16 research outputs found
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Relevance of heat stress and dehydration to chronic kidney disease (CKDu) in Sri Lanka.
Chronic kidney disease in the absence of hypertension and diabetes is a growing problem among agricultural laborers in tropical and subtropical regions. It is unclear if heat stress and dehydration are risk factors for this form of chronic kidney disease (CKDu). To investigate this relationship, agricultural workers in four villages (n = 261) in North Central Province, Sri Lanka completed the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) health hazard evaluation of heat stress, translated into Sinhalese (July 2017). We constructed a heat stress/dehydration index based on the frequency of 16 symptoms (range 0-32; reliability, 0.84). Workers provided a urine sample for dipstick assessment of urine albumin-creatinine ratio (ACR) and refractometer analysis of urine concentration. Of 261 respondents, 41 participants reported diabetes or chronic kidney disease. They scored higher on the heat stress-dehydration index (10.78 vs. 8.03, p < .01) and were more likely to have ACR > 30 (85.4% vs. 69.4%, p < .05). Among 216 non-pregnant agricultural workers without diabetes or kidney disease (mean age, 46.6; 37% male), villagers in the high-CKDu prevalence area were more likely to show signs of dehydration (for example, greater urine concentration, 1.015 vs. 1.012, p < .05, among males); however, the heat stress-dehydration index overall was not associated with ACR or urine concentration. Because an elevated ACR (proteinuria) is not a reliable marker of early CKDu, additional studies are needed to assess the association between heat stress-dehydration symptoms and risk of CKDu
Making Sense of Business Process Descriptions: An Experimental Comparison of Graphical and Textual Notations
How effective is a notation in conveying the writer's intent correctly? This paper identifies understandability of design notations as an important aspect which calls for an experimental comparison. We compare the success of university students in interpreting business process descriptions, for an established graphical notation (BPMN) and for an alternative textual notation (based on written use-cases). Because a design must be read by diverse communities, including technically-trained professionals such as developers and business analysts, as well as end-users and stakeholders from a wider business setting, we used different types of participants in our experiment. Specifically, we included those who had formal training in process description, and others who had not. Our experiments showed significant increases by both groups in their understanding of the process from reading the textual model. This was not so for the graphical model, where only the trained readers showed significant increases. This finding points at the value of educating readers of graphical descriptions in that particular notation when they become exposed to such models in their daily work