Validation of an Ultrashort Persian Version of Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-5) Questionnaire

Objective: To validate the ultrashort (5-item) Persian version of OHIP by investigating its psychometric properties. Material and Methods: Construct validity was assessed by examining the correlation between OHIP-5 scores and self-reported oral health status, judgment for dental treatment needs and the number of natural teeth. Reliability was calculated using Cronbach’s alpha and corrected item-total correlation. Effect size (ES) and Standardized Response Mean (SRM) were calculated for the responsiveness of the scale and factor analysis was done by measuring Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO), Bartlett’s sphericity test and scree plot. Results: In 430 subjects (mean age 41.56+/-11.35 years, 56% female) the correlations between OHIP-5 scores and mentioned items were significant (p<0.01) indicating sufficient construct validity. The reliability coefficient (Cronbach's alpha) of the OHIP-5 was above the recommended 0.7 thresholds (0.809) and considered well. For evaluation of responsiveness, the ES was measured to be 5.604 and the SRM was 1.5. Moreover, in the confirmatory factor analysis, the unidimensional model for OHIP5 approved by indices (KMO=0.81, p<0.001 for Bartlett sphericity). Conclusion: The Persian version of OHIP-5 is a precise, valid, reliable and unidimensional instrument for assessing oral health-related quality of life among the general adult population

Measurement Model Value Aspects Of Teacher Leadership In Vocational Education

Teaching profession at present is very challenging and the teachers themselves must be prepared to deal with it. The issue of teachers and the teaching profession continue to gain attention and often widely debated whether in the media, among the general public and even discussed until the national level. Negative sentiment against teachers often receives media attention although not authentic, and it creates a feeling of prejudice and less happy society on the individual teacher. These issues need to be addressed wisely by all teachers and the parties involved so that the dignity of the profession remain respected. Teachers need to show good values of the students, school and community. This is important because there is value in teachers will influence others to stay in school or otherwise. People often look at the behavior of teachers and assess externally only. Teachers must have admirable traits that can guide and educate students to become excellent once formed their personal character. This study aimed to verify the instrument model aspects of the leadership of teachers in technical and vocational education. Specifically, the objectives of this study were to confirm the scale of the measurement model teacher leadership and to identify the reliability of the instrument model. This study used a questionnaire to collect data from respondents. The questionnaire used is divided into two parts, Part A and Part B Section A consisted of demographic data, while Part B contains 53 item questionnaire measuring aspects of the leadership of the teachers in improving teaching and student learning, teacher leadership skills in improve relations and cooperation with the community and other parties, leadership skills and attributes of teachers in skill lead. And practice leadership skills teacher professional learning for continuous improvement. The study population consisted of all students of semester 8, IPG Zone east coast of peninsular Malaysia. This study used a sample of all the population to study. However, only 153 questionnaires that can be used for analysis and the respondents for this survey. This questionnaire has been validated by a panel of experts consisting of a lecturer who specializes in the study in IPGK Zone east coast of Malaysia, to get the validity of the content. The questionnaire was constructed and tested for suitability in the context of teacher education in IPGK Zone east coast of Malaysia

Psychological or physical prenatal stress differentially affects cognition behaviors

Introduction: Prenatal stress is proposed as a major risk factor in the development of cognitive impairments in the offspring. The objective of the current study was to evaluate the effect of prenatal physical or psychological stress on the motor and cognitive functions of male and female offspring. Methods: Adult female rats were stressed during their conception using a novel method to induced whether physical or psychological stress. Animal offspring were then kept until adulthood. Elevated plus maze (EPM) was used to evaluate their anxiety-like behavior. Rotarod and wire grip were used to evaluate muscle strength and balance function. Morris water maze (MWM) and passive avoidance (PA) learning and memory paradigm were used to evaluate the cognitive function of the offspring. Results: Female offspring of both physical and psychological stress had an increased anxiety-like behavior in the EPM test in comparison to female control rats. Balance function was impaired in physical stressed female offspring in comparison to the control and male offspring. Muscle strength was reduced in physical male and female offspring. Both male and female offspring groups that underwent prenatal physical and psychological stress had an impaired spatial learning and memory. PA learning and memory were impaired in both male and female offspring except for the psychological stress female offspring in PA learning. Conclusion: Results of our study revealed that prenatal physical or psychological stress have different effects on motor and cognitive functions of the offspring. Male and female offspring were differentially affected by prenatal stress. We suggest more studies to evaluate the role of sex hormones on the effects of prenatal physical or psychological stress on cognitive and motor functions of the offsprin

