A relationship between personality traits and Internet addiction in a sample of Albanian university students

The internet is one of the most important inventions that has brought the world together. It has changed the way we live, the way we work, and the way we learn. The internet takes a major part of our time, and research has shown that people struggle to find the balance between being online or offline. When this escalates to the level of addiction, we have a major problem. Even though this is now a worrying problem, just a few investigations have been made into understanding the relationship between internet addiction and its potential risk factors. This study aims to explore and understand the relationship between personality traits and internet addiction in a sample of Albanian university students. To date, the researcher could not identify any existing studies that examine internet addiction and personality traits among Albanian young adults. Students from a private university in Albania were asked to complete two questionnaires, that were designed (1) to measure the presence and severity of internet addiction and (2) to measure the big five personality traits. The conclusions provided by the data analysis indicated that internet addiction had a significant negative correlation with conscientiousness but there was no other significant correlation between internet addiction and the other Big Five personality traits

Cryptography, SPN algorithm and a simulation on S-Boxes

It is impossible to imagine ourselves not involved in this tremendously increasingtechnology nowadays. In the field of networking, the area of network security consists of the provisions and policies adopted by the network administrator to prevent and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of thecomputer network and resources that are network-accessible. Network security is acomplicated subject, historically only discussed by well-trained and experienced experts. However, as more and more we become "wired", all of us need tounderstand the basics of security in a networked world. In this research paper wetreat shortly the network concepts such as authentication and anti-virus softs and management of security which is different for all kinds of networks. So a small home or a workplace would only require basic security while large businesses will require high maintenance and advanced software and hardware to prevent malicious attacks from hacking and spamming. The term network security and information security are often used interchangeably. Information security uses cryptography to transform usable information into a form that renders it unusable by anyone other than an authorized user; this process is called encryption. Some history of cryptography is included, as well as an introduction that begins with Caesar Cipherand other used simple cryptosystems such as Shift, Substitution, Affine, Vigenere,Hill, Permutation, and Autokey Ciphers and the classification of modern cryptographic algorithms. In next session will be discussed S-Boxes as the most important part of SPN (Substitution-Permutation Network) that is a mixed transformation of bits in a number of rounds. What is more important is the non linearity of the s-box within a cryptosystem. That means that the function between the input bits and output bits must be non-linear. This gives the strengthness of analgorithm against attacks. The question is; how can this be achieved? There are several criterias that an s-box must satisfy to be non-linear. These will be described in an example then we go on with a software that examines the properties of the sbox.As a result will be defined if the s-box is appropriate to be used or not. What usreally matters is that what must be secret has to be a secret

Subtotal Esophagectomy-Akiyama Procedure： In a Case with Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Adenocarcinoma, typically in the distal third of the esophagus, and squamous cell carcinoma, typically in the proximal two thirds of the esophagus, each make up 49% of cases of esophageal cancer. The remaining cancers in this area include sarcoma (1%), lymphoma (0.5%), cylindroma (0.25%), and primary melanoma (0.25%). Case report We present patient S.G. 62 years old, male, with the following symptoms started 3 months from hospital admission: difficult swalloing mostly for the hard foods and eventually for the liquids too, chest burning, cough and vomiting, throat pain, weight loss. In the laboratory findings only a mild anemia was found, Hemoglobine 10.8 g/dl, and slightly high values of CRP. Patient was hospitalized in the First Clinic of General Surgery, University Hospital Center “Mother Teresa” Tirana, Albania and underwent an upper gastrointestinal tract endoscopy and 28 cm form the incisive teeth and esophageal narrowing was detected which could not allow the scope to go lower for further examination. Biopsy was taken through endoscopy. Patient was planned for a CT scan and tumor markers, CEA and CA 19-9, both later ones came in normal values. CT scan showed an irregular, asymmetric narrowing of the thoracic esophagus, thickening of the esophagus walls with 4 cm of extension without invasion of local periesophageal fat and regional lymphadenopathy. The biopsy resulted; esophageal squamous cell carcinoma G2. In these circumstances patient underwent a feeding jejunostomy and was sent to follow the protocol of neoadjuvant chemo and radiotherapy. Three months later the patient is returned in our clinic, where he underwent the surgical intervention. Postoperatively the patient was treated in the Intensive Care Unit. The next day after the operation, cervical drains were removed and in the fourth postoperative day the thoracic and abdominal drains were also removed. Patient comes in the surgery ward in the fifth postoperative day where is treated afterwards with an excellent postoperative course. In the tenth postoperative day the anastomosis integrity is verified by x-ray swallowing contrast gastrografin, and the next day he was discharged from the hospital. Keywords: Esophageal, squamous cell carcinoma, subtotal esophagectomy DOI: 10.7176/ALST/79-05 Publication date:March 31st 202

