Sexuality, sexual and reproductive health: an exploration of the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of Greek-Cypriot adolescents

The study examines the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of Greek-Cypriot adolescents regarding sexuality, sexual and reproductive health in Cyprus and is based on the concepts of culture, gender and sexuality under the general scope of health promotion and health education. The study reviews international and local literature on the theory and practice of these ideas and their influence on health, focusing on sexuality. Since culture and society are thought to influence health and sexuality, an extensive discussion is presented on the history of Cyprus and its development in contemporary years. This is a Pan-Cyprian study of 697 third grade students (13-15 years old) in public general secondary (high) education schools (gymnasium) in Cyprus. A close-ended questionnaire was designed including 51 questions. Three axes were taken in consideration: Knowledge; resources and needs; attitudes and beliefs. With the application of statistical analyses such as factor and cluster analysis, several results were drawn. Among other things the findings reveal that socio-cultural determinants such as religion/church, do have enormous impact on Greek-Cypriot adolescents' attitudes and beliefs. Although young people do have some knowledge about sexuality, limited resources and services exist to support and reinforce that. In the Cypriot society of the 21st century some conservatism and taboo still exist. Gender differences are apparent. Greek-Cypriot society at some point seems to have different expectations, roles and even a 'code of ethics' among males and females. Researching sexuality issues is a challenge since up until recently sexuality was very much a taboo area. Contemporary Cypriot society is becoming more sensitive and open about it even though a degree of conservatism still exists. However, there is limited scientific evidence on sexuality matters. This study aims to provide some evidence. When a shift in attitudes takes place is firstly noticed among adolescents. Based on the literature review and the results of this study a theoretical explanatory model was developed. At the end, the study highlights its conclusions and several recommendations are made for future investigation and progress in the fields of health and education

Polyunsaturated fatty acid-derived lipid mediators and T cell function

Copyright © 2014 Nicolaou, Mauro, Urquhart and Marelli-Berg . This is an open- access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms

Polyunsaturated fatty acid-derived lipid mediators and T cell function

Copyright © 2014 Nicolaou, Mauro, Urquhart and Marelli-Berg . This is an open- access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms

Construction labor and productivity : productivity improvements

Construction productivity has been on the decline in the last decade. Although an important factor in the nation\u27s economy, productivity of construction labor has been given little attention over the years. A review of the literature dealing with construction was performed that revealed the importance of the declining productivity as well as the confusion among construction managers and labor leaders as to what productivity is all about and how it can be improved. It has been found also, that construction labor motivation, which is the most important factor in improving productivity, is almost nonexist. Very few construction companies employ any kind of motivational programs and most of these programs are outdated and inefficient. It is recommended, therefore, that construction companies take immediate action to install motivational programs that are up-to-date and efficient. This paper also examines various ways of improving productivity in construction. The major ones are : (1) Management and unions should work together to establish job security; (2) absenteeism in construction must be controlled; (3) management must establish financial incentives; (4) communication in the construction site must be improved; and (5) management and unions must get themselves seriously involved in productivity bargaining. The paper further concludes that management and unions must work together to improve productivity. The feeling of togetherness, although nonexist , is much needed in construction and much work should be done by both management and unions toward creating this feeling

The value and role of non-invasive prenatal testing in a select South African population

Background. Concerns have been raised about the injudicious use of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) using cell-free DNA (cfDNA), which often leads to inaccuracies in interpretation of the role and value of cfDNA in prenatal screening.Objective. To determine the value and role of NIPT in a select South African (SA) population.Methods. A retrospective review of patients who elected to have NIPT between 1 October 2013 and 30 June 2015 at the Morningside Mediclinic Maternal and Fetal Medicine Centre in Johannesburg, SA. Patients had NIPT after either combined first-trimester screening (CFTS) or a second-trimester ultrasound scan. Data were collected on details of the first- and/or second-trimester screening, results of the NIPT, invasive tests done, decisions made in the event of abnormal results, and pregnancy outcomes.Results. Overall, 3 473 first- and second-trimester fetal assessments were done at the centre during the study period, and 2.3% of patients (n=82) elected to have NIPT. The majority of these individuals elected to have NIPT on the basis of positive findings on CFTS, or markers of aneuploidy detected on a second-trimester ultrasound scan. Of the tests done, 97.6% produced results. Of those with no results, one did not meet quality metrics and the other had a low fetal fraction of cfDNA. There were two abnormal NIPT results, one indicating a high risk of trisomy 13 and the other a triploidy. Patients who screened negative elected not to have an invasive test.Conclusion. The value of NIPT in this study was that it made it possible to avoid a number of invasive tests. NIPT had a role in contingency screening

Testosterone and the tendency to engage in self-employment

Does testosterone increase the tendency to engage in self-employment? The results presented to date have been mixed. Using three different studies, we provide additional evidence on the relationship between testosterone and self-employment. Drawing on a cross-section of 2,146 individuals (1,178 males and 968 females) from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys’ (NHANES’) 2011-2012 sample, and controlling for endogeneity (with red blood cell count, percentage Hematocrit, and zinc supplements intake in the past 30-days as instruments), serum testosterone levels are positively associated with self-employment for males (marginally significant, two-tailed test). As testosterone levels could be affected by social, economic, and biological factors during one’s life course, to draw more robust inferences we assess whether the 2D:4D digit ratio, a marker of prenatal testosterone exposure, influences the likelihood of self-employment. We reviewed a sample of 971 cases (449 males and 525 females) from Understanding Society’s Innovation Panel 6 (IP6), and our results indicate that males (females) with lower 2D:4D ratio in their left hand, or higher prenatal testosterone exposure, have a significantly greater (marginally significant for females) likelihood of self-employment (two-tailed test). Finally, we examine the twin testosterone transfer effect in a sample of opposite-sex and same-sex twins from the National Survey of Midlife Development (MIDUS I) in the Unites States and provide additional support for the marginally significant (two-tailed test) positive association between testosterone and self-employment

Bilinear Models of Parts and Appearances in Generative Adversarial Networks.

Recent advances in the understanding of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have led to remarkable progress in visual editing and synthesis tasks, capitalizing on the rich semantics that are embedded in the latent spaces of pre-trained GANs. However, existing methods are often tailored to specific GAN architectures and are limited to either discovering global semantic directions that do not facilitate localized control, or require some form of supervision through manually provided regions or segmentation masks. In this light, we present an architecture-agnostic approach that jointly discovers factors representing spatial parts and their appearances in an entirely unsupervised fashion. These factors are obtained by applying a semi-nonnegative tensor factorization on the feature maps, which in turn enables context-aware local image editing with pixel-level control. In addition, we show that the discovered appearance factors correspond to saliency maps that localize concepts of interest, without using any labels. Experiments on a wide range of GAN architectures and datasets show that, in comparison to the state of the art, our method is far more efficient in terms of training time and, most importantly, provides much more accurate localized control