Knowledge, awareness, attitudes, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) towards practices for COVID-19 infection prevention in Sarawak, Malaysia

The coronavirus disease pandemic is a viral disease that is spreading globally. In Malaysia, the government has contributed much effort in preventing the spread of the disease. However, the confirmed cases have kept increasing over the past year. Hence, there is a need to study the factors affecting the practices of the coronavirus disease prevention. A total of 1,515 datasets were collected from the respondents of 13-year-old and above within the whole Sarawak. Preliminary data analysis was performed by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 26.0, then partial least squares structural equation modelling analysis were performed using WarpPLS 7.0 to investigate the relationship of general public knowledge, public awareness, attitude and opinions of standard operating procedures toward practices of the coronavirus disease prevention. Besides, the analysis of the responses for each of the measurement item was reported. The result indicated that general public knowledge, public attitude and opinions of standard operating procedures were significantly impacting the practices of the coronavirus disease prevention. The study further revealed that public awareness was not impacting practices of the coronavirus disease prevention. It is imperative for the government to educate the public on the coronavirus disease knowledge. Besides, the public should do their part to coordinate with the government in preventing the coronavirus disease from the spread

Determinants Of Destination Image And Competitiveness In Sibu Heritage Trail: A PLS-SEM Approach

Tourism is the largest sector in the world and contributes significantly to the economies of the most advanced and developing countries. A major concern on limited resources and acknowledgement of competitiveness all led to the expansion of the literature on the competitiveness of tourism destinations. While there are limited studies investigating destination image and destination competitiveness, no studies have been found to examine the determinants of destination image and destination competitiveness. Thus, the present study attempts to explore whether accessibility quality, accommodation quality, destination attractiveness & resources on destination image and competitiveness. Data were collected from 132 tourists who have visited Sibu Heritage Trail. SmartPLS 3.0 was used to assess the developed model. The results highlighted that accessibility quality was positively and significantly related to the destination image. Besides, destination attractiveness and resources were found to be positively and significantly related to destination competitiveness as well as destination image. On the other hand, destination image was also found to have a significant and positive impact on destination competitiveness. The implications and limitations of the present study were further discussed

ANTECEDENTS OF DESTINATION IMAGE IN NATURAL PROTECTED AREA: THE MODERATING ROLE OF PERCEIVED VALUE

Ecotourism is a nature-oriented tourism idea that is flourishing and with promising outlook. The present study attempts to explore the importance of local communities’ attitude, carrying capacity and destination attractiveness & resources towards destination image by adopting perceived value as a moderator on examining the antecedents on destination image. Data were collected from 146 tourists who have visited Bako National Park, Sarawak. The research employs WarpPLS 6.0 and the results revealed that local communities’ attitude, carrying capacity and destination attractiveness & resources have impact on destination image. Perceived value has moderating effect between destination attractiveness & resources and destination image

Factors That Influences the Intention of Middle-Aged Adults' in Johor to Move Into A Retirement Village

Malaysia is in the fifth place for world’s top ten retirement havens. In light to the combination of medical and the growth of old aged community in Malaysia, a few developers are experimenting with the concept of retirement village. The current study aimed to explore and gain a better understanding of the factors that will influence the intention of the middle aged adults in Johor to move into a retirement village. Based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, the study found that Attitude and Subjective Norm has a positive and significant impact on the intention. Perceived Behavioural Control may be statistically significant but has not accurately predict the intention because of the absence of past behaviour or knowledge. The results indicated that those with tertiary education and who earns more that RM10,000 have intention to move in to the retirement village. The study itself have plausible explanation of the results and paved more opportunities for future research

Foxp2 controls synaptic wiring of corticostriatal circuits and vocal communication by opposing Mef2c

Cortico-basal ganglia circuits are critical for speech and language and are implicated in autism spectrum disorder, in which language function can be severely affected. We demonstrate that in the mouse striatum, the gene Foxp2 negatively interacts with the synapse suppressor gene Mef2c. We present causal evidence that Mef2c inhibition by Foxp2 in neonatal mouse striatum controls synaptogenesis of corticostriatal inputs and vocalization in neonates. Mef2c suppresses corticostriatal synapse formation and striatal spinogenesis, but can itself be repressed by Foxp2 through direct DNA binding. Foxp2 deletion de-represses Mef2c, and both intrastriatal and global decrease of Mef2c rescue vocalization and striatal spinogenesis defects of Foxp2-deletion mutants. These findings suggest that Foxp2-Mef2C signaling is critical to corticostriatal circuit formation. If found in humans, such signaling defects could contribute to a range of neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R37 HD028341)Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.) (Award R37 HD028341

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Catechin content and the degree of its galloylation in oolong tea are inversely correlated with cultivation altitude

AbstractThe taste quality of oolong tea generated from leaves of Camellia sinensis L. cultivated in the same mountain area is positively correlated to the cultivation altitude, partly due to the inverse correlation with the astringency of the tea infusion. The astringency of oolong tea mostly results from the presence of polyphenolic compounds, mainly catechins and their derivatives. Four catechins, (-)-epicatechin (EC) and (-)-epigallocatechin (EGC) together with their gallate derivatives (with relatively high astringency), (-)-EC gallate (ECG) and (-)-EGC gallate (EGCG), were detected as major compounds in oolong tea. The degrees of catechin galloylation, designated as ECG/(EC + ECG) and EGCG/(EGC + EGCG), in both oolong tea infusions and their fresh tea leaves, were found to be inversely correlated to the cultivation altitude at 200 m, 800 m, and 1300 m. A similar inverse correlation was observed when seven more oolong tea infusions and seven more fresh leaves harvested at altitude ranging from 170 m to 1600 m were recruited for the analyses. Moreover, catechin contents in oolong tea infusions were also found to be inversely correlated to the cultivation altitude. It is proposed that catechin content and the degree of its galloylation account for, at least partly, the inverse correlation between the astringency of oolong tea and the cultivation altitude

Assessment of Rice Developmental Stage Using Time Series UAV Imagery for Variable Irrigation Management

Rice is one of the three major crops in the world and is the major crop in Asia. Climate change and water resource shortages may result in decreases in rice yields and possible food shortage crises. In this study, water-saving farming management was tested, and IOT field water level monitoring was used to regulate water inflow automatically. Plant height (PH) is an important phenotype to be used to determine difference in rice growth periods and yields using water-saving irrigation. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with an RGB camera captured sequential images of rice fields to estimate rice PH compared with PH measured on site for estimating rice growth stages. The test results, with two crop harvests in 2019, revealed that with adequate image calibration, the correlation coefficient between UAV-PH and field-PH was higher than 0.98, indicating that UAV images can accurately determine rice PH in the field and rice growth phase. The study demonstrated that water-saving farming is effective, decreasing water usage for the first and second crops of 2019 by 53.5% and 21.7%, respectively, without influencing the growth period and final yield. Coupled with an automated irrigation system, rice farming can be adaptive to water shortage situations