Factors affecting the Gender- based Consumer purchase intention towards Ethical Fashion (A case study on undergraduates of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura)

The study examines the factors affecting the gender-based consumer purchase intention towards ethical fashion in Sri Lanka. Primary data was gathered using self-administrated questionnaire through online platform and physically. Sample of the study was selected using stratified and simple random sampling techniques through undergraduates from three selected faculties of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. Sample size of the study was 371 respondents including 228 female and 143 male undergraduates. Both descriptive analysis and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) method were applied for the quantitative data. Findings of the study revealed that both the female and male consumers have an identical level of awareness regarding the ethical fashion market and related scopes. The respondents of the study have a positive impression on ethical fashion concept, and they believe that the concept itself is necessary for the betterment of the society and environment. Attitudes and beliefs regarding ethical fashion and subjective norms were identified as the major factors which affect the purchase intention towards ethical fashion among the consumers. Furthermore, it was found that gender doesn’t have any moderate effect in determining the consumers’ purchase intention towards ethical fashion in the young adult consumers in Sri Lanka. Findings of the study suggested that the fashion industry should implement new methods to motivate the purchasing intention of young customers. Also, such methods should promote the core values of ethical fashion concept as most of the consumers are not aware about those and for the expansion of the ethical fashion industry.  DOI: http://doi.org/10.31357/fhss/vjhss.v08i02.1

Who cooks from scratch and how do they prepare food

Purpose – There is increasing interest in the domestic preparation of food and with the postulated health benefits of “cooking from scratch”. The purpose of this paper is to examine the demographic and food preparation associations of this term in order to examine its operational value. Design/methodology/approach – A national online survey was conducted during 2012 in Australia among 1,023 domestic food providers, half of whom were men. Questions were asked about cooking from scratch, demographic characteristics, food preparation practices and interest in learning about cooking. Findings – Three quarters of the sample reported they often or always “cooked from scratch” (CFS). More women than men always CFS; fewer 18-29 year olds did so often or always but more of the over 50s always did so; fewer single people CFS than cohabiting people. No statistically significant ethnic, educational background or household income differences were found. High levels of cooking from scratch were associated with interest in learning more about cooking, greater use of most cooking techniques (except microwaves), meat and legume preparation techniques, and the use of broader ranges of herbs, spice, liquids/ sauces, other ingredients and cooking utensils. Research limitations/implications – In future work a numerical description of the frequency of cooking from scratch should be considered along with a wider range of response options. The data were derived from an online panel from which men were oversampled. Caution is required in comparisons between men and women respondents. The cross-sectional nature of the sample prevents any causal attributions from being drawn from the observed relationships. Further replication of the findings, especially the lack of association with educational background should be conducted. Originality/value – This is the first study to examine the associations of demographic characteristics and cooking practices with cooking from scratch. The findings suggest that cooking from scratch is common among Australian family food providers and signifies interest in learning about cooking and involvement in a wide range of cooking techniques

Towards a Steady State Economy in Sri Lanka

In general, it is desired that Sri Lankan economy shows growth. A growing economy brings waste production which leads environmental pollutions such as air pollution water pollution etc. At present, increasing population in Sri Lanka requires more natural resources to meet the market demand. The ultimate result is an imbalance in the biological cycles, and an irreversible change in both economic process and environment.An irreversible economic process increases entropy. Ultimately, the entropy will reach its maximum value. Then everything will become standstill since there would not exist more energy to continue the economic process. As a solution, the concept of a steady state economy is structured.Sri Lankan economy was assessed within steady state economics to evaluate the present economic situation of Sri Lanka. A statistical analysis was carried out on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), population, energy use, CO2 emission through time series analysis and regression analysis,to identify the extent to which Sri Lankan economy has deviated from a steady state economy. Regression analysis indicates a strong relationship between GDP and CO2 emission. Total population size in Sri Lanka is increased from 9.9 million in 1960 to 20.48 million in 2013. CO2 emission per capita is increased from 0.25 metric tons in 1960 to 0.65 metric tons in 2010. CO2 emission is increased from 2259 kiloton in 1960 to 12831 kiloton in 2010.Rapid growth rates, CO2 emissions, population growth rates reveal that Sri Lankan economy is far apart from the concept of steady state.Transition to a steady state economy would require the implementation of new policies to restrict the utilization of nonrenewable resources. On the other hand it is mandatory to have legal regulations encouraging renewable resource use, energy efficiency, and reuse and recycling

Impurity-assisted tunneling in graphene

The electric conductance of a strip of undoped graphene increases in the presence of a disorder potential, which is smooth on atomic scales. The phenomenon is attributed to impurity-assisted resonant tunneling of massless Dirac fermions. Employing the transfer matrix approach we demonstrate the resonant character of the conductivity enhancement in the presence of a single impurity. We also calculate the two-terminal conductivity for the model with one-dimensional fluctuations of disorder potential by a mapping onto a problem of Anderson localization.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, final version, typos corrected, references adde

Implementation of a quality improvement programme to support advance care planning in five hospitals across a health region.

