The interval type-2 fuzzy possibilistic C-means clustering (IT2FPCM) algorithm improves the performance of the fuzzy possibilistic C-means clustering (FPCM) algorithm by addressing high degrees of noise and uncertainty. However, the IT2FPCM algorithm continues to face drawbacks including sensitivity to cluster centroid initialization, slow processing speed, and the possibility of being easily trapped in local optima. To overcome these drawbacks and better address noise and uncertainty, we propose an IT2FPCM method based on granular gravitational forces and particle swarm optimization (PSO). This method is based on the idea of gravitational forces grouping the data points into granules and then processing clusters on a granular space using a hybrid algorithm of the IT2FPCM and PSO algorithms. The proposed method also determines the initial centroids by merging granules until the number of granules is equal to the number of clusters. By reducing the elements in the granular space, the proposed algorithms also significantly improve performance when clustering large datasets. Experimental results are reported on different datasets compared with other approaches to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.

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Objective: To provide an overview of the key concepts, and issues of definition and measurement in health literacy, before considering approaches to improving health literacy in populations, and the implications for policy and practice.

Contents: Health literacy describes the possession of literacy skills that are required to make health-related decisions in a variety of different environments (home, community, health clinic). These skills vary from individual to individual, and poor health literacy has been consistently associated with adverse health outcomes. Health literacy can be improved through effective communication and education, and is moderated by the environment in which communication occurs. In clinical settings, research has consistently shown that low health literacy can be successfully identified, and can be improved through effective patient education to deliver better health outcomes. In the wider community, improving health literacy requires more than the transmission of new information, it also involves the development of empowering personal skills that enable participation in a range of actions that can protect and improve health. New communication technologies provide both challenges and opportunities for health education.

Conclusion: More personalised forms of communication, and active educational outreach will best support the goal of promoting greater independence in health decision-making. This requires more sophisticated understanding of the potential of education to strengthen both personal and community action to improve health. The use of relevant theories and models can provide important guidance on content, sequencing and delivery of health and patient education programs.

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This study aimed to determine the cardiac and autonomic nervous effects of deoxynivalenol (), a representative mycotoxin which frequently contaminates cereal grains, in conscious rats that had been implanted with telemetric transmitters. Four groups of rats given subcutaneous injections of 0.5, 1.0, or 2.0 mg/kg of or propylene glycol (vehicle solution) were used in the experiments. Telemetric electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings were performed for 2 weeks or longer during the pre- and post- injection period. The present study demonstrated that caused marked arrhythmias, such as second-degree atrioventricular block, atrial bradycardia, supraventricular extrasystole, and ventricular extrasystole, at 3 hr or later (mostly at 10-20 hr) after the -injection, which were accompanied by a significant increase in heart rate (HR) and a significant decrease in total power and low- and high-frequency power during the period from 90 to 180 min after the injection. In conclusion, it was elucidated that produces significant cardiac dysfunction and transient inhibition of the autonomic nervous function in conscious rats at a dose of 0.5 mg/kg s.c. or more.

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Research on understanding of science of adults reveals that females are less knowledgeable about organized science-especially physical science-than males. This study examines the effect of "I know" responses given to a series of true and false science knowledge questions in an adult survey on public attitude toward and knowledge about science and technology. The independent variables to be explored include respondents' age, exposure to science and mathematics education, gender, and attentiveness for science and technology issues. In addition, responses to scientific attitude will be examined to create a measure of the strength of the respondents' opinions about controversial issues in science. The model showed that age and attentiveness to science and technology also contribute to an understanding of the "I know" response to science knowledge questions. However, it is clear that other factors need to be considered to explore a more complete understanding of the "I know" response in this context.

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 Objective This paper provides an overview of current research and debate about the definition and measurement of health literacy, and the use of different health education methods to improve health literacy in populations.
 Definition and measurement Health literacy describes a person’s ability to perform knowledge-based literacy tasks (understanding and using information) that are required to make health related decisions in a variety of different situations. These cognitive and social skills are content and context specific, and are greatly influenced by a person’s age and stage in life. In these circumstances, developing a “universal” population measure of health literacy has been very difficult.
 Improving health literacy Health literacy can be improved through education and can be regarded as a measurable outcome to health education. As with all forms of education, significant differences in educational methods, media and content will result in different learning outcomes. Improving health literacy involves both the transmission of health information, and support to develop confidence to act on that knowledge. This will best be achieved through more personal forms of communication, and through community based educational outreach.
 Conclusions Applying the concept of health literacy in this way will support more comprehensive options for health improvement, disease prevention and more successful disease self-management among individuals with established illness. However, these approaches are less well tested through systematic research than work in clinical settings and further research is needed to develop the empirical basis for the concept.

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It is well known in clinical practice…both medical and psychiatric…that certain patients evoke negative attitudes and affects, including rage and hate, in their physicians. Such responses lead to discordant and/or dysfunctional relationships which, it is observed, affect clinical course and outcome. Patients who arouse negative feelings in physicians may include individuals with particular physical diseases such as bronchial asthma, cancer, alcoholism, labile hypertension, obesity, and so on. More commonly, patients with obnoxious personality traits or troublesome illness behabior are labelled "problem patients, " "difficult patients, " "help-rejecting complainers, " "malingerers, " "hypochondriacs, " "illness addicts, " "hateful patients, " and so on, with each culture establishing its own list of pejorative terms. Such reactions often interfere with the physician's ability to adequately assess and, if indicated, to treat patients appropriately. Patients hastily labelled "hypochondriacs" or "factitious illness" are particularly at risk to have treatable pathology overlooked orprematurely dismissed. The field of psychosomatic medicine has recognized, through clinical and research data, both human and animal, that social interaction, communication, and object relationships have significant effects upon physiologic, psychologic, endocrinologic, neurologic, hematologic, and immunologic mechanisms in the disease process. Much is also known about the placebo response and its power to effect physical and emotional change. It remains for psychosomatic research to elucidate the psychophysiology of physician-patient relationships with their transference and countertransference which can help to explain how negative repressed attitudes and affects in the physician can adversely influence the patient's health and disease. This presentation will review this problem, summarize pertinent literature, and suggest potential avenues of exploration.

