Development of a Global WebBased Industrial Process Control Laboratory for Undergraduate and Graduate Engineering Technology Education

Abstract Web technology provides powerful, online, educational tools for teaching and demonstration of automated processes. This paper describes a fundamental global initiative to establish laboratory cooperation based upon integrated web-based process control for engineering technology education. This initiative is a collaboration between Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, USA and AlBalqa' Applied University in Amman, Jordan. This treatment outlines the motivation and the need for this initiative and the approaches taken to develop the process. A case study of multi-variable coupled tanks level control process is proposed and the application of networking and control methods to allow remotely situated students from both universities to control and monitor the process parameters is described. Future steps are also discussed with the motivation of using this technology in real industrial applications for better industrial engagement with engineering education and to facilitate the sharing of expensive and inaccessible instruments and equipment, which is an essential step in remote distance engineering study

Wellness and coping of physicians who worked in ICUs during the pandemic: A multicenter cross-sectional North American survey

OBJECTIVES: Few surveys have focused on physician moral distress, burnout, and professional fulfilment. We assessed physician wellness and coping during the COVID-19 pandemic. DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey using four validated instruments. SETTING: Sixty-two sites in Canada and the United States. SUBJECTS: Attending physicians (adult, pediatric; intensivist, nonintensivist) who worked in North American ICUs. INTERVENTION: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: We analysed 431 questionnaires (43.3% response rate) from 25 states and eight provinces. Respondents were predominantly male (229 [55.6%]) and in practice for 11.8 ± 9.8 years. Compared with prepandemic, respondents reported significant intrapandemic increases in days worked/mo, ICU bed occupancy, and self-reported moral distress (240 [56.9%]) and burnout (259 [63.8%]). Of the 10 top-ranked items that incited moral distress, most pertained to regulatory/organizational ( n = 6) or local/institutional ( n = 2) issues or both ( n = 2). Average moral distress (95.6 ± 66.9), professional fulfilment (6.5 ± 2.1), and burnout scores (3.6 ± 2.0) were moderate with 227 physicians (54.6%) meeting burnout criteria. A significant dose-response existed between COVID-19 patient volume and moral distress scores. Physicians who worked more days/mo and more scheduled in-house nightshifts, especially combined with more unscheduled in-house nightshifts, experienced significantly more moral distress. One in five physicians used at least one maladaptive coping strategy. We identified four coping profiles (active/social, avoidant, mixed/ambivalent, infrequent) that were associated with significant differences across all wellness measures. CONCLUSIONS: Despite moderate intrapandemic moral distress and burnout, physicians experienced moderate professional fulfilment. However, one in five physicians used at least one maladaptive coping strategy. We highlight potentially modifiable factors at individual, institutional, and regulatory levels to enhance physician wellness

Next Generation Marine Data Networks in an IoT Environment

Packet data networks at sea offer the potential for increased safety, connectivity and meteorological data acquisition. Existing solutions including satellite communication are expensive and prohibitive to most small vessels. In this paper, an Internet of Things (IoT) application is proposed as a marine data acquisition and cartography system over Ship Ad-hoc Networks (SANET). Ships are proposed to communicate over Very High Frequency (VHF) which is already available on the majority of ships and are equipped with several sensors such as sea depth, temperature, wind speed and direction, etc. On shore, 5G base station nodes represent sinks for the collected data and are equipped with Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) capabilities for data aggregation and processing. The sensory data is ultimately aggregated at a central cloud on the internet to produce public up to date cartography systems. We discuss the deployment limitations and benefits of the proposed system and investigate it's performance using four different MANET routing protocols which are Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Ad hoc On-Demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV), Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocols. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed system with packet delivery rates of up to 60 percent at shore base stations

Increasing the rate of intrusion detection based on a hybrid technique

This paper presents techniques to increase intrusion detection rates. Theses techniques are based on specific features that are detected and it's shown that a small number of features (9) can yield improved detection rates compared to higher numbers. These techniques utilize soft computing techniques such a Backpropagation based artificial neural networks and fuzzy sets. These techniques achieve a significant improvement over the state of the art for standard DARPA benchmark data

Spreading Code Identification of Legal Drones in IoT Environment

The widespread use of drones has become very common today with large-scale civil and military applications. In the next few coming years, the outlook is expected that the number of drones will reach millions. So, these need to be well organised and managed in order to achieve the benefits of IoT with this accelerated environment. Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) must achieved a level of communications to authenticate a legal working. The proposed approach concentrated on preparing each drone with identification key based on the combination of its international sim number with the date of the first action and the local country code. This approach is called Drone IDentification (DID) that generate a unique code for each drone via spreading technique. In this case any drone not apply this regulation is considered as unauthenticated drone and does not allowed to fly. This approach is very important to establish drone regulation via IoT

Why we should be avoiding periorificial mimetic muscles when injecting tissue fillers

Background: Tissue fillers are generally safe and well tolerated by patients. However, complications do occur and may be very severe, such as intravascular injection (with occasional residual tissue loss, visual and neurological sequelae) and late nodularity and swelling. Methods to lessen the likelihood of complications have been the subject of much recent literature. Depth of injection has been identified as a key safety consideration. Patients/Methods: The role of injection of facial filler into the muscular layer of the face is explored in this article. Literature was explored using available search facilities to study the role of injections in or around this layer in the production of significant adverse reactions. Results: A body of literature seems to suggest that injection into mimetic musculature of the face especially the musculature in the periorbital and perioral regions is prone to adverse reactions. Conclusions: Injection of agents into the perioral and periorbital mimetic muscular layer may produce, product clumping, displacement, and tendency to late nodularity and swelling. It also risks intravascular injection as compared to injection of other layers of the face. Injection into the mimetic muscles especially the sphincteric muscles should be avoided to minimize the risk of complications

