Associations of Sociocultural Stressors with Psychological Distress and Self-rated Health among Hispanic Emerging Adults

Emerging adulthood (18-25 years) is a distinct period of life, characterized by a high level of instability in the matters of romantic life, work, and challenging developmental undertakings. Various events related to these developmental tasks may leave lifelong impacts on emerging adult’s identities and health across adulthood. Further, due to the unstable nature of this period, individuals in this age group are vulnerable to various mental health problems. Hispanic emerging adults may be particularly at risk of experiencing adverse health outcomes, as on top of normative developmental stressors (e.g., increased autonomy, finding employment), they are often exposed to various chronic sociocultural stressors. However, few studies have examined this period, let alone involving Hispanic emerging adults, in part due to the recent establishment of this period as a distinct stage of life. Considering the future health implications of this period, utilizing data from the Project on Health among Emerging Adult Latinos (Project HEAL), this research investigated the associations between cultural stressors (acculturation gap conflicts, ethnic discrimination) and outcomes such as depressive symptoms, psychological stress, and perceived health status among 200 Hispanic emerging adults. We also examined potential resources (family cohesion, distress tolerance, and optimism) that can help protect Hispanic emerging adults from the detrimental effects of acculturation gap conflicts and ethnic discrimination. Our findings from hierarchical multiple regressions indicated that those with higher acculturation gap conflicts were more likely to experience depressive symptoms and perceive their health as poor. Similarly, Hispanic emerging adults who were experiencing higher ethnic discrimination were more likely to develop psychological stress. Results from moderation analyses showed that family cohesion moderated the association between acculturation gap conflicts and depressive symptoms. Additionally, both distress tolerance and optimism moderated the association between ethnic discrimination and psychological stress. It is critical to identify culturally relevant and modifiable determinants that can have beneficial or adverse associations with the mental health of Hispanic emerging adults so that steps can be taken to design or modify prevention and intervention programs to safeguard the health of one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population. The findings of this study add to the limited literature by making a meaningful contribution to a subject area that needs more exploration

Is TGF-β playing a role in ectopic neuromuscular junction formation in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans?

The neuromuscular junction (nmj) is a commonly studied synapse, used often to investigate reciprocal signaling between a motor neuron and the appropriate target muscle. In Caenorhabditis elegans, ectopic nmjs can be created by eliminating selected embryonic muscle cells that act as guideposts for the migration of post-embryonic muscles. The ectopic muscles are required to induce sprouting from DD motor neurons, indicating the presence of a muscle derived signaling molecule that interacts with the neurons. A TGF-β homolog, unc-129, is reported to be transiently expressed in the dorsal body wall muscles. The timing of the expression of TGF-β coincides with the time that the DD motor neurons respecify their synapses. In this study, we show that TGF-β is expressed by the ectopic muscle and that in unc-129 mutant animals, the ectopic muscle is unable to induce sprouting from the DD motor neurons. Therefore, we conclude that TGF-β is necessary for ectopic nmj formation in C.elegans

Investigating Autophagy Dysfunction Induced by a Parkinson\u27s Disease-Causing Mutation in VPS35

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is an idiopathic disorder with no known cure. With number of cases steadily rising around the world, it is imperative to turn to the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms of the disease manifestation and neurodegeneration to craft novel modes of therapy. VPS35 is one of the few genes that have identified and definitively linked to familial PD. The particular mutation that has been associated is known to cause dysfunction of a key cellular process known as autophagy. This process is primarily responsible for clearance of unwanted, damaged or misfolded proteins, among other things. Our study reveals an important link between VPS35, PI3K-AKT signaling pathway and autophagy dysfunction that might be a potential mechanism of PD pathogenesis. We also address possible perturbed dopaminergic neurogenesis in the substantia nigra brain region as a second plausible disease mechanism, as well as a target for therapeutic intervention

Snoop-forge-replay attack on continuous verification with keystrokes

We present a new attack called the snoop-forge-replay attack on the keystroke-based continuous verification systems. We performed the attacks on two levels – 1) feature-level and 2) sample-level. (1) Feature-level attack targets specific keystroke-based continuous verification method or system. In feature-level attacks, we performed a series of experiments using keystroke data from 50 users who typed approximately 1200 to 2300 keystrokes of free text during three different periods. The experiments consisted of two parts. In the first part, we conducted zero-effort verification experiments with two verifiers ( R and S ) and obtained Equal Error Rates (EERs) between 10% and 15% under various verifier configurations. In the second part, we replayed 10,000 forged impostor attempts per user and demonstrated how the zero-effort impostor pass rates became meaningless when impostor attempts were created using stolen keystroke timing information. (2) Sample-level attack is not specific to any particular keystroke-based continuous verification method or system. It can be launched with easily available keyloggers and application programming interfaces (APIs) for keystroke synthesis. Our results from 2640 experiments show that (i) the snoop-forge-replay attacks achieve alarmingly high error rates compared to zero-effort impostor attacks, which have been the de facto standard for evaluating keystroke-based continuous verification systems; (ii) four state-of-the-art verification methods, three types of keystroke latencies, and eleven matching-pair settings (–a key parameter in continuous verification with keystrokes) that we examined in this dissertation were susceptible to the attack; (iii) the attack is effective even when as low as 20 to 100 keystrokes were snooped to create forgeries. In light of our results, we question the security offered by the current keystroke-based continuous verification systems. Additionally, in our experiments, we harnessed virtualization technology to generate thousands of keystroke forgeries within a short time span. We point out that virtualization setup such as the one used in our experiments can also be exploited by an attacker to scale and speed up the attack