OBJECTIVES: Advance care planning (ACP) can help patients with a terminal illness to prepare for the end of their lives. This report describes a regional service improvement initiative to increase the identification of hospital inpatients at this stage in their illnesses and to increase the number of such patients who are offered the opportunity to start the process of ACP. METHODS: Data were collected prospectively over a 7 month period from four acute hospital trusts and a specialist cancer centre in the South-West London region. Each unit identified a specific patient population who were screened for eligibility to engage in the process of ACP. Data concerning the reasons for eligibility, the suitability for discussion and the various reasons why patients did not complete the process, were recorded. RESULTS: Over a 7 month period 1980 patients were screened and 559 (28.2%) were found to be potentially eligible for an ACP discussion. Of these 227/559 (40.6%) were deemed suitable for a discussion by medical staff. The majority of these patients (195/227; 86%) were offered the opportunity to undergo ACP discussions and 144/195 (73.8%) agreed to begin the process of ACP. CONCLUSIONS: This report shows that a targeted approach can result in increased uptake in the number of patients who engage in ACP. However, systematic identification of potentially eligible patients requires a significant investment of clinical time and resources

A data-driven study of Alzheimer's disease related amyloid and tau pathology progression

Amyloid-beta is thought to facilitate the spread of tau throughout the neocortex in Alzheimer's disease, though how this occurs is not well understood. This is because of the spatial discordance between amyloid-beta, which accumulates in the neocortex, and tau, which accumulates in the medial temporal lobe during aging. There is evidence that in some cases amyloid-beta-independent tau spreads beyond the medial temporal lobe where it may interact with neocortical amyloid-beta. This suggests that there may be multiple distinct spatiotemporal subtypes of Alzheimer's-related protein aggregation, with potentially different demographic and genetic risk profiles. We investigated this hypothesis, applying data-driven disease progression subtyping models to post-mortem neuropathology and in vivo PET based measures from two large observational studies: the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and the Religious Orders Study and Rush Memory and Aging Project. We consistently identified 'amyloid-first' and 'tau-first' subtypes using cross-sectional information from both studies. In the amyloid-first subtype, extensive neocortical amyloid-beta precedes the spread of tau beyond the medial temporal lobe, while in the tau-first subtype mild tau accumulates in medial temporal and neocortical areas prior to interacting with amyloid-beta. As expected, we found a higher prevalence of the amyloid-first subtype among apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele carriers while the tau-first subtype was more common among APOE ε4 non-carriers. Within tau-first APOE ε4 carriers, we found an increased rate of amyloid-beta accumulation (via longitudinal amyloid PET), suggesting that this rare group may belong within the Alzheimer's disease continuum. We also found that tau-first APOE ε4 carriers had several fewer years of education than other groups, suggesting a role for modifiable risk factors in facilitating amyloid-beta-independent tau. Tau-first APOE ε4 non-carriers, in contrast, recapitulated many of the features of Primary Age-related Tauopathy. The rate of longitudinal amyloid-beta and tau accumulation (both measured via PET) within this group did not differ from normal aging, supporting the distinction of Primary Age-related Tauopathy from Alzheimer's disease. We also found reduced longitudinal subtype consistency within tau-first APOE ε4 non-carriers, suggesting additional heterogeneity within this group. Our findings support the idea that amyloid-beta and tau may begin as independent processes in spatially disconnected regions, with widespread neocortical tau resulting from the local interaction of amyloid-beta and tau. The site of this interaction may be subtype-dependent: medial temporal lobe in amyloid-first, neocortex in tau-first. These insights into the dynamics of amyloid-beta and tau may inform research and clinical trials that target these pathologies

ES11MA110N OF GLOBAL WARMING DAMAGE COST DUE TO THE FOREST RRES IN THE IMBULPE DIVISIONAL SECRETARIAT DIVISION, 2003 IN SRI LANKA

