IJEPA: Gray Area for Health Policy and International Nurse Migration

Indonesia is recognized as a nurse exporting country, with policies that encourage nursing professionals to emigrate abroad. This includes the country's adoption of international principles attempting to protect Indonesian nurses that emigrate as well as the country's own participation in a bilateral trade and investment agreement, known as the Indonesia�Japan Economic Partnership Agreement that facilitates Indonesian nurse migration to Japan. Despite the potential trade and employment benefits from sending nurses abroad under the Indonesia�Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, Indonesia itself is suffering from a crisis in nursing capacity and ensuring adequate healthcare access for its own populations. This represents a distinct challenge for Indonesia in appropriately balancing domestic health workforce needs, employment, and training opportunities for Indonesian nurses, and the need to acknowledge the rights of nurses to freely migrate abroad. Hence, this article reviews the complex operational and ethical issues associated with Indonesian health worker migration under the Indonesia�Japan Economic Partnership Agreement. It also introduces a policy proposal to improve performance of the Indonesia�Japan Economic Partnership Agreement and better align it with international principles focused on equitable health worker migration

Development and validation of the short-form Adolescent Health Promotion Scale.

BACKGROUND: Health-promoting lifestyle choices of adolescents are closely related to current and subsequent health status. However, parsimonious yet reliable and valid screening tools are scarce. The original 40-item adolescent health promotion (AHP) scale was developed by our research team and has been applied to measure adolescent health-promoting behaviors worldwide. The aim of our study was to examine the psychometric properties of a newly developed short-form version of the AHP (AHP-SF) including tests of its reliability and validity. METHODS: The study was conducted in nine middle and high schools in southern Taiwan. Participants were 814 adolescents randomly divided into two subgroups with equal size and homogeneity of baseline characteristics. The first subsample (calibration sample) was used to modify and shorten the factorial model while the second subsample (validation sample) was utilized to validate the result obtained from the first one. The psychometric testing of the AHP-SF included internal reliability of McDonald's omega and Cronbach's alpha, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and construct validity with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). RESULTS: The results of the CFA supported a six-factor model and 21 items were retained in the AHP-SF with acceptable model fit. For the discriminant validity test, results indicated that adolescents with lower AHP-SF scores were more likely to be overweight or obese, skip breakfast, and spend more time watching TV and playing computer games. The AHP-SF also showed excellent internal consistency with a McDonald's omega of 0.904 (Cronbach's alpha 0.905) in the calibration group. CONCLUSION: The current findings suggest that the AHP-SF is a valid and reliable instrument for the evaluation of adolescent health-promoting behaviors. Primary health care providers and clinicians can use the AHP-SF to assess these behaviors and evaluate the outcome of health promotion programs in the adolescent population

Substituting or Complementing?---The Influence of Chinese Overseas Direct Investment on Domestic Exports

The aim of this paper is to verify whether overseas direct investment activities of China can substitute or complement domestic exports. Using panel data of 85 host countries from 2003 to 2011 we conduct detailed empirical examinations within the framework of the gravity model. After correcting for bias caused by synchronism between trade flow and investment flow and also for econometrical misspecifications we discover that, contrary to all existing studies, Chinese overseas direct investment has a very weak substituting relationship with domestic exports. Sub-sample regressions show that Chinese overseas direct investment substitutes exports to developed countries but complements exports to developing countries. Panel threshold model further confirms the role of host country’s economic developmental stage (measured by per capita GDP) in determining the influence of overseas direct investment on exports and detects two thresholds. Thus the sample is divided into three regimes: (1) in the first regime where per capita GDP is lower than 1150.39 dollars, overseas direct investment complements exports to the host country; (2) in the second regime where per capita GDP falls between 1150.39 and 11601.63 dollars, the “gray zone”, overseas direct investment has very weak influence on domestic exports; (3) in the third regime where per capita GDP exceeds 11601.63 dollars, overseas direct investment substitutes exports to the host country. This paper concludes with possible explanations to the empirical results and the threshold phenomenon

Substituting or Complementing?---The Influence of Chinese Overseas Direct Investment on Domestic Exports

The aim of this paper is to verify whether overseas direct investment activities of China can substitute or complement domestic exports. Using panel data of 85 host countries from 2003 to 2011 we conduct detailed empirical examinations within the framework of the gravity model. After correcting for bias caused by synchronism between trade flow and investment flow and also for econometrical misspecifications we discover that, contrary to all existing studies, Chinese overseas direct investment has a very weak substituting relationship with domestic exports. Sub-sample regressions show that Chinese overseas direct investment substitutes exports to developed countries but complements exports to developing countries. Panel threshold model further confirms the role of host country’s economic developmental stage (measured by per capita GDP) in determining the influence of overseas direct investment on exports and detects two thresholds. Thus the sample is divided into three regimes: (1) in the first regime where per capita GDP is lower than 1150.39 dollars, overseas direct investment complements exports to the host country; (2) in the second regime where per capita GDP falls between 1150.39 and 11601.63 dollars, the “gray zone”, overseas direct investment has very weak influence on domestic exports; (3) in the third regime where per capita GDP exceeds 11601.63 dollars, overseas direct investment substitutes exports to the host country. This paper concludes with possible explanations to the empirical results and the threshold phenomenon

