Significantly Contributed Research Articles

Революционная деятельность первого уполномоченного НКИД РСФСР в Монголии О. И. Макстенека (по данным отечественных и зарубежных архивов)

Scientific historical literature highly estimates the activities of Russian party executives, Comintern members, military specialists, diplomats and Buryat national democrats to have played an essential role in the implementation of the Mongolian Revolution. However, those research works pay little attention to the life and deeds of O. I. Makstenek — Soviet diplomat and first authorized representative of the RSFSR People’s Foreign Affairs Commissariat to Mongolia — who had significantly contributed to the success of the Mongolian Revolution of 1921. Goals. The study seeks to identify and analyze archival documents about revolutionary efforts of O. I. Makstenek and his work as Soviet Russia’s authorized diplomatic representative to Mongolia contained in Russian and foreign depositories. The objectives to be solved thereto include as follows: 1) analysis of files of a criminal investigation against O. I. Makstenek from the State Archives of the Russian Federation, 2) analysis of the report titled ‘Outcomes of Activities of RSFSR Foreign Affairs Commissariat’s Plenipotentiary to Mongolia O. I. Makstenek from June 1, 1920 to March 1921’ and housed by Archives of Mongolia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 3) introduction of documents about O. I. Makstenek from the State Historical Archives affiliated to the National Archives of Latvia (collections ‘Baltic District Security Department’, ‘Police Department of Riga Uyezd’, ‘Gendarme Department of Livland Uyezd’, 4) identification and analysis of documents stored at the Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History, 5) exploration of archival documents about O. I. Makstenek’s activities in his diplomatic position at the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, 6) analyses of materials from the State Archive of Khabarovsk Krai. Conclusions. The archival documents show O. I. Makstenek as a notable historical figure whose life and deeds provide further details on revolutionary events during the 1900s to 1920s in Livland, Irkutsk Governorate, Transbaikalia and Mongolia, little-known aspects of confrontation between Makstenek and executives of the Far Eastern Republic, Troitskosavsk Communists, on strictness and inevitability of Party’s penalties throughout that period. It is his work as authorized representative of the RSFSR People’s Foreign Affairs Commissariat to Mongolia that can be viewed a pinnacle of his revolutionary activities when he made a most significant contribution to the victory of the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 — thereafter virtually to become a common Soviet functionary, mid-level executive in judicial authorities, industrial sphere, banking and customs services.

Society Awards 2021.

Society Awards 2021.

Contribution of Conflict Management on Employees' Performance in Tanzania: A Case Study of Dar es Salaam Maritime Gateway Project

This study examines the contribution of conflict management on employee’s performance in Tanzania with particular reference to Dar es Salaam Maritime Gateway Project (DMGP). Specifically, the study intended to examine the nature of communication flow at DMGP, to identify the conflict resolution approaches practiced at DMGP and to associate practiced conflict resolution approaches with employees’ performance in Dar es Salaam Maritime Gateway Project. The study adopted the use of case study research design in generating the required primary data and was limited to the employees of DMGP. The study involved 45 technical employees who were conveniently and purposively selected for inclusion in the sample. Collected data was coded then analyzed with the help of SPSS version 23. Findings revealed that employees fear to speak out their inner concerns to supervisors because of insecurity of their job despite having a chance to express their opinions. Results have also indicated that interpersonal conflicts were predominantly solved by involving the conflicted parties. Workers at DMGP prefer more settling job issues with their immediate supervisors than third parties. Also, training and development offered at DMGP has significantly contributed to the performance of employees in different departments. Generally, it was revealed that conflict management has significant contribution to employees’ performance at DMGP. The study recommends to managers to enhance interpersonal relationships amongst co-workers to inculcate trust, unleash communication and consequentially boost morale of the employees.

A Bibliometric Analysis of Remdesivir: A COVID-19 Vaccine

In October 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved remdesivir (RDV) for the treatment of COVID-19. This motivated us (a) to perform its bibliometric analysis and (b) to acknowledge the significant contribution of all researchers throughout the world. On 7th May 2021, we extracted the data from the Scopus database. Total documents were 3277, but we only analyzed 1496 articles and 1066 reviews. In all publications (n=2562), 13215 authors, 9854 departments, and 127 countries have significantly contributed. Based on Vosviewer analysis we presented the co-authorship network. Total citations for 2562 documents were 55366. The citation breakup for all documents is provided. The number of publications sources or journals was 1156. We also performed a bibliometric analysis of the top one hundred (n=100) most cited documents. Based on bibliometrix (biblioshiny) analysis, the local and global citations of one hundred documents are provided. These (100) documents are published in 73 sources. The citation details (h and g-indexes) are provided for all sources. By Lotka’s law, we presented the frequency distribution of the productivity of authors. To describe the focus of these 100-documents, we performed the co-words analysis of titles. By biblioshiny, we presented the main focus as a thematic map and by Vosviewer, we highlighted the main co-words that appeared in the titles of the manuscripts. In this report, we bibliometrically covered 2562 publications from 2019 to May 2021.

Effectiveness of Mobile Health Applications for 5% Body Weight Reduction in Obese and Overweight Adults.

BackgroundWorld Health Organization reports that over 1.9 billion adults are obese. Studies have found that people who reduce their body weight by 5% experience considerable health benefits. Currently, mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) show effectiveness in body weight reduction. The present study aimed to explore the effectiveness of a popular mHealth app in 5% body weight reduction and to identify factors that affect 5% body weight reduction in obese adults. We investigated the time it took users to achieve 5% body weight reduction according to usage characteristics and factors influencing this period of time.MethodsThis study was a secondary data analysis using data from 23,682 commercial mHealth app users. For analysis, logistic regressions, Kaplan-Meier estimators, log-rank tests, and Cox regressions were used.ResultsVariables in user characteristics including age (odds ratio [OR], 0.976; P<0.001), male (OR, 1.226; P<0.001), initial body mass index (OR, 1.009; P<0.001), frequency of data entry for body weight (OR, 1.004; P<0.001), frequency of exercise (OR, 1.002; P<0.001), and dinner intake (OR, 1.004; P<0.001) made significant contributions in predicting 5% weight reduction in the study cohort. Users who were obese and who more frequently entered their body weight, exercise, and dietary intake data reduced 5% body weight much sooner than other users. Data entry regarding initial body weight (exponentiation of the B coefficient [Exp(B)], 1.002; P<0.001), frequency in body weight entry (Exp(B), 1,001; P<0.001), dinner intake (Exp(B), 1.003; P<0.001), and evening snack intake (Exp(B), 1.001; P<0.001) significantly contributed to predicting the time needed to achieve a 5% body weight reduction in users.ConclusionFor 5% body weight reduction, mHealth apps are promising tools. Users who frequently monitor their health-related behaviors can expect a 5% reduction in body weight in a short period of time.

The Effect of Remittance, Consumption, and FDI on Economic Growth in ASEAN Countries

One of the main indicators seen in reviewing the relationship between international workers and economic growth is remittances. Remittances obtained from workers abroad are one of the major sources of finance for developing countries. Remittances are also a source of finance in increasing migrant household incomes which encourage improved consumption which will affect economic growth. This study was conducted to explore the impact of migrant remittances, consumption and FDI on economic growth in 10 ASEAN countries using annual panel data from 2015-2019. This study uses panel data regression analysis with the Random Effect Model (REM) approach. The results showed that remittances, consumption and FDI positively and significantly contributed to economic growth in 10 ASEAN countries. Significant contribution of migrant remittances in economic growth if their use is directed to more productive sectors such as use in the investment sector can help the economies of ASEAN countries to maintain and increase economic growth. The government needs to improve the quality of migrant workers through education because a high level of education will affect the level of wages received by migrants and will have an impact on increasing remittances. The limitation in this study is the use of limited data, for 2020 it is not included in the data set used in the analysis. For this reason, further research should use 2020 data because in 2020 there be a new phenomenon, namely COVID-19 which can be traced to the impact of this phenomenon on remittances. Keywords: Remittances, Migrant, Economic Growth, Panel Data

