The Effectiveness of Using E-Marketing to Promote Product on Sale for Supermarket

In these days most supermarkets acknowledge the importance of SMS marketing and web in reaching and interacting with their customers. However, there is much discussion regarding the effectiveness when it comes to SMS marketing. This study helped the customers and sellers and willing to accept, reading and using SMS messages: effective is SMS marketing compared to traditional marketing communications. The goal of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of SMS promotion compared to traditional ways in marketing for different aspects and on the other hand, to develop prototype by using web and SMS technology to apply this system and extent consumers are willing to accept commercial messages on their mobile phone, since the effectiveness of SMS marketing highly depends on this willing. The results of this research indicate that the use of the web and SMS for the benefit of the seller and the buyer in all aspects instead using traditional ways in promotion

Editorial: Selected Papers from IFIP Working Group 9.4, Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, Assessing the Contribution of ICT to Development Goals

The guest editors of this issue are the organizers of the 10th International Conference of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) 9.4 working group on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries. This special issue of Information Technologies \u26 International Development presents selected papers from the conference

An Improved Associative Classification Algorithm based on Incremental Rules

In Associative classification (AC), the step of rule generation is necessarily exhaustive because of the inherited search problems from the association rule. Besides which, the entire rules set must be induced prior constructing the classifier. This article proposes a new AC algorithm called Dynamic Covering Associative Classification (DCAC) that learns each rule from a training dataset, removes its classified instances, and then learns the next rule from the remaining unclassified data rather than the original training dataset. This ensures that the exhaustive steps of rule evaluation and candidate generation will no longer be needed, thereby maintaining a real time rule generation process. The proposed algorithm constantly amends the support and confidence for each rule rather restricting itself with the support and confidence computed from the original dataset. Experiments on 20 datasets from different domains showed that the proposed algorithm generates higher quality and more accurate classifiers than other AC rule induction approaches

COVID-19 IN LEBANON: DEMOGRAPHICS AND DISTRIBUTION

COVID-19 pandemic has emerged over more than 200 countries leading to more than 117 million infection cases and more than 2.6 million deaths. Lebanon is one of the countries affected by this disease especially in the second half of 2020 reaching its peak early this year. In this study, we studied the impact of multiple factors on this surge and analyzed the positive tests among different age groups over a period of one year (from March 2020 to February 2021). Data was collected from one medical center in Beirut where more than 20,000 PCR tests were done using RT-PCR method between March 2020 and February 2021 and analyzed the pattern of increase of the rate of positivity over this period. The SARS-CoV-2 positivity rate was 13% over a period of one year. The highest number of positive PCR tests was in patients aged between 20 and 39 years. Furthermore, the number of positive tests was low in the first 4 months, which was followed by a dramatic increase in July 2020 reaching a peak in January 2021. Lebanon is among the countries affected lately by the COVID-19 pandemic with most cases arising after August 2020 affected by the blast of Beirut and emergence of new variants resulting in higher positivity rate. Moreover, our data shows a distribution of age similar to other countries and suggest its role in the rapid increase of positivity rate

Brain Metastasis of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: A Case Report and Literature Review

Central nervous system metastases from nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) are uncommon. The patient presented was diagnosed with aggressive advanced NPC resistant to treatment and complicated by a solitary brain metastasis. A PubMed database search was conducted to review the existing literature regarding brain metastases of NPC, using the search terms “nasopharyngeal neoplasia,” “nasopharyngeal carcinoma,” “nasopharynx,” “radiotherapy,” “central nervous system,” and “brain” in section of “Title/Abstract.” The articles were first evaluated by title and then by abstract, and thereafter appropriate manuscripts were evaluated by full text. References of the published papers were also reviewed

From experimentation to public service delivery in social media. An analysis of institutionalization dynamics in Dutch local governments

Social media is being used by a large part of local administrations. As a highly disruptive adopted innovation, it is important to understand the process of institutionalization through empirical variables. This paper studies the Dutch case to analyze to what extent social media technologies have being institutionalized within major city councils in Netherlands. The study tries to answer the following research question: What is the level of institutionalization of social media in Dutch city councils with more than 50,000 inhabitants? Taking this into account, this work is based on two analytical levels: on the one hand, it performs a comparative analysis of Dutch city councils that responded to a survey on social media institutionalization. On the other hand, based on previous descriptive empirical results, the paper studies Utrecht as a case of success to analyze the level of social media institutionalization through Social Network Analysis and automated natural language processing with data crawled from Twitter. Overall, results show that social media institutionalization in Dutch city councils has been high, developing decentralized practices with formal commitments for social media use and with a high sense of leadership, showing interesting participatory and public service delivery logics. At the same time, the case of Utrecht confirms that a high level of institutionalization requires management capabilities and goals definition and implementation, including a conversational approach to citizens, and an emerging approach to public service delivery

Burnout among surgeons before and during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: an international survey

Background: SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has had many significant impacts within the surgical realm, and surgeons have been obligated to reconsider almost every aspect of daily clinical practice. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study reported in compliance with the CHERRIES guidelines and conducted through an online platform from June 14th to July 15th, 2020. The primary outcome was the burden of burnout during the pandemic indicated by the validated Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure. Results: Nine hundred fifty-four surgeons completed the survey. The median length of practice was 10 years; 78.2% included were male with a median age of 37 years old, 39.5% were consultants, 68.9% were general surgeons, and 55.7% were affiliated with an academic institution. Overall, there was a significant increase in the mean burnout score during the pandemic; longer years of practice and older age were significantly associated with less burnout. There were significant reductions in the median number of outpatient visits, operated cases, on-call hours, emergency visits, and research work, so, 48.2% of respondents felt that the training resources were insufficient. The majority (81.3%) of respondents reported that their hospitals were included in the management of COVID-19, 66.5% felt their roles had been minimized; 41% were asked to assist in non-surgical medical practices, and 37.6% of respondents were included in COVID-19 management. Conclusions: There was a significant burnout among trainees. Almost all aspects of clinical and research activities were affected with a significant reduction in the volume of research, outpatient clinic visits, surgical procedures, on-call hours, and emergency cases hindering the training. Trial registration: The study was registered on clicaltrials.gov "NCT04433286" on 16/06/2020

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries