Glaucoma Awareness and Knowledge, and Attitude to Screening, in a Rural Community in Ebonyi State, Nigeria

Awareness, knowledge, beliefs and the sociocultural and religious practices, are believed to influence the treatment-seeking behavior of people as well as their uptake of services. This study was carried out to assess the awareness and knowledge about glaucoma, and the attitude to glaucoma screening in Nchokko village in Igbeagu community, Izzi Local Government Area, Ebonyi State, Nigeria. This was a cross-sectional descriptive study. Data were collected using an interviewer-administered questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS 22. Results show that a total of 402 respondents— 228 (56.7%) women and 174 (43.3%) men—were interviewed. The mean age of respondents was 31.7 ± 11.9 years;82.8% of the respondents had secondary education or less;53% were married;and 38.1% were farmers. Only 21.1% of the respondents were aware of glaucoma. Gender, education, and positive family history were significantly associated with awareness. Only 6.3% of the respondents had good knowledge about the disease. A large proportion of respondents (62.1%) exhibited a positive attitude towards glaucoma screening;however, only 5% had ever undergone glaucoma screening. We conclude that glaucoma awareness and knowledge were poor in this rural community, but a high proportion of respondents had a positive attitude towards glaucoma screening. We therefore recommend a focused community health education campaign that will raise awareness and impart adequate knowledge about glaucoma. Eye care providers should make use of every opportunity to convey information on glaucoma to patients.

Call for Papers The Third International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology (RSKT2008)

Since the introduction of rough sets in 1982 by Professor Zdzisaw Pawlak, we have witnessed great advances in both theory and applications. Rough set theory is closely related to knowledge technology in a variety of forms such as knowledge discovery, approximate reasoning, intelligent and multiagent system design, knowledge intensive computations. The cutting-edge knowledge technologies have great impact on learning, pattern recognition, machine intelligence and automation of acquisition, transformation, communication, exploration and exploitation of knowledge. A principal thrust of such technologies is the utilization of methodologies that facilitate knowledge processing. To present the state-of-the-art scientific results, encourage academic and industrial interaction, and promote collaborative research in rough sets and knowledge technology worldwide, the 3rd International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology will be held in Chengdu, China, May 17～19, 2008. It will provide a forum for researchers to discuss new results and exchange ideas, following the successful RSKT'06 (Chongqing, China) and JRS'07 (RSKT'07 together with RSFDGrC'07) (Toronto, Canada).

Call for Papers Special Issue of Tsinghua Science and Technology on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

Tsinghua Science and Technology is founded and published since 1996. It is an international academic journal sponsored by Tsinghua University and is published bimonthly. This journal aims at presenting the up-to-date scientific achievements in computer science, and other information technology fields. It is indexed by Ei and other abstracting and indexing services. From 2013, the journal commits to the open access at IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Development of Conceptual Framework for Knowledge Management Process

Knowledge has become one of the most important driving forces for business success. Organizations are becoming more knowledge intensive. Many firms in the global market are aware of this, and they try to explore the field of knowledge management （KM） in order to improve and sustain their competitiveness. Knowledge has always been the central in the functioning of society. However, in today＇s ＂knowledge economy＂, organizations are increasingly aware of the need for a ＂knowledge focus＂ in their organizational strategies as they respond to changes in the environment. The aim of this paper is to describe the theoretical concepts and approaches of KM process that could be implemented in organizations by reviewing KM process theories and present suggestions for what a general process should include based on analysis of various models presented in KM. The main emphasis is laid upon the concept of goal definition review, validation, and knowledge training processes in order to make sure that KM process initiative will deliver competitive advantage to the organization.

Inarticulateness, Power and Ethnic identity On Jorge Luis Borges＇ The Gospel According to Mark

This paper attempts to focus on Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Gospel according To Mark. Borges, an Argentina short storywriter and translator, whose motherland is under long-term western colonization, identifi es himself unconsciously with the western culture. Hisworks mostly touch upon the themes of religion and philosophy. Along with post-colonialism theory’s springing up, critics began to analyze hisworks from the post-colonial perspective. The author thinks that this short story with religious implication parallels to the cultural invasion in theperiod of colonization, from powerful culture to weaker one. The author, thus, aims to use Michael Foucault’s viewpoints concerning power andknowledge to probe into the western cultural hegemony and ideological invasion refl ected in this story. Besides, the loss and construction of theethnic identity of the colonized will be discussed in details.