Relationship Between Leadership Styles of Sports Administrators and Orgranisational Development in Ilorin Metropolis, Nigeria

Leadership styles remain very pertinent in the effective performance of an organization. Without good leadership ability to coordinate the staff and the activities in an organization may be hampered thereby affecting the overall development of such organization. Leadership is an important determinant in the effective functioning of an organization. The research employs descriptive survey design of correlation type which is very important as the study tries to find out the relationship between leadership styles of sports administrators and organization performance in Ilorin. Two research questions and three operational hypotheses were formulated for the study. The target populations for the study are 62 sports personnel in the sports council Ilorin which comprised of Director of Sports, Stadium manager, organizing secretaries and coaches of the existing 20 sports in the Kwara State Sports Council. No sample is selected as the researcher made use of all the sports personnel as respondents for the study. Researcher questionnaire designed in a modified four points likert rating scale was used to collect data from the respondents which was validated by a Professor of sports management, Kwara State University, Malete and a season sports administrator, ministry of youth and sports, Abuja and tested for reliability using split half method and Cronbach alpha was used to determine the result with a coefficient of 0.80 obtained. Inferential statistic of multiple regressions was used to test the null hypotheses formulated at 0.05 level of significance. The findings reveal that leadership styles of sports administrators have significant relationship with organization performance, each leadership style has significant contribution to organization performance and all the leadership styles significantly contributed to organization performance. Among the recommendations suggested include: Sports administrators must be able to employ variety of leadership style is the best among others.&#x0D; Keywords: Leadership styles, sports Administrator and organization performance

To the description of semiotic theory in the tradition of Chinese Linguistics

The Russian scholars often associate semiotics with such names as Ferdinand De Saussure, Charles Morris, Roland Barthes, who wrote a wide variety of works and significantly contributed to the formation of semiotics. Therefore, the Russian science has sound understanding of semiotics in Europe. In Asian regions, namely in China, semiotics is also one of the most popular trends. This article gives special attention to the formation and development of semiotics in the modern Chinese academic environment for the purpose of revealing and clarifying the key periods of study of semiotic theory, trends and directions of semiotic research, as well as the main works written by the Chinese authors from the perspective of semiotics. The author's special contribution into this research consists in introduction to the Russian linguistic paradigm of the process of formation of semiotics as an independent scientific direction within the Chinese academic environment. Description is provided to the three key periods of development and advancement of semiotic theories in China. The main trends and directions of research in the modern academic environment are explored. The article features the works of the prominent Chinese linguists &amp;ndash; Yaping Huang and Hua Meng, who implemented &amp;nbsp;the semiotic ideas into the study of ideographic writing. The article also examines the work of the renowned Chinese scholar Qian Guanlian, who studied the pragmalinguistic aspects from the perspective of semiotics, which allowed comprising a semiotic base of the communication theory and pragmatics, and thus made a significant contribution to further research of these trends.

Potential heterogeneity in the relationship between urbanization and air pollution, from the perspective of urban agglomeration

Different socioeconomic developments have substantially shaped the unique characters of cities in urban agglomerations, which may have led to uncertainties in the interpretations of the relationship between urbanization and environmental risks. This study chose the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) urban agglomeration region as a case study area, in order to explore the potential heterogeneity in the driving forces of the urbanization process for air pollution risk, based on ground-level fine particulate matter (PM2.5) monitoring data and socioeconomic panel data for the period 2014–2018. The pairwise analysis results confirmed that the urbanization process has significantly contributed to alleviating PM2.5 pollution in the BTH region. However, we found that there were contradictory pairwise-relationship curves related to the classical Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis between the agglomeration and urban scales. Multivariate analysis further deepened the recognition of this heterogeneity, showing significant contribution differences in the socioeconomic factors for the variations in PM2.5 pollution among the 13 cities in the BTH region. We discussed our results in depth to enhance the understanding of the relationship between urbanization and air pollution in urban agglomerations. The significance of this study is the emphasis placed on the driving heterogeneity of socioeconomic factors for PM2.5 pollution within urban agglomerations. In the future, cross-scale studies on the heterogeneity of results from an imbalanced urbanization process will be helpful for better understanding the interaction between urban development and environmental stresses.