Hepato Cellular Carcinoma: Case Report

Hepatoma is a tumoral disease that consists in an abnormal proliferation of the hepatic cells. According to the augmentation of the risks factors such as smoking, alcohol abuse, consuming no healthy food and different types of viral and bacterial infections. Nowadays, this disease is becoming more evident even in the young ages. Here, we present a 63 old female with this disease. Keywords: Hetapoma, tumoral, disease DOI: 10.7176/ALST/78-06 Publication date: March 1st 202

A three-microRNA signature identifies two subtypes of glioblastoma patients with different clinical outcomes

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common and malignant primary brain tumor in adults, characterized by aggressive growth, limited response to therapy, and inexorable recurrence. Because of the extremely unfavorable prognosis of GBM, it is important to develop more effective diagnostic and therapeutic strategies based on biologically and clinically relevant patient stratification systems. Analyzing a collection of patient-derived GBM stem-like cells (GSCs) by gene expression profiling, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and signal transduction pathway activation, we identified two GSC clusters characterized by different clinical features. Due to the widely documented role played by microRNAs (miRNAs) in the tumorigenesis process, in this study we explored whether these two GBM patient subtypes could also be discriminated by different miRNA signatures. Global miRNA expression pattern was analyzed by oblique principal component (OPC) analysis and principal component analysis (PCA). By a combined inferential strategy on PCA results, we identified a reduced set of three miRNAs - miR-23a, miR-27a and miR-9* (miR-9-3p) - able to discriminate the proneural- and mesenchymal-like GSC phenotypes as well as mesenchymal and proneural subtypes of primary GBM included in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset. Kaplan-Meier analysis showed a significant correlation between the selected miRNAs and overall survival in 429 GBM specimens from TCGA-identifying patients who had an unfavorable outcome. The survival prognostic capability of the three miRNA signatures could have important implications for the understanding of the biology of GBM subtypes and could be useful in patient stratification to facilitate interpretation of results from clinical trials

Conceptual metaphors in the Albanian political and journalistic discourse and their meaning

The aim of this article is to analyze the conceptual metaphors in the Albanian political and journalistic discourse and its reception in the public. The notion of ‘conceptual metaphors’ is relatively new in the linguistics, it has started with Lakoff and Johnson: Metaphors we live by (1980). In the Albanian language there are few works about conceptual metaphors: Arbër Çeliku has committed some research according to this topic, comparing the Albanian with the German language (2009) and Albanian with the English language (2013). The metaphorizations in the concept level are very productive in the Albanian language, especially the politicians and journalists seem to use them very cleverly, and they use them as a weapon against the opponents and the critical thinking. The corpus of this article contents political speeches, declarations of different politicians, texts from different journals and Albanian online platforms, etc. Analyzing all this, we have classified the conceptual metaphors in different typologies as: conceptual metaphors they content idioms, lexemes with a mythological background, somatic lexemes, etc

The political and juridical status of Albanians in Macedonia after the Agreement of Prespa

After the independence of the Macedonian state in 1991, the Albanians lost the status of the nationality guaranteed with the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 and they became a minority. In the nowadays constellations, especially with the Agreement between Macedonia and Greece about the name issue, Albanians, as a result of the daily politics and not having a strategy for protecting their national rights, risk to lose the national identity which was protected with fanaticism during the centuries. The Agreement of Prespa which was signed in July this year between Macedonia and Greece under international mediation, should change the name of the state into Republic of Northern Macedonia and the ethnic Macedonians will protect their identity. But, it is unknown how this agreement will treat Albanians and others. The aim of this work is to analyze the debates on the status of the autochthon Albanians in Macedonia, as well as social and political strategies concerning expected constitutional changes

Towards Continuity-as-Code

Canary deployment is a well-known deployment strategy that allows companies to test their newest version of an application, also known as the canary, with a subset of the real network traffic. This enables engineers to detect various types of errors and performance degradations in advance. As a result, any negative impacts on the user experience as well as any potential risks are minimized. However, this deployment strategy is as good as it is sophisticated to implement, due to the amount of steps needed to complete it and because of the advancements that have occurred in the world of software deployment, with regards to automation. This thesis explores canary deployment setups in containerized cloud environments, with special focus on automation. The result is three technical implementations which build on top of another and show the progression of canary deployments from a manual setup to a more automated one. What was observed is that when increasing the level of automation, the complexity of the mechanism hosting the canary implementation increases as well due to the decrease of adaptability in various use-cases. The three created technical prototypes are best-practice solutions which resemble what is offered today from the industry and we classify them as local solutions. The results indicate that a high-level approach for automated canary deployments is missing and this thesis proposes a novel, language-based approach to overcome the adaptability issues observed from the local solutions. We name this approach as Continuity-as-Code to show the importance of continuous delivery-as-code. Future exploration of this approach can pave the way towards high-level, automated and more expressive ways to implement canary deployments and other deployment strategies