97 research outputs found

    An exploratory study of the FinTech (Financial Technology) education and retraining in UK

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    The purpose of this paper is to explore two identified knowledge gaps: first, the identification and analysis of online searching trends for Financial Technology (FinTech)-related jobs and education information in UK, and second to assess the current strength of the FinTech-related job distribution in terms of job titles and locations in UK, job market in UK and what is required to help it to grow

    Una battaglia di Florence Nightingale pressoché ignorata: l'opposizione alla creazione dell'albo professionale statale delle infermiere

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    Questo contributo intende porre all'attenzione alcuni fatti poco noti della storia dell'assistenza infermieristica che riguardano Florence Nightingale, di cui si celebrano i 200 anni dalla nascita. Si tratta della sua battaglia contro l'istituzione del registro delle infermiere diplomate (quello che oggi è l'Ordine degli infermieri). Le sue ragioni erano ben argomentate e andavano dall'ancora insufficiente istruzione, alla forte ingerenza medica nella Campagna a favore del registro, al rischio che l'ancora poco definita solidití  scientifica e sociale della professione l'avrebbe resa ancillare alla medicina, fino alla concreta impraticabilití  di tenere un albo sempre aggiornato per escludere eventuali soggetti non più idonei. Oltre ad informazioni sulla patrocinatrice della Campagna per la registrazione delle infermiere Ethel Bedford Gordon Fenwick, fra le fondatrici del Consiglio internazionale delle infermiere (ICN), emergono gli intrecci con le associazioni femminili dei primi del Novecento del secolo scorso e l'attuale Consociazione nazionale delle Associazioni infermieri (CNAI). Si riportano, inoltre, informazioni poco note sulle origini della regolamentazione professionale degli infermieri, in particolare nel Regno Unito e in Italia. Nella parte conclusiva si pongono diverse domande che stimolano riflessioni sulla realtí  professionale italiana e, in particolare, sugli elementi fondamentali dell'assistenza infermieristica, sulla formazione necessaria per l'abilitazione professionale, specialistica e avanzata, e il conseguente sviluppo di carriera. Parole Chiave:"ˆInfermieri, ordine professionale, associazioni infermieristiche, storia dell'assistenza infermieristicaRIASSUNTOThis contribution intends to draw attention to some little-known facts in the history of nursing regarding Florence Nightingale, whose 200th anniversary is celebrated. This is her battle against the establishment of the register of qualified nurses (what is now the Order of Nurses). Her reasons were well argued and ranged from the still insufficient education, to the strong medical interference in the Campaign in favour of the register, to the risk that the still poorly defined scientific and social solidity of the profession would have made it ancillary to medicine, up to the concrete impracticability of keeping a register always updated to exclude any subjects who were no longer suitable. In addition to information on the patroness of the Campaign for the registration of nurses Ethel Bedford Gordon Fenwick, one of the founders of the International Council of Nurses (ICN), the links with women's associations of the early twentieth century and the current Italian National Association of Nurses (Consociazione nazionale delle Associazioni infermieri, CNAI) emerge. Furthermore, little known information on the origins of professional regulation of nurses, particularly in the United Kingdom and Italy is reported. In the concluding part, several questions are asked that stimulate reflections on the Italian professional situation and, in particular, on the fundamentals of nursing care, on nursing education and training necessary for professional, specialist and advanced qualification, and the consequent career development.                Keywords:"ˆnurses, regulation, nursing association, nursing histor

    Pericardial rather than epicardial fat is a cardiometabolic risk marker: an MRI vs echo study

