994 research outputs found
Effects of Spiritual Intelligence-Gratitude Training on Spiritual Quotient of Iranian Adolescents
Adolescents are in desperate need of the skills, knowledge, and competencies to moderate the worldliness of the 21st century. The understanding that emanates from wisdom when applied to spirituality is spiritual intelligence. Hence, the main goal of the current study was to determine whether SI-G (Spiritual Intelligence â Gratitude) training results in measurable increases in SQ (spiritual intelligence). The present quasiexperimental study examined the effect of SI-G training on spiritual intelligence among Iranian students (n = 34) from one private, Iranian school in Kuala Lumpur. We evaluated the effects of the SI-G training program on
overall SQ and 22 subscales. Spiritual intelligence was measured using an adapted version of the Integrated Spiritual Intelligence Scale (ISIS) (Amram and Dryer, 2007) to assess studentsâ spiritual intelligence before the training,at the conclusion of the training and three weeks following the training Results of the pre-test showed that most of the students scored low on the overall SQ (M=3.96) while the subscale Gratitude showed the lowest score(M=2.75) among the 22 subscales. At the conclusion of the training, ttests indicated significant improvements in SQ and some subscales of the ISIS,like: Gratitude, Joy, Acceptance, Mindfulness, Optimism, Self acceptance, sacredness and Egolessness. Three weeks after the training, a follow-up test was conducted revealing a drop in scores on some of the subscales. After comparing the results with the pre-test, however, the training program showed significant, positive increases in SQ. The results
lend initial support to the assertion that with SI-G training, spiritual intelligence and its subscales can be enhanced, although three weeks may not be sufficient to make the changes sustainable
Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada with Unilateral Clinical Presentation: A Case Report
Purpose: To report a case of acute Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada (VKH) disease with unilateral clinical manifestations followed by late fellow eye involvement.
Case Report: This case report reviews the 12-month follow-up observation of a 44-year old woman who presented to the emergency department with unilateral progressive and painless visual blurring. Ophthalmoscopic findings, best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), fluorescein angiography (FAG), enhanced-depth optical coherence tomography (EDIOCT), indocyanine green angiography, and response to treatment were evaluated. Her BCVA was 20/50 (logMAR: 0.4) in the right eye and 20/20 (logMAR: 0) in the left eye. Eye examination revealed optic disc swelling and multiple serous retinal detachments in the right eye and a normal left eye. She had headache, dysacusia, and mild hearing problems. Her past ocular and drug histories were unremarkable. Retinal imaging revealed characteristic features of VKH in the right eye. All laboratory testing results were inconclusive. VA and OCT findings significantly improved following the treatment with methylprednisolone 1 g/day continued by tapering dose of oral prednisolone. Two months after the presentation and during prednisolone tapering, VA of the left eye decreased and fundus examination revealed multiple serous retinal detachments in this eye.
Conclusion: Ophthalmologists should recognize unilateral and asymmetrical VKH disease with subtle systemic involvement
Design and Synthesis of Curcumin Analogs for Anticancer Activity and Discovery of Novel Hit Molecules Targeting CXCR4.