Toward Wheeled Mobility on Vertically Challenging Terrain: Platforms, Datasets, and Algorithms

Most conventional wheeled robots can only move in flat environments and simply divide their planar workspaces into free spaces and obstacles. Deeming obstacles as non-traversable significantly limits wheeled robots' mobility in real-world, extremely rugged, off-road environments, where part of the terrain (e.g., irregular boulders and fallen trees) will be treated as non-traversable obstacles. To improve wheeled mobility in those environments with vertically challenging terrain, we present two wheeled platforms with little hardware modification compared to conventional wheeled robots; we collect datasets of our wheeled robots crawling over previously non-traversable, vertically challenging terrain to facilitate data-driven mobility; we also present algorithms and their experimental results to show that conventional wheeled robots have previously unrealized potential of moving through vertically challenging terrain. We make our platforms, datasets, and algorithms publicly available to facilitate future research on wheeled mobility.Comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk62ITBGoTI https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/Verti-Wheelers

Flood routing via a copula-based approach

Abstract Floods are among the most common natural disasters that if not controlled may cause severe damage and high costs. Flood control and management can be done using structural measures that should be designed based on the flood design studies. The simulation of outflow hydrograph using inflow hydrograph can provide useful information. In this study, a copula-based approach was applied to simulate the outflow hydrograph of various floods, including the Wilson River flood, the River Wye flood and the Karun River flood. In this regard, two-dimensional copula functions and their conditional density were used. The results of evaluating the dependence structure of the studied variables (inflow and outflow hydrographs) using Kendall's tau confirmed the applicability of copula functions for bivariate modeling of inflow and outflow hydrographs. The simulation results were evaluated using the root-mean-square error, the sum of squared errors and the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE). The results showed that the copula-based approach has high performance. In general, the copula-based approach has been able to simulate the peak flow and the rising and falling limbs of the outflow hydrographs well. Also, all simulated data are at the 95% confidence interval. The NSE values for the copula-based approach are 0.99 for all three case studies. According to NSE values and violin plots, it can be seen that the performance of the copula-based approach in simulating the outflow hydrograph in all three case studies is acceptable and shows a good performance

Measurement Model Value Aspects of Teacher Leadership in Vocational Education

Teaching profession at present is very challenging and the teachers themselves must be prepared to deal with it. The issue of teachers and the teaching profession continue to gain attention and often widely debated whether in the media, among the general public and even discussed until the national level. Negative sentiment against teachers often receives media attention although not authentic, and it creates a feeling of prejudice and less happy society on the individual teacher. These issues need to be addressed wisely by all teachers and the parties involved so that the dignity of the profession remain respected. Teachers need to show good values of the students, school and community. This is important because there is value in teachers will influence others to stay in school or otherwise. People often look at the behavior of teachers and assess externally only. Teachers must have admirable traits that can guide and educate students to become excellent once formed their personal character. This study aimed to verify the instrument model aspects of the leadership of teachers in technical and vocational education. Specifically, the objectives of this study were to confirm the scale of the measurement model teacher leadership and to identify the reliability of the instrument model. This study used a questionnaire to collect data from respondents. The questionnaire used is divided into two parts, Part A and Part B Section A consisted of demographic data, while Part B contains 53 item questionnaire measuring aspects of the leadership of the teachers in improving teaching and student learning, teacher leadership skills in improve relations and cooperation with the community and other parties, leadership skills and attributes of teachers in skill lead. And practice leadership skills teacher professional learning for continuous improvement. The study population consisted of all students of semester 8, IPG Zone east coast of peninsular Malaysia. This study used a sample of all the population to study. However, only 153 questionnaires that can be used for analysis and the respondents for this survey. This questionnaire has been validated by a panel of experts consisting of a lecturer who specializes in the study in IPGK Zone east coast of Malaysia, to get the validity of the content. The questionnaire was constructed and tested for suitability in the context of teacher education in IPGK Zone east coast of Malaysia

