Background: There exist few recovery and occupation-based interventions for mental health service users. Balancing Everyday Life (BEL) is a new occupation-based lifestyle intervention that was created to fill this need. Aim: To gain group leaders’ and participants’ perspectives of the BEL intervention content and format, including factors that helped, hindered, and could be improved. Methods: A co

Quantitative evaluations are valuable in the strive for improvements and asserting quality. However, the field of Command & Control (C2) evaluations are hard to navigate, and it is difficult to find the correct measurement for a specific situation. A comprehensive Scoping Study was made concerning measurements of C2 performance and effectiveness. A lack of an existing appropriate framework for

Poverty has a long history in Africa. Yet, the most conventional and influential history of African poverty is a very short one. As told by the World Bank, the history of poverty starts in the 1980s with the first Living Standard Measurement Study. This history of poverty by numbers is also a very narrow one. There is a disconnect between the theoretical and historical underpinnings of how academi

This study explores the effects of crescent ribs mounted in an internal cooling channel on the external adiabatic film cooling performance to evaluate the advantage of crescent ribs in gas turbine blade cooling. Three ribs including a transverse rib, a crescent rib concave to the stream-wise direction, and a crescent rib convex to the stream-wise direction are considered. For a fixed mainstream fl

A first lesson in physical chemistry invariably starts with an example of water existing in three states, or phases - gaseous (water vapour), liquid (water from the tap) and solid (ice cubes). Such phase transitions are easily observed, but their underlying cause is not so evident. Atoms and molecules are difficult to follow due to their minute size and rapid movements. So, in order to investigateThe effect of microscopic colloid interactions on the resultant macroscopic phase behaviour is a frequently studied topic in soft matter resarch, and lies at the heart of this thesis. Key structural and dynamic properties of colloidal model systems across liquid-solid transitions are tracked using optical imaging techniques. The first studied system comprises of thermosensitive microgels. These ar

Lipids are organic molecules vital for living organisms. They are part of cell membranes and provide an important energy reserve once they are digested by our body. They are most commonly known as fats and oils. Some important so-called polar lipids are amphiphilic molecules, which means they have a head group that is water ‘loving’ (hydrophilic) and a hydrocarbon tail is water ‘hating’ (hydrophobNonlamellar lipid liquid crystalline phases have many potential applications, such as for drug delivery, protein encapsulation or crystallization. Lipid liquid crystalline sponge phase (L3) has so far not been very much considered in these applications, in spite of apparent advantages in terms of its flexibility and capacity of forming large aqueous pores able to encapsulate large bioactive molecu

This article looks at the politics of shame in relation to the suppressed protests of December 2010 that challenged the re-election of Aliaksandr Lukashenka as president of Belarus (1994–present). My empirical data consist of independent media publications, blog posts, and interviews that speak of “shame” as an emotional response to the protest, its aftermath, and its general context. The article

The genetic architecture of common traits, including the number, frequency, and effect sizes of inherited variants that contribute to individual risk, has been long debated. Genome-wide association studies have identified scores of common variants associated with type 2 diabetes, but in aggregate, these explain only a fraction of the heritability of this disease. Here, to test the hypothesis that

Regression testing is a means to assure that a change in the software, or its execution environment, does not introduce new defects. It involves the expensive undertaking of rerunning test cases. Several techniques have been proposed to reduce the number of test cases to execute in regression testing, however, there is no research on how to assess industrial relevance and applicability of such tec

Poly(propylene imine) dendrimers have been shown to be promising 3-dimensional polymers for the use in the pharmaceutical and biomedical applications. Our aims of this study were first, to synthesize a novel type of dendrimer with poly(propylene imine) core and maltose-histidine shell (G4HisMal) assessing if maltose-histidine shell can improve the biocompatibility and the ability to cross the bloo

Aim: Abnormalities of one pelvic floor compartment are usually associated with anomalies in the other compartments. Therapies which specifically address one clinical problem may potentially adversely affect other pelvic floor activities. A new comprehensive holistic scoring system defining global pelvic function is presented. Method: A novel scoring system with a software program is presented expr

The aim of this study was to determine impact of lymph vascular space involvement (LVSI) on recurrence and survival in early stage of endometrial cancer. From 1991 through 2010, all endometrial cancer patients at University Hospital of Bari, Italy were identified. The Log-rank test and Kaplan-Meyer methods were used for time-to-event analysis to evaluate the effects of on lymph vascular space invo

Objective: To objectively assess anorectal dysfunction following nerve-sparing radical hysterectomy in stage I-II cervical carcinoma patients. Material and Methods: Between 2008 and 2012, 21 patients with primary cervical cancer stage FIGO I-II were enrolled in this prospective study. All women underwent nerve-sparing radical hysterectomy. Anorectal manometry was performed preoperatively and 6 mon

The study and development of a decision support system for doctors and students is presented, aiming to ease the diagnosis of the cervix cancer through an automated smart system: using a web application, a medical expert can upload colposcopic images feeding an expert system that carries out a deep analysis by a processing system on images uploaded by doctors; results coming out of the processing