Online Service Quality Evaluation for Residential Hall in Universiti Utara Malaysia

The advantages of internet services cannot be overemphasized especially in the academic environment where it is mainly used for e-learning as online services. The universities are known to provide for their students by giving them shelters, known as Student Hall of Residence. Maybank Hall of Residence officers provide many services for their occupants in the hall. However, these services are yet to be evaluated in order to know the services quality they are giving to their occupants. This project designs a requirement model and developed a prototype to allow the Service Quality for the occupants of the Maybank Student Hall of Residence to evaluate the services using the on-line evaluation system. The result generated during the implantation phase of this project shows that the system is effective and easy to learn

Removal of heavy metals from textile wastewater using sugarcane bagasse activated carbon

Excessive release of textile wastewater with heavy metals into environment has posed a great problem to the natural water system. The efficiency of the adsorption process to remove heavy metals depend on the adsorbent. The commercial activated carbon is one of the most efficient adsorbent, but the limitation lies in the high cost. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the efficiency of sugarcane bagasse activated carbon modified by phosphoric acid as adsorbent for the removal of zinc (Zn) and Ferum (Fe) from the textile wastewater. The adsorption process was conducted using batch method as a function for pH (2-7), contact time (30 min to 24 h) and adsorbent dosage (0.6 to 6g). The final concentrations of the metal ions were determined by ICP-MS. The results revealed that the adsorption efficiency increased with the contact time, the optimum time was recorded after 2 h. The removal percentage of Zn and Fe associated with the adsorbent dosage due to the greater surface area with optimum value of 4.0 g. The increasing of pH from 2 to 6 correlated with high adsorption efficiency, with the optimum condition at pH 5. The maximum percentage removal of Fe, Zn was 80%. These findings indicated that the SBAC is an attractive alternative adsorbent material for the metal ions removal in textile wastewater

Voltammetric Study For Cuso4 in Presence of Safranin (Saf ) in Hcl Solutions using New Multicarbon Nanotubes Doped with Nano Tantalum Pentoxide Working Electrode

Redox reaction for CuSO4 in the absence and presence of safranin (suffranine) was studied. We applied new electrode made from multicarbon nanotubes (MCNT) and nano (Ta2O5)  in a mixture with 80% MCNT and 20% (Ta2O5) by weight. Two drops paraffin oil was added, drying till dryness in tip of copper electrode covered with heat shrink polymer to do good isolation. The electrode was purified and put in oven at 90°C till working in the morning. Scan rate effect was done for the redox reactions in absence and presence of safranin to explain the type of the used reactions in the study electrode chemically. The stablilty constants and Gibbs free energies of complexation resulting from the interaction of CuSO4 with safranin in 0.1 M HCl at 27.5°C were evaluated and discussing their resulting data

Surgical difficulties for Total Knee Replacement in Stickler syndrome: A case report

Stickler syndrome is believed to be the most common connective tissue disorder in Europe and the USA. Severe osteoarthritis sets in at very early age in 3rd to 4th decade of life necessitating joint arthroplasty. This case report highlights the intraoperative surgical difficulties faced by the surgeon and the planning needed for the operation

Can large language model agents simulate human trust behaviors?

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have been increasingly adopted as simulation tools to model humans in applications such as social science. However, one fundamental question remains: can LLM agents really simulate human behaviors? In this paper, we focus on one of the most critical behaviors in human interactions, trust, and aim to investigate whether or not LLM agents can simulate human trust behaviors. We first find that LLM agents generally exhibit trust behaviors, referred to as agent trust, under the framework of Trust Games, which are widely recognized in behavioral economics. Then, we discover that LLM agents can have high behavioral alignment with humans regarding trust behaviors, particularly for GPT-4, indicating the feasibility to simulate human trust behaviors with LLM agents. In addition, we probe into the biases in agent trust and the differences in agent trust towards agents and humans. We also explore the intrinsic properties of agent trust under conditions including advanced reasoning strategies and external manipulations. We further offer important implications of our discoveries for various scenarios where trust is paramount. Our study provides new insights into the behaviors of LLM agents and the fundamental analogy between LLMs and humans