Antimicrobial Prophylaxis for Postoperative Urinary Tract Infections in Transurethral Resection of Bladder Tumors: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

The administration of antimicrobial prophylaxis for postoperative urinary tract infections following transurethral resection of bladder tumors is controversial. We aimed to systematically review evidence on the potential effect of antimicrobial prophylaxis on postoperative urinary tract infections and asymptomatic bacteriuria. We conducted a systematic search in Embase®, Medline® and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. Randomized controlled trials and nonrandomized controlled trials assessing the effect of any form of antimicrobial prophylaxis in patients with transurethral resection of bladder tumors on postoperative urinary tract infections or asymptomatic bacteriuria were included. Risk of bias was assessed using RoB 2.0 or the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Fixed and random effects meta-analyses were conducted. As a potential basis for a scoping review, we exploratorily searched Medline for risk factors for urinary tract infections after transurethral resection of bladder tumors. The protocol was registered on PROSPERO (CRD42019131733). Of 986 screened publications, 7 studies with 1,725 participants were included; the reported effect sizes varied considerably. We found no significant effect of antimicrobial prophylaxis on urinary tract infections: the pooled odds ratio of the random effects model was 1.55 (95% CI 0.73-3.31). The random effects meta-analysis examining the effect of antimicrobial prophylaxis on asymptomatic bacteriuria showed an OR of 0.43 (0.18-1.04). Risk of bias was moderate. Our exploratory search identified 3 studies reporting age, preoperative pelvic radiation, preoperative hospital stay, duration of operation, tumor size, preoperative asymptomatic bacteriuria and pyuria as risk factors for urinary tract infections following transurethral resection of bladder tumors. We observed insufficient evidence supporting routine antimicrobial prophylaxis in patients undergoing transurethral resection of bladder tumors for the prevention of postoperative urinary tract infections; our findings may inform harmonization of international guidelines.

Predictors of Feminist Identity Utilizing an Intersectional Lens With a Focus on Non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, and African American MSW Students

A fundamental value of social work is social justice, which includes gender and racial/ethnic equality. Feminists address gender-based oppression and often work to address racial/ethnic inequalities as well as many other forms of oppression. However, most literature suggest that less than half of social work students identify as feminists. This study investigated factors that contribute to student feminist self-identification, focusing on how racial/ethnic identity may influence feminist identity. Four predicting constructs were identified: method of exposure to feminism, feminist knowledge, feminist attitudes and ideologies, and description of feminists. A multiple regression model was applied to the overall sample ( N = 660) and to each racial/ethnic group. Findings indicate that in the overall sample, all four constructs significantly contributed to predicting feminist identification, while in the non-Hispanic white sample ( n = 366), method of exposure, feminist attitudes and ideologies, and description of feminists made significant contributions; for the Hispanic sample ( n = 157), only feminist attitudes and ideologies made significant contributions to predicting feminist identification; and for the African American sample ( n = 137), method of exposure and description of feminists made significant contributions. These findings indicate differences among racial/ ethnic background in feminist identity and provide a comprehensive picture of feminist identity among Master’s of Social Work (MSW) students.

VOLODYMYR ZVARUN’S СONDUCTING WORK (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE MALE CHOIR «CHERVONA KALYNA»)

