Refashioning Language: Arabic Literature in the New Millennium

In this paper I explore two contemporary Egyptian literary works, Nisāʾ il- Karantīna and the graphic novel Fī Shiqqat Bāb al-Lūq, showing that the language varieties and registers that exist within them make the dualistic category of Fuṣḥā and ʿAmmiyyah no longer sufficient. Using affective stance theory, I analyse the language and to what affect it is used in the novels, showing that the new millennium writers are refashioning a new poetics for the language that aims to unsettle previously held notions of power in all its guises, including the lingustic.Middle Eastern Studie

Fatal cytokine release syndrome by an aberrant FLIP/STAT3 axis

Inflammatory responses rapidly detect pathogen invasion and mount a regulated reaction. However, dysregulated anti-pathogen immune responses can provoke life-threatening inflammatory pathologies collectively known as cytokine release syndrome (CRS), exemplified by key clinical phenotypes unearthed during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The underlying pathophysiology of CRS remains elusive. We found that FLIP, a protein that controls caspase-8 death pathways, was highly expressed in myeloid cells of COVID-19 lungs. FLIP controlled CRS by fueling a STAT3-dependent inflammatory program. Indeed, constitutive expression of a viral FLIP homolog in myeloid cells triggered a STAT3-linked, progressive, and fatal inflammatory syndrome in mice, characterized by elevated cytokine output, lymphopenia, lung injury, and multiple organ dysfunctions that mimicked human CRS. As STAT3-targeting approaches relieved inflammation, immune disorders, and organ failures in these mice, targeted intervention towards this pathway could suppress the lethal CRS inflammatory state

Automated office blood pressure measurements in primary care are misleading in more than one third of treated hypertensives: The VALENTINE-Greece Home Blood Pressure Monitoring study

Abstract Background This study assessed the diagnostic reliability of automated office blood pressure (OBP) measurements in treated hypertensive patients in primary care by evaluating the prevalence of white coat hypertension (WCH) and masked uncontrolled hypertension (MUCH) phenomena. Methods Primary care physicians, nationwide in Greece, assessed consecutive hypertensive patients on stable treatment using OBP (1 visit, triplicate measurements) and home blood pressure (HBP) measurements (7 days, duplicate morning and evening measurements). All measurements were performed using validated automated devices with bluetooth capacity (Omron M7 Intelli-IT). Uncontrolled OBP was defined as ≥140/90 mmHg, and uncontrolled HBP was defined as ≥135/85 mmHg. Results A total of 790 patients recruited by 135 doctors were analyzed (age: 64.5 ± 14.4 years, diabetics: 21.4%, smokers: 20.6%, and average number of antihypertensive drugs: 1.6 ± 0.8). OBP (137.5 ± 9.4/84.3 ± 7.7 mmHg, systolic/diastolic) was higher than HBP (130.6 ± 11.2/79.9 ± 8 mmHg; difference 6.9 ± 11.6/4.4 ± 7.6 mmHg, p Conclusions In primary care, automated OBP measurements are misleading in approximately 40% of treated hypertensive patients. HBP monitoring is mandatory to avoid overtreatment of subjects with WCH phenomenon and prevent undertreatment and subsequent excess cardiovascular disease in MUCH

Estimation of Technical Efficiency of General Hospitals of Kerman University of Medical Sciences by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Method in 2007

Abstract: Background & Aims: Hospitals as the largest and most costly operational units in health care system have special importance. The rate of their efficiency can be used as a criterion for the measurement of performance and productivity of resource consumption in hospitals. The purpose of this study was to determine the technical efficiency of general hospitals of Kerman University of Medical Sciences. Methods: This study is a descriptive - analytic study in which the efficiency of general hospitals in Kerman University of Medical Sciences, including 13 teaching hospitals was determined by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Data and relevant Statistics were collected from statistics office of the University and Deap2.1 software was used to achieve the objectives of the research. Then the hypotheses of the research were studied by using SPSS software. Results: The average technical efficiency of studied hospitals in 2007 was 0.912, managerial efficiency was 0.993 and mean scale efficiency was 0.918. In regard to technical efficiency, 7 hospitals had the maximum technical efficiency (1), 4 hospitals had 0.8–1 efficiency and 2 hospitals had the technical efficiency of less than 0.8. Conclusion: In hospitals with technical efficiency of less than one, the optimal and initial values for staff differed and had personnel surplus. Therefore these hospitals should decrease their initial values for staff in order to achieve the expected optimal performance. Keywords: Hospital, Technical efficiency, Data envelopment analysis, Managerial efficiency, Efficiency of scale, Constant return to scale, Variable return to sca

