Proteomic variation and diversity in clinical Streptococcus pneumoniae isolates from invasive and non-invasive sites

Mustapha Bittaye is a PhD student funded by the Medical Research Council Unit, The Gambia. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

MUSTAPHA, Jennie

Jennie E. Mustapha (Jennie Mustapha Tate) was an educator who spent most of her professional career as an assistant principal at Cardozo Senior High School in Washington, D.C. The collection comprises 2 linear feet and was donated by a niece, Mrs. Phyllis Stokes in 1992

Efficient gear fault feature selection based on moth‑flame optimisation in discrete wavelet packet analysis domain

Rotating machinery—a crucial component in modern industry, requires vigilant monitoring such that any potential malfunction of its electromechanical systems can be detected prior to a fatal breakdown. However, identifying faulty signals from a defective rotating machinery is challenging due to complex dynamical behaviour. Therefore, the search for features which best describe the characteristic of different fault conditions is often crucial for condition monitoring of rotating machinery. For this purpose, this study used the intensification and diversification properties of the recently proposed moth-flame optimisation (MFO) algorithm and utilised the algorithm in the proposed feature selection scheme. The proposed method consisted of three parts. First, the vibration signals of gear with different fault conditions were decomposed by a fourth-level discrete wavelet packet transform, and the statistical features at all constructed nodes were derived. Second, the MFO algorithm was utilised to select the optimal discriminative features. Lastly, the MFO-selected features were used as the input for a support vector machine (SVM) diagnostic model to identify fault patterns. To further demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, other feature selection approaches were applied, including randomly selected features and complete features, and other diagnostic models, namely the multilayer perceptron neural network and k-nearest neighbour. Comparative experiments demonstrated that SVM with the MFO-selected features outperformed the others, with the classification accuracy of 99.60%, thus validating its effectiveness

An hp-version discontinuous Galerkin method for integro-differential equations of parabolic type

We study the numerical solution of a class of parabolic integro-differential equations with weakly singular kernels. We use an $hp$-version discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for the discretization in time. We derive optimal $hp$-version error estimates and show that exponential rates of convergence can be achieved for solutions with singular (temporal) behavior near $t=0$ caused by the weakly singular kernel. Moreover, we prove that by using nonuniformly refined time steps, optimal algebraic convergence rates can be achieved for the $h$-version DG method. We then combine the DG time-stepping method with a standard finite element discretization in space, and present an optimal error analysis of the resulting fully discrete scheme. Our theoretical results are numerically validated in a series of test problems

Ethnic and religious tolerance: barrier factors and improvement measures based on Malay youth perspectives in Malaysia

Ethnic and religious unity is a thing that every country wishes for not exempting Malaysia. Tolerance among the population is very much expected to achieve this. Nevertheless, ethnic and religious diversity in Malaysia is often seen as a challenge for realizing tolerance and thus creating unity. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the barrier factors for ethnic and religious tolerance while at the same time identifying proposals for improvement measures to tolerance among the community. Hence, the Focus Group Discussion or FGD study design was used by involving 20 Malay youth informants as information providers. As a result of the analysis it can be concluded that there are six themes that exist as a barrier factor to ethnic and religious tolerance, namely (i) social gap; 38.06 percent, (ii) political debate; 16.42 percent, (iii) religious differences; 16.42 percent, (iv) economic inequality; 11.94 percent, (v) rights and constitution; 11.94 percent, and (vi) primordial sentiment; 5.22 percent. Meanwhile, in addressing the problem of ethnic and religious tolerance, the informants also proposed four perspectives on improvement measures i.e. (i) social empowerment; 71.19 percent, (ii) political role; 15.25 percent, (iii) the rule of law; 10.17 percent, and (iv) maintaining the image of Islam; 3.39 percent. The issues are important to be scrutinized because the practice of good ethnic and religious tolerance can unite the community, thereby driving the stability and progress of the country

Superconvergence of a discontinuous Galerkin method for fractional diffusion and wave equations

We consider an initial-boundary value problem for $\partial_tu-\partial_t^{-\alpha}\nabla^2u=f(t)$, that is, for a fractional diffusion ($-1<\alpha<0$) or wave ($0<\alpha<1$) equation. A numerical solution is found by applying a piecewise-linear, discontinuous Galerkin method in time combined with a piecewise-linear, conforming finite element method in space. The time mesh is graded appropriately near $t=0$, but the spatial mesh is quasiuniform. Previously, we proved that the error, measured in the spatial $L_2$-norm, is of order $k^{2+\alpha_-}+h^2\ell(k)$, uniformly in $t$, where $k$ is the maximum time step, $h$ is the maximum diameter of the spatial finite elements, $\alpha_-=\min(\alpha,0)\le0$ and $\ell(k)=\max(1,|\log k|)$. Here, we generalize a known result for the classical heat equation (i.e., the case $\alpha=0$) by showing that at each time level $t_n$ the solution is superconvergent with respect to $k$: the error is of order $(k^{3+2\alpha_-}+h^2)\ell(k)$. Moreover, a simple postprocessing step employing Lagrange interpolation yields a superconvergent approximation for any $t$. Numerical experiments indicate that our theoretical error bound is pessimistic if $\alpha<0$. Ignoring logarithmic factors, we observe that the error in the DG solution at $t=t_n$, and after postprocessing at all $t$, is of order $k^{3+\alpha_-}+h^2$.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figure