Sexual and Reproductive Health Knowledge and Behaviour among Adolescents in Rural Burkina Faso

Background: Adolescents in developing countries have limited knowledge about the prevention of STIs and unwanted pregnancies. In several African countries, risky sexual behaviour persists, including early sexual debut, multiple sexual partners, economic and sexual exchange, and low condom and contraceptive use. The purpose of this study is to assess the sexual and reproductive health knowledge and behaviour of adolescents in rural Burkina Faso in order to improve their sexual and reproductive health. Method: This was a descriptive cross-sectional study with prospective data collection conducted from 07 March to 04 April 2022 in the area of the Demographic and Health Surveillance System of the Nouna Research Centre. A questionnaire was administered to a randomly selected sample of 1202 adolescents. Results: The mean age of the adolescents was 14.1 years and 56.6% were male. Only 58.2% of the adolescents had ever heard of HIV/AIDS. Of these, 95.7% did not know their HIV status. In addition, 15.8% had ever had sexual intercourse and 2.4% had been sexually active at an early age. Almost 45% had not used any contraceptive method the last time they had sex. Condoms were the most frequently used contraceptive method (47.4%). Among teenagers, 27.6% had been pregnant at least once, 7.3% were married and the average age at marriage was 18.45 years. Almost 7% (6.9%) of teenagers had more than one sexual partner. Conclusion: Adolescents have limited knowledge about reproductive health. Risky sexual behaviour persists. Awareness campaigns need to be intensified to improve their sexual and reproductive health.

The current status of foot self-care knowledge, behaviours, and analysis of influencing factors in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in China

Purpose:To investigate the knowledge and behaviours on foot self-care in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus;analyse the influential factors,and provide information for the intervention study.Methods:A total of 5961 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus from 144 hospitals in China were included in the study.The investigation content included patients'demographic data,foot self-care knowledge and behaviours.The investigation tools were the questionnaires on the general diabetes information,on the foot self-care knowledge,and on the foot selfcare behaviours.Results:The foot self-care knowledge was medium and the foot self-care behaviour was poor.The status of knowledge and behaviours were influenced by education,duration of diabetes mellitus,periodic inspection,and education about diabetic complications.Pearson analysis demonstrated that there was positive correlation between knowledge score and behaviour score(r?0.27,p<0.001).Conclusions:The status of foot self-care knowledge and behaviours are not optimistic.According to the patients'own characteristics,the theory of knowledge,attitude and practice applies to encouraging patients to go for periodic inspection and education about diabetic complications so as to enhance the knowledge and promote the self-care behaviours.

Observational study to assess pregnant women's knowledge and behaviour related to toxoplasmosis in Essaouira province, Morocco

Objective: To assess knowledge and behaviour related to toxoplasmosis which remains a neglected disease in Morocco.Methods: Observational investigations were conducted among 600 pregnant women from Essaouira Province.The interview items covered respondents' knowledge of the disease, its preventive practices and risk behaviours.Results: A total of 22/600 women had already carried out the anti-toxoplasmosis test, while, 96% have never done any screening of anti-Toxoplasma antibodies.Only 16/600 women have good information about the disease, its mode of transmission and its complications in both the fetus and his mother.Although most women adopt a healthy diet, the consumption of raw or undercooked meat is far to be considered as a risk factor, along with other potential factors that may foster the acquisition of the disease, such as possessing a domestic cat, educational status and knowledge of the disease.However, in this study, contact with soil was revealed the most important risk factor(P = 0.045), followed by the hygiene conditions after handling raw meat(P = 0.048).Conclusion: The underestimation of the Toxoplasma gondii sero-prevalence in Essaouira Province can be explained by the absence of toxoplasmosis serology in health institutions, as well as the gap of knowledge about the disease by local population.

Enhancing Embedding-Based Chinese Word Similarity Evaluation with Concepts and Synonyms Knowledge

Word similarity(WS)is a fundamental and critical task in natural language processing.Existing approaches to WS are mainly to calculate the similarity or relatedness of word pairs based on word embedding obtained by massive and high-quality corpus.However,it may suffer from poor performance for insufficient corpus in some specific fields,and cannot capture rich semantic and sentimental information.To address these above problems,we propose an enhancing embedding-based word similarity evaluation with character-word concepts and synonyms knowledge,namely EWS-CS model,which can provide extra semantic information to enhance word similarity evaluation.The core of our approach contains knowledge encoder and word encoder.In knowledge encoder,we incorporate the semantic knowledge extracted from knowledge resources,including character-word concepts,synonyms and sentiment lexicons,to obtain knowledge representation.Word encoder is to learn enhancing embedding-based word representation from pre-trained model and knowledge representation based on similarity task.Finally,compared with baseline models,the experiments on four similarity evaluation datasets validate the effectiveness of our EWS-CS model in WS task.

