Motives of excessive Internet use and its impact on the academic performance of business students in Pakistan

Aim: Nonavailability of Internet is thought to be a nightmare in this technology fluxed world. The current investigation highlights the effect of excessive Internet usage motives and the effect of this excessive Internet usage on the academic performance of students undergoing business education.

Methods: A sample of 350 business students provided evidence in extracting meaningful results. Quantitative, explanatory, cross-sectional design is used for conducting this study.

Originality: Little research has been conducted using the “Uses and Gratification” theory for selecting motives of excessive Internet use in Pakistan along with application of SEM by examining a range of factors responsible for excessive internet usage that seems a unique effort for the sample selected from Pakistan.

Findings: The results support the view that entertainment, social interaction, information seeking and economic motives play significant role in excessive Internet usage and finally excessive Internet usage negatively impact the academic performance of students.     

A Structural Equation Modeling Approach for the Adoption of Cloud Computing to Enhance the Malaysian Healthcare Sector

Ontology engineering covers issues related to ontology development and use. In Case Based Reasoning (CBR) system, ontology plays two main roles; the first as case base and the second as domain ontology. However, the ontology engineering literature does not provide adequate guidance on how to build, evaluate, and maintain ontologies. This paper proposes an ontology engineering methodology to generate case bases in the medical domain. It mainly focuses on the research of case representation in the form of ontology to support the case semantic retrieval and enhance all knowledge intensive CBR processes. A case study on diabetes diagnosis case base will be provided to evaluate the proposed methodology.     

External Factors in Hospital Information System (HIS) Adoption Model: A Case on Malaysia

Studies related to healthcare ICT integration in Malaysia are relatively little, thus this paper provide a literature review of the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the healthcare sector in Malaysia through the hospital information system (HIS). Our study emphasized on secondary data to investigate the factors related to ICT integration in healthcare through HIS. Therefore this paper aimed to gather an in depth understanding of issues related to HIS adoption, and contributing in fostering HIS adoption in Malaysia and other countries. This paper provides a direction for future research to study the correlation of factors affecting HIS adoption. Finally a research model is proposed using current adoption theories and external factors from human, technology, and organization perspectives.     

Molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis in Malaysia

Molecular typing with IS6110 was applied to Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from all parts of Malaysia. The degree of clustering increased with patient age, suggesting that reactivation may contribute to clustering. Identical banding patterns were also obtained for isolates from widely separate regions. Therefore, the use of clustering as a measure of recent transmission must be treated with caution. Strains related to the Beijing family were common in Peninsular Malaysia but were less common in Sabah and Sarawak, while a distinct group of strains comprised nearly 40% of isolates from East Malaysia but such strains were rare in Peninsular Malaysia. Single-copy strains, common in South and Southeastern Asia, constituted nearly 20% of isolates from the peninsula but were virtually absent in East Malaysia. The marked geographical difference in the prevailing strains indicates not only a restricted dissemination of M. tuberculosis but also a considerable degree of stability in the banding patterns.     

Interleukin-1 or tumor necrosis factor-alpha augmented the cytotoxic effect of mycobacteria on human fibroblasts: application to evaluation of pathogenesis of clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and M. avium complex.

Mycobacteria-induced in vitro events reflecting human tuberculosis can contribute to the evaluation of the pathogenesis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB). In this study, we propose such an in vitro method based on live mycobacteria-induced cytotoxicity to human cell lines. When human lung-derived normal fibroblast cell line MRC-5 was infected with various strains of mycobacteria (M. tuberculosis H(37)Rv and H(37) Ra, Mycobacterium avium 427S and 2151SmO, and Mycobacterium bovis BCG Pasteur and Tokyo), the fibroblasts were killed by mycobacteria according to the degree of virulence. Other human originated macrophage (U-937, THP-1), myeloid (HL-60), and epithelial carcinoma (A549) cell lines exhibited a similar cytotoxic response to virulent mycobacteria. MRC-5 was most susceptible to virulent mycobacteria among various human cell lines examined. The cytotoxicity was enhanced by the proinflammatory cytokines, interleukin-1 (IL-1) and tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-alpha), which in the absence of mycobacteria stimulate the growth of normal human fibroblasts. This in vitro evaluation system was applied to clinical isolates of drug-sensitive MTB (DS-MTB), drug-resistant MTB (DR-MTB) including multidrug-resistant (MDR-MTB), and M. avium complex (MAC). MTB strains (n = 24) exhibited strong cytotoxic activity, but MAC strains (n = 5) had only weak activity. Furthermore, there was no significant difference in cytotoxicity between DS-MTB (n = 11) and DR-MTB (n = 13). Collectively, these results suggest that this new in vitro system is useful for evaluating the pathogenesis of mycobacteria and that there was no difference in the pathogenesis between drug-susceptible and drug-resistant clinical isolates.     

Patients’ perception of the information security management in health centers: the role of organizational and human factors

Background

Researchers paid little attention to understanding the association of organizational and human factors with patients’ perceived security in the context of health organizations. This study aims to address numerous gaps in this context. Patients’ perceptions about employees’ training on security issues, monitoring on security issues, ethics, physical & technical protection and trust in hospitals were identified as organizational and human factors.

Methods

After the development of 12 hypotheses, a quantitative, cross-sectional, self-administered survey method was applied to collect data in 9 hospitals in Iran. After the collection of 382 usable questionnaires, the partial least square structural modeling was applied to examine the hypotheses and it was found that 11 hypotheses were empirically supported.

Results

The results suggest that patients’ trust in hospitals can significantly predict their perceived security but no significant associations were found between patients’ physical protection mechanisms in the hospital and their perceived information security in a hospital. We also found that patients’ perceptions about the physical protection mechanism of a hospital can significantly predict their trust in hospitals which is a novel finding by this research.

Conclusions

The findings imply that hospitals should formulate policies to improve patients’ perception about such factors, which ultimately lead to their perceived security.

     

Motives of excessive Internet use and its impact on the academic performance of business students in Pakistan

Aim: Nonavailability of Internet is thought to be a nightmare in this technology-fluxed world. The current investigation aims at examining the excessive Internet usage motives and the effect of this excessive Internet usage on the academic performance of students seeking business education.

Methods: A sample of 350 business students considered for the study resulted in providing meaningful results. A quantitative, explanatory, cross-sectional design is used for conducting this study.

Originality: Use of “uses and gratification” theory for selecting the motives of excessive Internet use in Pakistan along with the application of Structural equation modeling seems a unique effort for the sample selected from Pakistan.

Findings: The results support the view that entertainment, social interaction, information seeking, and economic motives play a significant role in excessive Internet usage, and finally excessive Internet usage has a negative effect on the academic performance of students.