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    Several studies using echocardiography identified epicardial adipose tissue (EPI) as an important cardiometabolic risk marker. However, validation compared with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography has not been performed. Moreover, pericardial adipose tissue (PERI) has recently been shown to have some correlation with cardiovascular disease risk factors. The aims of this study were to validate echocardiographic analyses compared with MRI and to evaluate which cardiac fat depot (EPI or PERI) is the most appropriate cardiovascular risk marker. METHODS: Forty-nine healthy subjects were studied (age range, 25-68 years; body mass index, 21-40 kg/m(2)), and PERI and EPI fat depots were measured using echocardiography and MRI. Findings were correlated with MRI visceral fat and subcutaneous fat, blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, triglycerides, cholesterol, insulin, glucose, and 10-year coronary heart disease risk. RESULTS: Most cardiac fat was constituted by PERI (about 77%). PERI thickness by echocardiography was well correlated with MRI area (r = 0.36, P = .009), and independently of the technique used for quantification, PERI was correlated with body mass index, waist circumference, visceral fat, subcutaneous fat, blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, triglycerides, cholesterol, glucose, and coronary heart disease risk. On the contrary, EPI thicknesses correlated only with age did not correlate significantly with MRI EPI areas, which were found to correlate with age, body mass index, subcutaneous fat, and hip and waist circumferences. CONCLUSIONS: Increased cardiac fat in the pericardial area is strongly associated with features of the metabolic syndrome, whereas no correlation was found with EPI, indicating that in clinical practice, PERI is a better cardiometabolic risk marker than EPI

    Early Hypertension Is Associated With Reduced Regional Cardiac Function, Insulin Resistance, Epicardial, and Visceral Fat

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    Mild-to-moderate hypertension is often associated with insulin resistance and visceral adiposity. Whether these metabolic abnormalities have an independent impact on regional cardiac function is not known. The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of increased blood pressure, insulin resistance, and ectopic fat accumulation on the changes in peak systolic circumferential strain. Thirty-five male subjects (age: 47±1 years; body mass index: 28.4±0.6 kg . m −2 ; mean±SEM) included 13 with normal blood pressure (BP: 113±5/67±2 mm Hg), 13 with prehypertension (BP: 130±1/76±2 mm Hg), and 9 newly diagnosed with essential hypertension (BP: 150±2/94±2 mm Hg) who underwent cardiac magnetic resonance tissue tagging (MRI) and MRI quantitation of abdominal visceral and epicardial fat. Glucose tolerance, on oral glucose tolerance test, and insulin resistance were assessed along with the serum lipid profile. All of the subjects had normal glucose tolerance, left- and right-ventricular volumes, and ejection fraction. Across the BP groups, left ventricular mass tended to increase, and circumferential shortening was progressively reduced at basal, midheart, and apical segments (on average, from −17.0±0.5% in normal blood pressure to −15.2±0.7% in prehypertension to −13.6±0.8% in those newly diagnosed with essential hypertension; P =0.004). Reduced circumferential strain was significantly associated with raised BP independent of age ( r =0.41; P =0.01) and with epicardial and visceral fat, serum triglycerides, and insulin resistance independent of age and BP. In conclusion, regional left ventricular function is already reduced at the early stages of hypertension despite the normal global cardiac function. Insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, and ectopic fat accumulation are associated with reduced regional systolic function

    Visualization and analysis of cellular & Twitter data using qgis

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    The study is to understand individual presence and movement in Friuli Venezia Giulia region. It is important for tourism planning, hazard management, business marketing, implementing government lifetime policies and benefit. The aim of this study is achieved by advanced web 2.0 applications. We need real time and geo-located data to monitor the inflow of tourist and to come up with effective promoting and benefiting plans for tourism, the evacuation and mitigation strategies during hazards to protect social life and environment with less infrastructure damage, marketing plans for advertising or selling of products. Despite wide spread success in predicting specific aspects of human behavior by social media information, a little attention is given to twitter and cell phone data. Accessibility to detailed human movements with fine spatial and temporal granularity is challenging due to confidentiality and safety reasons. With rapid development of web2.0 applications people can post about events, share opinion and emotions online. Using twitter data, how short term travelers, such as tourists, can be recognized and how their travel pattern can be analyzed. Study of finding tourist dynamics such as arriving and outgoing of tourist, sum of trips, sum of days and night spent, number of unique visitors, country of residence, main destination, secondary destination, transits pass through, repeat visits are achieved using CDR (call detail records) and DDR (data detail records)

    An Alu-derived intronic splicing enhancer facilitates intronic processing and modulates aberrant splicing in ATM