A Study on Learning Social Robot Navigation with Multimodal Perception

Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task becomes more than only obstacle avoidance, but also requires considering surrounding humans and their intentions to somewhat change the navigation behavior in response to the underlying social norms, i.e., being socially compliant. Machine learning methods are shown to be effective in capturing those complex and subtle social interactions in a data-driven manner, without explicitly hand-crafting simplified models or cost functions. Considering multiple available sensor modalities and the efficiency of learning methods, this paper presents a comprehensive study on learning social robot navigation with multimodal perception using a large-scale real-world dataset. The study investigates social robot navigation decision making on both the global and local planning levels and contrasts unimodal and multimodal learning against a set of classical navigation approaches in different social scenarios, while also analyzing the training and generalizability performance from the learning perspective. We also conduct a human study on how learning with multimodal perception affects the perceived social compliance. The results show that multimodal learning has a clear advantage over unimodal learning in both dataset and human studies. We open-source our code for the community's future use to study multimodal perception for learning social robot navigation

Analyzing the conditional behavior of rainfall deficiency and groundwater level deficiency signatures by using copula functions

Abstract The complex hydrological events such as storm, flood and drought are often characterized by a number of correlated random variables. Copulas can model the dependence structure independently of the marginal distribution functions and provide multivariate distributions with different margins and the dependence structure. In this study, the conditional behavior of two signatures was investigated by analyzing the joint signatures of groundwater level deficiency and rainfall deficiency in Naqadeh sub-basin in Lake Urmia Basin using copula functions. The study results of joint changes in the two signatures showed that a 90–135 mm reduction in rainfall in the area increased groundwater level between 1.2 and 1.7 m. The study results of the conditional density of bivariate copulas in the estimation of groundwater level deficiency values by reducing rainfall showed that changes in values of rainfall deficiency signature in the sub-basin led to the generation of probability curves of groundwater level deficiency signature. Regarding the maximum groundwater level deficiency produced, the relationship between changes in rainfall deficiency and groundwater level deficiency was calculated in order to estimate the groundwater level deficiency signature values. The conditional density function presented will be an alternative method to the conditional return period

Role of Opioid System in Empathy-like Behaviours in Rats

Background: Empathy is defined as the ability to simulate the mental states of others. Recent studies havedemonstrated empathy-like behaviors in other animals including rats and mice. The objective of the currentstudy was to evaluate the effect of acute administration of morphine and naloxone on cognition andnociception changes following observing conspecifics undergoing nociceptive stimulus.Methods: Adult male Wistar rats were used (n = 8 for each group). One cagemate received formalin injectioninto the hindpaw five times within a nine-day period and the other cagemate observed the pain while beingpretreated with saline, morphine, or naloxone [10 mg/kg, intraperitoneal (i.p.)]. Pain behaviors, anxiety-likebehaviour, locomotion, balance and muscle strength were evaluated in the observer animals.Findings: Observing a cagemate in pain increased anxiety-like behavior and reduced thermal pain threshold in theobserver animals. Administration of morphine reversed these effects and naloxone did not affect the responses.Conclusion: Results of the current study reveal an important role for opioid receptors (ORs) in empathy forpain, so that activation of this system dampens the empathy-like responses