The unrecognized paradigm shift in nursing: Implications, problems, and possibilities

Despite far-reaching economic, social and political developments in Sri Lanka over the last century or so, Sri Lankan women continue to occupy a subordinate status. While women are not subjected to extreme forms of oppression, many adverse structures and forces, such as the patriarchal social structure, woman’s role in the family, traditional values, rituals and myths, the division of labour and unequal pay, and women’s lack of participation in politics contribute to the continuing subordination of Sri Lankan women. In this context, this article seeks to address the socio-economic, cultural and political processes that shape the status and the progress of women in Sri Lanka. It emphasizes the policy makers to ensure that Sri Lankan women are empowered to participate in development. For this to happen, the article, however, argues that an attitudinal change and a paradigm shift in the minds of policy makers and the society at large must be accomplished. KeywordsEmpowerment, Sri Lanka, Subordination, Women

Chapter 26 - Phytopharmaceutical marketing: A case study of USPs used for phytomedicine promotion

Among the different factors associated to change in traditional ecological knowledge, the study of the relations between cultural change and traditional ecological knowledge has received scan and inadequate scholarly attention. Using data from indigenous peoples of an Amazonian society facing increasing exposure to the mainstream Bolivian society, we analyzed the relation between traditional ecological knowledge, proxied with individual plant use knowledge (n=484), and cultural change, proxied with individual- and village-level (n=47) measures of attachment to traditional beliefs and values. We found that both the individual level of detachment to traditional values and the village level of agreement in detachment to traditional values were associated with individual levels of plant use knowledge, irrespective of other proxy measures for cultural change. Because both the individual- and the village-level variables bear statistically significant associations with plant use knowledge, our results suggest that both the individual- and the supra-individual level processes of cultural change are related to the erosion of plant use knowledge. Results from our work highlight the importance of analyzing processes that happen at intermediary social units -the village in our case study- to explain changes in traditional ecological knowledge.

Assisted Living Facilities: Benefits, Challenges, and the Importance of Culture

Edge computing is a (r)evolutionary extension of traditional cloud computing. It expands central cloud infrastructure with execution environments close to the users in terms of latency in order to enable a new generation of cloud applications. This paradigm shift has opened the door for telecommunications operators, mobile and fixed network vendors: they have joined the cloud ecosystem as essential stakeholders considerably influencing the future success of the technology. A key problem in edge computing is the optimal placement of computational units (virtual machines, containers, tasks or functions) of novel distributed applications. These components are deployed to a geographically distributed virtualized infrastructure and heterogeneous networking technologies are invoked to connect them while respecting quality requirements. The optimal hosting environment should be selected based on multiple criteria by novel scheduler algorithms which can cope with the new challenges of distributed cloud architecture where networking aspects cannot be ignored. The research community has dedicated significant efforts to this topic during recent years and a vast number of theoretical results have been published addressing different variants of the related mathematical problems. However, a comprehensive survey focusing on the technical and analytical aspects of the placement problem in various edge architectures is still missing. This survey provides a comprehensive summary and a structured taxonomy of the vast research on placement of computational entities in emerging edge infrastructures. Following the given taxonomy, the research papers are analyzed and categorized according to several dimensions, such as the capabilities of the underlying platforms, the structure of the supported services, the problem formulation, the applied mathematical methods, the objectives and constraints incorporated in the optimization problems, and the complexity of the proposed methods. We summarize the gained insights and important lessons learned, and finally, we reveal some important research gaps in the current literature.

This study examines the paradigm shift of traditional media in the face of the digital era, focusing on the adaptation processes and forms of media convergence through Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. The research analyzes the discourse representations of digitalization constructed by four media institutions, BBC, TVRI, Kompas, and The Guardian, through official documents, corporate statements, and strategic content. This study aims to explore how traditional media constructs its identity in response to the demands of digital platforms and how the power structures and ideologies behind this transformation process unfold. The main findings reveal that media transformation is not only technical but also reflects changes in power structures, ideological values, and epistemic dynamics. At the textual level, media adaptation is constructed through narratives of innovation and participation, yet it retains the institutional dominance of traditional media. At the level of discursive practices, media institutions adopt multiplatform strategies and user engagement; however, public participation remains structurally controlled by the media organizations. Meanwhile, at the social practice level, there is a negotiation between traditional journalistic values and the increasingly dominant digital algorithmic logic in content management. The shift in media paradigms from linear, centralized communication models to participatory, modular, and decentralized many-to-many communication models has introduced new challenges, such as epistemic crises, misinformation, and digital platform dominance. Despite this, traditional media still strives to maintain its relevance in the increasingly complex digital media ecosystem. This study contributes theoretically by recommending the need for deeper critical digital literacy, as well as a reformulation of journalistic values to address the challenges of misinformation and technological dominance. An interdisciplinary approach is essential to better understand communication within the contemporary media landscape, which is increasingly dominated by digital platforms.

