The Status of Digital Dental Technology Implementation in the Saudi Dental Schools' Curriculum: A National Cross-Sectional Survey for Healthcare Digitization.

Objective: The primary objective of this cross-sectional national study was to investigate the status of digital dental technology (DDT) adoption in Saudi Arabian undergraduate dental education. A secondary objective was to explore the impact of dental schools' funding sources to incorporate digital technologies. Methods: A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to the chairpersons of prosthetic sciences departments of the 27 dental schools in Saudi Arabia. If any department chairman failed to respond to the survey, a designated full-time faculty member was contacted to fill out the form. The participants were asked about the school's sector, DDT implementation in the curriculum, implemented level, their perceptions of the facilitators and challenges for incorporating DDT. Results: Of the 27 dental schools (18 public and 8 private), 26 responded to the questionnaire (response rate: 96.3%). The geographic distribution of the respondent schools was as follows: 12 schools in the central region, 6 in the western region, and 8 in other regions. Seventeen schools secure and preserve patients' records using electronic software, whereas nine schools use paper charts. Seventeen schools (64,4%) implemented DDT in their curricula. The schools that did not incorporate DDT into their undergraduate curricula were due to not being included in the curriculum (78%), lack of expertise (66%), untrained faculty and staff (44%), and cost (33%). Conclusions: This national study showed that digital components still need to be integrated into Saudi Arabian dental schools' curricula and patient care treatment. Additionally, there was no association between funding sources and the DDT implementation into the current curricula. Consequently, Saudi dental schools must emphasize the implementation and utilization of DDT to align with Saudi Vision 2030 for healthcare digitization and to graduate competent dentists in digital dental care

Digital Innovation in Schools:Using tenets of social constructivism through a design thinking approach to engage learners in digital computing and the development of meta-competencies in a Scottish secondary school

As the world undergoes significant digital technological advancements, many believe that traditional education systems are not providing the essential competencies learners require for the future (Istance & Kools, 2013; Joynes et al., 2019). With an ever-increasing critical digital skills gap (Meechan, 2021; S. Wright, 2018), today's learners must be encouraged to develop their digital prowess (Skills Development Scotland, 2018; S. Wright, 2018) and develop the meta-competencies required for the world they are to inhabit (Beetham & Sharpe, 2013; The Scottish Government, 2020; Trilling & Fadel, 2009). Many feel compulsory education fails to provide learners with the requisite digital computing competencies (Istance & Kools, 2013; Joynes et al., 2019). Therefore, more engaging and effective alternatives to our current curriculum content delivery and high-stake examinations must be examined. This proposal and research study examine an alternative method of developing digital computing competencies by employing a social constructivist (SC) approach using a design thinking (DT) model, also purported to develop the much-needed meta-competencies (MC) learners need in the future (Fairburn, 2010; Goldman & Kabayadondo, 2016; Koh et al., 2015). Internationally renowned universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, and Berkeley use DT to develop MC; however, there is little research into DT studios in a compulsory educational setting (Carroll, 2015). This opportunistic, single-case study details a school's journey to develop outcomes from a digitally focused design thinking studio integrated into its curriculum, examining the perceptions and experiences of outcomes from learners and educators immersed in a two-week digital DT studio. This study should be of interest to educators, policymakers, and parents

Systematic Methodology for Exploration of Performance – Energy Trade-offs in Network Applications Using Dynamic Data Type Refinement

Modern network applications require high performance and consume a lot of energy. Their inherent dynamic nature makes the dynamic memory subsystem a critical contributing factor to the overall energy consumption and to the execution time performance. This paper presents a novel, systematic methodology for generating performance-energy trade-offs by implementing optimal Dynamic Data Types, finely tuned and refined for network applications. Our systematic methodology is supported by a new, fully automated tool. We assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach in four representative, real-life case studies and provide significant energy savings and performance improvements compared to the original implementations

