Profile and Motivations of Registered Whole-Body Donors in Turkey: Istanbul University Experience     

İlke Ali Gürses  Ahmet Ertaş  Başak Gürtekin  Osman Coşkun  Mehmet Üzel  Özcan Gayretli  Mehmet Selman Demirci 《Anatomical sciences education》2019,12(4):370-385

Little is known regarding the profiles of whole body donors in Muslim majority countries where donation is scarce. Therefore, this study aims to profile registered donors in Turkey by means of a survey. The explored data could be used to improve ongoing campaign efforts and ethical practices such as commemoration services. Registered donors of the donation programs at the two faculties of medicine of Istanbul University were compared with the national population and a cluster analysis was performed to reveal any concealed sub-groups. Data from 188 respondents were analyzed. The majority of registered donors were married (42%), male (65.4%), aged over 50 years (76%), held a tertiary education degree (49.7%), and were irreligious (58.5%). Cluster analysis revealed two groups with significantly different educational levels, marital statuses, and religious choices. Regarding whether their bodies could be used for education or research, the majority (64.5%) of the respondents left the decision to the anatomy department. Similarly, 73.8% approved indefinite use of their organs, body parts and/or skeletons. The respondents were also willing to share their medical history (94.2%) and personal information (81.6%) if needed. Motivational themes for body donation including usefulness, impermanence, religion, awareness, and kinship were devised after a thematic analysis. Among the respondents, 56.5% were registered organ donors and 63.3% were frequent blood donors. The results of this study provide data that may help revising informed consent forms, developing and implementing thanksgiving ceremonies, and selecting additional targets for supporting body donation campaign activities such as organ and blood donation units.  相似文献   

Towards a Model of Intercultural Communicative Competence in Iranian EFL Context: Testing the Role of International Posture,Ideal L2 Self,L2 Self-Confidence,and Metacognitive Strategies     

Ali Asghar Ghasemi  Hooshang Yazdani  Majid Amerian 《Journal of Intercultural Communication Research》2020,49(1):41-60

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to present a model of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) by incorporating international posture, motivational disposition (ideal L2 self), second language (L2) self-confidence, and metacognitive learning strategies. To this end, 150 Iranian L2 learners, selected through convenience sampling procedure, took part in the research. The findings of structural equation modelling revealed that the proposed model showed adequate fit to the data, implying that the model is appropriate in Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Also, the results indicated that learners with a high level of international posture are more likely to bridge the gap between their present and ideal selves. This was, additionally, argued that internationally oriented and ideally motivated learners become confident of their abilities to get engaged in interaction with L2 target communities. Furthermore, metacognitive learning strategies were found to be directly associated with ICC, implicating that the learners who continuously reflect on their learning and evaluate their performances are more prone to have a higher level of ICC. Finally, suggestions were offered for language teachers and policy-makers to inspire their learners to be more competent in communication with people of other cultures and languages.  相似文献   

Neural embedding-based indices for semantic search     

Fatemeh Lashkari  Ebrahim Bagheri  Ali A. Ghorbani 《Information processing & management》2019,56(3):733-755

Traditional information retrieval techniques that primarily rely on keyword-based linking of the query and document spaces face challenges such as the vocabulary mismatch problem where relevant documents to a given query might not be retrieved simply due to the use of different terminology for describing the same concepts. As such, semantic search techniques aim to address such limitations of keyword-based retrieval models by incorporating semantic information from standard knowledge bases such as Freebase and DBpedia. The literature has already shown that while the sole consideration of semantic information might not lead to improved retrieval performance over keyword-based search, their consideration enables the retrieval of a set of relevant documents that cannot be retrieved by keyword-based methods. As such, building indices that store and provide access to semantic information during the retrieval process is important. While the process for building and querying keyword-based indices is quite well understood, the incorporation of semantic information within search indices is still an open challenge. Existing work have proposed to build one unified index encompassing both textual and semantic information or to build separate yet integrated indices for each information type but they face limitations such as increased query process time. In this paper, we propose to use neural embeddings-based representations of term, semantic entity, semantic type and documents within the same embedding space to facilitate the development of a unified search index that would consist of these four information types. We perform experiments on standard and widely used document collections including Clueweb09-B and Robust04 to evaluate our proposed indexing strategy from both effectiveness and efficiency perspectives. Based on our experiments, we find that when neural embeddings are used to build inverted indices; hence relaxing the requirement to explicitly observe the posting list key in the indexed document: (a) retrieval efficiency will increase compared to a standard inverted index, hence reduces the index size and query processing time, and (b) while retrieval efficiency, which is the main objective of an efficient indexing mechanism improves using our proposed method, retrieval effectiveness also retains competitive performance compared to the baseline in terms of retrieving a reasonable number of relevant documents from the indexed corpus.  相似文献   

