The Impacts Of Institutional Stock Ownership On Stock Returns And Performance: A Financial Market Perspective

Recent studies indicate that corporations with high Institutional ownership have higher stock prices than those with less Institutional ownership. Even small companies with high Institutional ownership have higher stock prices in their range. Institutions have researchers and analysts to investigate the financials and the industry potential of the firms. As a result, the perception is that high institutional ownership indicates good value. This study investigates if the percentage of institutional ownership directly correlates with the price of stocks.  The relationship between the Institutional ownerships and price was prevalent. This was more indicative among the large cap stocks than the small caps stocks.  It was also found that the higher the percentage of Institutional ownership does reflect a higher stock price.  This was manifest among the large caps than the small caps

Low-Cost, Commercial Scale Production of Sofosbuvir

Recent advances in antiviral therapeutics have produced highly effective small molecule drugs to treat Hepatitis C, a deadly infection of the liver. Sofosbuvir, a hepatitis C drug developed by Gilead Sciences, is a breakthrough treatment due to its low side effects and high cure rate. However, the cost of treatment is extraordinarily high, priced at $84,000 per treatment in the US. In response to backlash regarding the cost barriers in developing countries, Gilead has reached licensing agreements with generic pharmaceutical companies to produce the drug for markets in low-income countries such as India, Kenya, and Cuba among others. The report describes a cost-effective, commercial scale process design for the production of sofosbuvir. The proposed production facility is designed to deliver 350,000 kg/year of the active pharmaceutical ingredient, enough to treat 10 million patients per year. The production will be completed over one hundred batches, requiring operation of 120 days/year. Assuming an 11-year period of operation, detailed economic analysis suggests that this is a profitable venture with an IRR of 67.7$1.2 billion USD

On the implementation of error handling in dynamic interfaces to scientific codes

With the advent of powerful workstations with windowing systems, the scientific community has become interested in user friendly interfaces as a means of promoting the distribution of scientific codes to colleagues. Distributing scientific codes to a wider audience can, however, be problematic because scientists, who are familiar with the problem being addressed but not aware of necessary operational details, are encouraged to use the codes. A more friendly environment that not only guides user inputs, but also helps catch errors is needed. This thesis presents a dynamic graphical user interface (GUI) creation system with user controlled support for error detection and handling. The system checks a series of constraints defining a valid input set whenever the state of the system changes and notifies the user when an error has occurred. A naive checking scheme was implemented that checks every constraint every time the system changes. However, this method examines many constraints whose values have not changed. Therefore, a minimum evaluation scheme that only checks those constraints that may have been violated was implemented. This system was implemented in a prototype and user testing was used to determine if it was a success. Users examined both the GUI creation system and the end-user environment. The users found both to be easy to use and efficient enough for practical use. Moreover, they concluded that the system would promote distribution

Objective methods for reliable detection of concealed depression

Recent research has shown that it is possible to automatically detect clinical depression from audio-visual recordings. Before considering integration in a clinical pathway, a key question that must be asked is whether such systems can be easily fooled. This work explores the potential of acoustic features to detect clinical depression in adults both when acting normally and when asked to conceal their depression. Nine adults diagnosed with mild to moderate depression as per the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) were asked a series of questions and to read a excerpt from a novel aloud under two different experimental conditions. In one, participants were asked to act naturally and in the other, to suppress anything that they felt would be indicative of their depression. Acoustic features were then extracted from this data and analysed using paired t-tests to determine any statistically significant differences between healthy and depressed participants. Most features that were found to be significantly different during normal behaviour remained so during concealed behaviour. In leave-one-subject-out automatic classification studies of the 9 depressed subjects and 8 matched healthy controls, an 88% classification accuracy and 89% sensitivity was achieved. Results remained relatively robust during concealed behaviour, with classifiers trained on only non-concealed data achieving 81% detection accuracy and 75% sensitivity when tested on concealed data. These results indicate there is good potential to build deception-proof automatic depression monitoring systems

Residency Exposures and Anticipated Future Involvement in Community Settings

Objective— To assess how exposures to community activities in residency impact anticipated future involvement in community child health settings. Methods— Prospective cohort study of pediatric residents from 10 programs (12 sites) who completed training between 2003 and 2009. Residents reported annual participation for ≥8 days in each of 7 community activities (eg, community settings, child health advocacy) in the prior year. At the start and end of residency, residents reported anticipated involvement in 10 years in 8 community settings (eg, school, shelter). Anticipated involvement was dichotomized: moderate/ substantial (“high”) versus none/limited (“low”). Logistic regression modeled whether residency exposures independently influenced anticipated future involvement at the end of residency. Results— A total of 683 residents completed surveys at the start and end of residency (66.8% participation). More than half of trainees reported ≥8 days’ of involvement in community settings (65.6%) or child health advocacy (53.6%) in residency. Fewer anticipated high involvement in at least 1 community setting at the end of residency than at the start (65.5% vs 85.6%, P < .001). Participation in each community activity mediated but did not moderate relations between anticipated involvement at the start and end of residency. In multivariate models, exposure to community settings in residency was associated with anticipated involvement at end of residency (adjusted odds ratio 1.5; 95% confidence interval 1.2, 2.0). No other residency exposures were associated. Conclusions— Residents who anticipate high involvement in community pediatrics at the start of residency participate in related opportunities in training. Exposure to community settings during residency may encourage community involvement after training

COMPARATIVE STUDY OF KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE AND PRACTICE OF MIDWIVES ON ISLAMIC RULES OF MATERNITY CARE IN JALINGO LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, OF TARABA STATE, NIGERIA.

