Search the digital library catalog

Abstract: While the problem of vaccine hesitancy is not new, it has become more pronounced with the new COVID-19 vaccines and represents an obstacle to resolving the crisis. Even people who would usually trust vaccines and experts now prefer to wait for more information. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted in Slovenia in December 2020 to find out the attitudes of the population regarding COVID-19 vaccination and the factors that affect these attitudes. Based on 12,042 fully completed questionnaires, we find that higher intention to get vaccinated is associated with men, older respondents, physicians and medical students, respondents who got the influenza vaccination, those who knew someone who had gotten hospitalised or died from COVID-19 and those who have more trust in experts, institutions and vaccines. Nurses and technicians were less likely to get vaccinated. In answers to an open question, sceptics were split into those doubting the quality due to the rapid development of the vaccine and those that reported personal experiences with side effects of prior vaccinations. Although the Slovenian population is diverse in its attitudes towards vaccination, the results are comparable to those found in other countries. However, there are potential limitations to the generalizability of the findings that should be addressed in future studies.
Keywords: cross-sectional studies, intention, public opinion, trust, ordinal regression, COVID-19, vaccination, surveys and questionnaires, Europe, immune system, SARS-CoV-2
Published in DKUM: 10.10.2024; Views: 0; Downloads: 7
Full text (2,15 MB)
This document has many files! More...

Abstract: This cross-sectional study was designed to analyse the differences between the subject-specific competences of Slovenian and Italian physical education (PE) teachers. The participants, 669 Slovenian and 484 Italian PE teachers, evaluated their professional competences with a self-administered questionnaire on a four-level Likert scale. A t-test for independent samples indicates differences in the self-evaluations of the majority of subject-specific competences between both groups. However, in almost all items, Slovenian PE teachers evaluate their competences higher. A multivariate analysis of variance, used to identify the role of some socio-demographic factors (state, gender, years of service), shows that the state has the highest impact on the differences between self-efficiency of both groups (p<0.001, Eta2=0.531). The greatest differences (Cohen's d > 0.8) are observed on those competences that relate to some of the narrower aspects of PE didactics. The reasons for the perceived differences can be found in some historical and social events, length of education, the different orientation of PE teacher education programmes, and the different responses of both countries to educational policies. The present study outcomes may aid in updating initial PE teacher training and designing a creative system of continuous professional development.
Keywords: physical education, educators, self-efficiency, cross-cultural study
Published in DKUM: 04.09.2024; Views: 41; Downloads: 4
Full text (173,36 KB)
This document has many files! More...

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the introduction of unprecedented safety measures, one of them being physical distancing recommendations. Here, we assessed whether the pandemic has led to long-term effects on two important physical distancing aspects, namely interpersonal distance preferences and interpersonal touch behaviors. We analyzed nearly 14,000 individual cases from two large, cross-cultural surveys – the first conducted 2 years prior to the pandemic and the second during a relatively stable period of a decreased infection rate in May-June 2021. Preferred interpersonal distances increased by 54% globally during the COVID-19 pandemic. This increase was observable across all types of relationships, all countries, and was more pronounced in individuals with higher self-reported vulnerability to diseases. Unexpectedly, participants reported a higher incidence of interpersonal touch behaviors during than before the pandemic. We discuss our results in the context of prosocial and self-protection motivations that potentially promote different social behaviors.
Keywords: neverbalna komunikacija, preference glede medosebne razdalje, medosebni dotiki, pandemija, kovid, COVID-19, fizična distanca, medkulturna psihologija, coronavirus, nonverbal communication, interpersonal distance preferences, interpersonal touch behaviour, cross-cultural psychology, physical distancing
Published in DKUM: 02.08.2024; Views: 89; Downloads: 5
Link to full text

Abstract: An optimization model for reinforced concrete circular columns based on the Eurocodes is presented. With the developed optimization model, which takes into account the exact distribution of the steel reinforcement, which is not the case when designing with conventional column design charts, an optimal design for the reinforced concrete cross section is determined. The optimization model uses discrete variables, which makes the results more suitable for actual construction practice and fully exploits the structural capacity of the structure. A parametric study of the applied axial load and bending moment was performed for material cost and CO2 emissions. The results based on a single objective function show that the optimal design of the reinforced concrete column cross section obtained for the material cost objective function contains a larger cross-sectional area of concrete and a smaller area of steel compared with the optimization results when CO2 emissions are determined as the objective function. However, the optimal solution in the case where the material cost was assigned as the objective function has much more reserve in axial load capacity than in the optimal design where CO2 was chosen as the objective function. In addition, the multi-objective optimization was performed to find a set of solutions that provide the best trade-offs between the material cost and CO2 emission objectives.
Keywords: reinforced concrete columns, circular cross section, costs, CO2 emissions, multi-objective optimization, genetic algorithm
Published in DKUM: 15.04.2024; Views: 338; Downloads: 207
Full text (4,56 MB)
This document has many files! More...

Abstract: This paper presents the design of a high-voltage pulse-based radar and a supervised data processing method for soil moisture estimation. The goal of this research was to design a pulse-based radar to detect changes in soil moisture using a cross-hole approach. The pulse-based radar with three transmitting antennas was placed into a 12 m deep hole, and a receiver with three receive antennas was placed into a different hole separated by 100 m from the transmitter. The pulse generator was based on a Marx generator with an LC filter, and for the receiver, the high-frequency data acquisition card was used, which can acquire signals using 3 Gigabytes per second. Used borehole antennas were designed to operate in the wide frequency band to ensure signal propagation through the soil. A deep regression convolutional network is proposed in this paper to estimate volumetric soil moisture using time-sampled signals. A regression convolutional network is extended to three dimensions to model changes in wave propagation between the transmitted and received signals. The training dataset was acquired during the period of 73 days of acquisition between two boreholes separated by 100 m. The soil moisture measurements were acquired at three points 25 m apart to provide ground truth data. Additionally, water was poured into several specially prepared boreholes between transmitter and receiver antennas to acquire additional dataset for training, validation, and testing of convolutional neural networks. Experimental results showed that the proposed system is able to detect changes in the volumetric soil moisture using Tx and Rx antennas.
Keywords: ground penetrating radar, cross-hole, L-band, deep learning, convolutional neural network, soil moisture estimation
Published in DKUM: 03.04.2024; Views: 448; Downloads: 23
Full text (3,22 MB)
This document has many files! More...