Australian oral health case notes: assessment of forensic relevance and adherence to recording guidelines

BACKGROUND: Dental case notes record clinical diagnoses and treatments, as well as providing continuity of patient care. They are also used for dento-legal litigation and forensic purposes. Maintaining accurate and comprehensive dental patient records is a dental worker's ethical and legal obligation. METHODS: Australian-registered specialist Forensic Odontologists were surveyed to determine the relevance of recorded case note items for dental identification. A dental case notes sample was assessed for adherence with Odontologist-nominated forensic value and compiled professional record keeping guidelines of forensic relevance. Frequency of item recording, confidence interval, examiner agreement and statistical significance were determined. RESULTS: Broad agreement existed between Forensic Odontologists as to which recorded dental items have most forensic relevance. Inclusion frequency of these items in sampled case notes varied widely (eg. single area radiographic view present in 75%, CI=65.65-82.50; completed odontogram in 56%, CI=46.23-65.33). Recording of information specified by professional record keeping guidelines also varied, although overall inclusion was higher than for forensically-desired items (eg. patient's full name in 99%, CI=94.01->99.99; named treating practitioner in 23%, CI=15.78-32.31). CONCLUSION: Many sampled dental case notes lacked details identified as being valuable by forensic specialists and as specified by professional record keeping guidelines.Lauren Stow, Helen James and Lindsay Richard

Why we should be avoiding periorificial mimetic muscles when injecting tissue fillers

Background: Tissue fillers are generally safe and well tolerated by patients. However, complications do occur and may be very severe, such as intravascular injection (with occasional residual tissue loss, visual and neurological sequelae) and late nodularity and swelling. Methods to lessen the likelihood of complications have been the subject of much recent literature. Depth of injection has been identified as a key safety consideration. Patients/Methods: The role of injection of facial filler into the muscular layer of the face is explored in this article. Literature was explored using available search facilities to study the role of injections in or around this layer in the production of significant adverse reactions. Results: A body of literature seems to suggest that injection into mimetic musculature of the face especially the musculature in the periorbital and perioral regions is prone to adverse reactions. Conclusions: Injection of agents into the perioral and periorbital mimetic muscular layer may produce, product clumping, displacement, and tendency to late nodularity and swelling. It also risks intravascular injection as compared to injection of other layers of the face. Injection into the mimetic muscles especially the sphincteric muscles should be avoided to minimize the risk of complications

Morphological, nutritional and medicinal traits of wild mango (Mangifera Sylvatica Roxb.): Implications for increased use and options for cultivar development

Mangifera sylvatica Roxb. is an underutilised and threatened wild fruit species found in Bangladesh, which is highly valued by local people as a source of fruit and is an important source of nutrition. As part of a feasibility study of the domestication and cultivar development potential of M. sylvatica, a preliminary study examined the morphological traits (fruit, kernel and pulp mass), nutritional profile (carbohydrate, sugar, pH, fat, protein, mineral and vitamins) and medicinal traits (total phenolic and phenolic profiling). The fruit of M. sylvatica is small (27.00g ± 7.03g) with a comparatively bigger kernel fruit (40% of its body weight). M. sylvatica fruit pulp has been proved to be a good source of carbohydrate, Vitamin C, sodium (Na) and potassium (K) and also has good medicinal properties (mangiferin and quercetin). The kernel is also a rich source of carbohydrate and has a good fatty acid profile (rich in stearic and oleic acids) consistent with cocoa butter, which indicates its potential to be used in the chocolate and confectionery industry. There is continuous variation in these traits, indicating opportunities for multiple trait cultivar development targeted at the food and pharmaceutical industries. The information generated in the study can be used as a stimulus to the process of domestication and to encourage widespread use of the species, which will ultimately help to conserve this wild underutilised fruit species

Inner ear tissue preservation by rapid freezing: improving fixation by high-pressure freezing and hybrid methods

In the preservation of tissues in as ‘close to life’ state as possible, rapid freeze fixation has many benefits over conventional chemical fixation. One technique by which rapid freeze-fixation can be achieved, high pressure freezing (HPF), has been shown to enable ice crystal artefact-free freezing and tissue preservation to greater depths (more than 40μm) than other quick-freezing methods. Despite increasingly becoming routine in electron microscopy, the use of HPF for the fixation of inner ear tissue has been limited. Assessment of the quality of preservation showed routine HPF techniques were suitable for preparation of inner ear tissues in a variety of species. Good preservation throughout the depth of sensory epithelia was achievable. Comparison to chemically fixed tissue indicated that fresh frozen preparations exhibited overall superior structural preservation of cells. However, HPF fixation caused characteristic artefacts in stereocilia that suggested poor quality freezing of the actin bundles. The hybrid technique of pre-fixation and high pressure freezing was shown to produce cellular preservation throughout the tissue, similar to that seen in HPF alone. Pre-fixation HPF produced consistent high quality preservation of stereociliary actin bundles. Optimising the preparation of samples with minimal artefact formation allows analysis of the links between ultrastructure and function in inner ear tissues