Knowledge Automatic Indexing Based on Concept Lexicon and Segm-entation Algorithm

This paper is based on two existing theories about automatic indexing of thematic knowledge concept. The prohibit-word table with position information has been designed. The improved Maximum Matching-Minimum Backtracking method has been researched. Moreover it has been studied on improved indexing algorithm and application technology based on rules and thematic concept word table.

Effect of hemovigilance education on nursing students’knowledge:the application of a conceptual map

Objective:Given the importance of having knowledge on the hemovigilance process in nursing care,the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of the hemovigilance education on nursing students’knowledge using a conceptual map.The current research was a semi-experimental study.Methods:The samples consisted of 60 nursing students who were selected based on the inclusion criteria using the census sampling method.Thereafter,these participants were randomly assigned into the two groups:experimental and control groups.The required data were collected before,immediately after,and 1 month after the education using the hemovigilance knowledge questionnaire.Accordingly,the validity of this questionnaire was confirmed,and its reliability using the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was reported as 0.83.The education process was conducted during a 4-week period.Thereafter,the collected data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics by SPSS v25.Results:The results reveal that a significant difference existed between the knowledge scores of students in the experimental group compared with that of the control group during different times(including before,immediately after,and 1 month after the education)(P<0.0001).Of note,hemovigilance education had a significant effect on the students’knowledge(P<0.0001).Conclusions:Due to the effect of the hemovigilance education on the students’knowledge and by applying the conceptual map in the easy transfer of the educational concepts,it is recommended that the results of the present study be used to strengthen the theoretical and clinical education of nursing students.

Knowledge and health seeking behavior for malaria among the local inhabitants in an endemic area of Ethiopia: implications for control

This cross-sectional study was conducted to assess the knowledge and health seeking behavior for malaria among the local inhabitants in an endemic area of Ethiopia: Implications for control. 98.6% and 80.7% of respondents had awareness about malaria and the cause (‘mosquito bite’) of malaria, respectively. 186 (81.6%) respondents seek treatment for a febrile disease from health care facilities. Chi-square analysis revealed a strong association between the edu- cational status of respondents and the measures they take to prevent malaria (Х2 = 58.7;df = 16;p < 0.001). The findings clearly suggest that the majority of the respondents had adequate knowledge and enviable health seeking behaviour. However, still a sizable faction had misconception and undesirable health seeking behaviour. It’s a major barrier to implement effective malaria control strategies in the resource- limited settings particularly in country like Ethiopia. In this context, appropriate communication strategies apparently inevitable. Therefore, appropriate communication strategies should be designed to promote the knowledge and health seeking behaviour of vulnerable section of the society in this vicinity.

Tourists’ Behavioural Intention Towards Ecotourism in Bali Under Consideration of Issue-Related Knowledge

Tourists’image about Bali and the motivation to visit the island are firmly based on Bali’s rich culture and tradition as well as its abundant nature.Due to the increasing number of visitors year by year,the island is in urgent need to reduce or even minimize the negative impacts of tourism and the damages done to nature and Balinese society.To improve the quality of tourism,a better understanding of tourists’behavioural intention and actual behaviour is crucial.An essential part of this context and the process of tourists’decision making plays the level of environmental knowledge.Therefore,the study intended to answer the research question:“How does issue-related knowledge influence ecotourism behavioural intention and actual environmental behaviour of tourists?”.A sequential exploratory research method using quantitative and qualitative data from interviews and Focus Group Discussion has been utilized to find more insights.Ajzen’s(1991)“Theory of Planned Behaviour”has been applied in an extended model to analyze whether knowledge influences attitude,intention,and behaviour.The data for the quantitative analyzes were collected 2019 within four weeks through interviews of 264 international and domestic tourists at three nature-based tourism destinations in Bali.The gained data were processed using multiple techniques:descriptive statistical analysis,correlation analysis,and Structural Equation Model(SEM)analysis.The results showed that ecotourism knowledge has a direct impact on tourists’environmental attitudes and their actual environmental behaviour.Although the SEM analysis could not show the direct influence towards ecotourism behavioural intention,this was confirmed by the correlation analysis result with a positive relationship of the latent variables ecotourism knowledge and ecotourism behavioural intention with significant strength.The research findings led to the conclusion that the research question could be confirmed.The level of ecotourism knowledge has a positive influence onenvironmental attitude,behaviour intention,and actual behaviour.

Semantic model and optimization of creative processes at mathematical knowledge formation

The aim of this work is mathematical education through the knowledge system and mathematical modeling. A net model of formation of mathematical knowledge as a deductive theory is suggested here. Within this model the formation of deductive theory is represented as the development of a certain informational space, the elements of which are structured in the form of the orientated semantic net. This net is properly metrized and characterized by a certain system of coverings. It allows injecting net optimization parameters, regulating qualitative aspects of knowledge system under consideration. To regulate the creative processes of the formation and realization of mathematical know- edge, stochastic model of formation deductive theory is suggested here in the form of branching Markovian process, which is realized in the corresponding informational space as a semantic net. According to this stochastic model we can get correct foundation of criterion of optimization creative processes that leads to “great main points” strategy (GMP-strategy) in the process of realization of the effective control in the research work in the sphere of mathematics and its applications.

Cardiovascular health awareness,risk perception,behavioural intention and INTERHEART risk stratification among middle-aged adults in Malaysia

Objective:To investigate the interrelationship between cardiovascular health awareness,risk perception,behavioural intention,and INTERHEART risk stratification in a middle-aged adult population in Malaysia.Methods:A cross-sectional survey with convenience sampling was conducted during November 2022 and January 2023.Participants completed validated questionnaires assessing cardiovascular health awareness,risk perception of cardiovascular diseases,behavioural intention towards adopting healthy habits,and INTERHEART risk stratification score(IHRS)based on established risk factors.A total of 602 respondents were included in the final analysis.Data were analysed with independent t-test/one-way ANOVA or Mann-Whitney/Kruskal-Wallis to test the differences,Pearson correlation or linear regression test to analyze the association of independent and dependent variables.Results:There was a significant positive correlation between medical knowledge related to cardiovascular disease(CVD)and knowledge related to CVD risk prevention,risk perception,behavioural intention and IHRS(P<0.05,Pearson correlation).Notably,individuals with higher IHRS tended to have lower knowledge related to CVD and CVD risk prevention,risk perception,and behavioural intention.Males,laborers,active/former smokers,individuals with lower household income and educational levels,those involved in occupations not related to the healthcare sector,and those who did not receive the CVD health brochure or are unaware of health self-assessment tools are likely to have lower levels of knowledge,risk perception,and poorer behavioural intention regarding cardiovascular health(P<0.05,one-way ANOVA).While educational level,smoking status,awareness about CVD poster,self-assessment tools were repeatedly significantly associated with knowledge related to CVD and CVD risk prevention,risk perception,behavioral intention and/or IHRS(P<0.05,linear regression).Conclusions:These findings underscore the importance of promoting cardiovascular health awareness and risk perception among middle-aged adults to foster positive BI and reduce CVD risk.Tailored interventions targeting specific risk factors identified by INTERHEART may enhance risk stratification accuracy and facilitate targeted preventive strategies.

基于Knowledge-Analysis的军事知识联通研究

军事专业知识在军事决策系统、军事智能教学系统、军事知识查询系统等高技术产品中具有重要的作用。知识库是机器智能的重要来源,所以有必要建立一个完善、协调、具有良好联通性的大型军事知识库,而大量实践证明计算机真正具有智能不仅需要大型知识库,而且更需要知识间广泛的联通。本文主要讨论军事概念联通。所谓概念联通是指通过关系链或属性或属性值将两个概念联系起来的过程。概念联通的目的之一就是通过概念联通帮助发现不同知识源的知识之间的不一致性,尽可能保证所获取知识的完备性和精确性,建立一个大型的军事专业知识库。

The comparison study of Chinese and American secondary school students’knowledge structure—an experimental research based on concept map assessment technique

A concept map is a schematic device for representing a set of concept meanings embedded in a framework of propositions.It can be used to evaluate students’knowledge structure.This article introduces the comparative study of Chinese and American secondary school students’knowledge structure.They are compared quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of mean score,individual proposition scores,proposition choice and map structure.The results indicate that students’knowledge structures in the two countries are remarkably different.Compared with American students,Chinese students’ability to take an exam is stronger and their mean score is higher.However,Chinese students need to improve their general knowledge and creativity although their basic knowledge is solid and they are better in mastering discipline knowledge and knowledge application.