Concerning the Capitalization Restriction of Training Cost According to IAS 38

In today＇s knowledge-based economy, the role played by human capital in the determination of the market value of a firm is recognized. To be able to persist in the open competition, entities are forced to invest increasingly in the professional training of their employees. Inconsistent with this rising importance is the prohibition to capitalize professional training cost according to international accounting standards （IAS） 38.69 （b）. Highly qualified employees ensure competitive advantages and thus lead to an increase in shareholder value. Regarding the financial statement as a primary source of information, it does not seem reasonable to leave such a valuable resource completely unnoticed in the balance sheet. Consequently, a truthful representation of a firm＇s asset should take training costs into account. This article pleads for a limitation of this general legal prohibition and analyzes under which premises those expenditures for training can comply with the common criteria of capitalization according to IAS 38.

Synthetic biology in the UK-An outline of plans and progress

Synthetic biology is capable of delivering new solutions to key challenges spanning the bioeconomy,both nationally and internationally.Recognising this significant potential and the associated need to facilitate its translation and commercialisation the UK government commissioned the production of a national Synthetic Biology Roadmap in 2011,and subsequently provided crucial support to assist its implementation.Critical infrastructural investments have been made,and important strides made towards the development of an effectively connected community of practitioners and interest groups.A number of Synthetic Biology Research Centres,DNA Synthesis Foundries,a Centre for Doctoral Training,and an Innovation Knowledge Centre have been established,creating a nationally distributed and integrated network of complementary facilities and expertise.The UK Synthetic Biology Leadership Council published a UK Synthetic Biology Strategic Plan in 2016,increasing focus on the processes of translation and commercialisation.Over 50 start-ups,SMEs and larger companies are actively engaged in synthetic biology in the UK,and inward investments are starting to flow.Together these initiatives provide an important foundation for stimulating innovation,actively contributing to international research and development partnerships,and helping deliver useful benefits from synthetic biology in response to local and global needs and challenges.

Semantic Rule Based Image Visual Feature Ontology Creation

Multimedia is one of the important communication channels for mankind. Due to the advancement in technology and enormous growth of mankind, a vast array of multimedia data is available today. This has resulted in the obvious need for some techniques for retrieving these data. This paper will give an overview of ontology-based image retrieval system for asteroideae flower family domain. In order to reduce the semantic gap between the low-level visual features of an image and the high-level domain knowledge, we have incorporated a concept of multi-modal image ontology. So, the created asteroideae flower domain specific ontology would have the knowledge about the domain and the visual features. The visual features used to define the ontology are prevalent color,basic intrinsic pattern and contour gradient. In prevalent color extraction, the most dominant color from the images was identified and indexed. In order to determine the texture pattern for a particular flower, basic intrinsic patterns were used. The contour gradients provide the information on the image edges with respect to the image base. These feature values are embedded in the ontology at appropriate slots with respect to the domain knowledge. This paper also defines some of the query axioms which are used to retrieve appropriate information from the created ontology. This ontology can be used for image retrieval system in semantic web.

KnoE:A Web Mining Tool to Validate Previously Discovered Semantic Correspondences

The problem of matching schemas or ontologies consists of providing corresponding entities in two or more knowledge models that belong to a same domain but have been developed separately. Nowadays there are a lot of techniques and tools for addressing this problem, however, the complex nature of the matching problem make existing solutions for real situations not fully satisfactory. The Google Similarity Distance has appeared recently. Its purpose is to mine knowledge from the Web using the Google search engine in order to semantically compare text expressions. Our work consists of developing a software application for validating results discovered by schema and ontolog2/ matching tools using the philosophy behind this distance. Moreover, we are interested in using not only Google, but other popular search engines with this similarity distance. The results reveal three main facts. Firstly, some web search engines can help us to validate semantic correspondences satisfactorily. Secondly there are significant differences among the web search engines. And thirdly the best results are obtained when using combinations of the web search engines that we have studied.

Feature selection on probabilistic symbolic objects

In data analysis tasks, we are often confronted to very high dimensional data. Based on the purpose of a data analysis study, feature selection will find and select the relevant subset of features from the original features. Many feature selection algorithms have been proposed in classical data analysis, but very few in symbolic data analysis （SDA） which is an extension of the classical data analysis, since it uses rich objects instead to simple matrices. A symbolic object, compared to the data used in classical data analysis can describe not only individuals, but also most of the time a cluster of individuals. In this paper we present an unsupervised feature selection algorithm on probabilistic symbolic objects （PSOs）, with the purpose of discrimination. A PSO is a symbolic object that describes a cluster of individuals by modal variables using relative frequency distribution associated with each value. This paper presents new dissimilarity measures between PSOs, which are used as feature selection criteria, and explains how to reduce the complexity of the algorithm by using the discrimination matrix.