Cultural Impact on e-Performance in Government Organizations in the United Arab Emirates

This paper examines the influence of cultural forces in accepting the implementation of technology systems that deal with assessment and evaluation of government employees to facilitate the transitional process from manual to e-performance assessment in governmental organizations in the United Arab Emirates. The research methodology followed is descriptive and semi-structured interviews with government employees and line managers involved in e- performance and assessment. This study finds that scholars have long argued that cultural characteristics influence behavior directly. This phenomenon, however, varies from one culture to the other depending on numerous factors that shape work ethics and norms in the workplace. This study suggests that the United Arab Emirates enjoys highly structured governmental organizations. This primarily results from the naturally inherited characteristics of being a high- context society

The distribution and diversity of dinoflagellate cysts in sediments of Gwatar Bay (Northeast Gulf of Oman)

Most dinoflagellate produce resting cysts during their sexual lifecycle as well as under unfavorable environmental conditions and from water column settle in the sediments substratum. The evaluation of diversity and distribution of dinoflagellate cysts is very important in environmental studies, because cysts act as seed in sea bed that can cause red tide with excystment. This study was performed to determine the diversity and distribution of dinoflagellate cysts in the sediments of Gwatar Bay in 2013 by sediments sampling from five stations. Sediment sampling was made by Ekman grab with covering area of 0.225 square meters with three replicates at each station in two seasons before and after the monsoon. In total of sampling 16 samples in species levels belonging to 9 genera of dinoflagellate cysts were identified. The highest and lowest abundances are related to the genus Protoperidinium (52%) and the genus Zygabikodinium (1%), respectively. The results showed the average dinoflagellate cysts diversity from 2.22 before monsoon have decreased to 2.06 after monsoon

THE RELATIONSHIP OF MARITAL ADJUSTMENT AND SEXUAL FUNCTION WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS AFFECTING TREATMENT IN INFERTILE WOMEN

Abstract. Infertility is one of the most importantissues of reproductive health that has prominent effects on psychological and social aspects of couple's life. Infertility causes women’s concern about their sexual attractiveness and also their physical and mental health, It is even possible that using assisted reproductive technologies have negative effects on women’s feelings of the sexual values and marital relationships. This study therefore aimed to investigate the relationship of marital adjustment and sexual function with psychological factors affecting treatment in infertile women in 2013 in Mashhad, Iran. This correlational study was performed on 130 infertile women referred to Montaserie Infertility Research Center, Mashhad who selected using convenient sampling. Research tools were consisted of demographic questionnaires including personal and infertility-related information, and valid and reliable ROSEN Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI),Spanier Marital Adjustment Scale(DAS) and Goldbergand Hillier General Health Questionnaire, which were completed by the subjects. Data analysis was carried out by SPSS software using t-test,one way ANOVA, Spearman and Pearson correlation tests. The mean score of awareness of infertility and the length of infertility treatment were 5.24±4.12 and 4±3.95 years, respectively. The cause of infertility in 46.9% was a female factor and in 38.7% a male factor. General health in 49.2% of the infertile women were good. 54.6% of the infertile women had poor sexual function and 76.9% had high maritaladjustment. There was a direct correlation between sexual function and marital adjustment with general health in infertile women (P<0.001).A significantrelationship was also seen between sexual function and spouse accompany during treatment (P<0.05). Also a direct correlation was found between marital adjustment and being hopeful to treatment success and also spouse accompany during treatment in infertile women (P<0.05). The findings showed that infertile women with improved sexual function and good marital adjustment will have better mental health and are more hopeful toinfertility treatment . These results can be incorporated in planning of training and counseling programs, specially for infertile women who suffer from psychological disorders

Challenges of Deep Learning-based Text Detection in the Wild

The reported accuracy of recent state-of-the-art text detection methods, mostly deep learning approaches, is in the order of 80% to 90% on standard benchmark datasets. These methods have relaxed some of the restrictions of structured text and environment (i.e., "in the wild") which are usually required for classical OCR to properly function. Even with this relaxation, there are still circumstances where these state-of-the-art methods fail.&nbsp; Several remaining challenges in wild images, like in-plane-rotation, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex font styles, and perspective distortion, cause exciting methods to perform poorly. In order to evaluate current approaches in a formal way, we standardize the datasets and metrics for comparison which had made comparison between these methods difficult in the past. We use three benchmark datasets for our evaluations:&nbsp;ICDAR13, ICDAR15, and COCO-Text V2.0. The objective of the paper is to quantify the current shortcomings and to identify the challenges for future text detection research

2D Positional Embedding-based Transformer for Scene Text Recognition

Recent state-of-the-art scene text recognition methods are primarily based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), however, these methods require one-dimensional (1D) features and are not designed for recognizing irregular-text instances due to the loss of spatial information present in the original two-dimensional (2D) images.&nbsp; In this paper, we leverage a Transformer-based architecture for recognizing both regular and irregular text-in-the-wild images. The proposed method takes advantage of using a 2D positional encoder with the Transformer architecture to better preserve the spatial information of 2D image features than previous methods. The experiments on popular benchmarks, including the challenging COCO-Text dataset, demonstrate that the proposed scene text recognition method outperformed the state-of-the-art in most cases, especially on irregular-text recognition

