Financial Satisfaction of International Students in Malaysia

Studying in a foreign country is the opportunity for the students for understanding the different cultures and advances new knowledge from different societies. The core aim of this research is to determine the financial satisfaction of international students in Malaysian universities. This data gathered from 288 oversease students of Malaysian universities by using convenience sampling method. This study utilized the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) for data analysis. The finding suggests that there is a significant effect of financial stress and financial and economic consideration on financial satisfaction of international students. This study also asserted that there is a significant effect of financial knowledge and family financial support on financial satisfaction. This research prone to some limitation such as cross-sectional method, and the convenience sampling method utilized in this current research. This study will beneficial for the government as well as policymakers to new rules and guidelines in favor of international students

Are Unhygienic Practices During the Menstrual, Partum and Postpartum Periods Risk Factors for Secondary Infertility?

This study was aimed at identifying practices during the menstrual, partum and postpartum periods posing possible risk factors contributing towards secondary infertility in women of a selected population in Karachi, Pakistan. A matched case-control study was conducted from April 2003 to March 2004. Four hundred cases were selected from five infertility clinics affiliated with tertiary-care hospitals, and 400 age-matched controls were recruited from the neighbourhood of each case. After taking written consents, trained interviewers conducted interviews using a pretested structured questionnaire. Factors found to be independently associated with secondary infertility were: previous delivery at an unclean place (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=1.7, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.1-2.6), delivery by a birth attendant without washing hands with soap (AOR=4.2, 95% CI 2.36-7.47), use of unclean material for absorption of lochia (AOR=3.1, 95% CI 1.5-6.5), non-washing of perineal area after urination/defaecation (AOR=7.1, 95% CI 1.4-35.7), and insertion of home-made vaginal medications (AOR=2.5, 95% CI 1.3-4.7). Since these factors are preventable/modifiable to a great extent, public-health interventions are, thus, recommended to address these risk factors at various levels

Assessment of knowledge, skill and attitude of oncology nurses in chemotherapy administration in tertiary hospital Pakistan.

Objective: To measure the levels of nurse’s knowledge and attitude after the conduct of education session regarding chemotherapy administration and management. Methodology: This research study was conducted at two oncology units of tertiary Hospital Rawalpindi. A prepost test intervention study design was used on 35 nurses by using Verity’s tools. Results: The mean scores of knowledge were calculated by Cochran’s Q test showed that knowledge scores have significantly increased with ‘educational training’ (p value \u3c 0.001). The difference in the attitude of the nurses was not found to be statistically significant in repeated measure of ANOVA. Conclusion: The results show that knowledge is the weakest component and attitude is strongest component of oncology nurses ‘competencies in chemotherapy administration

Information Literacy among Faculty members in the Public Sector Medical Colleges of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa-Pakistan

Purpose of the study: This study aims to evaluate faculty members\u27 information literacy skills in public sector medical colleges in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Design/Methodology/approach: The descriptive research design was used to conduct and accomplish the study\u27s objectives. The research population consisted of faculty members at public sector medical colleges in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa southern region. Professors, Associate Professors, Assistant Professors, Lecturers, and demonstrators comprise the faculty. The adapted questionnaires of (Jan & Bahtti, 2018; Ullah, 2015; Sharma & Lata, 2019; and Rafique, 2014) were modified and used as data collection instrument. Key findings: Majority of the public sector medical college faculty recognizes the various sources of information, and they use both printed and online materials to identify needed information. The majority of faculty at these medical colleges consults monographs/textbooks regularly, preceded by online journals/medical databases. A good number of medical faculty members opted to use the HEC digital library to locate and access their contents. Delimitations of the study: This study is delimited to three public sector medical colleges operate in southern districts: of Khyber Medical University Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) in Kohat, the Gomal Medical College (GMC) in Dera Ismail Khan, and the Bannu Medical College (BMC) in Bannu. Practical implication(s): The findings of the study will motivate the policy makers and authorities of these three medical colleges in southern region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to enhance the information literacy skills of medical faculty. This practice will result into an effective medical education in the province. Contribution to the knowledge: No significant work has been done on the Faculty\u27s Information literacy skills at public sector medical colleges in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.. This study will add valuable literature to literary world

Towards Efficient, Work-Conserving, and Fair Bandwidth Guarantee in Cloud Datacenters

Bandwidth guarantee is a critical feature to enable performance predictability in cloud datacenters. This process is expected to achieve three requirements: work conservation, fairness, and simplicity. However, the distributed nature of datacenters raises significant challenges to attaining those requirements at the same time. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach that can satisfy the three requirements simultaneously. Our scheme takes advantage of multipath TCP (MPTCP) to generate explicit bandwidth guarantee (BG) traffic and work conservation (WC) traffic.We further prioritize the BG traffic over the WC traffic in the network fabric. Due to the priority setting, WC cannot harm bandwidth guarantees and thus is effectively supported. We show that the MPTCP fits this direction well but presents some new issues when the WC subfows own a low priority. We thus adapt the MPTCP to handle these issues through a customized scheduler (which strictly prioritizes BG subfow during packet scheduling) and adopting a large receive buffer. In addition, we enable tenants to share unused bandwidth fairly by managing the overall aggressiveness of the WC traffic. The proposed system can be easily implemented with commercial off-the-shelf servers and switches.We have implemented with the Linux kernel MPTCP for experiments. The extensive experiments in a small cluster (including one MapReduce experiment) and trace-driven simulations show that our scheme achieves the design goals effectively