There is no doubt that “Global Change” and its scientific analysis and interpretation are on the forefront of international research efforts. Since the detection of global warming, first signs of world-wide melting of ice-masses and glaciers, indications of sea-level rises and/or the depletion of the atmospheric ozone-layers, increasing numbers of scientists — meteorologists, physicists, atmospheric chemists, oceanographers and others — have devoted their research to the solution of these and related problems. Global change research and its development over the last 20 or 30 years are testimony not only to the almost unbelievable broadening, widening and deepening of research themes, but also — and likewise — to a shift of scientific paradigms. As a matter of fact: the title of this conference “Understanding the Earth System — Compartments, Processes and Interactions” and the publication of its proceedings are part of this development.

Starting with an analysis of the significance of the French New Wave for postmodern cinema, this essay sets out to make a study of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) as the film that marks the beginning of what could be considered a paradigm shift in American cinema at the end of the 20th century. Building from the muchdebated passing of postmodernism, this study focuses on several key postmodern aspects that take a different slant in this movie. The film points out the value of aspects that had lost their meaning within the fiction typical of postmodernism—such as the absence of causality; sincere honesty as opposed to destructive irony; or the loss of faith in Lyotardian meta-narratives. We shall look at the nature of the paradigm shift to link it to the desire to overcome postmodern values through a recovery of Romantic ideas.

BackgroundPoor maternal nutrition adversely affects pregnancy and birth outcomes. In many societies, there are dietary restrictions due to misconceptions or food taboos during pregnancy which consequently results in the depletion of important nutrients. These cultural malpractices and beliefs can influence the dietary intake of pregnant women which subsequently affects the birth outcome. The study aimed at exploring the extent of food taboos and misconceptions during pregnancy in rural communities of Illu Aba Bor Zone, Southwest Ethiopia.MethodsA qualitative study was conducted using an in-depth interviews of key informants and focus group discussions among purposively selected pregnant women and their husbands, health care workers, health extension workers, and elderly people. Data were transcribed verbatim, thematized; color-coded, and analyzed manually using the thematic framework method.ResultThorough reading and review of the transcripts generated three major themes. The primary theme was the belief and practice of taboos related to the intake of certain food items during pregnancy. Pregnant women, their husbands, and mothers-in-law believed that certain foods should be avoided during pregnancy. The second theme was foods that were held as taboo and the reason attached to it. The most common food items held as taboo were related to the consumption of vegetables like cabbage, pumpkin, milk and milk products, sugar cane, fruits like bananas and avocado and egg. The main reasons to avoid these foods were beliefs that it can be plastered on the fetal head, making fatty baby which is difficult for delivery. The third theme was the reasons underlying adherence to food taboos which is deeply embedded in the person’s believes and attitudes of the pregnant women, who were nested within the influence of the social environment surrounding them and the traditional beliefs and values of the society in general.ConclusionsThe results showed a widespread practice of food taboos during pregnancy in the study area. The finding suggested that there is a need for strengthening the nutrition counseling components of antenatal care follow-up and planning comprehensive nutrition education through involving important others to dispel such traditional beliefs and prevent food taboo practices in the study community.

In recent years, Mixed Reality (MR) headsets have increasingly made advances in terms of capability, affordability and end-user adoption, slowly becoming everyday technology. HCI research typically explores positive aspects of these technologies, focusing on interaction, presence and immersive experiences. However, such technological advances and paradigm shifts often fail to consider the dark patterns, with potential abusive scenarios, made possible by new technologies (cf. smartphone addiction, social media anxiety disorder). While these topics are getting recent attention in related fields and with the general population, this workshop is aimed at starting an active exploration of abusive, ethical, social and political scenarios of MR research inside the HCI community. With an HCI lens, workshop participants will engage in critical reviews of emerging MR technologies and applications and develop a joint research agenda to address them.