Community knowledge,attitudes and practices related to schistosomiasis and associated healthcare-seeking behaviours in northern Côte d’Ivoire and southern Mauritania

Background:Among parasitic infections,schistosomiasis ranks second after malaria in terms of worldwide morbidity.Despite efforts to contain transmission,more than 230 million people are infected,of which 85%live in Sub-Saharan Africa.While the epidemiologic characteristics of schistosomiasis have been extensively studied across endemic settings,social factors have been paid less attention.The current study assesses community knowledge of schistosomiasis causes,transmission,signs,symptoms and prevention,as well as healthcare-seeking behaviours in two West African settings,with the aim of strengthening schistosomiasis control interventions.Methods:From August 2014 to June 2015,we conducted two cross-sectional surveys in Korhogo,Cote d’Ivoire and Kaedi,Mauritania.We applied a questionnaire to collect quantitative data at the household level in Korhogo(n=1456)and Kaedi(n=1453).Focus group discussions(Korhogo:n=32,Kaedi:n=32)and participatory photography(photovoice)(Korhogo:n=16,Kaedi:n=16)were conducted within the communities to gather qualitative data.In addition,semi-structured interviews were used to discuss with key informants from control programmes,nongovernmental organizations and health districts(Korhogo:n=8,Kaedi:n=7).Results:The study demonstrated that schistosomiasis is not well known by the communities;64.1%claimed to know the causes of the disease,but the reality is different.This knowledge is more from cultural than biomedical source.It was observed that social construction of the disease is different from the biomedical definition.In Korhogo,schistosomiasis was often associated with several other diseases,notably stomach ulcer and gonorrhoea.The populations believe that schistosomiasis is caused by exposure to goat or dog urine in the environment.In Kaedi,schistosomiasis is considered as a disease transmitted by environmenal elements such as sunshine and dirty water.In both settings,the care-seeking pathways were found to be strongly influenced by local customs and self-medication acquired from the informal sector.Conclusions:This study revealed that knowledge about the aetiology,transmission,symptoms,prevention and treatment of schistosomiasis among the populations in Korhogo and Kaedi is based on their local culture.Deep-rooted habits could therefore pose a significant obstacle to the elimination of schistosomiasis.

DEBRA: On the Unsupervised Learning of Concept Hierarchies from (Literary) Text

With this work, we introduce a novel method for the unsupervised learning of conceptual hierarchies, or concept maps as they are sometimes called, which is aimed specifically for use with literary texts, as such distinguishing itself from the majority of research literature on the topic which is primarily focused on building ontologies from a vast array of different types of data sources, both structured and unstructured, to support various forms of AI, in particular, the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee. We first elaborate on mutually informing disciplines of philosophy and computer science, or more specifically the relationship between metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, computing and AI, followed by a technically in-depth discussion of DEBRA, our dependency tree based concept hierarchy constructor, which as its name alludes to, constructs a conceptual map in the form of a directed graph which illustrates the concepts, their respective relations, and the implied ontological structure of the concepts as encoded in the text, decoded with standard Python NLP libraries such as spaCy and NLTK. With this work we hope to both augment the Knowledge Representation literature with opportunities for intellectual advancement in AI with more intuitive, less analytical, and well-known forms of knowledge representation from the cognitive science community, as well as open up new areas of research between Computer Science and the Humanities with respect to the application of the latest in NLP tools and techniques upon literature of cultural significance, shedding light on existing methods of computation with respect to documents in semantic space that effectively allows for, at the very least, the comparison and evolution of texts through time, using vector space math.

Constructing an Educational Knowledge Graph with Concepts Linked to Wikipedia

To use educational resources efficiently and dig out the nature of relations among MOOCs(massive open online courses),a knowledge graph was built for MOOCs on four major platforms:Coursera,EDX,XuetangX,and ICourse.This paper demonstrates the whole process of educational knowledge graph construction for reference.And this knowledge graph,the largest knowledge graph of MOOC resources at present,stores and represents five classes,11 kinds of relations and 52779 entities with their corresponding properties,amounting to more than 300000 triples.Notably,24188 concepts are extracted from text attributes of MOOCs and linked them directly with corresponding Wikipedia entries or the closest entries calculated semantically,which provides the normalized representation of knowledge and a more precise description for MOOCs far more than enriching words with explanatory links.Besides,prerequisites discovered by direct extractions are viewed as an essential supplement to augment the connectivity in the knowledge graph.This knowledge graph could be considered as a collection of unified MOOC resources for learners and the abundant data for researchers on MOOC-related applications,such as prerequisites mining.