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    We have previously reported a natural GTAA deletion within an intronic splicing processing element (ISPE) of the ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM) gene that disrupts a non-canonical U1 snRNP interaction and activates the excision of the upstream portion of the intron. The resulting pre-mRNA splicing intermediate is then processed to a cryptic exon, whose aberrant inclusion in the final mRNA is responsible for ataxia telangiectasia. We show here that the last 40 bases of a downstream intronic antisense Alu repeat are required for the activation of the cryptic exon by the ISPE deletion. Evaluation of the pre-mRNA splicing intermediate by a hybrid minigene assay indicates that the identified intronic splicing enhancer represents a novel class of enhancers that facilitates processing of splicing intermediates possibly by recruiting U1 snRNP to defective donor sites. In the absence of this element, the splicing intermediate accumulates and is not further processed to generate the cryptic exon. Our results indicate that Alu-derived sequences can provide intronic splicing regulatory elements that facilitate pre-mRNA processing and potentially affect the severity of disease-causing splicing mutations

    The gamma-ray emitting region of the jet in Cyg X-3

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    We study models of the gamma-ray emission of Cyg X-3 observed by Fermi. We calculate the average X-ray spectrum during the gamma-ray active periods. Then, we calculate spectra from Compton scattering of a photon beam into a given direction by isotropic relativistic electrons with a power-law distribution, both based on the Klein-Nishina cross section and in the Thomson limit. Applying the results to scattering of stellar blackbody radiation in the inner jet of Cyg X-3, we find that a low-energy break in the electron distribution at a Lorentz factor of ~ 300--1000 is required by the shape of the observed X-ray/gamma-ray spectrum in order to avoid overproducing the observed X-ray flux. The electrons giving rise to the observed \g-rays are efficiently cooled by Compton scattering, and the power-law index of the acceleration process is ~ 2.5--3. The bulk Lorentz factor of the jet and the kinetic power before the dissipation region depend on the fraction of the dissipation power supplied to the electrons; if it is ~ 1/2, the Lorentz factor is ~ 2.5, and the kinetic power is ~ 10^38 erg/s, which represents a firm lower limit on the jet power, and is comparable to the bolometric luminosity of Cyg X-3. Most of the power supplied to the electrons is radiated. The broad band spectrum constrains the synchrotron and self-Compton emission from the gamma-ray emitting electrons, which requires the magnetic field to be relatively weak, with the magnetic energy density < a few times 10^-3 of that in the electrons. The actual value of the magnetic field strength can be inferred from a future simultaneous measurement of the IR and gamma-ray fluxes.Comment: MNRAS, in press, 13 page

    Signatures of Environmental Genetic Adaptation Pinpoint Pathogens as the Main Selective Pressure through Human Evolution

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    Previous genome-wide scans of positive natural selection in humans have identified a number of non-neutrally evolving genes that play important roles in skin pigmentation, metabolism, or immune function. Recent studies have also shown that a genome-wide pattern of local adaptation can be detected by identifying correlations between patterns of allele frequencies and environmental variables. Despite these observations, the degree to which natural selection is primarily driven by adaptation to local environments, and the role of pathogens or other ecological factors as selective agents, is still under debate. To address this issue, we correlated the spatial allele frequency distribution of a large sample of SNPs from 55 distinct human populations to a set of environmental factors that describe local geographical features such as climate, diet regimes, and pathogen loads. In concordance with previous studies, we detected a significant enrichment of genic SNPs, and particularly non-synonymous SNPs associated with local adaptation. Furthermore, we show that the diversity of the local pathogenic environment is the predominant driver of local adaptation, and that climate, at least as measured here, only plays a relatively minor role. While background demography by far makes the strongest contribution in explaining the genetic variance among populations, we detected about 100 genes which show an unexpectedly strong correlation between allele frequencies and pathogenic environment, after correcting for demography. Conversely, for diet regimes and climatic conditions, no genes show a similar correlation between the environmental factor and allele frequencies. This result is validated using low-coverage sequencing data for multiple populations. Among the loci targeted by pathogen-driven selection, we found an enrichment of genes associated to autoimmune diseases, such as celiac disease, type 1 diabetes, and multiples sclerosis, which lends credence to the hypothesis that some susceptibility alleles for autoimmune diseases may be maintained in human population due to past selective processes

    Taxonomy of the order Bunyavirales : second update 2018

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    In October 2018, the order Bunyavirales was amended by inclusion of the family Arenaviridae, abolishment of three families, creation of three new families, 19 new genera, and 14 new species, and renaming of three genera and 22 species. This article presents the updated taxonomy of the order Bunyavirales as now accepted by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV).Non peer reviewe
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