Ukrainian researchers frequently investigate the work of professional choirs, paying almost no attention to amateur ones – the centers creating musical environment at the local level. As a rule, such collectives are conducted by professional conductors, graduates from music academies, enthusiasts, masters of their work, who do not work for financial reward, but they work to develop the national choral art, and to involve talented singers in singing. The figure of V. Zvarun, who devoted more than 70 years to his favourite activity – work with Ivano-Frankivsk choirs, stands out among the passionate personalities who have contributed to the development of the choral life in the Carpathian region.The artist’s long creative life was closely connected with various choirs of the city as well as the region. If we take into consideration the fact that homogeneous male collectives are a rare phenomenonon on the choral map of Ukraine, it is very important to pay special attention to them. «Chervona Kalyna» is one of the few male choirs that has a long history and is probably the only semiprofessional collective of such a kind in the Carpathian region.The relevance of the article consists in the necessity to describe the creative path of the choir «Chervona Kalyna» and its conductor, who made a significant contribution to the development and evolution of the cultural life of the Carpathian region. Due to the fact that the choir occupied its niche in the musical movement of the region, significantly contributed to its revival, became one of the leading choirs in the cohort of professional and amateur collectives of the Carpathian region, it is necessary and equally relevant to analyze its creative work. However, no choir is able to work during rehearsals or on concert venues without a conductor and, therefore, it is vital to characterize the creative work of some personalities, such as V. Zvarun in particular.The main objective of the article is to reveal V. Zvarun’s talent through the prism of his conducting practice with the choir «Chervona Kalyna».Methodology is related to the analysis methods of V. Zvaryn’s conducting work and the systematization of the concerts given by his collectives, it enables us to demonstrate the importance of the choirmaster’s major impact.The article analyzes the long creative activity of the famous Carpathian conductor, teacher-methodologist, Methodologist at the Chair of the Methodics of Music Education and Conducting at V. Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, Honored Artist of Ukraine V. Zvarun. The artist’s conducting postulates were found out, his work with various creative collectives was described, special focus was made on the professional development of the amateur choir «Chervona Kalyna», its repertoire, concert life, touring were characterized, and it is the scientific novelty of the article as this choir and its conductor were not previously investigated in other researches.The results of the study were achieved owing to the author’s interview with V. Zvarun, the investigation of concert programmes provided by the conductor from the artist’s personal archive, analysis of newspapers reviews from the local periodicals.Conclusions. The musician’s work is a great responsibility to a society which accumulates energy and tempers the conductor’s character. V. Zvarun is an enthusiast of choral work who lived and worked for art’s sake, and the successful creative work of the collectives conducted by the maestro (there were 21 choirs in total) prove this fact. The most popular one was the amateur choir «Chervona Kalyna», which gave over a hundred concerts during its activity, becoming a part of history not only in Ivano-Frankivsk, Carpathian region, but also in the Ukrainian society in general.

In-situ utilization of soluble microbial product (SMP) cooperated with enhancing SMP-dependent denitrification in aerobic-anoxic sequencing batch reactor

Soluble microbial products (SMPs), as secondary pollutants, comprise a dominant percentage of residual COD in effluents from biological wastewater treatment processes. They can also be regarded as substitute electron sources if the in-situ utilization of SMPs could be achieved. In this study, the fate of SMPs in a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) treating artificial municipal sewage was investigated. Based on the regular SBR operation mode, a 3 h extension of anoxic phase was provided to promote SMP degradation. Meanwhile, the denitrification efficiencies achieved by adopting SMPs and influent organic substrates (IOSs) were compared to reveal the significant contribution of the in-situ utilization of SMP for nitrogen removal. Approximately 21.1 mg N/L of total nitrogen (TN) was removed over a single cyclic reaction, in which only 13.2 mg N/L was removed via IOS-dependent denitrification. The remaining 7.9 mg N/L of TN was realized via SMP-dependent denitrification, including 3.9 mg N/L by utilization-associated products and 4.0 mg N/L by biomass-associated products, which significantly contributed 37.4% of TN removal. The aromatic proteins, tryptophan-like proteins, polysaccharides and fulvic acids contained in SMP were the potential precursors of electron donors to support SMP-dependent denitrification process.

How Do Sources of Self-Efficacy Predict Preservice Teachers’ Beliefs Related to Constructivist and Traditional Approaches to Teaching and Learning?

