Relationship between performance barriers and pharmacist competency towards the implementation of an expanded public health pharmacy role.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between performance barriers and competency, and implementation of an expanded public health role for community pharmacists. METHODS: A validated questionnaire was utilised for this study whereby three variables of the study (performance barriers, competency and public health role) were measured using a 5-point Likert scale. Three hundred questionnaires were distributed to target respondents of registered community pharmacies in five states (Johor, Negeri Sembilan, Selangor, Perak and Penang) in Malaysia. The data were analysed utilising the principles of structural equation modelling. KEY FINDINGS: There were 191 completed and usable responses received, which represented a 66.7% response rate. This study showed perceived competency had a direct relationship with delivering a general public health role. A perceived lack of competency was shown to be a barrier to fulfilling a public health role. However, other factors, such as design of premises, IT infrastructure and pay, were not viewed as barriers to carrying out a public health role. CONCLUSION: Perceived competency is an obstacle for community pharmacists to undertake a public health role in Malaysia. Adequate training programmes in pharmaceutical public health have to be put in place to address this concern and this should therefore be a priority

Industrial Development in South Kongu Region as shown by Stone Inscriptions in Tholkaapiyar's theory

Literature is the mirror of life. Grammatical literary theory is one among the various kind of theories. Tamil literary texts helps us to understand the history of Tamilnadu. Tamil literature follows the principles of Grammar. Tholkaapiyar has given themes in his text Tholkaapiyam. Overall there are eight themes. Literature is made up of these eight themes. Basically the history of the people is recorded in the temple inscriptions.  Medieval temples include themes such as deity, food, animals, trees, grass (bird), drum, lyre, message.  Medieval inscriptions also mention these themes. This article tries to explain about news and business in detail

VIP: Finding Important People in Images

People preserve memories of events such as birthdays, weddings, or vacations by capturing photos, often depicting groups of people. Invariably, some individuals in the image are more important than others given the context of the event. This paper analyzes the concept of the importance of individuals in group photographs. We address two specific questions -- Given an image, who are the most important individuals in it? Given multiple images of a person, which image depicts the person in the most important role? We introduce a measure of importance of people in images and investigate the correlation between importance and visual saliency. We find that not only can we automatically predict the importance of people from purely visual cues, incorporating this predicted importance results in significant improvement in applications such as im2text (generating sentences that describe images of groups of people)

Gonadotropin releasing hormone in first trimester human placenta: isolation, partial characterisation and in vitro biosynthesis

Using a specific radioimmunoassay for gonadotropin releasing hormone, the presence of gonadotropin releasing hormone like material in the first trimester human placenta has been demonstrated. The material has been partially characterized using carboxy methyl cellulose chromatography, high pressure gel permeation chromatography and reverse phase C18 high pressure liquid chromatographic analysis. Analysis for bioactivity revealed that placental gonadotropin releasing hormone is much more active than synthetic gonadotropin releasing hormone in in vitro rat pituitary lutinising hormone release assay. In vitro biosynthetic studies using labelled precursors and immunoaffinity chromatography indicated that first trimester human placenta synthesizes gonadotropin releasing hormone like material

Pattern of antidepressant utilization at a tertiary hospital in Malaysia (2009-2011)

The specific goals of this study are to determine trends in the usage and comparison of clinical patterns of antidepressant treatment modality in a tertiary hospital between year 2009-2011. We retrospectively reviewed prescription records in the Outpatient Pharmacy Department (OPD) of a tertiary hospital in central Malaysia from 2009 to 2011.About 3000 prescriptions, containing at least one anti-depressant drug, were systematically sampled and evaluated. Malay patients had a decreasing trend of 3% in anti-depressant usage over the study.Escitaloprom (SSRI) group was found to be the most widely utilized antidepressant with a steady increase of 9% while usage of Fluvoxamine was found to show a decreasing trend over the three years.The overall pattern profoundly favoured monotherapy modality rather than combination therapy among practitioners.This study also found an increasing pattern in the use of antidepressants with antianxiety and antipsychotic.In general, this study has contributed additional information regarding the prescribing pattern of anti-depressants in Malaysia at the current moment

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND MEDIA ENVIRONMENT AS ANTECEDENTS OF CHILDHOOD OBESITY IN MALAYSIA