Catastrophic Emission of Charges from Near-Extremal Nariai Black Holes

Using the in-out formalism and also the monodromy method, we study the emission of charges from near-extremal charged Nariai black holes with the black hole and cosmological horizons close to each other. The emission becomes catastrophic for a charge with energy greater than its chemical potential, whose leading exponential factor increases inversely proportional to the separation of two horizons. This implies that near-extremal Nariai black holes quickly evaporate through the charge emission and end in the de Sitter space, in contrast to near-extremal RN-dS black holes that have the Breitenlohner-Friedman bound below which they become stable against Hawking radiation and Schwinger effect of charge emission. We illuminate the origin of the catastrophic emission in the phase-integral formulation by comparing near-extremal charged Nariai black holes with near-extremal RN-dS black holes.Comment: 15 page

Functional analysis of hepatitis B virus pre-s deletion variants associated with hepatocellular carcinoma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Naturally occurring pre-S deletion mutants have been identified in hepatitis B carriers and shown to be associated with the development of hepatocellular carcinoma. The phenotypes of these pre-S deletion genomes remain unclear, and they were investigated in this study.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The pre-S deletion genomes: (1) pre-S1 deletion, (2) deletion spanning pre-S1 and pre-S2, (3) pre-S2 N-terminal deletion, and (4) pre-S2 internal deletion were constructed and analyzed by transfection into Huh-7 cells.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Functional analyses reveal that these mutants were divided into two groups: S promoter deletion and non-S promoter deletion variants. Compared with the wild-type genome, S promoter deletion variants led to an inverse ratio of pre-S1 mRNA and pre-S2/S mRNA, and intracellular accumulation of surface proteins. An interesting finding is that a small amount of L proteins was detected in the medium from S promoter deletion variant-transfected cells. Non-S promoter deletion variants conversely displayed a wild-type like mRNA and protein pattern. The secretion of surface proteins from non-S promoter deletion variants was inhibited less than from S promoter deletion variant. Immunofluorescence analysis showed mutant surface proteins colocalized with ER and exhibited an atypical distribution: granular staining pattern in the S-promoter deletion variants and perinuclear staining pattern in the non-S promoter deletion variants.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study shows that these pre-S deletion genomes exhibit two different phenotypes in mRNA transcription, surface protein expression and secretion. This diversity seems to result from the deletion of S promoter rather than result from the deletion of pre-S1 or pre-S2.</p

Television Meets Facebook: The Correlation between TV Ratings and Social Media

Abstract This study examines the relationship between social media site Facebook and TV ratings drawing from audience factors of integration model of audience behavior. Based on context of Taiwan television network programs, this study collected measures for Facebook likes, shares, comments, posts for three genres of television shows and their Nielsen ratings over a period of eleven weeks, resulting in the size of sample more than 130 observations. This study applied multiple regression models and determined that the key social media measures correlate with TV ratings. In essence, TV shows with higher number of posts and engagement are likely to relate to higher ratings, special in drama shows. Subsequently, this study constructed the TV prediction models with measures for Facebook via SVR. The results suggested that prediction models are a good forecasting of which MAPE was between 10% -20%, even less than 10%. This implies that TV network should be motivated to invest in social media and engage their audience and analysts can use social media as a mechanism of exante forecasting

Determination of band alignment in the single layer MoS2/WSe2 heterojunction

The emergence of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) as 2D electronic materials has stimulated proposals of novel electronic and photonic devices based on TMD heterostructures. Here we report the determination of band offsets in TMD heterostructures by using microbeam X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy ({\mu}-XPS) and scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S). We determine a type-II alignment between $\textrm{MoS}_2$ and $\textrm{WSe}_2$ with a valence band offset (VBO) value of 0.83 eV and a conduction band offset (CBO) of 0.76 eV. First-principles calculations show that in this heterostructure with dissimilar chalcogen atoms, the electronic structures of $\textrm{WSe}_2$ and $\textrm{MoS}_2$ are well retained in their respective layers due to a weak interlayer coupling. Moreover, a VBO of 0.94 eV is obtained from density functional theory (DFT), consistent with the experimental determination.Comment: ^ These authors contributed equally. *Corresponding author E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] 20 pages, 4 figures in main tex