The objective of the study was to estimate the global warming damage costs caused byman made catastrophic forest fires in the Imbulpe divisional secretariat division (23140ha), Balangoda electorate in the Ratnapura district in Sri Lanka in 2003. The climaticforest fires occur every year during the period June to mid October in this area, creatingnumerous environmental and socio-economic problems such as declining of water table,extinction of endemic flora and fauna species, loss of bio diversity and pollution of air,water, and land and occasionally rendering people homeless. Even though the gravity ofthose forest fires in this region every year was devastating, the majority of the researchersdid not take this aspect into their consideration.Hence to combat this menace the Sabaragamuwa University Centre for Environment andSustainable Development (SUCEDS) had launched a number of projects since 2000 andthe current study is one such project. To accomplish this task primary data (forest fireaffected land areas and types of forests) were collected by means of household surveysand land surveying techniques. In addition to that maps and previous reports pertainingto the area were used to obtain secondary data (land use types, population of that area,endemic plant species). Determination of the extent of burnt land of diverse types and theconsideration of catastrophic forest fires caused in the Imbulpe area were identified using1:50000 map. The estimation of the global warming damage cost of the burnt area wascarried out by carbon Sequestration value of the burnt forest in the Imbulpe area by theTurner's (1994) value of $20. This value has been suggested as the financial damagecaused by every ton of carbon released from burning tropical rain forests, whichcontributes the global warming. The estimated global warming damage costs based onlost carbon sequestration function was Rs. 126.5 millionFurther this research disclosed that the main reasons for such fires were fires set out forunknown reasons, fires to prepare fresh grazing land for cattle feeding, hunters also setfire to forests for poaching of wild animals, fires caused by butt-ends of cigarettes andfires set to clear virgin forests for agricultural purposes.

The temporal event-based model: Learning event timelines in progressive diseases

Timelines of events, such as symptom appearance or a change in biomarker value, provide powerful signatures that characterise progressive diseases. Understanding and predicting the timing of events is important for clinical trials targeting individuals early in the disease course when putative treatments are likely to have the strongest effect. However, previous models of disease progression cannot estimate the time between events and provide only an ordering in which they change. Here, we introduce the temporal event-based model (TEBM), a new probabilistic model for inferring timelines of biomarker events from sparse and irregularly sampled datasets. We demonstrate the power of the TEBM in two neurodegenerative conditions: Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Huntington's disease (HD). In both diseases, the TEBM not only recapitulates current understanding of event orderings but also provides unique new ranges of timescales between consecutive events. We reproduce and validate these findings using external datasets in both diseases. We also demonstrate that the TEBM improves over current models; provides unique stratification capabilities; and enriches simulated clinical trials to achieve a power of 80% with less than half the cohort size compared with random selection. The application of the TEBM naturally extends to a wide range of progressive conditions

Posttranscriptional regulation of colonic epithelial repair by RNA binding protein IMP1/IGF2BP1

RNA binding proteins, including IMP1/IGF2BP1, are essential regulators of intestinal development and cancer. Imp1 hypomorphic mice exhibit gastrointestinal growth defects, yet the specific role for IMP1 in colon epithelial repair is unclear. Our prior work revealed that intestinal epithelial cell-specific Imp1 deletion (Imp1ΔIEC) was associated with better regeneration in mice after irradiation. Here, we report increased IMP1 expression in patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. We demonstrate that Imp1ΔIEC mice exhibit enhanced recovery following dextran sodium sulfate (DSS)-mediated colonic injury. Imp1ΔIEC mice exhibit Paneth cell granule changes, increased autophagy flux, and upregulation of Atg5. In silico and biochemical analyses revealed direct binding of IMP1 to MAP1LC3B, ATG3, and ATG5 transcripts. Genetic deletion of essential autophagy gene Atg7 in Imp1ΔIEC mice revealed increased sensitivity of double-mutant mice to colonic injury compared to control or Atg7 single mutant mice, suggesting a compensatory relationship between Imp1 and the autophagy pathway. The present study defines a novel interplay between IMP1 and autophagy, where IMP1 may be transiently induced during damage to modulate colonic epithelial cell responses to damage

Single hadron response measurement and calorimeter jet energy scale uncertainty with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

The uncertainty on the calorimeter energy response to jets of particles is derived for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). First, the calorimeter response to single isolated charged hadrons is measured and compared to the Monte Carlo simulation using proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energies of sqrt(s) = 900 GeV and 7 TeV collected during 2009 and 2010. Then, using the decay of K_s and Lambda particles, the calorimeter response to specific types of particles (positively and negatively charged pions, protons, and anti-protons) is measured and compared to the Monte Carlo predictions. Finally, the jet energy scale uncertainty is determined by propagating the response uncertainty for single charged and neutral particles to jets. The response uncertainty is 2-5% for central isolated hadrons and 1-3% for the final calorimeter jet energy scale.Comment: 24 pages plus author list (36 pages total), 23 figures, 1 table, submitted to European Physical Journal