Objective: The aim of this study was to explore the influence of physical activity and media viewing on the occurrence of childhood obesity in Malaysia.Methods: A 42-item validated questionnaire in the Malay and English language, containing Likert scale close-ended questions was used to explore the degree of physical activity practiced by families as well as trends on media viewing restrictions among parents in 5 selected states of Peninsular Malaysia. A total of 1200 self-administered questionnaires were sent out to schools in rural and urban areas of the respective 5 states and body mass index (BMI) for children was measured using the WHO 2007 reference standards. A total of 802 completed and usable questionnaires were obtained yielding a response rate of 66.6%. Chi-square and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the results.Results: The findings revealed that while children may have agreed limits on media viewing (television/computer/video games), as the child's BMI increased the rate of agreed limits decreased. However, the enforcement of these limits was not consistent. Interestingly, 70% of the parents who did not enforce restrictions on media viewing were also obese themselves. In terms of physical activity, this was far lower among obese and severe obese children and family activities involving physical activity was scarce with a rate of 25%.Conclusion: The study affirms the fact that Malaysia needs to promote engagement in physical activity as a national policy and shows that the importance of enforcing media viewing restrictions should be highlighted to the community at large

Memory Checking for Parallel RAMs

When outsourcing a database to an untrusted remote server, one might want to verify the integrity of contents while accessing it. To solve this, Blum et al. [FOCS `91] propose the notion of memory checking. Memory checking allows a user to run a RAM program on a remote server, with the ability to verify integrity of the storage with small local storage. In this work, we define and initiate the formal study of memory checking for Parallel RAMs (PRAMs). The parallel RAM model is very expressive and captures many modern architectures such as multi-core architectures and cloud clusters. When multiple clients run a PRAM algorithm on a shared remote server, it is possible that there are concurrency issues that cause inconsistencies. Therefore, integrity verification is even more desirable property in this setting. Assuming only the existence of one-way functions, we construct an online memory checker (one that reports faults as soon as they occur) for PRAMs with $O(\log N)$ simulation overhead in both work and depth. In addition, we construct an offline memory checker (one that reports faults only after a long sequence of operations) with amortized $O(1)$ simulation overhead in both work and depth. Our constructions match the best known simulation overhead of the memory checkers in the standard single-user RAM setting. As an application of our parallel memory checking constructions, we additionally construct the first maliciously secure oblivious parallel RAM (OPRAM) with polylogarithmic overhead

MacORAMa: Optimal Oblivious RAM with Integrity

Oblivious RAM (ORAM), introduced by Goldreich and Ostrovsky (J. ACM `96), is a primitive that allows a client to perform RAM computations on an external database without revealing any information through the access pattern. For a database of size $N$, well-known lower bounds show that a multiplicative overhead of $\Omega(\log N)$ in the number of RAM queries is necessary assuming $O(1)$ client storage. A long sequence of works culminated in the asymptotically optimal construction of Asharov, Komargodski, Lin, and Shi (CRYPTO `21) with $O(\log N)$ worst-case overhead and $O(1)$ client storage. However, this optimal ORAM is known to be secure only in the honest-but-curious setting, where an adversary is allowed to observe the access patterns but not modify the contents of the database. In the malicious setting, where an adversary is additionally allowed to tamper with the database, this construction and many others in fact become insecure. In this work, we construct the first maliciously secure ORAM with worst-case $O(\log N)$ overhead and $O(1)$ client storage assuming one-way functions, which are also necessary. By the $\Omega(\log N)$ lower bound, our construction is asymptotically optimal. To attain this overhead, we develop techniques to intricately interleave online and offline memory checking for malicious security. Furthermore, we complement our positive result by showing the impossibility of a generic overhead-preserving compiler from honest-but-curious to malicious security, barring a breakthrough in memory checking

Comparison of Essential Oil of Lemongrass (Cymbopogon Citratus) Extracted with Microwave-Assisted Hydrodistillation (MAHD) and Conventional Hydrodistillation (HD) Method

The increasing demand of essential oil has opened up wide opportunities for global marketing which leads to the requirement of its competitive product in market that comes with all the advantages in term of cost, quality and its production time. Microwave-assisted hydrodistillation (MAHD) method is an advance extraction technique that takes advantage of microwave heating with the conventional hydrodistillation (HD). This research was carried out to study the effect of different MAHD parameters which were water to plant material ratio (6:1, 8:1,10:1), microwave power (200 W,250W) and extraction time (30min,60min, 90min,120min) in extraction of essential oil from Lemongrass (Cymbopogon Citratus). Its extraction yield and major constituents were analyzed and the results were compared with those of conventional HD. The optimum parameters were found at water to plant material ratio of 8:1, microwave power of 250W and 90 minutes of extraction and the yield obtained under this condition was 1.46%. The gas chromatography/mass spectrometric (GC-MS) analysis showed that the content of main constituents which were neral, geranial and myrcene were almost similar in the essential oil extracted using MAHD and conventional HD. This has proved that the use of microwave irradiation did not adversely influence the composition of essential oils. Overall, the results obtained indicate that MAHD method provided a good alternative for the extraction of essential oil from Lemongrass (Cymbopogon Citratus)