Screening of Arabidopsis mutants for functional genomic studies

Eight photosynthetic Arabidopsis mutants were screened for co-segregation of a photosynthetic phenotype with the T-DNA insertion. These mutants were selected from 80 photosynthetic mutants with genetic background of Columbia-0. Two different screening approaches were used to study the T-DNA insertion in the genome of mutant Arabidopsis lines. The sulphonamide sulfadiazine was found to be an effective selective agent and a single copy of sulfonamide resistant gene was found to be completely resistant to the optimal concentration i.e., 5mg mL-1. The maximum number of Arabidopsis mutant plants had confirmed insertions. Some of the plants did not show any amplification with gene specific primer combination, and it was assumed that either they were wild type plants or they had random T-DNA insertion and the insertion was not found in the gene under study but it could be found in any where in the genome. Some mutant plants were morphologically different from the wild type plants e.g., ALP105. These plants grew as small in size and dark green in color. After PCR screening with gene specific and T-DNA border primers all such mutant plants were confirmed as heterozygous T-DNA insertion plants

Confirmation of sunflower F1 hybrids using SDS-PAGE analysis

Among bio-chemical techniques, sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDSPAGE) is most widely used due to its validity and simplicity for describing genetic structures of group of plants. In the present study, SDS-PAGE was used to confirm sunflower hybrids. Four male sterile lines, four restorer lines and their sixteen F1 hybrids were analyzed. Based on results of electrophoretic band spectra, Jaccard’s similarity index (S) was calculated for all possible pairs. The similarity matrix, thus, generated was converted to a dissimilarity matrix and used to construct dendrogram, using unweighed pair-group method with arithmetic means. Euclidean distance of 1.0 was observed among 5 comparisons, whereas maximum distance (3.87) was observed for 1 comparison only. In most of the cases, female parents, along with their respective crosses, were found in one cluster, indicating thatSDS-PAGE can be used reliably for the identification of hybrids in sunflower

Association between circulating adiponectin levels and polycystic ovarian syndrome

Background: Low adiponectin levels in polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) have been largely attributed to obesity which is common among these patients. In addition, evidence also suggests that low adiponectin in PCOS may be related to insulin resistance (IR) in these women. However, studies on the role of adiponectin in younger and lean patients are limited. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine the association of adiponectin levels in young and lean women with PCOS.<p></p> Methods: A case–control study was conducted at the Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan. Cases were 75 patients of PCOS with Body Mass Index (BMI) &23 aged 16–35 years and 75 healthy age and BMI matched controls were selected from family and friends of the cases. Demographic details, family history and past medical history were obtained through interview by a physician. Anthropometric measurements included weight and height of the participants. Fasting glucose, total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL), insulin, adiponectin, and androgen levels were determined. IR was calculated using homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). Logistic regression models were used to assess the association between adiponectin and PCOS after adjusting for co-variates.<p></p> Results: On multivariable analysis, PCOS cases were 3.2 times more likely to have low adiponectin level (OR = 3.2, 95% CI 1.49-6.90, p-value 0.003) compared to the controls after adjustment for age, BMI, family history, marital status, total cholesterol, HDL level and IR. Females with a family history of PCOS were significantly more likely to have lower adiponectin (OR = 3.32, 95% CI 1.27-8.67, p-value 0.014) compared to those who did not have a family history of PCOS. The associations of IR and family history with low adiponectin level also remained statistically significant after adjustments for covariates.<p></p> Conclusion: Serum adiponectin levels are independently associated with PCOS and are only partly explained by IR. Adiponectin level may serve as a potential independent biomarker for diagnosis of PCOS in young and lean women with fewer symptoms, or women with a family history of PCOS

Frequency Of Depression In Patients With Vitamin B12 Deficiency

Objective: To determine the frequency of depression in patients with vitamin B12 deficiency. Methodology: This cross-sectional study was carried out from January 2020 to March 2021 on a total sample size of n=100 patients (age 49.84 ± 0.91 years) using a simple random sampling technique, visiting the medical department of the federal government polyclinic hospital, in Islamabad. Patients presenting with macrocytic anaemia secondary to vitamin B12 deficiency were included while the patients with previously diagnosed depression were excluded from the study. Serum vitamin B12 levels were measured through the ELISA technique. Patient Healthcare Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) was designed and presented to patients with vitamin B12 deficiency for depression assessment. Patients with PHQ-9 score ≤5 were rated as having no depression and the patients with score ≥5 were rated as having depression. Data were analyzed using GraphPad Prism and the correlation coefficient was measured through non-linear fit and linear regression curves while ordinary ANOVA (non-parametric) was applied for study variables. Results: The average level of vitamin B12 in the serum and PHQ-9 score were recorded as 158 ± 4.94 (pg/uL) and 5.85 ± 0.30, respectively. Vitamin B12 levels and PHQ-9 score depicted an inverse correlation, however, no association was found between gender and PHQ-9 score. Conclusion: Data depicted that the patients presenting low levels of vitamin B12 in their serum have shown corresponding high PHQ-9 scores which is an indicator of depression. However, depression prevails in all age groups without any discrimination of gender