Flexible Wearable Antenna on Electromagnetic Band Gap using PDMS substrate

A robust and low-profile electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) based on flexible wearable antenna covering 2.4 GHz frequency band is presented. The incorporated EBG with antenna reduces the  radiation into the human body around 17 dB and decreases the impacts of frequency detuning. The overall dimension of the antenna integrated with EBG is 56 x 56 x 4 mm3 with relative impedance bandwidth of 8.3% is achieved. The proposed design has improved the gain up to 7 dBi. Specific absorption rate (SAR) assessment is also studied to certify the performance of the antenna when it is located proximity to human tissue. The flexible antenna with aforementioned performances could be chosen as a good candidate for integration into a range of wearable devices for medical application

Cellular infiltration in traumatic brain injury

Abstract: Traumatic brain injury leads to cellular damage which in turn results in the rapid release of damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) that prompt resident cells to release cytokines and chemokines. These in turn rapidly recruit neutrophils, which assist in limiting the spread of injury and removing cellular debris. Microglia continuously survey the CNS (central nervous system) compartment and identify structural abnormalities in neurons contributing to the response. After some days, when neutrophil numbers start to decline, activated microglia and astrocytes assemble at the injury site—segregating injured tissue from healthy tissue and facilitating restorative processes. Monocytes infiltrate the injury site to produce chemokines that recruit astrocytes which successively extend their processes towards monocytes during the recovery phase. In this fashion, monocytes infiltration serves to help repair the injured brain. Neurons and astrocytes also moderate brain inflammation via downregulation of cytotoxic inflammation. Depending on the severity of the brain injury, T and B cells can also be recruited to the brain pathology sites at later time points

Diagnostic and Therapeutic Costs of Patients With a Diagnosis of Or Suspected of Coronavirus Disease in Iran

Objectives: To understand the social and individual effects of the disease and make decisions on the allocation of health resources, it is necessary to understand the economic burden of coronavirus disease (COVID-19); however, there are limited data in this field. This study aimed to estimate diagnostic and therapeutic costs of patients with a diagnosis of or suspected of COVID-19 disease admitted to hospitals in northeast Iran. Methods: This descriptive and analytical research was conducted as a retrospective study using the data collected from 2980 patients admitted to 30 hospitals from February to April 2020 in Iran. For data collection, an appropriate data capture tool was designed to record detailed resource use. A multivariate regression analysis was performed to examine the association between the treatment costs and sociodemographic, disease severity, and underlying diseases. Data were analyzed using Excel 2017 (Microsoft, Redmond, WA) and SPSS version 21 software (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL). Results: The inpatient costs per patient were Int$416, of which 74% were paid by social health insurance systems, 19% by the government, and 7% by the patients. The largest cost components were hoteling (37%) and medicine (36%). The 4 subscales of age, sex, underlying disease, and severity predicted 48.6% of the cost variance. Conclusion: Understanding the economic consequences of diseases can help policymakers to make plans to reduce out-of-pocket payments and make plans for funding. Since COVID-19 is a newly emerging disease and there is no definitive cure for the disease, the discovery of an effective medicine may alter medical costs and reduce the hospital length of stay, therefore significantly reducing treatment costs

Human-robot interaction torque estimation methods for a lower limb rehabilitation robotic system with uncertainties

Lower limb rehabilitation robot (LLRR) users, to successfully conduct isotonic exercises, require real-time feedback on the torque they exert on the robot to meet the goal of the treatment. Still, direct torque measuring is expensive, and indirect encoder-based estimation strategies, such as inverse dynamics (ID) and Nonlinear Disturbance Observers (NDO), are sensitive to Body Segment Inertial Parameters (BSIPs) uncertainties. We envision a way to minimize such parametric uncertainties. This paper proposes two human–robot interaction torque estimation methods: the Identified ID-based method (IID) and the Identified NDO-based method (INDO). Evaluating in simulation the proposal to apply, in each rehabilitation session, a sequential two-phase method: (1) An initial calibration phase will use an online parameter estimation to reduce sensitivity to BSIPs uncertainties. (2) The torque estimation phase uses the estimated parameters to obtain a better result. We conducted simulations under signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) = 40 dB and 20% BSIPs uncertainties. In addition, we compared the effectiveness with two of the best methods reported in the literature via simulation. Both proposed methods obtained the best Coefficient of Correlation, Mean Absolute Error, and Root Mean Squared Error compared to the benchmarks. Moreover, the IID and INDO fulfilled more than 72.2% and 88.9% of the requirements, respectively. In contrast, both methods reported in the literature only accomplish 27.8% and 33.3% of the requirements when using simulations under noise and BSIPs uncertainties. Therefore, this paper extends two methods reported in the literature and copes with BSIPs uncertainties without using additional sensors