Educational Process of Medical Students in Basic Sciences in Birjand University of Medical Sciences

Background & Objective : Identifying faculty members' educational needs and level of their skills in teaching affairs would improve planning for faculty members’ development and sublimity. This study was performed to assess attitude of faculty members who are teaching practical courses towards their educational needs and level of skills in teaching methods of practical courses. Methods : In this descriptive study, 83 faculty members teaching practical courses in Isfahan University of Medical Sciences were selected by stratified random sampling and completed a reliable and valid questionnaire consisted of 14 items about educational needs and skill level of teaching methods in practical courses. Results : The mean (±SD) score of faculty members' skill level was 2.71(±0.4) out of four. Faculty members’ skill level was low (mean score less than 2.5) in analysis and interpretation of the test questions (38.9%), evaluation methods of practical skills (53.5%), designing performance tests (52.8%) and making educational films (47.9%). Mean (±SD) total score of educational needs was 3.45(±0.89) out of five. According to these results, faculty members were in need of all 14 aforementioned items. Educational needs included critical thinking, motivating methods and information resources in order of priority. Conclusion : Faculty members expressed need for education and improving their skills in teaching practical courses. Considering mentioned educational needs and skills, it seems that teaching method and student assessment workshops need to be revised and the content of the workshops should be designed according to faculty members’ educational needs together with implementing different educational methods. Keywords: Practical teaching, Faculty members, Teaching methods, Skill, Need assessment

Fanon, Colonial Violence, And Racist Language In Federal American Indian Law

This Comment will argue that the racist language enshrined in foundational Supreme Court decisions involving Native tribes continuously enacts a form of colonial violence that seeks to preserve a white racial dictatorship. The paper will use Frantz Fanon’s scholarship on colonial violence and the dehumanization of Indigenous people as a framework to understand the history of legalized racism against Indigenous people in the United States. Fanon’s analysis allows us to understand how language is used to dehumanize Native people in order to establish a system of hierarchy that informs the societal roles of the colonizer and the colonized. The paper will then trace the use of racial stereotypes and brutalizing language against Native Americans in Supreme Court decisions under Justice Marshall. Further, the paper will argue that the racist precedents and language relied upon by the Supreme Court have operated as a form of colonial violence that serve to justify the denial of property, self–governance, and cultural survival of Native Americans

SonicJoin: fast, robust and worst-case optimal

The establishment of the AGM bound on the size of intermediate results of natural join queries has led to the development of several so-called worst-case join algorithms. These algorithms provably produce intermediate results that are (asymptotically) no larger than the final result of the join. The most notable ones are the Recursive Join, its successor, the Generic Join and the Leapfrog-Trie-Join. While algorithmically efficient, however, all of these algorithms require the availability of index structures that allow tuple lookups using the prefix of a key. Key-prefix-lookups in relational database systems are commonly supported by tree-based index structures since hash-based indices only support full-key lookups. In this paper, we study a wide variety of main-memory-oriented index structures that support key-prefix-lookups with a specific focus on supporting the Generic Join. Based on that study, we develop a novel, best-of-breed index structure called Sonic that combines the fast build and point lookup properties of hashtables with the prefix-lookups capabilities of trees and tries. To evaluate the performance of a variety of indices for worst-case optimal joins in a modern code-generating DBMS, we leveraged flexible, compile-time metaprogramming features to build a framework that creates highly efficient code, interweaving (at a microarchitectural level) a generic join implementation with any appropriate index structure. We demonstrate experimentally that in that framework, Sonic outperforms the fastest existing approaches by up to 2.5 times when supporting the Generic Join algorithm

Influence of the spatial correlation structure of an elastic random medium on its scattering properties

International audienceIn the weakly heterogeneous regime of elastic wave propagation through a random medium, transport and diffusion models for the energy densities can be set up. In the isotropic case, the scattering cross sections are explicitly known as a function of the wave number and the correlations of the Lamé parameters and density. In this paper, we discuss the precise influence of the correlation structure on the scattering cross sections, mean free paths and diffusion parameter, and separate that influence from that of the correlation length and variance. We also analyze the convergence rates towards the low-and high-frequency ranges. For all analyses, we consider five different correlation structures, that allow us to explore a wide range of behaviors. We identify that the controlling factors for the low-frequency behavior are the value of the Power Spectral Density Function (PSDF) and its first non-vanishing derivative at the origin. In the high frequency range, the controlling factor is the third moment of the PSDF (which may be unbounded)

Evaluation of Bcl2 gene expression in MCF-7 Human Breast Cancer Cells under treatment of Centaurea Behen extract and Cisplatin