Antineoplastic activity in L-Asparaginase of Cladosporium cladosporiodies     

S. S. Ali  V. Rai  K. Soni  P. Kulshrestha  S. K. Lal 《Indian journal of clinical biochemistry : IJCB》1993,8(1):68-70

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Biochemistry of Nitric Oxide     

Habib S  Ali A 《Indian journal of clinical biochemistry : IJCB》2011,26(1):3-17

Nitric oxide (NO) a free radical having both cytoprotective as well as tumor promoting agent is formed from l-arginine by converting it to l-citrulline via nitric oxide synthase enzymes. The reaction product of nitric oxide with superoxide generates potent oxidizing agent, peroxynitrite which is the main mediator of tissue and cellular injury. Peroxynitrite is reactive towards many biomolecules which includes amino acids, nucleic acid bases; metal containing compounds, etc. NO metabolites may play a key role in mediating many of the genotoxic/carcinogenic effects as DNA damage, protein or lipid modification, etc. The basic reactions of nitric oxide can be divided as direct effect of the radical where it alone plays a role in either damaging or protecting the cell milieu and an indirect effect in which the byproducts of nitric oxide formed by convergence of two independent radical generating pathways play the role in biological reactions which mainly involve oxidative and nitrosative stress. Nitric oxide is also capable of directly interacting with mitochondria through inhibition of respiration or by permeability transition. Reaction of nitric oxide with metal ions include its direct interaction with the metals or with oxo complexes thereby reducing them to lower valent state. Excessive production of nitric oxide can be studied by inhibiting the synthetic pathway of nitric oxide using both selective or specific nitric oxide synthase inhibitor or non-selective nitric oxide synthase inhibitor with respect to isoforms of nitric oxide.  相似文献   

Examining the moderating effect of individual-level cultural values on users’ acceptance of E-learning in developing countries: a structural equation modeling of an extended technology acceptance model     

Ali Tarhini  Kate Hone  Xiaohui Liu  Takwa Tarhini 《Interactive Learning Environments》2017,25(3):306-328

In this study, we examine the effects of individual-level culture on the adoption and acceptance of e-learning tools by students in Lebanon using a theoretical framework based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). To overcome possible limitations of using TAM in developing countries, we extend TAM to include subjective norms (SN) and quality of work life constructs as additional constructs and a number of cultural variables as moderators. The four cultural dimensions of masculinity/femininity (MF), individualism/collectivism, power distance and uncertainty avoidance were measured at the individual level to enable them to be integrated into the extended TAM as moderators and a research model was developed based on previous literature. To test the hypothesised model, data were collected from 569 undergraduate and postgraduate students using e-learning tools in Lebanon via questionnaire. The collected data were analysed using the structural equation modelling technique in conjunction with multi-group analysis. As hypothesised, the results of the study revealed perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), SN and quality of work life to be significant determinants of students’ behavioural intention (BI) towards e-learning. The empirical results also demonstrated that the relationship between SN and BI was particularly sensitive to differences in individual-cultural values, with significant moderating effects observed for all four of the cultural dimensions studied. Some moderating effects of culture were also found for both PU and PEOU, however, contrary to expectations the effect of quality of work life was not found to be moderated by MF as some previous authors have predicted. The implications of these results to both theory and practice are explored in the paper.  相似文献   

Exploring the use of the ICT in supporting dyslexic students’ preferred learning styles : A preliminary evaluation     

FatimaEzzahra Benmarrakchi  Jamal El Kafi  Ali Elhore  Sara Haie 《Education and Information Technologies》2017,22(6):2939-2957

