students. To assess validity of the patience scale, students completed the Boredom Proneness Scale, the Student Version of the Jenkins Activity Scale, and a modified version of the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy in addition to the patience measure. Forty undergraduate students completed the measures at a four-week interval to assess temporal stability. Factor analysis utilized the Scree test and Kaiser eigenvalue rule in determining the number of factors to retain. Equamax rotation was the orthogonal method of factor rotation.;A six-factor model of patience was found with strong reliability for the measure as a whole (alpha = .7993) and adequate for individual factors (alpha = .7334--.5226). The six factors explained 48.282 percent of the variance. Temporal stability was high (r = .893). Support was found for convergent validity. Factor labels are postponement, even-tempered, composure, time abundance, tolerance, and limits of patience.;The Patience Scale is discussed in comparison to a sociotemporal model of patience and the other measures used in the study. Future directions for the use of the scale are discussed

Journal Usage Report for Fiscal Year 2012

Journal usage for the University Libraries are listed alphabetically by authority title. The report includes the usage statistics taken from each vendor and incorporated in Serials Solutions 360 Counter. The report is broken down monthly for fiscal year 2012 and shows each journal\u27s usage per month and the cost per use for the year, if available