Pharmaceutical Industry and Trade Liberalization Using Computable General Equilibrium Model

Background: Computable general equilibrium models are known as a powerful instrument in economic analyses and widely have been used in order to evaluate trade liberalization effects. The purpose of this study was to provide the impacts of trade openness on pharmaceutical industry using CGE model.Methods: Using a computable general equilibrium model in this study, the effects of decrease in tariffs as a symbol of trade liberalization on key variables of Iranian pharmaceutical products were studied. Simulation was performed via two scenarios in this study. The first scenario was the effect of decrease in tariffs of pharmaceutical products as 10, 30, 50, and 100 on key drug variables, and the second was the effect of decrease in other sectors except pharmaceutical products on vital and economic variables of pharmaceutical products. The required data were obtained and the model parameters were calibrated according to the social accounting matrix of Iran in 2006.Results: The results associated with simulation demonstrated that the first scenario has increased import, export, drug supply to markets and household consumption, while import, export, supply of product to market, and household consumption of pharmaceutical products would averagely decrease in the second scenario. Ultimately, society welfare would improve in all scenarios.Conclusion: We presents and synthesizes the CGE model which could be used to analyze trade liberalization policy issue in developing countries (like Iran), and thus provides information that policymakers can use to improve the pharmacy economic

Hospital service quality - patient preferences - a discrete choice experiment.

PURPOSE: High quality healthcare is important to all patients. If healthcare is felt to be high quality, then patients will be satisfied, and the relationship between patients and healthcare providers will improve. Patient satisfaction is among the most commonly used service quality indicators; however, it is not fully known which factors influence satisfaction. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the elements that affect both healthcare quality and patient satisfaction. Nowadays, several methods are used in health economics to assess patient preferences, prioritize them and help health policy makers improve services. Discrete choice experiment (DCE) is one method that is useful to elicit patient preferences regarding healthcare services. The purpose of this paper is to apply DCE and elicit patient preferences in medical centers to rank certain healthcare quality factors. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The descriptive, analytical study used a cross-sectional questionnaire that the authors developed. In total, 12 scenarios were chosen after applying fractional factorials. The questionnaire was completed by patients who were admitted to Kerman General Teaching Hospitals, South-East Iran in 2015. Patient preferences were identified by calculating the characteristics' marginal effects and prioritizing them. The generalized estimation equation (GEE) model was used to determine attribute effects on patient preferences. FINDINGS: In total, 167 patients completed the questionnaire. Prioritizing the attributes showed that "physical examination" was the most important attribute. Other key features included "cleanliness," "training after discharging," "medical staff attention," "waiting for admission" and "staff attitude." All attributes were statistically significant ( p<0.05) except staff behavior. No demographic characteristic was significant. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: To increase hospital patient satisfaction, health policy makers should develop programs to enhance healthcare quality and hospital safety by increasing physical examination quality and other services. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: To estimate DCE independent variables, logistic regression models are usually used. The authors used the GEE model to estimate discrete choice experiment owing the explanatory variables' dependency

Can reputation migrate? On the propagation of reputation in multi-context communities

As e-communities grow in both quality and quantity, their online users require more appropriate tools to suite their needs in such environments. Many such tools are not explicitly needed in real-world communities where humans directly interact with each other. Trust making and reputation ascription are among the most important examples of such tools. Humans often build trust relationships through interaction or recommendation, and are therefore able to ascribe relevant reputation to those they interact with. However, in online communities the process of trust making and reputation ascription is more complicated. In this paper, we address a special case of the trust making process where community users need to create bonds with those they have not encountered before. This is a common situation in websites such as amazon.com, ebay.com, epionions.com and many others. The model we propose is able to estimate the possible reputation of a given identity in a any new context by observing his/her behavior in other communities. Our proposed model employs Dempster-Shafer based valuation networks to develop a global reputation structure and performs a belief propagation technique to infer contextual reputation values. The preliminary evaluation of the proposed model on a dataset collected from epinions.com shows promising results.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye