General Knowledge Research Articles

Political and Legal Changes and Nursing Knowledge Generation.

Political and Legal Changes and Nursing Knowledge Generation.

India's Potential as a Leader in Cancer Care Progress in the Future: A Synthetic Interdisciplinary Perspective.

This paper comprehensively analyzes India's potential to become a leader in cancer care in the Global South, particularly in precision population cancer medicine (PPCM). Through an interdisciplinary lens, it examines the current landscape of cancer care in India, highlighting its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in this domain. This review explores the concept of knowledge translation and its importance in bridging the gap between knowledge generation and implementation in medical sciences and applies this to the Indian healthcare scenario. The review then delves into India's technological prowess, exemplified by its digital health initiatives such as the CoWIN (winning over COVID-19) app and the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, which provide a strong foundation for leveraging advanced technologies in healthcare. The authors discuss India's pharmaceutical industry, often referred to as the "pharmacy of the world," emphasizing its crucial role in global drug manufacturing and distribution. It also examines the country's emerging genomic research landscape, including initiatives such as GenomeIndia and the Indian Cancer Genome Atlas Foundation, which are pivotal for advancing personalized medicine. A significant portion of the review is dedicated to analyzing India's clinical trial ecosystem. It traces the evolution of regulatory frameworks governing clinical research in the country and highlights recent reforms that have made India an increasingly attractive destination for global studies, the potential adoption of innovative trial designs and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analyses. Crucially, the authors confront the formidable obstacles inherent in India's complex healthcare landscape, illuminating the unique challenges that must be overcome. The review acknowledges India's underrepresentation in global clinical trials despite its large population and significant cancer burden. The issue of financial toxicity in cancer care is discussed, underscoring the need for affordable treatment options. The study also points out the nascent state of India's genomic databases, which account for only a small percentage of global genetic data. Despite these challenges, the authors posit that by effectively leveraging its information technology (IT) infrastructure, robust pharmaceutical sector, and large, diverse population, India has the potential to develop unique, country-specific solutions for cancer care. The study suggests that by fostering genomic research, strategically reforming its clinical trial ecosystem, and harnessing its digital capabilities, India could transform its cancer care landscape and emerge as a model for other developing nations in the Global South. In essence, this paper provides a roadmap for India's journey towards becoming a leader in PPCM, offering valuable insights for policymakers, healthcare professionals, and researchers in the field of oncology and precision medicine. Indeed, by using PPCM as a "pilot project," India can learn to use its new strategies to improve non-cancer care disease prevention, early detection, and improved and more cost-effective management. This approach could revolutionize cancer care in India and serve as a model for other developing nations in the Global South. By leveraging the strategies and technologies developed for PPCM, India could significantly enhance its healthcare system, highlighting the importance and urgency of improving cancer care in the region.

Predicting conserved functional interactions for long noncoding RNAs via deep learning

Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) genes outnumber protein coding genes in the human genome and the majority remain uncharacterized. A major difficulty in generalizing understanding of lncRNA function is the dearth of gross sequence conservation, both for lncRNAs across species and for lncRNAs that perform similar functions within a species. Machine learning based methods which harness vast amounts of information on RNAs are increasingly used to impute certain biological characteristics. This includes interactions with proteins that are important mediators of RNA function, thus enabling the generation of knowledge in contexts for which experimental data are lacking. Here, we applied a natural language-based machine learning approach that enabled us to identify RNA binding protein interactions in lncRNA transcripts, using only RNA sequence as an input. We found that this predictive method is a powerful approach to infer conserved binding across species as distant as human and opossum, even in the absence of sequence conservation, thus informing on sequence-function relationships for these poorly understood RNAs.

Accelerating a learning public health system: Opportunities, obstacles, and a call to action.

Public health systems worldwide face increasing challenges in addressing complex health issues and improving population health outcomes. This experience report introduces the concept of a Learning Public Health System (LPHS) as a potential solution to transform public health practice. Building upon the framework of a Learning Health System (LHS) in healthcare, the LPHS aims to create a dynamic, data-driven ecosystem that continuously improves public health interventions and policies. This report explores the definition, benefits, challenges, and implementation strategies of an LPHS, highlighting its potential to revolutionize public health practice. This report employs a comparative analysis approach, examining the similarities and differences between an LPHS and an LHS. It also identifies and elaborates on the potential benefits, challenges, and barriers to implementing an LPHS. Additionally, the study investigates promising national initiatives that exemplify elements of an LPHS in action. An LPHS integrates data from diverse sources to inform knowledge generation, policy development, and operational improvements. Key benefits of implementing an LPHS include improved disease prevention, evidence-informed policy-making, and enhanced health outcomes. However, several challenges were identified, such as interoperability issues, governance concerns, funding limitations, and cultural factors that may impede the widespread adoption of an LPHS. Implementation of an LPHS has the potential to significantly transform public health practice. To realize this potential, a call to action is issued for stakeholders across the public health ecosystem. Recommendations include investing in informatics infrastructure, prioritizing workforce development, establishing robust data governance frameworks, and creating incentives to support the development and implementation of a LPHS. By addressing these key areas, public health systems can evolve to become more responsive, efficient, and effective in improving population health outcomes.

Artificial Flowers in the Credit Records of an Eighteenth-Century French Fashion Merchant

Abstract In recent decades, historians have acknowledged the role that women played in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Current scholarship also suggests that fashion was a means through which haptic, economic, and practical knowledge was shared among women. This article focuses on one particular fashion accessory – the artificial flower – to explore its contribution to our understanding of women’s knowledge of botany in eighteenth-century France. An analysis of the receipts preserved in the credit records of France’s most famous fashion merchant, Marie-Jeanne (Rose) Bertin (1747–1813), demonstrates high levels of specificity in the flowers that women chose to adorn their outfits. Seventy-five different types of flowers are mentioned using their vernacular names, suggesting that knowledge about a wide variety of flowers was exchanged between fashion merchants and their clients during conversations about clothing. This article therefore casts the fashion merchant’s shop as a site of botanical knowledge generation and exchange.

An Assessment Model for Agricultural Databases: The Arthropod Pesticide Resistance Database as a Case Study.

This paper presents a multi-method approach for evaluating the utility and impact of agricultural databases in the context of the rapidly expanding digital economy. Focusing on the Arthropod Pesticide Resistance Database, one of the most comprehensive global resources on arthropod pesticide resistance, we offer a framework for assessing the effectiveness of agricultural databases. Our approach provides practical guidance for developers, users, evaluators, and funders on how to measure the impact of these digital tools, using relevant metrics and data to validate their contributions. Additionally, we introduce an index-based method that evaluates impact across multiple dimensions, including data usage, accessibility, inclusivity, knowledge generation, innovation, research and policy development, and collaboration. The detailed methodology serves as both a reference and a model for evaluating the impact of other agricultural databases, ensuring they effectively support decision-making and foster innovation in the agricultural sector.

Reuse of service concept elements for modular service design

PurposeThis research investigates the systematic reuse of service concept elements within modular service design, aiming to offer actionable insights into effective conceptualization of services and extending methodological underpinnings to enhance the approach of service design.Design/methodology/approachEmploying a design science research approach, this study investigates the intentional and targeted reuse of service concept elements for modular service design. It develops four general design principles and applies them in a real-world context to demonstrate and evaluate the purposeful integration of service concept elements.FindingsThis research reveals the efficacy of reusing service concept elements for modular service design, highlighting the benefits of this approach in conceptualizing new services. It theorizes generalizable design knowledge by formalizing four design principles that allow to underpin the reuse of service concept elements.Originality/valueThis research contributes to service design literature by providing actionable insights into the systematic reuse of service concept elements, particularly within the framework of modular service design. We develop and test general design principles and, specifically, apply them for analytics-based digital services.