Guided by Bandura’s theoretical construct of self-efficacy, in this study, we attempted to model the relationship between preservice elementary teachers’ sources of self-efficacy and their constructivist, and traditional beliefs related to teaching and learning by multiple linear regression analyses. Participants consist of 151 preservice elementary teachers at a state university. Results indicated that while mastery experience is significantly contributed to preservice elementary teachers’ constructivist teaching beliefs, physiological/emotional state made a statistically significant contribution to their traditional teaching beliefs. These results suggested that preservice elementary teachers hold more constructivist teaching beliefs as they gain experience with teaching based on the constructivist approach. Moreover, when preservice teachers have high anxiety, fear, or stress, they tend to be more traditional-oriented. The implications were discussed in terms of teacher education programs.

PREDICTORS OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN MALAYSIA, AND THE MODERATING EFFECTS OF JOB DEMANDS AND TOTAL REWARD

&#x0D; As reported by Aon Hewitt in 2015 and 2017, there are still a lot of countries, including Malaysia, that recorded the employee engagement score below the global average value of 65%. Malaysia’s employee engagement score values were recorded at 61% and 59% for years 2015 and 2017, respectively. Low quality condition of new vehicles produced by Malaysia’s national automotive manufacturing companies is potentially caused by non-engaged employees. In academic literature, Job Demand-resource (JD-R) is the most widely used theory in employee engagement study. However, there are still a few gaps associated with the theory (i.e., inconsistence finding). In addressing the research gaps, this present study aims to examine whether job-related variables (i.e., job characteristics and job demands), personal-related variable (i.e., positive psychological capital), and environmental-organisational related variable (i.e., total reward) influence employee engagement. The relationships among the variables were explained using two selected theories, namely the JD-R theory, and Self Determination theory. This study makes several significant contributions to practitioners and theories especially on the employee engagement context. Generally, findings from the study significantly contributed knowledge to practitioners especially from Malaysia’s national automotive manufacturing companies on the major factors influencing employee engagement for them to understand, describe, and explain. In addition, for the theories, the study added to the general body of knowledge and current research work on the effects of job-related variables (i.e., job characteristics and job demands), personal-related variable (i.e., positive psychological capital), and organisational-environmental related variable (i.e., total reward) on employee engagement.&#x0D;

Inicijalna javna ponuda kao izvor finansiranja i njen značaj za razvoj tržišta kapitala u Srbiji

Initial public offering has often been used in many economies in the privatization process of state-owned companies, primarily with those companies of strategic importance for the country. This further affected the private sector companies to decide on this step and thus gain additional capital in order to finance their further development. Based on the previous experience of many developed countries and countries in the region, the privatization through public offering of shares has significantly contributed to the development of the capital market in these countries, which is predominantly reflected in the growth of market capitalization, volume of turnover, number of transactions and participation of local and foreign investors in these markets. Through the conducted analysis of the capital market of Serbia, this paper points to its modest market capitalization and low level of liquidity largely caused by the long-term negligence of the role that the stock market can have on its development. The aim of the paper is to present the initial public offering of shares as a form of financing of companies, which can also make a significant contribution to the development of the Serbian capital market.

Microstructure and tensile behavior of Fe-8Mn-6Al-0.2C low density steel

The microstructure and tensile behavior of Fe-8Mn-6Al-0.2C low density steel were investigated in the present study. The results show that, after being solution treated at 900°C for 1h, the steel has a duplex microstructure consisting of ferrite and ~ 30% austenite, and it exhibits an excellent combination in mechanical properties, with a tensile strength of 846MPa and a total elongation of 32%, which were attributed to significant contribution of TRIP effect and three stages work hardening behavior. During tensile test, the work hardening behavior can be defined as three-stage characteristics, in which the stage 2(S2) was linked to the TRIP effect. In S2, with the increase of tensile strain, austenite volume fraction decreased while martensite volume fraction increased gradually. During this process, some austenite grains, positioned at grain boundaries among multiple ferrite grains, were the first ones to transform, while, some austenite grains, located between ferrite laths or embedded in large ferrite grains were often found to undergo rotations. The TRIP effect and the high dislocation density in ferrite and martensite significantly contributed to the excellent mechanical property. In addition, the volume fraction of small angle grain boundaries increased greatly, with a value of over 51% being observed at the true strain of 0.27. The steel possessed a density of 6.95g/cm3, which is about 11% lower than pure iron.

