Using nursing science does not guarantee nursing excellence.

Keywords: ways of knowing; clinical scholarship; nursing journals; writing for publication

This chapter discusses the role that research should play in the current discussions about the role of technology in educational development, with particular reference to small developing states. It shows that often decisions about technology use in education are far from being based on evidence and suggests that this is due partly to the absence of a rigorous knowledge base but also of an appropriate research agenda. No doubt, research has a role to play investigating further the role that technology solutions play in improving the quality of education. But the right research questions must be asked. This chapter addresses two questions. First, it looks at what is currently known and the limitations of the existing knowledge base about how technology can contribute to improving learning – recognizing the paradox that developing countries, which make comparatively bigger efforts in this domain, lag also in terms of knowledge base. The question is therefore whether research has missed the point and failed to build a comprehensive, coherent and useful knowledge base. Second, the chapter considers both what elements are missing and how the important research challenges required to assemble them could be met.

Introduction: Tracheostomies are frequently utilized to treat upper airway obstruction, provide mechanical ventilation, and remove tracheobronchial secretions in people of all ages. Aim: The aim of the study was to assess nurses’ knowledge in the management of dysphagia among tracheostomized patients Nurses have a crucial role in providing tracheostomy care, making adequate knowledge and abilities essential for patient stability and safety. The objective of the study was to determine the level of knowledge and skills regarding tracheostomy care among nurses working in a selected teaching hospital. Method: The study comprised 270 participants categorized into three groups: Group 1 consisted of 51 working nurses, Group 2 consisted of 80 final-year General Nursing and Midwifery (GNM) students, and Group 3 included 139 final-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing (B.Sc. nursing) students. A two-part questionnaire derived from the published literature was used in the study. Results: In the association between comfort level and group (GNM students and B.Sc. nursing students) among GNM students, the majority (63.8%) reported feeling “comfortable,” while 23.8% left the question unattended. In comparison, 48.9% of B.Sc. nursing students reported feeling “comfortable” and 20.9% were unattended. The distribution of comfort levels varies significantly between GNM and B.Sc. nursing students. The results of skills revealed that mean skill scores exhibited varied significantly among all the three groups. Conclusion: In the current study, there was no statistically significant correlation between knowledge and skills in tracheal care. The lack of a statistically significant correlation suggests that participants’ knowledge levels are not directly associated with their skills.

Services and prevention: pharmacoepidemiology of antidepressant use

Background: Malaria still imposes an enormous burden in terms of morbidity and loss of life. It is assumed that school based health education can help to promote community wide awareness and prevention of malaria. But, evidence is limited on the extent to which school children are equipped with appropriate and scientific information about malaria and communicate with their parents. Objective: To assess malaria related knowledge and child to parent communication regarding prevention and control of malaria among primary school students. Methods: Institution based cross sectional study was conducted in three selected Woredas of Jimma zone, south west Ethiopia from march, 15 to 30, 2014. The study recruited 432 samples of school children in 10 selected schools from the three woredas. A multi stage sampling method followed by simple random sampling was carried out to select the samples. The data were collected using pretested structured questionnaire adapted from similar studies. EPI-DATA version 3.1 was used to enter the data and data was exported to SPSS version 20.0 for further statistical analysis. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used. Adjusted odds ratios and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals were used to assess the association between individual variables with the outcome variable in the multivariate analysis with a p-value of (< 0.05). Result: The mean score of students for comprehensive knowledge related to malaria was 6.13+ 1.88. The major source of information was radio (42.2%). Nearly half (49.5%) of students communicate with their family about malaria and the major areas of communication were concerning symptoms and prevention and control methods. Age [AOR, 95% CI, 1.18 (1.04, 1.34)], comprehensive knowledge [AOR, 95% CI, 1.34(1.19, 1.50)] and perceived parental readiness to learn from children [AOR, 95% CI, 2.09 (1.43, 3.06)] were independent predictors of child to parent communication. Conclusion: In this study comprehensive knowledge about malaria was found to be high among the students. However, knowledge gap about the cause and transmission were also observed among the students. Malaria health education should be strengthened in the schools to advance malaria knowledge and foster communication behavior of the students and health facilities should give attention for schools through equipping teachers with information about malaria prevention and control strategies so that such knowledge could be passed on to students.

