Different apoptotic responses to Plasmodium chabaudi malaria in spleen and liver

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the apoptotic responses to Plasmodium chabaudi malaria in spleen and liver via mRNA expression of three genes involved in apoptosis (Bax, Bcl-2 and Caspase-3) are similar or not and to detect if these genes could be a good marker for apoptosis due to infection with P. chabaudi of female C57BL/6 mice. Mice were injected intraperitoneally (ip) with 106 P. chabaudi-infected erythrocytes and then scarified at days (0, 1, 4 and 8, respectively). Quantitative real time-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to quantify apoptotic genes. The levels of Bax and caspase-3 were significantly  increased only at days 1 and 8 in the liver cells and at day 8 in the spleen when compared with day 0. The level of B-cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) was significantly increased at all three days after infection in the liver cells, but significantly decreased at all three days after infection in the spleen. In conclusion, present data has shown  that infection with P. chabaudi stimulated apoptotic genes in the liver and spleen cells in different ways. Based on the obtained data, it can be hypothesized that the out come of malaria triggered different apoptotic  pathways in the liver and spleen. Also, these apoptotic genes can be used as a reliable apoptosis detection method.Key word: Apoptosis, malaria, mice, liver, spleen

Robustness of DEWMA versus EWMA Control Charts to Non-Normal Processes

Exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) and double EWMA (DEWMA) control charts were designed under the normality assumption. This study considers various skewed (Gamma) and symmetric non-normal (t) distributions to examine the effect of non-normality on the average run length (ARL) performance of EWMA and DEWMA. ARL performances were investigated and compared using Monte Carlo simulations. Results show that DEWMA charts can be designed to be robust to non-normality, that the ARL performances of EWMA and DEWMA charts were more robust to t distributions and DEWMA was more robust to non-normality for larger values of the smoothing parameter

Career Development in Language Education Programs

This study assesses the influence of a two-year language program evaluation on program directors and faculty career development. The study makes use of mixed-paradigms (positivism and qualitative interpretive), mixed-strategies (survey research and qualitative evaluation), one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and a post-hoc test of multiple comparisons (Scheffe). The findings indicate that imposed program evaluation experiences help faculty members advance their career skills in terms of course planning, classroom teaching, learning assessment, classroom research, and coping with career pressure. The findings also indicate significant improvement in program director academic and administrative career skills. Moreover, the findings did not show inter-program differences regarding the program evaluation impact on faculty and program director career skills. The study recommends program evaluation as an effective and systematic approach to program stakeholder career development

Building and verifying parallel corpora between Arabic and English

Arabic and English are acknowledged as two major natural languages used by many countries and regions. Reviews of previous literature conclude that machine translation (MT) between these languages is disappointing and unsatisfactory due to its poor quality. This research aims to improve the translation quality of MT between Arabic and English by developing higher quality parallel corpora. The thesis developed a higher quality parallel test corpus, based on corpora from Al Hayat articles and the OPUS open-source online corpora database. A new Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM)-based metric for sentence alignment has been applied to verify quality in translation between the sentence pairs in the test corpus. This metric combines two techniques; the traditional approach is based on sentence length and the other is based on compression code length. A higher quality parallel corpus has been constructed from the existing resources. Obtaining sentences and words from two online sources, Al Hayat and OPUS, the new corpus offers 27,775,663 words in Arabic and 30,808,480 in English. Experimental results on sample data indicate that the PPM-based and sentence length technique for sentence alignment on this corpus improves accuracy of alignment compared to sentence length alone

Children's access to medicines

Access to health care for children is important. It is dependent on access to health professionals and also parental attitudes towards illness. Children have the right to receive medicines that are scientifically evaluated for both efficacy and safety. Counterfeit and substandard medicines unfortunately result in the death of many children worldwide. There have been particular problems with diethylene glycol which has been used as a solvent in counterfeit medicines. It has also been found in contaminated substandard medicines. It has been responsible for the death of many children in different countries throughout the world. I performed a literature review of all cases of diethylene glycol poisoning that have been published. I have described the clinical signs and symptoms and hope that these findings increase the awareness of diethylene glycol poisoning in children. It is well known that there are clear inequalities in health and access to health care in the UK. This inequity has been particularly noticed amongst certain minority groups. Children of “at risk” groups, such as Asylum Seekers and Refugees, and Gypsies and Travellers, were recognised as having possible barriers in accessing health care and medicines. I conducted a study to explore children’s access to medicines in the East Midlands area in the UK. Alongside determining accessibility to health care the study also wished to explore parental attitudes towards receiving treatment for pain, asthma and epilepsy Both quantitative and qualitative research methodology was used in this study. The research data was gathered with the aid of semi-structured interviews with parents from the “at risk” groups and control parents. Fifty parents from each group were selected and interviewed regarding their children‟s health and their access to health care and medicines. The semi-structured interviews allowed participating parents to state their opinions about any barriers they had encountered to their children receiving medicines. Parents from both “at risk” groups and children from the Traveller group had more health problems than the controls. The attitude of some Gypsy and Traveller parents (11%) not to immunise their children was a significant problem. One in six Refugee parents reported difficulties while obtaining medicines. The two main barriers were language/communication problems and financial difficulties. Both Refugee and Traveller children received fewer OTC medicines than the children of the control group. It was not clear from the interviews whether this was due to financial difficulties or reluctance to use medicines without a doctor having seen the child first. Parents from both “at risk” groups were less likely to give analgesics for treating earache than those in the control group. Parents of Refugee children were more reluctant to tell others about their child’s epilepsy. Access to health care is an essential human right. Children are dependent upon both their parents and the health system for ensuring access to health care. This study has identified problems both within the system and also in relation to parental beliefs that may affect the access to health care and treatment for children. It is important that both of these potential barriers are addressed in order to improve the health of children of “at risk” groups. It is hopeful that the findings in this study will help to identify ways of improving access to health care and medicines for these groups