Background: Maternity care is still a mirage due to poor knowledge, attitudes, and practice of Islamic rules of maternity care, Objectives: The purpose of this study was to compare the Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of midwives on Islamic rules of maternity care in Jalingo LGA, Taraba state, Nigeria. Methodology:   Descriptive comparative, cross-sectional survey design with multi-stage and simple random sampling techniques. The population for the dissertation consisted of all Nurses and Midwives in two hospitals and Primary Health Care Centres and a sample size of 405 Nurses/midwives. The validated questionnaire was tested for reliability and validity with Cronbach Alfa, 0.80. Results:   The mean age of respondents was  36.10(0.43) ±8.21,   Majority were married (77.5%), female (75.3%), Muslims (65.7%), Hausa (45.6%), and those with RN and BNSc certifications (30.2/23.5%). knowledge on 24-points scale scored mean = 19.24 (0.11) ± 2.19,  Attitudes on 28-points scale, mean  =18.18 (0.16) ± 2.97 and Practice on 45-points scale, mean  = 34.83 (0.10) ± 5.71. Comparing how knowledge is spread across the type of health facilities, score were mean = 16.5 (0.18) ± 2.4 and mean  = 16.7 (0.19) ± 2.5; t- -1.001, P=0.318; mean  = 15.3 (0.3) ± 3.6 for PHCCs and mean  = 15.2 (0.3) ± 3.6, t-0.124, p=0.901 and Practices, mean = 17.6 (0.5) ± 6.4 for PHCs and mean = 17.7 (0.5) ± 6.6, t-0.114, p=0.915 for PHCCs and Hospitals respectively. Conclusion: Multi-cultural, ethnoreligious practices and perceptions concerning maternity care have posed many influences on maternity care. Recommendation: It is therefore recommended that High quality/evidence-based and culturally competent care be initiated by the midwives

How Do We Combat Bogus Medicines in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought concurrent challenges. The increased incidence of fake and falsified product distribution is one of these problems with tremendous impact, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Up to a tenth of medicines including antibiotics and antimalarial drugs in the African market are considered falsified. Pandemics make this worse by creating an ecosystem of confusion, distraction, and vulnerability stemming from the pandemic as health systems become more stressed and the workload of individuals increased. These environments create opportunities for substandard and falsified medicines to be more easily introduced into the marketplace by unscrupulous operators. In this work, we discussed some of the challenges with fake or falsified product distribution in the context of COVID-19 and proposed strategies to best manage this problem

Trends in the conduct and reporting of clinical prediction model development and validation: a systematic review

OBJECTIVES: This systematic review aims to provide further insights into the conduct and reporting of clinical prediction model development and validation over time. We focus on assessing the reporting of information necessary to enable external validation by other investigators.MATERIALS AND METHODS: We searched Embase, Medline, Web-of-Science, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar to identify studies that developed 1 or more multivariable prognostic prediction models using electronic health record (EHR) data published in the period 2009-2019.RESULTS: We identified 422 studies that developed a total of 579 clinical prediction models using EHR data. We observed a steep increase over the years in the number of developed models. The percentage of models externally validated in the same paper remained at around 10%. Throughout 2009-2019, for both the target population and the outcome definitions, code lists were provided for less than 20% of the models. For about half of the models that were developed using regression analysis, the final model was not completely presented.DISCUSSION: Overall, we observed limited improvement over time in the conduct and reporting of clinical prediction model development and validation. In particular, the prediction problem definition was often not clearly reported, and the final model was often not completely presented.CONCLUSION: Improvement in the reporting of information necessary to enable external validation by other investigators is still urgently needed to increase clinical adoption of developed models.</p

Women's Experiences with Cervical Cancer in Ghana

Cervical cancer remains a significant global public health concern, and its impact in low- and middle-income countries, including Ghana is profound. Existing policies in Ghana focus on early screening and diagnosis. While the primary step of diagnosis is important and widely represented in literature, the evidence on the experiences of women diagnosed with cervical cancer remain sparse. The aim of this scoping review, therefore, is to explore and map the available literature on the experiences of women diagnosed with cervical cancer in Ghana. This study was conducted according to the framework developed by Arksey and O’Malley and reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews. Five databases (Google Scholar, PubMed, SCOPUS, CINAHL, and Africa Journal online) were searched using key words and key terms. Two authors independently screened the titles and abstracts, and the full texts of the included studies. Out of the 463 studies identified through the database search, ten studies met the eligibility criteria and were included in the review. The findings reveal that, the experiences of Ghanaian women with cervical cancer are multifaceted. These experiences are influenced by physical, psychological, and socio-cultural factors with significant impact on their quality of life. The women expressed ongoing discomfort due to bleeding and chronic pain. Psychologically, the women expressed pervasive anxiety, due to the fear associated with the diagnosis, and the cost associated living with cervical cancer. The socio-cultural experiences varied among the women. While some of the women expressed receiving support from their family members and friends, others reported receiving immense support from their significant others. Policy makers must consider including the experiences of women with cervical cancer in policy to provide interventions that meet their specific needs