In order to reduce the impact on complex information, a comprehensive knowledge base is of great urgency to be constructed and the knowledge needs to be hosted on the question-answering robot. A new kind of knowledge base - Association Map is constructed, which is based on human's association of entities and associate related entities. And this paper shows the application of the knowledge base in knowledge retrieval and reasoning of question-answering robot.

In their recent study, Alsan et al explored the relationship between aspects of COVID-19 messaging and African American and Latinx participants' knowledge and information-seeking behavior Video messages about COVID-19, delivered by physicians, were viewed by more than 14 000 African American and Latinx participants This study demonstrated a small but statistically significant increase in COVID-19 knowledge that did not differ by racial concordance between the physician messenger and the viewer However, information seeking was higher among African American participants after they viewed messages from African American physicians Previous research has documented the benefits of patient-physician racial concordance on communication and health outcomes, underscoring the importance of a diverse workforce to care for a diverse population

The World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that the proportion of the elderly will soon include nearly a quarter of the world population. Ensuring that health systems are prepared to deal with this phenomenal rate of aging and associated diseases generates many challenges. Among these challenges is facing Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) that may occur at some point in the elderly life and may harm societies. AD is considered a neurological, psychological, mental, and health setback. The Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) can improve patient care and support many medical functions, such as diagnosing diseases that can reduce preventable harm. This research’s main objective is to design, implement, and evaluate the Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis Ontology (ADDO). It is a comprehensive semantic knowledge base toward the development of fuzzy ontology-based CDSS for AD diagnosis. ADDO can serve as a core component of CDSS, which provides representation, annotation, and access to aspects related to AD’s study and diagnosis. Toward the management of this objective, ADDO is based on the essentials of the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) and follows the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Ontology for General Medical Sciences (OGMS) principles. ADDO focuses on representing the patient characteristics, complications, drugs, diagnosis examination tests, and key aspects of their periodic visits in a standard way. The possibility of semantic interoperability is taken into account by integrating ADDO and a heterogeneous AD dataset. We used ADNI as a case study to mapping a set of real instances. To manage the medical domain’s uncertainty, ADDO is extended to fuzzy ontology to accommodate the medical linguistic variables and enhance diagnosis results’ efficiency. ADDO is constructed using Protege 5.5.0 software and evaluated using the HermiT reasoner and SPARQL semantic queries. ADDO currently includes 7060 concepts, 99 properties, 46274 axioms, and 30708 annotations. As a result, ADDO is consistent and more reliable in managing most AD aspects than other existing AD ontologies.

A group of SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals present lingering symptoms, defined as long COVID (LC), that may last months or years post the onset of acute disease. A portion of LC patients have symptoms similar to myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which results in a substantial reduction in their quality of life. A better understanding of the pathophysiology of LC, in particular, ME/CFS is urgently needed. We identified and studied metabolites and soluble biomarkers in plasma from LC individuals mainly exhibiting ME/CFS compared to age-sex-matched recovered individuals (R) without LC, acute COVID-19 patients (A), and to SARS-CoV-2 unexposed healthy individuals (HC). Through these analyses, we identified alterations in several metabolomic pathways in LC vs other groups. Plasma metabolomics analysis showed that LC differed from the R and HC groups. Of note, the R group also exhibited a different metabolomic profile than HC. Moreover, we observed a significant elevation in the plasma pro-inflammatory biomarkers (e.g. IL-1α, IL-6, TNF-α, Flt-1, and sCD14) but the reduction in ATP in LC patients. Our results demonstrate that LC patients exhibit persistent metabolomic abnormalities 12 months after the acute COVID-19 disease. Of note, such metabolomic alterations can be observed in the R group 12 months after the acute disease. Hence, the metabolomic recovery period for infected individuals with SARS-CoV-2 might be long-lasting. In particular, we found a significant reduction in sarcosine and serine concentrations in LC patients, which was inversely correlated with depression, anxiety, and cognitive dysfunction scores. Our study findings provide a comprehensive metabolomic knowledge base and other soluble biomarkers for a better understanding of the pathophysiology of LC and suggests sarcosine and serine supplementations might have potential therapeutic implications in LC patients. Finally, our study reveals that LC disproportionally affects females more than males, as evidenced by nearly 70% of our LC patients being female.

Settlements at the Edge examines the evolution, characteristics, functions and shifting economic basis of settlements in sparsely populated areas of developed nations. With a focus on demographic change, the book features theoretical and applied cases which explore the interface between demography, economy, well-being and the environment. This book offers a comprehensive and insightful knowledge base for understanding the role of population in shaping the development and histories of northern sparsely populated areas of developed nations including Alaska (USA), Australia, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Finland and other nations with territories within the Arctic Circle.

