Perceived professionalism and its relationship with communication skills, social interaction and attitude towards medical subjects among undergraduate medical students in Malaysia

Background: Professionalism is an essential core competency in medical education in line with societal expectations.  It is expected that the medical professionals show a specified set of behaviours and attitudes towards patients and society. This study assessed professionalism and its relationship with undergraduate medical students’ communication competency skills, learning attitude, and social interaction. Methods: This was a cross-sectional-correlation study conducted among undergraduate medical students irrespective of gender and nationality. A total of 319 students’ data were collected using a validated self-administered questionnaire. The collected data were analysed using IBM SPSS version 27.0. Pearson’s moment correlation and multiple linear regression analysis were done to identify the potential predictors of perceived medical professionalism. A p value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The study showed that professional relationship was significantly correlated with a positive attitude on communication skill (p<0.001), environmental control (p<0.001), interaction management (p<0.01), immediacy (p<0.01), attitude towards the medical subject (p<0.001). However, no statistically significant correlation was found between perceived empathy and age, gender, year of study, parental education and previous CGPA (p>0.05). Conclusions: The study found an interrelationship between professionalism, communication skills, interpersonal communication, and attitude towards medical subjects. However, the multivariate analysis revealed different weightage of influence to professionalism. Further advanced analysis is warranted to get the impact of each of the contributing variables to academic achievement

Kazakh Text Generation using Neural Bag-of-Words Model for Sentiment Analysis

Text generation plays an important role in making decisions in business. Analyzing the consumer’s feedback provides a complete picture of the problem with a definite direction. However, sentimental analyses of reviews in the Kazakh language are not widely cultivated. In this paper, we introduce the Kazakh text generation using the Bag-of-Words model (BoW) models for analyzing the opinions of consumers in social networks. The use of proposed models in natural language processing consists of four stages: data collection, cleaning data, building model, and model evaluation. The proposed BoW model is supported by the platform - Colab notebook and implemented using the python language. Based on experimental results, defined method with higher efficiency as compared to other existing analogs

Effect of Nenas honey supplementation on the oxidative status of undergraduate students

Honey is a dietary antioxidant as it contains phenolic compounds, such as flavonoids and phenolic acids. Antioxidants are non-nutritive, biologically active ingredients in food that reduce oxidative stress. The antioxidant content in each type of honey varies depending on its source. This study was aimed to determine the effect of Nenas honey supplementation on the oxidative status of a group of healthy medical students. They were divided into two groups; control (n=10) and supplemented (n=13), where 1 tablespoon of Nenas honey was given each day. Blood sampling was done at baseline, 1st and 2nd month of the study for determination of DNA damage and antioxidant enzyme activities, such as superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidise (GPx), and catalase (CAT). Results showed that Nenas honey increased the level of DNA damage at the 1st month but reduced it significantly at the 2nd month as compared to control. GPx and CAT activities also decreased significantly with honey supplementation throughout the study, though no changes were observed in SOD activity. Fasting glucose levels remained within the normal range with honey supplementation. In conclusion, Nenas honey decreases oxidative stress which leads to a reduction of antioxidant enzyme activities in the body

Modeling Of Lower Extremity For Joint Torques Determination By Performing A Lifting Task

Physical lifting tasks commonly involve two types of body postures,namely, squat lifting and stoop lifting. Studies shows improper bodyposture during lifting task has detrimental effect to human lower-backregion over extended period of time. This is because generally, stoop-liftingposture exerts relatively higher moments and compression forces on humanback than squat lifting posture. However, this claim was never thoroughlyexamined and validated from mathematical model approach. This paperproposes a mathematical model to represent the lower extremity of humanbody during lifting tasks, based on a two-link kinematic open chain in twodimensional spaces. Thus, all moment of torque and their effect to everypart of lower extremity of human body can be thoroughly analyzed

Comparison of amino acids profile and antioxidant activities between edible bird nest and chicken egg