Curcumin as a natural compound is made of various components including protein, carbohydrate, and curcuminoid. Curcuminoid is made of curcumin, desmethoxycurcumin and bis desmethoxycurcumin. Curcumin is used for the treatment of cancer and inflammatory disorders, but it has some therapeutic problems like poor bioavailability, poor efficacy, and chemical instability. To overcome these problems, the objective of this study is (1) synthesis of pyrazole curcumin analogs, (2) synthesis of triazole curcumin analogs, and (3) in-vitro study of the anticancer activity of these curcumin analogs on head & neck, breast, pancreatic and glioblastoma cancer cells. During this part of my Ph.D. project, we have synthesized 9 pyrazole and 4 triazole curcumin analogs and studied their anticancer activity against CAL 27 and UM-SCC-74A as head & neck cancer cell lines, MDA-MB-231 as breast cancer cell line, HPAF as pancreatic cancer cell line, and MG118 as glioblastoma cancer cell lines. We have studied the effect of these analogs on head & neck cancer cell lines by using cell proliferation assay and western blotting analysis. Compound 49 was shown the best anticancer activity on these cancer cell lines. Western blotting analysis revealed that compounds 49, 81, and 77, showed anticancer activity. We did MTS assay study on MDA-MB 231 as a human cancer cell line and the study revealed that compounds 6 and 81 had good anticancer activity against these cancer cell lines, while triazole analogs showed weak anticancer activity. We also used MTS assay study to investigate the effect of curcumin analogs. Compounds 6 and 86 showed good anticancer activity against HPAF cell line. Cell Titer Glo-2 assay study on MG118 cell line revealed that compounds 49, 51, and 80 had good anticancer activity against glioblastoma cancer cell lines. The expression of the CXCR4 gene leads to making a CXCR4 protein which is a GPCR protein. Research showed that this protein is involved in different cancer types. Overexpression of CXCR4 leads to cancer metastasis. The objective of this study as the second part of my Ph.D. project is the discovery of novel hit molecules targeting CXCR4. We did the virtual screening of 229358 natural product compounds. Based on the crystallography structure, we generated the receptor file. FRED docking led to the identification of 500 hit compounds out of 229358 compounds. 500 hit compounds were filtered based on several parameters which led to the identification of 4 hit molecules. Root Mean Square Deviation study has shown that two of these hit molecules stabilized the protein Structure. Moreover, based on the Radius of the gyration study, three of these molecules maintain the compactness of protein. The hydrogen bond study of these complexes showed that two complexes made hydrogen bonds with targets. So, molecular dynamic analysis by Gromacs led to the identification of 2 hit molecules for CXCR4 antagonist activity. Keywords: Curcumin, Cancers, In-vitro study
Assessment and Estimating Groundwater Vulnerability to Pollution Using a Modified DRASTIC and GODS Models (Case Study: Malayer Plain of Iran)
This study deals with the intrinsic vulnerability of groundwater reservoirs to pollution, by the use of two models DRASTIC and GODS, this study is done by taking samples from 17 water resources of Malayer plain Aquifer area of southern Hamedan Province, Iran. 30 physicochemical parameters and heavy metals have been studied and vulnerability of this aquifer to the nitrate concentration, was determined. The study showed that results from DRASTIC were better than GODS in Assessment and Estimating groundwater vulnerability to pollution, also DRASTIC model has been corrected, and compared the ability of these two models in vulnerability zoning has been evaluated. According to high correlation between DRASTIC index and nitrate concentration, ranking and weighting of nitrate pollutant is inserted in the DRASTIC equation, and zoning map of DRASTIC method has been calibrated by nitrate concentration. By this method, vulnerability zoning is determined between very low to very high, which shows the increase of DRASTIC index by nitrate concentration. DRASTIC parameters uncertainty has affected the zoning results in this method, but its calibration with nitrate concentration, gives more accurate vulnerability results
HOW DO ANGRY DRIVERS RESPOND TO EMOTIONAL MUSIC? A COMPREHENSIVE PERSPECTIVE ON ASSESSING EMOTION