The Unified Phenotype Ontology (uPheno): A framework for cross-species integrative phenomics.

Phenotypic data are critical for understanding biological mechanisms and consequences of genomic variation, and are pivotal for clinical use cases such as disease diagnostics and treatment development. For over a century, vast quantities of phenotype data have been collected in many different contexts covering a variety of organisms. The emerging field of phenomics focuses on integrating and interpreting these data to inform biological hypotheses. A major impediment in phenomics is the wide range of distinct and disconnected approaches to recording the observable characteristics of an organism. Phenotype data are collected and curated using free text, single terms or combinations of terms, using multiple vocabularies, terminologies, or ontologies. Integrating these heterogeneous and often siloed data enables the application of biological knowledge both within and across species. Existing integration efforts are typically limited to mappings between pairs of terminologies; a generic knowledge representation that captures the full range of cross-species phenomics data is much needed. We have developed the Unified Phenotype Ontology (uPheno) framework, a community effort to provide an integration layer over domain-specific phenotype ontologies, as a single, unified, logical representation. uPheno comprises (1) a system for consistent computational definition of phenotype terms using ontology design patterns, maintained as a community library; (2) a hierarchical vocabulary of species-neutral phenotype terms under which their species-specific counterparts are grouped; and (3) mapping tables between species-specific ontologies. This harmonized representation supports use cases such as cross-species integration of genotype-phenotype associations from different organisms and cross-species informed variant prioritization.

The role of scientists in regional innovation system transformation: shaping the direction to a biomass-bioeconomy

ABSTRACT Following evolutionary approaches, regional innovation systems (RISs) scholarship has begun investigating RIS transformation processes. Recently, the focus has shifted towards understanding more sophisticated changes needed to tackle grand societal challenges. So far, the changing roles of RIS actors within these processes have remained underexplored. This paper analyses the role of scientists in supporting transformative changes in RISs, drawing on existing literature on agency and asset modification. Taking the case of the bioeconomy in Lower Austria, the paper shows that scientists, expanding beyond their traditional roles as knowledge generators and disseminators, are crucial in modifying and mobilising regional assets to support the biomass-bioeconomy. The findings indicate that scientists’ activities in asset modification have influenced the development of the biomass bioeconomy path in the region.

Deconstructing paradigms: the contribution of women to science

In recent times, academic research has focused on how the concept of the "social" permeates notions of science and knowledge, in the methodologies employed, the results discussed and the relationship between theory and practice. Against this backdrop, feminist epistemology has gained prominence, criticizing the traditional model of science and advocating an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates individuals from different fields into dialogues, contextualizing knowledge in context and examining the influence of gender on the generation of knowledge. This theoretical article seeks to investigate the link between female representation and knowledge creation, shedding light on the persistent gender gap in academic institutions and research establishments. Furthermore, it aims to contemplate how a more feminist perspective can impact research efforts and social intervention strategies, recognizing the value of women's perspectives in the theoretical discourse on social and gender equality. By highlighting the importance of including different perspectives in science, the article emphasizes the need to promote an inclusive and equitable approach to human progress.

ENGAGING INDONESIAN YOUTH WITH THE MEBUUG-BUUGAN TRADITION THROUGH THE NOVEL "SEHARI SETELAH SEPI"

This research explores the potential of novel illustrations as an educational medium for the Mebuug-buugantradition, a unique ritual from Kedonganan Village, Bali, which has been increasingly marginalized from the younger generation's knowledge. Through a qualitative approach, this study analyzes how the "slice of life" genre and anime/webtoon visual style can be utilized in the fictional novel "Sehari Setelah Sepi" to bridge the generational gap and promote local cultural heritage. Set in 2017-2018, when the Mebuug-buugan tradition was revived, the novel aims to present a relevant and engaging story for Indonesian teenagers. Analysis of literature, competitor research, and Unique Selling Proposition (USP) formed the foundation for designing practical illustrations. Research findings indicate that combining the "slice of life" genre with anime/webtoon visual style can effectively convey complex information about the history and meaning of the Mebuug-buugan tradition in a simple yet profound manner. The novel serves as entertainment and an effective educational tool for introducing Balinese cultural values to the younger generation.

Helmet Therapy for Positional Plagiocephaly: A Systematic Review of the Tools Used to Diagnose, Offer Treatment Recommendations, and Assess Treatment Outcomes of the Condition

BackgroundPositional plagiocephaly (PP) is an asymmetric deformation of the skull as a consequence of external forces acting on a normal and pliable skull. The prevalence of PP ranges between 19.6% and 46.6%. Treatment options for PP include repositioning, physical therapy, and helmet orthoses. Consensus regarding the treatment of PP remains elusive due to the condition's imprecise natural history, dissimilar diagnostic strategies, and unreliable data asserting treatments' efficacy. Our aim was to conduct a systematic review of the tools used to diagnose, suggest treatment strategies, and assess outcomes for PP. MethodsWe used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines to query a variety of databases. A total of 444 articles were imported into Covidence, a screening and data extraction tool for conducting systematic reviews. ResultsAfter a series of screenings, 60 articles met inclusion criteria and were reviewed in detail. The information was entered into a data extraction list consisting of 16 variables in the categories of general information, diagnostic strategies, treatment modalities, and treatment outcomes. Most articles reported retrospective case series, which yielded level 4 evidence. Only one article reported the results of a randomized and blinded outcomes assessment trial. Such article yielded level 1 evidence and was rated as high quality for allocation, concealment, and blinding of personnel. ConclusionThe strategies used to diagnose and classify PP are a disparate list of measures most of which have no parallels making it impossible to offer treatment recommendations and generate generalizable knowledge.

What if we consider research teams as teams?

Research teams are an important means by which knowledge is generated in Health Professions Education (HPE). Although funding agencies encourage the formation of interdisciplinary and interprofessional research teams, we know little about how our interdisciplinary and interprofessional research teams are functioning, nor how best to ensure their success. Indeed, while HPE Scholarship Units and research environments have been the object of study, little work has been focused on research teams themselves. In this article, the authors propose that research teams should be studied as unique instantiations of teams where several individuals work together towards a common goal. Considering research teams as a team can encourage attention to how effective teams are built, supported, and celebrated, it can acknowledge that competent individuals may form incompetent teams, and it opens important avenues for future research. Turning our attention to better understanding how and when research teams thrive should support the development of more effective teams; resulting in reduced waste and redundancy, better mobilization of team members' time and skills, and enhanced knowledge generation. Considering research teams as teams, encourages an understanding that these teams require care, commitment, and effort to sustain them, and it acknowledges that pursuing research in a team context is both a collaborative and a social endeavour.

Trends in Sustainable Tourism Paradigm: Resilience and Adaptation

In recent decades, sustainable tourism has emerged as a central paradigm, attracting growing scholarly interest. External factors, such as the SDGs, climate change agendas, smart and digitalized tourism, cyber and astronaut travel, pandemics, and shifting trends in economic competitiveness, mass tourism, and overtourism, are shaping the 21st-century paradigmatic landscape, challenging both the theoretical “what” and practical “how” of the sustainable tourism paradigm. Using Kuhn’s paradigmatic framework and the Web of Science bibliometric database from 1991 to 2022, this analysis traces trends in sustainable tourism research, advances in academic communication through influential co-citation networks and interdisciplinarity, and the emergence of alternative and quasi-paradigms. The findings suggest, first, a positive trend in tourism scholarly research production; second, weak and diverse communication and interdisciplinarity, as scholars do not sufficiently collaborate in co-citations; and third, the coexistence of the sustainable tourism paradigm with numerous alternative, rival, and quasi-paradigms. The lack of influential knowledge communication highlights the need for the academic tourism community to reconsider its knowledge generation practices. Enhanced collaboration through co-citation and interdisciplinary cooperation is crucial for fostering a deeper and shared understanding of multiple tourism-related concepts. Further thematic and interactive research is needed on the resilience and adaptability of the sustainable tourism paradigm. This article contributes to advancing sustainable tourism scholarship by advocating for a more influential and adaptable paradigm to ensure its relevance amidst emerging challenges.

Virtual Immersion in STEM Education: A MICMAC Study on How Virtual Reality Impacts the Understanding and Application of Scientific Concepts

The integration of virtual reality into STEM education has generated growing interest in how this technology impacts the understanding and application of scientific concepts. This study focuses on investigating this relationship by using the MICMAC technique to identify key variables and their interactions in virtual educational environments. It was found that variables such as the design of educational content, the quality of the virtual experience, and the interactivity of the environment are key to the learning process in STEM. In addition, determinant and autonomous variables were identified, which play fundamental roles in the generation of scientific knowledge for students. These results highlight the relevance of considering various aspects of virtual educational design to improve the effectiveness of learning in STEM. The practical implications of this study are significant for educators and educational program designers, highlighting the need to create immersive, interactive, and collaborative virtual environments to promote better understanding and application of scientific concepts. This study contributes to existing knowledge by providing a deeper understanding of how virtual reality can enhance learning in STEM, and suggests directions for future research in the field.

Parental Awareness of Children’s Psychosocial Needs: Parents’ and Childcare Professionals’ Perspectives

Despite high rates of child mental health needs globally, these remain largely unmet. Barriers to the provision of psychosocial support to children include stigma and sparse resources. To address this gap, local professionals can promote change by working to capacitate parents on children’s mental health needs. In the current study, five childcare professionals (also referred to as “trainers”) attended a Train-of-Trainer (ToT) child mental health programme before facilitating three awareness workshops for 48 parents. Of those, 16 parents and the five trainers participated in focus groups before and after the workshops to discuss factors that either enabled or hindered psychosocial awareness. Established themes emerged that were related to the concepts of psychosocial needs, parental influences, help-seeking and knowledge generation. The findings suggest that a psychosocial model with social workers at the centre can maximise existing resources, with parents playing an important peer support and education role in mobilising communities.

Building a learning health care community in rural and remote areas: a systematic review

BackgroundA Learning Health Care Community (LHCC) is a framework to enhance health care through mutual accountability between the health care system and the community. LHCC components include infrastructure for health-related data capture, care improvement targets, a supportive policy environment, and community engagement. The LHCC involves health care providers, researchers, decision-makers, and community members who work to identify health care needs and address them with evidence-based solutions. The objective of this study was to summarize the barriers and enablers to building an LHCC in rural areas.MethodsA systematic review was conducted by searching electronic databases. Eligibility criteria was determined by the research team. Published literature on LHCCs in rural areas was systematically collected and organized. Screening was completed independently by two authors. Detailed information about rural health care, activities, and barriers and enablers to building an LHCC in rural areas was extracted. Qualitative analysis was used to identify core themes.ResultsAmong 8169 identified articles, 25 were eligible. LHCCs aimed to increase collaboration and co-learning between community members and health care providers, integrate community feedback in health care services, and to share information. Main barriers included obtaining adequate funding and participant recruitment. Enablers included meaningful engagement of stakeholders and stakeholder collaboration.ConclusionsThe LHCC is built on a foundation of meaningful use of health data and empowers health care practitioners and community members in informed decision-making. By reducing the gap between knowledge generation and its application to practice, the LHCC has the potential to transform health care delivery in rural areas.

Fuzzy Adaptive Knowledge-Based Inference Neural Networks: Design and Analysis.

A novel fuzzy adaptive knowledge-based inference neural network (FAKINN) is proposed in this study. Conventional fuzzy cluster-based neural networks (FCBNNs) suffer from the challenge of a direct extraction of fuzzy rules that can capture and represent the interclass heterogeneity and intraclass homogeneity when the data possess complex structures. Moreover, the capability of the cluster-based rule generator in FCBNNs may decrease with the increase of data dimensionality. These drawbacks impede the generation of desired fuzzy rules, and affect the inference results depending on the fuzzy rules, thereby limiting their generalization ability. To address these drawbacks, an adaptive knowledge generator (AKG), consisting of the observation paradigm (OP) and clustering strategy (CS), is effectively designed to improve the generalization ability in FAKINN. The OP distills the characteristic information (CI) from data to highlight the homogeneity and heterogeneity of objects, and the CS, viz., the weighted condition-driven fuzzy clustering method (WCFCM), is proposed to summarize the CI to construct fuzzy rules. Moreover, the feedback between the OP and CS can control the dimensionality of CI, which endows FAKINN with the potential to tackle high-dimensional data. The main originality of the study focuses on the AKG and WCFCM that are proposed to develop the structural design methodology of FNNs. The performance of FAKINN is evaluated on various benchmarks with 27 comparative methods, and two real-world problems are adopted to validate its effectiveness. Experimental results show that FAKINN outperforms the comparison methods.

Africa si(gh)ted in Spanish: an introduction

The introduction to this special issue, “Africa-Si(gh)ted in Spanish,” presents readers with essays that illustrate the creative energy emerging in various countries in Africa and the diaspora. The works analyzed may be viewed as exophonic literature, demonstrating how contemporary African writers are shaping African Hispanic identities that defy colonial nation-state notions of belonging and assert the centrality of Africans in interpreting the world. The “Africa-si(gh)ted” approach’ as we term it, involves simultaneously prioritizing perspectives drawn from African lived experience and reclaiming the place of Africa as an ever-evolving site of knowledge generation and negotiation about Africans and African-descendant people. We propose Spanish as a language of affiliation and relation amongst creators from different cultural traditions—drawing on Edward Said and Édouard Glissant respectively—to offer a deeper understanding of the novel communities of belonging that are being forged in African Hispanism.

Quality Management Systems and Service Delivery in Parastatals in Kenya: A Case Study of Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (Kephis)

Total quality management is becoming more widely recognized due to businesses' efforts to provide high-quality goods and services. Government parastatals are confronted with various challenges due to shifting dynamics, such as inadequate legal and regulatory frameworks, subpar corporate governance, and unfavourable public perception. The main objective was to examine quality management systems and service delivery in Kenya. The investigation was guided and anchored by the following theoretical pillars: The study's fundamental anchor theory is Deming's Theory of Quality Management, which was backed by institutional theory The study employed a descriptive research design with a population of 300 as its target. Stratified random sampling was used to select a sample size of 171 people. Data was gathered through surveys. The quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS. The data was displayed using tables. The relationship between the variables was demonstrated using inferential statistics. Some ethical guidelines were considered to direct the research investigation throughout the study period. The relationship between quality services and service delivery had an R2 = 0.499, which indicates that a shift in quality services may be responsible for 49.9% of the variation in service delivery, and an R2 = 0.642, which indicates a strong positive association between quality services and service delivery. basic relationship between quality control and service delivery (R = 0.595) with an R2 value of 0.431. This means that to improve performance, businesses should be aware of their clients' requirements, meet their needs now and in the future, and aim to surpass their expectations. KEPHIS's management should think about incorporating quality service principles within the organization's divisions and departments. To ensure successful quality services and business success, KEPHIS should set up their quality management systems by ISO standards. More research can be done to broaden the study's focus to include other industries or look at how public, private, and SMEs are implementing the findings. Furthermore, knowledge generation processes can be integrated with a company's internal and external operations through quality management.