Introduction: Breast cancer is among the most common malignancies of human around the world. Millions of cases of cancer worldwide occur annually, which, if detected in a timely manner, are easier to treat and can be conveniently controlled. In 2008, about 1,384,155 breast cancer cases were detected worldwide, with about 459,000 of them deceased.Method:MTT assay was performed to evaluate cell proliferation.The BCL2 gene is an inhibitor of apoptosis that prevents the release of cytochrome C from mitochondria and leads to inhibition of various apoptosis stimuli. Due to the importance of this gene in the apoptotic process, the level of BCL2 gene expression under treatment of Cisplatin and Centaurea Behen agents for 24 hours and 48 hours was evaluated in this research,using the Real time-PCR method. It is noteworthy that Cisplatin as a DNA binding agent may be effective in treating breast cancer;moreover, some studies have shown that Centaurea Behenplant has an antioxidant effect that can be a preventive factor in cancer.Results: The results obtained related to Cisplatin showed that IC50 for cells treated with Cisplatin for 24 hours was about  2.91 mg/ml while IC50 for cells treated with Cisplatin for 48 hours was about 1.77 mg/ml. Similarly, results obtained related to Centaurea Behenherbal extract showed that IC50 for cells treated with Centaurea Behen for 24 hours was about 9.64 mg/ml while IC50 for cells treated with Centaurea Behen for 48 hours was about 7.85 mg/ml.Results showed that the expression level of gene under treatment of the Cisplatinand Centaurea Behenhas decreased compared to the non-treatment state, so this expression reduction showed a significant difference between samples group and control group . 

When Non-Suicidal Self-Injury Predicts Non-Suicidal Self-Injury and Poor Sleep—Results from a Larger Cross-Sectional and Quasi-Longitudinal Study

Poor sleep is associated with a higher risk of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) as a proxy of unfavorable emotion regulation. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that past non-suicidal self-injury was associated with current non-suicidal self-injury and with current subjective sleep patterns. To this end, a larger sample of young adults were assessed. A total of 2374 adults (mean age: 27.58 years; 39.6% females) completed a series of self-rating questionnaires covering sociodemographic information, past and current NSSIs, suicide attempts, and current sleep patterns, including experiencing nightmares. Past NSSIs predicted current NSSIs. Current sleep patterns had a modest impact on the association between past and current NSSIs. Compared to male participants, female participants did not report more sleep complaints or more current NSSIs, but more past NSSIs. Past NSSIs predicted the occurrences of nightmares and suicide attempts. The best predictor of current NSSI was the remembered past NSSI, while current poor sleep was only modestly associated with current NSSI. Further indicators of current NSSI and poor sleep were suicide attempts and nightmares within the last six months. Overall, it appears that poor emotion regulation should be considered as underlying factor to trigger and maintain non-suicidal self-injury-related behavior and poor sleep. Further, unlike previous studies, which focused on the possible influence of sleep patterns on NSSIs, the aim of the present study paradigm was to investigate NSSIs on sleep patterns

Does It Make a Difference? L2 Vocabulary Learning via Mobile and Conventional Mode

The present study investigated the significance of mobile learning (m-learning) of English vocabulary items through a traditional contrasted with a blended method of content representation. To achieve the goals, sixty semi-illiterate adults were evaluated for their knowledge of the English alphabet and then randomly placed in two groups: traditional (G1) and the blended group (G2). Next, they were presented thirty new English vocabulary items through the two methods. Also, the vocabulary items were taught with and without pictorial annotations. Upon the completion of teaching, the participants took the paper-and-pencil-based English Vocabulary Recognition and Recall (EVRR) test. The test results were subjected to the appropriate statistical analyses. The analysis demonstrated the supremacy of blended group's performance over the traditional group in vocabulary learning. Furthermore, the obtained results confirmed that pictorial annotations enhanced the learning of L2 vocabulary compared with non-annotated items. The results can provide some practical and theoretical implications for both teachers and learners

Multi Scale Identity-Preserving Image-to-Image Translation Network for Low-Resolution Face Recognition

State-of-the-art deep neural network models have reached near perfect face recognition accuracy rates on controlled high-resolution face images. However, their performance is drastically degraded when they are tested with very low-resolution face images. This is particularly critical in surveillance systems, where a low-resolution probe image is to be matched with high-resolution gallery images. super-resolution techniques aim at producing high-resolution face images from low-resolution counterparts. While they are capable of reconstructing images that are visually appealing, the identity-related information is not preserved. Here, we propose an identity-preserving end-to-end image-to-image translation deep neural network which is capable of super-resolving very low-resolution faces to their high-resolution counterparts while preserving identity-related information. We achieved this by training a very deep convolutional encoder-decoder network with a symmetric contracting path between corresponding layers. This network was trained with a combination of a reconstruction and an identity-preserving loss, on multi-scale low-resolution conditions. Extensive quantitative evaluations of our proposed model demonstrated that it outperforms competing super-resolution and low-resolution face recognition methods on natural and artificial low-resolution face data sets and even unseen identities