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities. It is described as a disorder manifested by difficulty in learning to read despite conventional instruction, adequate intelligence, and sociocultural opportunity. It affects relatively about 7–10 % of the population across most languages and cultures. In this study, we explore the potential benefits offered by the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to support dyslexic students by considering their preferred learning styles. In the current paper we administered the VAK and Honey & Mumford questionnaires to 28 Arabic students with ages between 8 and 10 years old. 8 students from dyslexic group and 20 students from control group were selected to assess and compare their preferred learning style. The implemented system focuses on dyslexia in Arabic language, especially in Arabic countries such as Morocco. Based on the results of the analysis of learning styles differences, we introduced an adaptive mobile learning to support and promote learning for dyslexic students. The aim of the study is to consider the relationship between dyslexia and learning style and to suggest a different learning way. Preliminary results show that the ICT has a valuable role in providing opportunities for learners with dyslexia to participate more fully in education.  相似文献   

Local Lyapunov Exponents and characteristics of fixed／periodic points embedded within a chaotic attractor     

ALI M  SAHA L.M 《浙江大学学报(A卷英文版)》2005,6(4):296-304

A chaotic dynamical system is characterized by a positive averaged exponential separation of two neighboring trajectories over a chaotic attractor. Knowledge of the Largest Lyapunov Exponent λ1 of a dynamical system over a bounded attractor is necessary and sufficient for determining whether it is chaotic (λ1＞0) or not (λ1≤0). We intended in this work to elaborate the connection between Local Lyapunov Exponents and the Largest Lyapunov Exponent where an altemative method to calculate λ1has emerged. Finally, we investigated some characteristics of the fixed points and periodic orbits embedded within a chaotic attractor which led to the conclusion of the existence of chaotic attractors that may not embed in any fixed point or periodic orbit within it.  相似文献   

Main trends in graduate study in basic sciences in Turkish universities: a quantitative overview     

Ali Uzun  Mehmet Emin Özel  Cengiz Yalçin 《Higher Education》1990,20(4):485-497

This paper seeks to trace the development of graduate studies in basic sciences in Turkish universities from origins to the present day. The study includes a sketch of the historical background of higher education from its start in medieval madrasahs and Istanbul Darulfunun (The House of Sciences), to the transition into present-day university education, i.e., to the beginnings of modern graduate study and the emergence of new universities. Empirical statistics are given to substantiate the rapid growth of graduate study and of the number of degrees produced since the 1980s. The mean number of Ph.D. Degrees per year has increased from a few in a single university in the 1930s to nearly a hundred in today's twenty seven universities in Turkey in the 1980s. Finally, a quantitative overview of the growth trends in graduate study in basic sciences as well as an assessment of the present degree productivity of Turkish universities are presented.  相似文献   

The Japanese education system with special emphasis on higher education     

Ali M. El-Agraa  Akira Ichii 《Higher Education》1985,14(1):1-16

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief analysis of the Japanese educational system and to give a somewhat detailed discussion of Japanese higher education. Its main conclusions are: although the bulk of higher education is catered for privately, the prestige institutions tend to be public ones; the character of the system as a whole seems to reflect Japanese society very clearly indeed since it supports high growth industries, reinforces the traditionally accepted distinction between the sexes, and determines both the structure of wages and salaries in general and its sex variance in particular; and that there are very serious problems currently confronting Japanese educationalists - these relate to the official inspection of textbooks, the emergence of anti-teacher violence within schools and the reduction in the size of the public subsidy to private education.The authors are extremely grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from Margaret B. Sutherland, Professor of Education, University of Leeds and Dr. Penny Francks, specialist on modern Japanese history at the Department of Chinese Studies, University of Leeds. However, the usual disclaimer applies.Ali M. El-Agraa is a Senior Lecturer in Economics, School of Economic Studies, University of Leeds, England and is the Visiting Professor in charge of International Economics and Middle Eastern Studies, Graduate School of International Relations, International University of Japan, Niigata for the period September 1984–August 1985. Akira Ichii is Professor of Economics, University of Chuo in Tokyo and is currently (April 1982–March 1984) a Visiting Fellow in the School of Economic Studies, University of Leeds.  相似文献