Settlements at the Edge examines the evolution, characteristics, functions and shifting economic basis of settlements in sparsely populated areas of developed nations. With a focus on demographic change, the book features theoretical and applied cases which explore the interface between demography, economy, well-being and the environment. This book offers a comprehensive and insightful knowledge base for understanding the role of population in shaping the development and histories of northern sparsely populated areas of developed nations including Alaska (USA), Australia, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Finland and other nations with territories within the Arctic Circle.

Analysing progress of sustainable development goal 6 in India: Past, present, and future

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is often described as a knowledge‐intensive approach to invertebrate pest management, requiring information on the biology, ecology and phenology of a pest combined with an understanding of the interactions between crop growth and pests and between pests and their natural enemies. We conducted a systematic quantitative literature review to summarise what is known about pest and natural enemy species common to Australian grain production systems, based on 1513 published and unpublished research studies. Drawing on this information, we address three issues: what are the knowledge gaps in relation to grain pests and their natural enemies, do these knowledge gaps limit the development of an IPM package for grain growers in Australia and what further ecological or biological information might growers require to enhance the use of IPM approaches for managing pests? The main gaps identified include a lack of understanding around specific factors that lead to pest outbreaks or factors that could be useful for predicting when and where pest outbreaks will occur in the future. Monitoring techniques for many pests are not well developed, and therefore, it is difficult to link the density recorded in a field with crop damage and yield loss and to develop economic thresholds that can be linked with intervention decisions. For most natural enemies, the impact in terms of reduction in pest numbers has not been quantified, with very few studies including both pests and natural enemies together. There is large variability in the level of control provided by natural enemies between years and regions, and the factors leading to this variability are not well understood. Finally, the lack of taxonomic resolution for individual species within groups is identified as a critical knowledge gap. We suggest that a more comprehensive fundamental knowledge base is required across the invertebrate community in grain systems aimed at reducing insect pest outbreaks, combined with a greater depth of understanding in monitoring strategies for pests that contribute to pesticide‐use decisions.

Information technology has become the core tool of business organisations'. External and internal threats as well as legal, regulatory and contractual compliance requirements are all combining to make effective information security a key information technology management challenges. This paper describes an undergraduate information technology security management course that provides comprehensive knowledge and skills necessary to manage both strategic and operational aspects of information security. The course covers a broad range of managerial topics in information technology security and makes use of a number of security tools and techniques to complement the theory taught. In this paper, we describe our approach, our experiences and lessons learned for teaching information technology security management course. The paper details the content of the course and outlines how it is taught and assessed.

Universities serve as a hub in knowledge generation which is the main driver for a sustainable economic growth. The National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) continues to foster a green development pathway for Kenya. Maasai Mara University being a public university in Narok County it is expected to influence the community in knowledge sharing and dissemination on various research outputs. Through the establishment of the Center for Innovation, New and Renewable Energy, Maasai Mara University has facilitated the use of green energy. With only 46% of the Kenyan households having access to electricity, 54% of the population make use of non-renewable energy sources for their daily needs. This means that most Kenyans continue to use non-renewable energy presumably due to lack of knowledge for an alternative. Narok County counted as a marginalized county in Kenya, benefited from International Development Association (IDA) where $150 million grant was issued via the World Bank to promote access to modern energy. The Kenyan government through Rural Electrification Programme, has come up with the National Electricity Policy aimed at increasing the deployment of renewable energy. With such concerns, there is need to determine whether or not universities actualize their role of sharing information including that of renewable energy to the community. This study adopted a descriptive survey design. The target population was 11,776 households in Narok Town sublocation. With the use of stratified sampling technique, the sample size used in the study was 4122 households being 35% of the number of households in the area. Primary data was collected using open ended and closed questionnaire. The study revealed that 56.6% of the Narok Town residents were not aware of renewable energy sources. Only 17.6% of the households were able to be influenced on green energy choices by Centre for Innovation, New and Renewable Energy at Maasai Mara University. The study further indicates that 47.9% of the households would prefer seminars as the appropriate method. For universities to share knowledge on renewable energy. The study therefore recommends that Institutions of higher learning should be on the forefront to influence green energy to surrounding communities. Keywords: Universities; Knowledge Sharing; Renewable Energy; Maasai Mara University DOI : 10.7176/JETP/9-9-04 Publication date: December 31 st 2019