Driving is a complicated task that requires the coordination of visual and sensory-motor skills. Unsafe driving behavior and accidents can happen regardless of the level of driversâ experience. The main cause of the most of these accidents is human error. Emotions influence the way drivers process and react to internal or environmental factors. Specifically, anger elicited either from traffic or personal issues, is a serious threat on the road. Therefore, having an affective intelligent system in the car that can estimate driversâ anger and respond to it appropriately can help drivers adapt to moment to-moment changes in driving situations. To this end, the present dissertation uses an integrated approach to monitoring driversâ affective states in various driving contexts to address the question: âWhat types of music can mitigate the effects of anger on driving performance?â Three sources of information (behavioral, physiological, and subjective data) were considered in two experiments. In Experiment 1, three groups of participants were compared based on their emotional reactions and driving behaviors. Results showed that angry drivers who did not listen to music had riskier driving behavior than emotion neutral drivers. Results from heart rate, oxygenation level in prefrontal cortex, and self report questionnaires showed that music could help angry drivers react at the similar level to emotion-neutral drivers both internally and behaviorally. In Experiment 2, types of music emotion and familiarity of music were addressed to identify what kind of music an in-vehicle auditory system should play when it recognizes driversâ anger. Results showed that different kinds of music did not effect driving performance. However, drivers experienced less frustration and effort when listening to music in general and less viii frustration when listening to self-selected music specifically. Regarding personality characteristics, drivers who had anger-expression out style had riskier driving behavior just as in Experiment 1. In conclusion, this research showed the benefits of music as a possible strategy to help angry drivers. In addition, important patterns were uncovered relating to assessing driver anger for possible affective intelligent systems in cars
Historiography in "Beginnings: Malcolm" by Amiri Baraka
This article discusses Aimiri Barakaâs concern with the history of black people in his poem "Beginnings: Malcolm". The writers try to shed some light on the way Baraka's historiography challenges the white supremecist discourses through a rewriting of the African American past that blurs the boundaries of myth and history, fact and fiction, in a postmodern manner. It is argued that through the use of the central African myth of Esu/Elegba and drawing on traditions of Christianity and Western literature/culture, Barakaâs poem offers an uncanny insight into the past
Noise processing in the auditory system with applications in speech enhancement
Abstract: The auditory system is extremely efficient in extracting auditory information in the presence of background noise. However, speech enhancement algorithms, aimed at removing the background noise from a degraded speech signal, are not achieving results that are near the efficacy of the auditory system. The purpose of this study is thus to first investigate how noise affects the spiking activity of neurons in the auditory system and then use the brain activity in the presence of noise to design better speech enhancement algorithms. In order to investigate how noise affects the spiking activity of neurons, we first design a generalized linear model that relates the spiking activity of neurons to intrinsic and extrinsic covariates that can affect their activity, such as noise. From this model, we extract two metrics, one that shows the effects of noise on the spiking activity and another the relative effects of vocalization compared to noise. We use these metrics to analyze neural data, recorded from a structure of the auditory system named the inferior colliculus (IC), while presenting noisy vocalizations. We studied the effect of different kinds of noises (non-stationary, white and natural stationary), different vocalizations, different input sound levels and signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). We found that the presence of non-stationary noise increases the spiking activity of neurons, regardless of the SNR, input level or vocalization type. The presence of white or natural stationary noises however causes a great diversity of responses where the activity of sites could increase, decrease or remain unchanged. This shows that the noise invariance previously reported in the IC depends on the noisy conditions, which had not been observed before. We then address the problem of speech enhancement using information from the brain's