Peoples’ Perception towards Telemedicine: A Case Study on Rural Area of Bangladesh

Telemedicine is a two-way, real time interactive session between the patient and the physician or practitioner at the remote location for the purpose of providing consultation. Telemedicine has enormous prospect to reduce health care service gap between rural area and urban area of Bangladesh. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the peoples’ perception towards telemedicine and the factors influencing peoples’ perception in telemedicine. The chi-square analysis and descriptive statistics have been used as statistical tools to test the hypotheses. A self-administered questionnaire has been developed and snowball sampling method is used to collect data from the study area. In addition to the traditional health care system, urban specialist doctors provide medical consultation in rural area by telemedicine. The findings of this study have revealed that age, gender, educational qualification, trust, privacy and confidentiality, awareness, service quality, existing equipment status, proper coordination, treatment cost and IT infrastructure have significant influence on the perception of telemedicine. The findings and recommendations may be taken by policymakers to make effective decisions regarding telemedicine services. Keywords: Telemedicine, Urban area, Peoples’ perception, Bangladesh

The Impact of Sound Industrial Relations on Job Satisfaction: A Case of Different Manufacturing Industries in Bangladesh

Comparing to the enormous changes in the infrastructure and communication with the dramatic diversity at the workplace the norms, values and personal thinking of the workers have been changing drastically and the effect of those mental revolution influences at the workplace. As Bangladesh is a flourishing economy, the industrial sector faces different challenges at workplace. The focus of this study is to find out the current industrial relations practices and the relative job satisfaction at different manufacturing industrial sector in Bangladesh. The study is based on field survey where randomly selected twelve manufacturing industries in Barisal division through observing and talking with workers and managers information are collected through ninety seven respondents. It is found that for maintaining harmonious relationship at industrial premises twelve factors are much  influential such as Job security, work environment, healthy and safely measures, Fair practices of Labor court, Wages & monetary benefit, Grievance handling procedures, Industrial democracy, Participation in Decision making, training and development, structured conflict resolution procedures, strong collective bargaining agent, Existence of Trade union and have positive influences with job satisfaction. Through this study it is found that there is a positive relationship exists between sound industrial relations and job satisfaction and the study developed by using hypothesis with multiple regression models. Finally the research finished on the conclusion that workers job satisfaction is the result of sound industrial relations. Keywords: Industrial Relations, job Satisfaction, Manufacturing industrial sector, multiple regression mode

Contributions of VPS35 Mutations to Parkinson’s Disease

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a multi-system neurodegenerative disease where approximately 90% of cases are idiopathic. The remaining 10% of the cases can be traced to a genetic origin and research has largely focused on these associated genes to gain a better understanding of the molecular and cellular pathogenesis for PD. The gene encoding vacuolar protein sorting protein 35 (VPS35) has been definitively linked to late onset familial PD following the identification of a point mutation (D620N) as the causal agent in a Swiss family. Since its discovery, numerous studies have been undertaken to characterize the role of VPS35 in cellular processes and efforts have been directed toward understanding the perturbations caused by the D620N mutation. In this review, we examine what is currently known about VPS35, which has pleiotropic effects, as well as proposed mechanisms of pathogenesis by the D620N mutation. A brief survey of other VPS35 polymorphisms is also provided. Lastly, model systems that are being utilized for these investigations and possible directions for future research are discussed

Guiding Software Developers using Automated Adaptation of Object Ensembles Plug-in

Software developing process has been improving day by day The development process can be affected through different ways like changing the development environment strategies and upcoming technologies In order to save valuable times and to speed up the process we can guide programmer during the development time through providing relevant recommendations There are some strategies that suggest related code snippets and API-items to the software programmers There are some techniques that apply general code searching approaches and some techniques that employ online based repository mining process But it is kind of difficult tasks to guide programmers when they need specific type conversion like adapting existing interfaces from the previously used types as per their demands One of the familiar approaches to guide developers in such a situation is to adapt collections and arrays through automated adaptation of object ensembles But how does it help a novice developer in real time software development that is not explicitly exemplified In this paper we have tried to introduce a system that works as a plug-in tool incorporated with a data mining integrated environment to recommend the relevant interfaces while they look for a type conversion We have a mined repository of respective adapter classes and related APIs from where programmers search their query and get their result using the relevant transformer classes The system that recommends developers entitled automated objective ensembles AOE plug-in From the investigation that we have done we can see that our approach works much better than some of the existing approache

Retrospective analysis of natural disaster impact on firm growth: A case in manufacturing firms in Bangladesh

Natural disaster has vulnerable effects on manufacturing firm’s growth as well as on economic development, due to climate change in these geographical areas. The limited empirical evidence in this knowledge base points out inappropriate strategic policy decisions for manufacturing firms’ growth in developing countries as root cause. Taking manufacturing firms in Bangladesh as an example, this paper upholds the impact of natural disasters on firm growth in both short and long run. The estimates use the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) Data as a sample to analyze firm growth between 2007 and 2014 in Bangladesh matched with Emergency Event Database (EM-DAT) disaster database for 2472 valid samples of manufacturing firms using the OLS regression model. The study finds the positive association of natural disasters with long term growth measured via assets and labor growth. Whereas the study found that the natural disasters negatively short run firm growth measured via sales growth. We may also conclude that natural disasters significantly impact on firm growth and policymakers can initiate the strategies for manufacturing firms to mitigate the risk of climate change