A Conceptual Model for Scholarly Research Activity

This paper presents a conceptual model for scholarly research activity, developed as part of the conceptual modelling work within the ???Preparing DARIAH??? European e-Infrastructures project. It is inspired by cultural-historical activity theory, and is expressed in terms of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, extending its notion of activity so as to also account, apart from historical practice, for scholarly research planning. It is intended as a framework for structuring and analyzing the results of empirical research on scholarly practice and information requirements, encompassing the full research lifecycle of information work and involving both primary evidence and scholarly objects; also, as a framework for producing clear and pertinent information requirements, and specifications of digital infrastructures, tools and services for scholarly research. We plan to use the model to tag interview transcripts from an empirical study on scholarly information work, and thus validate its soundness and fitness for purpose

Long-Term Oxygen Therapy in COPD: Factors Affecting and Ways of Improving Patient Compliance

Long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT) is the cornerstone mode of treatment in patients with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) associated with resting hypoxaemia. When appropriately prescribed and correctly used, LTOT has clearly been shown to improve survival in hypoxemic COPD patients. Adherence to LTOT ranges from 45% to 70% and utilization for more than 15 hours per day is widely accepted as efficacious. Although several studies have addressed the level of patients' adherence to LTOT, few have suggested or evaluated interventions that conduce to compliance enhancement. The lack of sufficient data regarding COPD patients following oxygen prescription is an enormous void that must be duly confronted to augment clinical effectiveness and cost containment for the long term use. The present review article highlights factors influencing the compliance of patients using LTOT and emphasizes novel strategies and interventions that may prove to be of significant benefit given the remarkably little current research appraising this issue. Therefore, additional research should be promptly performed to verify the efficacy of newly designed approaches in improving the outcomes of patients receiving LTOT

Pay Inequality and Gender Pay Gap

The topic of this thesis paper is pay inequality and gender pay gap, specifically within the United States while occasionally comparing Europe and other parts of the world. The research questions that are brought up while starting this thesis process were how the topic started and developed with the last 10 years. Plus, the potential strides to eliminate the thesis topics issues within the United States. The method of analysis for this thesis paper includes an integrative desktop literature review while analyzing various online and prior academic research articles. The result of studying the numerous amounts of research helped gather three primary resolutions to remove the pay inequality and gender pay gap in the United States. This academic research was only conducted analyzing only male and female genders. Future research should include or attempt to interview and find data regarding the LGBTQ2+ community and those affected such as transgenders, non-binary, etc

Inherited Cardiomyopathies: From Genotype to Phenotype

The heart undergoes extensive morphological, metabolic, and energetic remodeling in response to inherited, or familial, hypertrophic cardiomyopathies (FHC). Myocyte contractile perturbations downstream of Ca2+, the so-called sarcomere-controlled mechanisms, may represent the earliest indicators of this remodeling. We can now state that the dynamics of cardiac contraction and relaxation during the progression of FHC are governed by downstream mechanisms, particularly the kinetics and energetics of actin and myosin interaction to drive the trajectory of pathological cardiac remodeling. This notion is unambiguously supported by elegant studies above linking inheritable FHC-causing mutations to cardiomyopathies, known to disturb contractile function and alter the energy landscape of the heart. Although studies examining the biophysical properties of cardiac myocytes with FHC-causing mutations have yielded a cellular and molecular understanding of myofilament function, this knowledge has had limited translational success. This is driven by a critical failure in elucidating an integrated and sequential link among the changing energy landscape, myofilament function, and initiated signaling pathways in response to FHC. Similarly, there continues to be a major gap in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms contributing to sex differences in FHC development and progression. The primary reason for this gap is a lack of a “unifying” or “central” hypothesis that integrates signaling cascades, energetics, sex and FHC

Preparing DARIAH

In this paper, a preparatory project for an integrated European research infrastructure in the humanities is presented. This project, Preparing for the construction of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities - or Preparing DARIAH for short, is part of the ESFRI e-infrastructures programme and supports the emergence of a new collaborative framework in which researchers are able to maximise the impact of their work on the international stage and aims at providing the foundations for the timely construction of the infrastructure requisite for the arts, humanities and cultural heritage communities in the digital age. DARIAH uses an interdisciplinary approach and involves tackling a number of interrelated issues such as strategic, organisational, financial, technical and conceptual in order to facilitate long-term access to and use of all European humanities and cultural heritage information for the purposes of enhancing and expanding research, thereby increasing our knowledge and understanding of our histories, heritage, languages and cultures. The DARIAH network will act as a place where the incubation of new ideas and ways of working can be facilitated and developed, and then transitioned into established organisations thus ensuring long-term sustainability and stability and the integration of these methods and techniques into everyday research practice. DARIAH will support research practitioners at all stages in the research process, and at differing levels of sophistication, from beginners through to those employing advanced techniques and methodologies

Preparation and characterisation of vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotube arrays on porous silicon

http://spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/doc/SPIEDL-home/proc