Birth weight influences cardiac structure, function and disease risk: evidence of a causal association

Background and Aims Low birth weight is a common pregnancy complication, which has been associated with higher risk of cardiometabolic disease in later life. Prior Mendelian randomization (MR) studies exploring this question do not distinguish the mechanistic contributions of variants that directly influence birth weight through the foetal genome (direct foetal effects), vs. variants influencing birth weight indirectly by causing an adverse intrauterine environment (indirect maternal effects). In this study, MR was used to assess whether birth weight, independent of intrauterine influences, is associated with cardiovascular disease risk and measures of adverse cardiac structure and function. Methods Uncorrelated (r2 < .001), genome-wide significant (P < 5 × 10−8) single nucleotide polymorphisms were extracted from genome-wide association studies summary statistics for birth weight overall, and after isolating direct foetal effects only. Inverse-variance weighted MR was utilized for analyses on outcomes of atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease, heart failure, ischaemic stroke, and 16 measures of cardiac structure and function. Multiple comparisons were accounted for by Benjamini–Hochberg correction. Results Lower genetically-predicted birth weight, isolating direct foetal effects only, was associated with an increased risk of coronary artery disease (odds ratio 1.21, 95% confidence interval 1.06–1.37; P = .031), smaller chamber volumes, and lower stroke volume, but higher contractility. Conclusions The results of this study support a causal role of low birth weight in cardiovascular disease, even after accounting for the influence of the intrauterine environment. This suggests that individuals with a low birth weight may benefit from early targeted cardiovascular disease prevention strategies, independent of whether this was linked to an adverse intrauterine environment during gestation

Brain age estimation at tract group level and its association with daily life measures, cardiac risk factors and genetic variants

Brain age can be estimated using different Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) modalities including diffusion MRI. Recent studies demonstrated that white matter (WM) tracts that share the same function might experience similar alterations. Therefore, in this work, we sought to investigate such issue focusing on five WM bundles holding that feature that is Association, Brainstem, Commissural, Limbic and Projection fibers, respectively. For each tract group, we estimated brain age for 15,335 healthy participants from United Kingdom Biobank relying on diffusion MRI data derived endophenotypes, Bayesian ridge regression modeling and 10 fold-cross validation. Furthermore, we estimated brain age for an Ensemble model that gathers all the considered WM bundles. Association analysis was subsequently performed between the estimated brain age delta as resulting from the six models, that is for each tract group as well as for the Ensemble model, and 38 daily life style measures, 14 cardiac risk factors and cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging features and genetic variants. The Ensemble model that used all tracts from all fiber groups (FG) performed better than other models to estimate brain age. Limbic tracts based model reached the highest accuracy with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 5.08, followed by the Commissural ([Formula: see text]), Association ([Formula: see text]), and Projection ([Formula: see text]) ones. The Brainstem tracts based model was the less accurate achieving a MAE of 5.86. Accordingly, our study suggests that the Limbic tracts experience less brain aging or allows for more accurate estimates compared to other tract groups. Moreover, the results suggest that Limbic tract leads to the largest number of significant associations with daily lifestyle factors than the other tract groups. Lastly, two SNPs were significantly (p value [Formula: see text]) associated with brain age delta in the Projection fibers. Those SNPs are mapped to HIST1H1A and SLC17A3 genes

The impact of carbon monoxide inhalation on developing noise-induced hearing loss in guinea pigs

Carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning is one of the most common types of fatal poisonings worldwide. Acute exposure to high levels of CO as well as chronic exposure to low levels of CO and excessive noise can lead to high frequency hearing loss. In this study, twelve guinea pigs were randomly divided into two groups: (1) exposed to noise and (2) exposed to noise plus CO. Auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) were measured prior to the experiment and immediately, 5, 10 and 15 days post exposures. There was a significant difference between the ABR thresholds before and immediately after exposure to noise at frequencies of 4, 8, and 16 kHz and the most threshold shift was observed at 8 kHz. There was also a significant difference between the ABR thresholds before and immediately after exposure to noise and CO at frequencies of 2, 4, 8, and 16 kHz which demonstrated a temporary hearing loss after exposure to noise and CO and the major impact of CO on developing noise induced hearing loss occurred at 8 kHz. No significant difference was observed between the ABR thresholds recorded before conducting the experiments and the ones obtained 5, 10 and 15 days after simultaneous exposure to noise and CO at none of frequencies. Simultaneous exposure to noise and CO contributes to transient hearing loss in guinea pigs with the most evident temporary shift at 8 kHz. The methods were accepted in the Ethics Committee of Iran University of Medical Science (registration No. CTRI/2016/01/017170) on January 18, 2016. © 2020 Medical Gas Research