A new hybrid metric for verifying parallel corpora of Arabic-English

This paper discusses a new metric that has been applied to verify the quality in translation between sentence pairs in parallel corpora of Arabic-English. This metric combines two techniques, one based on sentence length and the other based on compression code length. Experiments on sample test parallel Arabic-English corpora indicate the combination of these two techniques improves accuracy of the identification of satisfactory and unsatisfactory sentence pairs compared to sentence length and compression code length alone. The new method proposed in this research is effective at filtering noise and reducing mis-translations resulting in greatly improved quality.Comment: in CCSEA-201

Request Strategies by Second Language Learners of English: Pre- and Post-head Act Strategies

This study investigates the speech act of request by Saudi high- and low-level learners of Australian English. All participants were asked to take part in three different role plays, which varied according to the relative power relationship between the informant and the conductor. We found that high-level learners did not considerably differ from low-level learners in terms of pre- and post-head act strategies, and request strategies; thereby indicating that proficiency level does not have a significant impact on L2 learners’ choice of pre- and post-head act strategies and request strategies. However, both groups of learners deviated from Australian English native speakers in terms of post-head act and request strategies. In light of the social variable (power) influence, it was found that power affected both groups of learners, along with the native speaking group, in terms of pre- and post-head act strategies. However, power did not have an impact on the SLL group, while it did have an effect on the high-level group, along with the native speaking group, in terms of request strategies. Thus, there is no apparent correlation between the social variable (power) and L2 learners’ use of pre- and post-head act strategies, while power positively correlates with L2 learners’ proficiency level regarding their use of request strategies.Key words: Interlanguage pragmatics; Speech act of requests; L2 learner

Children's access to medicines

Access to health care for children is important. It is dependent on access to health professionals and also parental attitudes towards illness. Children have the right to receive medicines that are scientifically evaluated for both efficacy and safety. Counterfeit and substandard medicines unfortunately result in the death of many children worldwide. There have been particular problems with diethylene glycol which has been used as a solvent in counterfeit medicines. It has also been found in contaminated substandard medicines. It has been responsible for the death of many children in different countries throughout the world. I performed a literature review of all cases of diethylene glycol poisoning that have been published. I have described the clinical signs and symptoms and hope that these findings increase the awareness of diethylene glycol poisoning in children. It is well known that there are clear inequalities in health and access to health care in the UK. This inequity has been particularly noticed amongst certain minority groups. Children of “at risk” groups, such as Asylum Seekers and Refugees, and Gypsies and Travellers, were recognised as having possible barriers in accessing health care and medicines. I conducted a study to explore children’s access to medicines in the East Midlands area in the UK. Alongside determining accessibility to health care the study also wished to explore parental attitudes towards receiving treatment for pain, asthma and epilepsy Both quantitative and qualitative research methodology was used in this study. The research data was gathered with the aid of semi-structured interviews with parents from the “at risk” groups and control parents. Fifty parents from each group were selected and interviewed regarding their children‟s health and their access to health care and medicines. The semi-structured interviews allowed participating parents to state their opinions about any barriers they had encountered to their children receiving medicines. Parents from both “at risk” groups and children from the Traveller group had more health problems than the controls. The attitude of some Gypsy and Traveller parents (11%) not to immunise their children was a significant problem. One in six Refugee parents reported difficulties while obtaining medicines. The two main barriers were language/communication problems and financial difficulties. Both Refugee and Traveller children received fewer OTC medicines than the children of the control group. It was not clear from the interviews whether this was due to financial difficulties or reluctance to use medicines without a doctor having seen the child first. Parents from both “at risk” groups were less likely to give analgesics for treating earache than those in the control group. Parents of Refugee children were more reluctant to tell others about their child’s epilepsy. Access to health care is an essential human right. Children are dependent upon both their parents and the health system for ensuring access to health care. This study has identified problems both within the system and also in relation to parental beliefs that may affect the access to health care and treatment for children. It is important that both of these potential barriers are addressed in order to improve the health of children of “at risk” groups. It is hopeful that the findings in this study will help to identify ways of improving access to health care and medicines for these groups

ADSORPTION OF FOOD COLORING ALLURA RED DYE (E129) FROM AQUEOUS SOLUTIONS USING ACTIVATED CARBON

The adsorption behavior of Allura red (E129) from aqueous solutions onto activated carbon was successfully investigated. All factors affecting the adsorption process were carefully studied and the conditions were optimized. Adsorption of E129 onto activated carbon was found to increase by decreasing the mass of activated carbon, pH and ionic strength of the solution and by increasing temperature. The adsorption capacity of the activated carbon for Allura red was relatively high. Under the optimum conditions, the maximum adsorption capacity for E129 dye was 72.85 mg/g. Three adsorption models; Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin model were investigated regarding the adsorption of E129. The models’ parameters KL, qm, R2, (n) were determined and found to be 0.0222, 72.85 mg/g, 0.9057-0.9984, and 0.992, respectively. Also, pseudo first and second-order kinetic models were tested to determine the best-fit model to the adsorption of E129 dye onto activated carbon. The results showed that the adsorption of E129 onto activated carbon obeyed both the Freundlich isotherm and pseudo second-order kinetic models. Moreover, thermodynamic studies indicated that the adsorption of E129 dye onto the activated carbon was spontaneous.Â