Dissection of additive, dominance, and imprinting effects for production and reproduction traits in Holstein cattle

BackgroundAlthough genome-wide association and genomic selection studies have primarily focused on additive effects, dominance and imprinting effects play an important role in mammalian biology and development. The degree to which these non-additive genetic effects contribute to phenotypic variation and whether QTL acting in a non-additive manner can be detected in genetic association studies remain controversial.ResultsTo empirically answer these questions, we analyzed a large cattle dataset that consisted of 42,701 genotyped Holstein cows with genotyped parents and phenotypic records for eight production and reproduction traits. SNP genotypes were phased in pedigree to determine the parent-of-origin of alleles, and a three-component GREML was applied to obtain variance decomposition for additive, dominance, and imprinting effects. The results showed a significant non-zero contribution from dominance to production traits but not to reproduction traits. Imprinting effects significantly contributed to both production and reproduction traits. Interestingly, imprinting effects contributed more to reproduction traits than to production traits. Using GWAS and imputation-based fine-mapping analyses, we identified and validated a dominance association signal with milk yield near RUNX2, a candidate gene that has been associated with milk production in mice. When adding non-additive effects into the prediction models, however, we observed little or no increase in prediction accuracy for the eight traits analyzed.ConclusionsCollectively, our results suggested that non-additive effects contributed a non-negligible amount (more for reproduction traits) to the total genetic variance of complex traits in cattle, and detection of QTLs with non-additive effect is possible in GWAS using a large dataset.

Knowledge, Attitude, Pictorial Health Warnings And Quitting Attempt To Smoking In Sarawak, Malaysia

Background: Every year, millions of preventable deaths and disabilities were directly and indirectly caused by smoking. Various methods have been employed and millions of dollars have been spent in order to tackle this issue.Objectives: This study was designed to identify the factors associated with knowledge, attitude and quitting attempts to smoking among adult population in Sarawak.Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study conducted among the adult population in Sarawak. Data were collected from ten villages in Kota Samarahan and Kuching Division by face to face interview using modified Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) questionnaire. Non-probability sampling method was adopted to select the villages. All the households of the villages were visited, and an adult member was selected randomly from each house irrespective of the sex. After missing value imputation, a total of 1000 data were analysed using statistical software SPSS 19.0 version.Results: Analysis showed that 28.8% of the respondents were current smokers. Multiple Linear Regression Analysis (MLR) revealed that younger age, family size, marital status, scariness and in formativeness of Pictorial Health Warnings (PHWs) significantly contributed to perceived knowledge of health effects of smoking (p&lt;0.05). Similarly level of education, perceived knowledge of health effects and information on cigarette packages have significant positive contribution to preventive attitude towards smoking, whereas non smoking status has no influence on the attitude towards smoking (p&lt;0.05?. On the contrary, marital status, clarity and nature of information on the cigarette packages about PHWs have significantly influence for quitting attempts (p&lt;0.05), whereas the nature of jobs such as business and service had no influence in quitting attempt of smoking (p&lt;0.05).Conclusion: Despite numerous interventions programme for tobacco control being implemented such as PHWs, the study findings revealed that better plans and strategies for more effective preventive measures against smoking should be instituted by policy makers.Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol.16(2) 2017 p.266-273

5S implementation methodologies: literature review and directions

The objective of the paper is to investigate the process of 5S implementation across all the levels of organisations and highlight the significant contributions of 5S to the organisations. The paper is based on a methodical literature review that inspects how the implementation of 5S technique significantly contributed the progress of different organisations in the term of quality, productivity, effective utilisation of space, safety and employees morale values. The manuscript presents the systematic 5S implementation initiatives implementation methodologies suggested by various researchers and practitioners. The success factors that enrich 5S implementation in the organisation are also identified and discussed progressively. The study also highlights the manufacturing achievements through successful 5S initiatives and obstacles that create hindrance in the path of implementing 5S technique. The paper provides comprehensive outlook of 5S approach to the management for implementing it as way of attaining maintainable performance for their organisations.