The use and fate of pesticides in vegetable-based agroecosystems in Ghana

The use of a wide range of chemicals to destroy pests and weeds is an important aspect of agricultural practice in Ghana, contributing to increased crop yield and reduced post-harvest losses. Notwithstanding the beneficial effects of pesticides, their adverse effects on environmental quality and human health constitute a major issue that gives rise to concerns at local, regional and national scales. The situation is particularly worrying in view of the lack of reliable data on the long-term consequences of exposure to pesticides. Ntow’s thesis reports on current knowledge on pesticides use in vegetable farming in Ghana and establishes the fate of pesticides in situ in tropical vegetable-based agroecosystems, as well as their environmental and public health impacts on selected population groups. Thus, water, waterbed sediment and vegetable crops (viz. tomato, cabbage, pepper, onion and eggplant) were checked for residues of the pesticides monitored on the farmers’ fields. Data on persistent pesticide residues in farmers’ breast milk and blood serum indicated the presence of DDTs, dieldrin, HCB, and HCHs; this especially raises concerns for children’s health. The thesis concludes that successful actions to reduce negative impacts of pesticides require sustained, low cost, and well-targeted training interventions

Programming Models\u27 Support for Heterogeneous Architecture

Accelerator-enhanced computing platforms have drawn a lot of attention due to their massive peak computational capacity. Heterogeneous systems equipped with accelerators such as GPUs have become the most prominent components of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Even at the node level the significant heterogeneity of CPU and GPU, i.e. hardware and memory space differences, leads to challenges for fully exploiting such complex architectures. Extending outside the node scope, only escalate such challenges. Conventional programming models such as data- ow and message passing have been widely adopted in HPC communities. When moving towards heterogeneous systems, the lack of GPU integration causes such programming models to struggle in handling the heterogeneity of different computing units, leading to sub-optimal performance and drastic decrease in developer productivity. To bridge the gap between underlying heterogeneous architectures and current programming paradigms, we propose to extend such programming paradigms with architecture awareness optimization. Two programming models are used to demonstrate the impact of heterogeneous architecture awareness. The PaRSEC task-based runtime, an adopter of the data- ow model, provides opportunities for overlapping communications with computations and minimizing data movements, as well as dynamically adapting the work granularity to the capability of the hardware. To fulfill the demand of an efficient and portable Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation to communicate GPU data, a GPU-aware design is presented based on the Open MPI infrastructure supporting efficient point-to-point and collective communications of GPU-residential data, for both contiguous and non-contiguous memory layouts, by leveraging GPU network topology and hardware capabilities such as GPUDirect. The tight integration of GPU support in a widely used programming environment, free the developers from manually move data into/out of host memory before/after relying on MPI routines for communications, allowing them to focus instead on algorithmic optimizations. Experimental results have confirmed that supported by such a tight and transparent integration, conventional programming models can once again take advantage of the state-of-the-art hardware and exhibit performance at the levels expected by the underlying hardware capabilities

Barriers to the digitalisation and innovation of Australian Smart Real Estate: A managerial perspective on the technology non-adoption

The real estate sector brings a fortune to the global economy. But, presently, this sector is regressive and uses traditional methods and approaches. Therefore, it needs a technological transformation and innovation in line with the Industry 4.0 requirements to transform into smart real estate. However, it faces the barriers of disruptive digital technology (DDT) adoption and innovation that need effective management to enable such transformation. These barriers present managerial challenges that affect DDT adoption and innovation in smart real estate. The current study assesses these DDTs adoption and innovation barriers facing the Australian real estate sector from a managerial perspective. Based on a comprehensive review of 72 systematically retrieved and shortlisted articles, we identify 21 key barriers to digitalisation and innovation. The barriers are grouped into the technology-organisation-external environment (TOE) categories using a Fault tree. Data is collected from 102 real estate and property managers to rate and rank the identified barriers. The results show that most of the respondents are aware of the DDTs and reported AI (22.5% of respondents), big data (12.75%) and VR (12.75%) as the most critical technologies not adopted so far due to costs, organisation policies, awareness, reluctance, user demand, tech integration, government support and funding. Overall, the highest barrier (risk) scores are observed for high costs of software and hardware (T1), high complexity of the selected technology dissemination system (T2) and lack of government incentives, R&D support, policies, regulations and standards (E1). Among the TOE categories, as evident from the fault tree analysis, the highest percentage of failure to adopt the DDT is attributed to E1 in the environmental group. For the technological group, the highest failure reason is attributed to T2. And for the organisational group, the barrier with the highest failure chances for DDT adoption is the lack of organisational willingness to invest in digital marketing (O4). These barriers must be addressed to pave the way for DDT adoption and innovation in the Australian real estate sector and move towards smart real estate