Colonial State of Mind: Examining the Culture of Healing and the Potential for Wholeness

Prior to European contact, Indigenous peoples had complex and intricate medical systems that demonstrated high levels of efficacy in preventing and treating a plethora of historically specific health-related issues. Since contact, Indigenous groups in Canada have experienced severe and prolonged effects of colonization by European Settlers on their communities, lands and belief-systems. Consequently, European occupation of traditional Indigenous territories has had a dramatic impact on the lived realities of Indigenous peoples, including significant effects on their health and wellness. Multiple studies indicate that the health and wellness of Canada’s Indigenous population is lower than the general population in almost every health indicator. Various correlating factors have been advanced to help elucidate factors linking the multifarious aspects of colonialism to the maintenance of this health gap. Among these explanations, scholars have investigated how the introduction and imposition of foreign political and economic structures has resulted in the alienation and disconnection of Indigenous peoples from their own cultural practices and healing methods. In response, health care scholars and providers have begun designing unique strategies to meet the specific needs of Indigenous groups. The explicit recognition and incorporation of Indigenous healing systems within the biomedical model has been linked to improving the health and wellness of Indigenous peoples in Canada. This paper adapts the popular LEARN transcultural communication guide into a 5-part analytic framework investigating the emergence and maintenance of power imbalances vested in the dominant Western health care system. This paper deploys the LEARN analytic framework to examine how the colonial encounter has resulted in a severe disruption of traditional approaches to health and healing. As an analytic framework, LEARN has broad applications in assisting health care scholars in considering the various complexities of the Indigenous-Settler interface, including examining the implications of colonial contact for Indigenous health and wellness, a look at emergent recommendations to ameliorate poor health outcomes and strategies to resolve power disparities at an institutional and individual level. &nbsp

Whose Click Fraud Data Do You Trust? Effect Of Click Fraud On Advertiser’s Trust And Sponsored Search Advertising Decisions

Online sponsored search has emerged as a dominant business model for majority of search engines and as a popular advertising mechanism for online retailers. However, sponsored search advertising is being negatively impacted by click fraud which involves the intentional clicking on sponsored links with the purpose of gaining undue monetary returns for the search engine or harming a particular advertiser by depleting its advertising budget. While search engines tend to compensate advertisers to an extent for click frauds, it still leaves an element of uncertainty in the minds of advertisers whether search engine is being faithful in reporting the click fraud numbers. Armed with additional data available from third party click fraud audit companies, advertisers may have more reasons to suspect click fraud numbers reported by search engines if there is a discrepancy between the numbers reported by two sources (search engines and third party click fraud audit companies). While the phenomenon of click fraud has been acknowledged to exist, its effect on sponsored search advertisers’ trust and their decision to advertise with a particular search engine has not been given sufficient attention in the literature. As an initial step, in this research in progress study, we develop a theoretical model to examine the effect of click fraud on advertiser’s trust in search engine and its subsequent impact on advertiser’s decision to adjust advertising spend for different search engines. In this paper, we also outline the proposed experimental design to validate the theoretical model subsequently in future. Broadly, the research suggests that sponsored search advertisers are likely to adjust their advertising spend based on level of trust they have in search engine, click fraud numbers discrepancy, and return on investment obtained from advertising on that particular search engine

FORMULATION DEVELOPMENT AND STABILITY INDICATING HPLC ASSAY OF TABLETS OF APIXABAN

Objective: Cost effective formulation development and stability indicating HPLC method for estimation of apixaban in bulk and tablets dosage form.Methods: 32 factorial design was applied to formulate the immediate release tablets of apixaban by using direct compression method. The chromatographic separation was performed on Purospher Star RP-18e (5 µm, 250x4, 6 mm) column and a stability indicating assay method was developed by using HPLC. The mobile phase consists of water: acetonitrile (60:40 v/v) was delivered at a flow rate of 1 ml/min and UV detection at 280 nm. The method was validated with forced degradation studies as per ICH guidelines.Results: Prepared batches were evaluated for all pre-compression parameters and post-compression parameters. Formulation batch F5 prepared by direct compression shows highest dissolution release of 90.97 % over the period of 60 min while disintegration time was found to be 136 seconds. The retention time of developed HPLC method was found to be 5.66 min. This method was found to be linear in a concentration range of 5-30 μg/ml of the drug (r2= 0.999). The low value of % RSD in the precision study indicates reproducibility of the method. The low value of LOD and LOQ suggests the sensitivity of the method. The results of forced degradation studies indicated that the drug was less stable in thermal and photolytic condition and degraded in acidic, basic, oxidative conditions.Conclusion: On the basis of formulation evaluation, batch F5 was found to be promising formulation suitable for the immediate release of apixaban. Results obtained by validation studies suggested that the developed stability indicating assay method is simple, accurate, specific, sensitive and precise. Thus, this method can be used for routine analysis of apixaban formulation and to check the stability testing.Â