Concept Lattice Construction through the Composition and Decomposition of Formal Contexts

The purpose of this paper is to study the construction of concept lattice from variable formal contexts.Composition and decomposition theories are proposed for the unraveling of concept lattice from contexts with variable attribute set in the process of information updating.The relationship between the extension sets of the original context and that of its sub-context is analyzed.The composition and decomposition theories are then generalized to the situation involving more than two sub-contexts and the situation with variable attribute set and object set.

面向知识结构分析的模糊概念格模型

知识空间理论使用数学语言对学习者进行知识评价与学习指导,属于数学心理学的研究范畴.技能与问题是构成知识空间的两个基本要素,深入研究两者之间的关系是知识状态刻画与知识结构分析的内在要求.在当前的知识空间理论研究中,没有明确建立技能与问题之间的双向映射,从而难以提出直观概念意义下的知识结构分析模型,也没有明确建立知识状态之间的偏序关系,不利于刻画知识状态之间的差异,更不利于规划学习者未来的学习路径.此外,现有的成果主要集中在经典的知识空间,没有考虑实际问题中数据的不确定性.为此,将形式概念分析与模糊集引入知识空间理论,建立面向知识结构分析的模糊概念格模型.具体地,分别建立知识空间与闭包空间的模糊概念格模型.首先,建立知识空间模糊概念格,并通过任意两个概念的上确界证明所有概念的外延构成知识空间.引入粒描述的思想定义技能诱导的问题原子粒,由问题原子粒的组合判定一个问题组合是否是知识空间中的一个状态,进而提出由问题组合获取知识空间模糊概念的方法.其次,建立闭包空间模糊概念格,并通过任意两个概念的下确界证明所有概念的外延构成闭包空间.类似地,定义问题诱导的技能原子粒,由技能原子粒的组合判定一个技能组合是否是闭包空间中某一知识状态所需的技能,进而提出由技能组合获取闭包空间模糊概念的方法.最后,通过实验分析问题数量、技能数量、填充因子以及分析尺度对知识空间与闭包空间规模的影响.结论表明知识空间模糊概念不同于现有的任何概念,也不能从其他概念派生而来.闭包空间模糊概念本质上是一种面向属性单边模糊概念.在二值技能形式背景中,知识空间与闭包空间中的状态具有一一对应关系,但这种关系在模糊技能形式背景中并不成立.

Concept-based approach for information retrieval

A concept-based approach is expected to resolve the word sense ambiguities in information retrieval and apply the semantic importance of the concepts, instead of the term frequency, to representing the contents of a document. Consequently, a formalized document framework is proposed. The document framework is used to express the meaning of a document with the concepts which are expressed by high semantic importance. The framework consists of two parts： the ＂domain＂ information and the ＂situation ＆ background＂ information of a document. A document-extracting algorithm and a two-stage smoothing method are also proposed. The quantification of the similarity between the query and the document framework depends on the smoothing method. The experiments on the TREC6 collection demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach in information retrieval tasks. The average recall level precision of the model using the proposed approach is about 10% higher than that of traditional ones.

知识、想象力与深度学习——与吉莉安·贾德森教授关于基兰·伊根的研究的对话

20世纪80、90年代以来,加拿大西蒙菲莎大学基兰•伊根教授带领团队开展了“富有想象力的教育”“深度学习研究项目”等研究,系统地探讨了课程知识、学习、理解、想象与想象力的本质,以及知识理解的本质与类型、知识与想象力的关系,开发了想象力培养的认知工具,提出了在学科教学中培育学生想象力的教学策略。在深度学习研究中,建立了深度学习的知识标准和教学基本准则。2006年以来,针对我国中小学课程实施中存在的问题,我们组建了深度教学研究团队。围绕教学价值观、课程知识观、教学过程观和学习活动观的转变,采取3K研究方式,探讨了指向核心素养的教与学的理念与策略,并开展了国际合作研究。围绕基兰•伊根教授关于知识、想象力与深度学习研究等方面的创新贡献,对话和访谈西蒙菲莎大学吉莉安•贾德森教授,以期为我国深化课程与教学改革,破解核心素养发展的难题提供借鉴。