Edible bird’s nest (EBN) and eggs are sources of high quality protein. The objectives of this study were to compare the amino acid profile between EBN and eggs to determine the differences in nutrition composition and antioxidant properties. Amino acid profile and antioxidant properties (DPPH, ABTS and FRAP) of four samples, raw EBN (EBNraw), EBN hydrolysates (EBNh), commercial chicken egg (Eggcomm) and free range chicken egg (EggFR) were determined and correlated with one another. It was found that EBN raw and EBNh have significantly higher (p<0.05) DPPH and ABTS activities compared to Eggcomm and EggFR, whereas Eggcomm and EggFR have significantly higher (p<0.05) FRAP activities compared to EBNraw and EBNh. Amino acid profile analysis showed that Eggcomm and EggFR have significantly higher (p<0.05) methionine, cysteine, lysine and isoleucine content compared to EBNraw and EBNh. Histidine, proline, phenylalanine and tryptophan in EBN were found to have significant (p<0.01) positive correlation with DPPH and ABTS antioxidant activities assays, while methionine and cysteine in chicken eggs have significant (p<0.01) positive correlation with FRAP activity. In conclusion, both EBN and chicken eggs are good sources of proteins and essential amino acids, but EBN showed higher antioxidant activities

Dynamic Mechanical Analysis of Bio-Based and Synthetic Petroleum Based Polymer Foams with Powder Type Organic Filler at Prolonged Ultra-Violet Exposure

Wood powder filler that have been added in the bio-based and epoxy polymer foams can be proved that it have ability to strengthen the structure of polymer foams. In this study, ‘Meranti’ type wood filler has been used as the filler. This study was developed to observe the pore size of each sample when expose to different hours of UV irradiation exposure using Optical Microscopy (OM). This study was also to compare the mechanical properties of every sample with different ratio filler of 0 wt%, 5 wt%, 10 wt%, 15wt% and 20 wt% at different hours of UV irradiation exposure which is 0 hour until 6,000 hours with increment of 2,000 hours. The testing was run by DMA Q800 TA machine. The samples that have 40 x 10 x 5 mm size were clamped in the machine to get the result of their mechanical properties. From the DMA testing, the results will show the value of tan delta, loss modulus and storage modulus. The value of tan delta shows that higher ratio filler will give the high value of tan delta. The epoxy polymer foams with powder filler have the highest value of tan delta compare to bio-based polymer foams. It proves that the higher filler ratio, the lower value of tan delta can be recorded.&nbsp; The result of storage and loss modulus was found to increase as the more filler ratio filler in the polymer foams. The higher the loss modulus and storage modulus, the lower the temperature. Bio-based polymer foams with high powder filler ratio can dissipate more energy as energy are lost as heat during UV irradiation exposure

Effects of wastewater type on stability and operating conditions control strategy in relation to the formation of aerobic granular sludge – a review

Currently, research trends on aerobic granular sludge (AGS) have integrated the operating conditions of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) towards the stability of AGS systems in various types of wastewater with different physical and biochemical characteristics. More attention is given to the stability of the AGS system for real site applications. Although recent studies have reported comprehensively the mechanism of AGS formation and stability in relation to other intermolecular interactions such as microbial distribution, shock loading and toxicity, standard operating condition control strategies for different types of wastewater have not yet been discussed. Thus, the dimensional multi-layer structural model of AGS is discussed comprehensively in the first part of this review paper, focusing on diameter size, thickness variability of each layer and diffusion factor. This can assist in facilitating the interrelation between disposition and stability of AGS structure to correspond to the changes in wastewater types, which is the main objective and novelty of this review

An audit of type 2 diabetes care in a Malaysian public community polyclinic

Adequate and proper diabetes care in any practice is paramount and deems to be the fundamental requirement for good diabetes control. This is an audit of type 2 diabetes care process in a public Polyclinic, with the objectives of studying the quality of diabetic care provided in terms of clinical and managerial performance and also to give recommendations on improving its diabetes care delivery. The audit was done on patients’ medical records selected via systematic random sampling. Patients who have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus for more than 2 years, and those who have come for follow-up at least twice in between 1st October 2008 and 30th September 2009 by the medical officer and/or family medicine specialist. Patients with gestational diabetes mellitus and Type 1 diabetes mellitus were excluded. A total of 100 medical records were audited. 51% were female and 82% were in the 40-69 age group. Measurements of blood glucose and blood pressure were done at each follow-up at the polyclinic at 96% and 93% of the times, respectively. Within the past one year, HbA1c was performed in 46% of the patients, while renal profile was screened in 66% of the patients and urine protein was tested in 59% of the diabetics. Only 15% had their eyes screened by fundus camera. The diabetes care process at this public polyclinic was unsatisfactory, as many annual blood tests were not done and complications screening were also omitted. Thus, an urgent intervention is recommend in order to rectify these inadequacies