processing in the presence of noise. It has been shown before that the brain waves of a listener strongly correlates with the speaker to which the listener attends. Given this, we design two speech enhancement algorithms with a denoising autoencoder structure, namely the Brain Enhanced Speech Denoiser (BESD) and U-shaped Brain Enhanced Speech Denoiser (U-BESD). These algorithms take advantage of the attended auditory information present in the brain activity of the listener to denoise a multi-talker speech. The U-BESD is built upon the BESD with the addition of skip connections and dilated convolutions. Compared to previously proposed approaches, BESD and U-BESD are trained in a single neural architecture, lowering the complexity of the algorithm. We investigate two experimental settings. In the first one, the attended speaker is known, referred to as the speaker-specific setting, and in the second one no prior information is available about the attended speaker, referred to as the speaker-independent setting. In the speaker-specific setting, we show that both the BESD and U-BESD algorithms surpass a similar denoising autoencoder. Moreover, we also show that in the speaker-independent setting, U-BESD surpasses the performance of the only known approach that also uses the brain's activity.Le systĂšme auditif est extrĂȘmement efficace pour extraire de lâinformation pertinente en prĂ©sence dâun bruit de fond. Par contre, les algorithmes de rehaussement de la parole, visant Ă supprimer le bruit dâun signal de parole bruitĂ©, nâatteignent pas des rĂ©sultats proches de lâefficacitĂ© du systĂšme auditif. Le but de cette Ă©tude est donc dâabord dâĂ©tudier comment le bruit affecte lâactivitĂ© neuronale dans le systĂšme auditif, puis dâutiliser lâactivitĂ© cĂ©rĂ©brale en prĂ©sence de bruit pour concevoir de meilleurs algorithmes de rehaussement. Afin dâĂ©tudier comment le bruit peut affecter lâactivitĂ© des neurones, nous concevons dâabord un modĂšle linĂ©aire gĂ©nĂ©ralisĂ© qui relie lâactivitĂ© des neurones aux covariables intrinsĂšques et extrinsĂšques qui peuvent affecter leur activitĂ©, comme le bruit. De ce modĂšle, nous extrayons deux mĂ©triques, lâune qui permet dâĂ©tudier les effets du bruit sur lâactivitĂ© neuronale et lâautre les effets relatifs sur cette activitĂ© de la vocalisation par rapport au bruit. Nous utilisons ces mĂ©triques pour analyser lâactivitĂ© neuronale dâune structure du systĂšme auditif, nomĂ©e le colliculus infĂ©rieur (IC), enregistrĂ©e lors de la prĂ©sentation de vocalisations bruitĂ©es. Nous avons Ă©tudiĂ© lâeffet de diffĂ©rents types de bruits, diffĂ©rentes vocalisations, diffĂ©rents niveaux sonores dâentrĂ©e et diffĂ©rents rapports signal sur bruit (SNR). Nous avons constatĂ© que la prĂ©sence de bruit non stationnaire augmente lâactivitĂ© des neurones, quel que soit le SNR, le niveau dâentrĂ©e ou le type de vocalisation. La prĂ©sence de bruits stationnaires blancs ou naturels provoque cependant une grande diversitĂ© de rĂ©ponses oĂč lâactivitĂ© des sites dâenregistrement pouvait augmenter, diminuer ou rester inchangĂ©e. Cela montre que lâinvariance du bruit prĂ©cĂ©demment signalĂ©e dans lâIC dĂ©pend des conditions de bruit, ce qui nâavait pas Ă©tĂ© observĂ© auparavant. Nous abordons ensuite le problĂšme du rehaussement de la parole en utilisant de lâinformation provenant du cerveau. Il a Ă©tĂ© dĂ©montrĂ© auparavant que les ondes cĂ©rĂ©brales dâun auditeur sont fortement corrĂ©lĂ©es avec le locuteur auquel lâauditeur porte attention. Compte tenu de cette corrĂ©lation, nous concevons deux algorithmes de rehaussement de la parole, le Brain Enhanced Speech Denoiser (BESD) et le U-shaped Brain Enhanced Speech Denoiser (U-BESD), qui tirent parti de lâinformation prĂ©sente dans lâactivitĂ© cĂ©rĂ©brale de lâauditeur pour dĂ©bruiter un signal de parole multi-locuteurs. LâU-BESD est construit Ă partir du BESD avec lâajout de sauts de connexions (skip connections) et de convolutions dilatĂ©es. De plus, BESD et U-BESD sont constituĂ©s respectivement dâun seul rĂ©seau qui nĂ©cessite un seul entraĂźnement, ce qui rĂ©duit la complexitĂ© de lâalgorithme en comparaison avec les approches existantes. Nous Ă©tudions deux conditions expĂ©rimentales. Dans la premiĂšre, le locuteur auquel lâauditeur porte attention est connu, et dans la seconde, ce locuteur nâest pas connu. Dans le cadre du locuteur connu, nous montrons que les algorithmes BESD et U-BESD surpassent un autoencodeur similaire. De plus, nous montrons Ă©galement que dans le cadre du locuteur inconnu, le U-BESD surpasse les performances de la seule approche existante connue qui utilise Ă©galement lâactivitĂ© cĂ©rĂ©brale
- âŠ