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Ultrastructural changes during the fusion of the protoplasts isolated from wild viola callus(without chloroplasts)and pansy mesophyll cells(with chloroplasts)were examined by scanning electron microscopy(SEM)and transmission electron microscopy(TEM). The presence of pansy protoplasts in the fusion products was proved by the presence of chloroplasts lying beneath the plasma membrane identified by SEM. Involvement of pansy chloroplasts in the fusion products was confirmed by TEM. Thus it was possible to distinguish between viola protoplasts and pansy protoplasts by SEM. During the process of protoplast fusion, adhesion of two protoplasts, the rupture and recovery of the membrane between them, and a single-paired spherical fusion body were clearly observed by SEM using our preparation method. Fused protoplasts divided and a microcolony was produced.

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This paper presents the design of an ad hoc two-way two-hop relay network using physical-layer network coding (PNC) in which multiple antennas are used at all nodes. In the considered network, the Alamouti's space-time block code (STBC) is used for transmission while linear detection is used for signal recovery. In order to facilitate linear estimation, we develop an equivalent multiuser STBC model for the proposed network and design the sum-and-difference matrix which allows convenient combination of the transmitted symbols from the end nodes. In addition, a simple relay selection method based on minimum mean square error (MSE) is proposed for performance improvement. Simulation results show that the proposed network achieves diversity order 2 while requiring only polynomial complexity. Moreover, it is possible to achieve significant bit error rate (BER) performance improvement when the proposed relay selection algorithm is used.

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Energy and environmental issues have become pertinent to all industries in the globe because of sustainable development issues. This paper systematically investigates the turning process of the hardened material via process modeling, numerical experiments, and a hybrid algorithm. The objectives of this work are to reduce the specific cutting energy (SCE) and improve the energy efficiency (EF) based on the turning conditions optimization. The machining simulations were performed in conjunction response surface methodology (RSM) to generate the quadratic mathematical models of the specific cutting energy and energy efficiency in terms of machining parameters, including cutting speed, feed rate, nose radius, edge radius, and rake angle. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was then adopted to examine the model adequacy and significant parameters. Subsequently, an evolutionary algorithm, namely non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) was used to find a much better spread of design solutions and better convergence near the true Pareto optimal front. A quantitative approach, namely entropy method was conducted to calculate the weight factors of multiple responses. In the last step, a TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) was applied as to determine the best compromise solution. It was indicated that the energy efficiency was significantly improved using the optimal machining parameters and the specific cutting energy was effectively decreased in comparison with initial values. Moreover, the integrative approach performed very well in optimum performance of the machining process. Therefore, this work is expected as a contribution to improve the machining efficiency of the turning process of hardened steels.

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Based on the cytological and molecular studies, types and frequency of chromosomal aberrations during meiotic division of wheat plants treated with different concentrations of deoxynivalenol () were investigated. The common types of abnormalities that have been recorded were stickiness, outside, laggards, bridges, fragments, unequal division, as well as multipolar and micro- nucleated cells. Regarding the first meiotic division, the percentage of abnormal cells detected from untreated plants was 2.12% however, plants treated with 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25μg/ml revealed 3.73, 6.62, 6.78, 9.23 and 8.18% of abnormalities, respectively. In the second meiotic division, control plants exhibit 2.69% of abnormalities while, 2.29, 4.34, 4.23, 5.59, 4.46% of abnormal cells were detected from plants treated with 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25μg/ml , respectively. These results demonstrate the significant effect of treatment with on the total percentage of irregularities during meiosis. DNA amplification patterns of wheat plants treated with using two RAPD primers revealed some variations in the DNA profiles within the examined samples as compared with the control. Such variations include band intensity and appearance of novel bands or disappearance of others. The polymorphism of the detected DNA fragments particularly the absence of a number of fragments in some plants treated with different concentrations of suggested that contaminated wheat grains with this toxin or mycotoxigenic fungi might induce DNA rearrangements, deletions and/or changes in the DNA sequence that lead to the observed changes.

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Very low magnetic susceptibility of the air causes local distortion of magnetic gradient and results in spatial mismapping and signal change, chemical shift artifacts are produced in the frequency-encoding axis by lipid molecules because of difference of resonance frequencies of contained protons with those of protons in water. A test tube phantom study was performed in 2.0 T and 0.5 T superconducting magnetic resonance imaging systems for the investigation of natures of susceptibility and chemical shift artifacts encountered in high and medium field strength and in various imaging sequences. Both artifacts were prominent in high field MR and showed characteristic appearances. Several signal voids were noted around the air-colums in gradients echo images and MRI at 0.5 T showed more severe artifacts in T2-weighted image than those in the other sequences. Familiarity with causes, appearances and mechanisms of various artifacts helps Radiotechnologist for interpretation of MRI.

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We describe a patient with painful neuropathy associated with an abnormal anti-MAG titer in which predominant involvement of intra-epidermal nerve fiber was documented. Electrophysiological studies revealed low-borderline amplitude of sensory and compound motor action potentials registering from lower limbs and normal conduction velocity. Sural nerve biopsy disclosed only a slight loss of myelinated fiber. Skin biopsy performed at the proximal thigh and at the distal leg was consistent with a non-length-dependent small fiber neuropathy. It is likely that in this case anti-MAG antibodies played a role in the pathogenesis of small fiber neuropathy.

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