GenAI's advanced natural language processing capabilities will revolutionize numerous areas, ranging from a paradigm shift in education to the economy. Along with the positive aspects of GenAI, ethical and social risks are also one of the negative aspects that attract attention in the literature. The purpose of this study is to test the role of mindset and GenAI literacy in university students' awareness of ethical and social risk with structural equation modeling. According to the research results, the developed awareness of ethical and social risk of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and the adapted GenAI literacy scale are valid and reliable. GenAI literacy variable does not have a significant effect on ethical and social risk awareness towards GenAI. Mindset should be taken into account in activities for both variables.

Researchers at INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) face challenges from basic to hard science use cases (e.g., big-data latest generation experiments) in many areas: High Energy Physics (HEP), Astrophysics, Quantum Computing, Genomics, etc. Machine Learning (ML) adoption is ubiquitous in these areas, requiring researchers to solve problems related to the specificity of applications (e.g., tailored models and intricate domain knowledge), but also requiring solving general infrastructure-level and ML-workflow related problems. As the demand for ML solutions continues to rise across the diverse research domains, there exists a critical need for an innovative approach to accelerate ML adoption. In this regard we introduce an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform designed as an application-agnostic Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) solution. The platform provides a paradigm shift by offering a flexible and generalized infrastructure that decouples the ML development process from the specific use cases. The AI platform is implemented as a software layer on top of our cloud platform: the INFN Cloud, a dedicated, geographically distributed infrastructure which offers composable, scalable, and open-source solutions. The AI platform leverages INFN Cloud resources and principles, gathering and orchestrating technologies to support end-to-end scalable ML solutions: Kubernetes, Kubeflow, KServe, KNative, Kueue, Horovod, etc., ensuring support for several ML frameworks: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Apache MXNet, XGBoost, etc. This paper describes the platform’s design and principles, as well as some selected use cases from Natural Language Processing and HEP domains that can take advantage of the “aaS” approach.

This essay explores the issue of masculinity in John Cheever’s somewhat critically overlooked novel, Bullet Park (1969), so as to call attention to the inevitable conflict between the conformist ideologies of the postwar corporate world and the dormant desires of the atomized male suburbanite. By way of an interrelated interpretation of contemporaneous sociological and psychological theory, this essay foreparts the dysfunctional dimensions of masculine dejection as being derivative of suburbia’s larger malady, which is rooted in the very impossibility of the imaginative “apple pie order” it represents. A detailed interpretation of Cheever’s use of the doppelganger narrative will moreover allow for an assessment of the dislocation at the heart of the postwar suburban experience. Bullet Park may be read this way as not only critiquing the prevailing cultural view of suburbia as a pillar of postwar American security, stability, and social adjustment through its portrayal of a disturbing reality of insecurity, instability and maladjustment, but also as directly addressing the fractured principles of America’s traditional values and beliefs. Considering this late sixties text by Cheever as such, this essay hence works to highlight in what ways, and to what extent, the author’s portrayal of a disenchanted suburban ennui in Bullet Park treads the fault lines of laissez-faire capitalism, whilst furthermore succeeding in uncovering the sources of masculine dissatisfaction in their more true and underground origins.

The Ideological Roots of Institutional Change

The objective of this qualitative research was to examine the interface of traditional Chinese and American values related to perceptions of obesity among Chinese Americans. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty Chinese American adults (twenty-four females; sixteen males) in the New York City metropolitan area. The interview protocol was derived from tenets of major social psychological theories. Common themes were identified, coded, and compared using NVivo computer software. The participants described pressures to overeat due to traditional Chinese influences, along with the plethora of mainstream American fast food characterized by large portion sizes. Social norms related to desirable body weight and gender effects were evident. Nutrition professionals need to be culturally competent, and understand the traditional values and beliefs of Chinese Americans regarding obesity prevention. Public policy and support for healthier social environments are mandated to encourage individuals to select foods with a nutritional value conducive to weight management.