Design Thinking in Middle School Classroom

Engineering design is an iterative process that supports the solution of problems by applying scientific knowledge to make informed decisions. Assessing different levels of expertise in experimentation is a difficult task since these are not usually visible as part of a student’s final design solution. The purpose of this research is to investigate and characterize students’ experimentation strategies while working on a design challenge. This research explores the various aspects of engineering design behaviors in middle school students. Questionnaires, observations, CAD software logs and focus group methodology are employed for qualitative and quantitative data collection. R scripts models are used to visualize and characterize patterns within educational data and validate them using statistical techniques. This study reveals interesting aspects of design thinking processes in students, provides recommendations and opens the discussion to engineering educators and researchers who are interested in understanding and assessing students’ experimentation strategies in engineering design

Detection of Offensive Tweets: A Comparative Study

With the growing popularity, Twitter has become a major platform for posting views via tweets. Tweets contain useful, relevant and offensive content as well. More than a decade of research has resulted in numerous techniques and models to detect offensive content. However, little is known about lexically offensive and contextual offensive content. In this research paper, lexical offensive contents have been identified using two techniques- Rule-Based Naive Bayes (RNB) and a collaborative model of LDA with Naïve Bayes (LDANB). LDANB provides better results as compared to RNB for lexical offensive tweet detection. Further, contextually offensive contents are detected using newly devised Adjective Based approach. Contextual offensive content results prove to be better with Adjective based approach than Cosine similarity based results. To validate results of applied offensive tweet detection techniques three performance metrics- precision, Accuracy and recall are used

The Less Known Alpha Generation

The social interactions, contemporary life style, changing technolgy and their economic effects have its consequence on the way organizations develop the structure, company-wide operations, retain and motivate employees. Hence, organizations need to know about the type of people they are hiring. The \u27next generation\u27, also called the \u27alpha generation\u27 will enter workforce soon and form its major part in about a decade. However, very little is known about them yet. This paper explores the various aspects of organizational behavior that this generation might institute and tries to predict the best strategies to have them in workforce effectively. In person interviews, surveys and focus group methodology are employed for qualitative and quantitative data collection. This study reveals interesting aspects about this new generation and compares it to Generation X, Y and Z. It is recommended that organizations start developing methods for the future workforce

User interface development

This viewgraph presentation describes the development of user interfaces for OS/2 versions of computer codes for the analysis of seals. Current status, new features, work in progress, and future plans are discussed

A Convex Reconstruction Model for X-ray Tomographic Imaging with Uncertain Flat-fields

Classical methods for X-ray computed tomography are based on the assumption that the X-ray source intensity is known, but in practice, the intensity is measured and hence uncertain. Under normal operating conditions, when the exposure time is sufficiently high, this kind of uncertainty typically has a negligible effect on the reconstruction quality. However, in time- or dose-limited applications such as dynamic CT, this uncertainty may cause severe and systematic artifacts known as ring artifacts. By carefully modeling the measurement process and by taking uncertainties into account, we derive a new convex model that leads to improved reconstructions despite poor quality measurements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology based on simulated and real data sets.Comment: Accepted at IEEE Transactions on Computational Imagin

Clinical profile of women seeking medical termination of pregnancy at a tertiary care institute, South India

Background: Medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) has largely become a medical procedure rather than surgical and in the recent times and few women approach public health care facility and hence the profile of women has changed and is different in various hospitals. Hence this study was undertaken with the objectives to know the proportion of indications as per MTP act and gestational age in women who opted MTP. The study also aimed to find out the clinic-demographic profile and the method of MTP and contraception adopted along with MTP.Methods: A retrospective cohort over 3 year period (2016-2019). Data was extracted from the medical records of women who were hospitalised for MTP and analysed for the outcome parameters Viz: Women were categorised as per the indication for MTP. In each category of indication, age, socioeconomic status, trimester of MTP, number of living children, methods of MTP and methods of contraception adopted was noted. The results were expressed as proportions and frequencies and the trend over 3 years was expressed as percentage per total number of deliveries per year.Results: There were 640 MTPs over 3 year period and this constituted 1.22% of total deliveries (52,555). Fifty one percent were first trimester MTPs. Thirty eight percent were done for congenital malformations, 32% for socio-economic reasons of family limitation, 17% for saving physical or mental health , 4% for rape victims and 8% for failure of contraception. The mean age was 28 years and the age in humanitarian group was ≤ 20 years. More than 88% belonged to lower socioeconomic class and 37% were third gravidae with 2 living children. Medical methods were used in 90% of terminations and 46% adopted contraception.Conclusions: The most common reason for opting MTP is congenital malformation of fetus. Women who achieved the desired family size and non-practice of contraception was the next common indication for termination of pregnancy and majority of terminations in this group were first trimester. Practice of contraception to avoid unwanted pregnancy and measures to prevent congenital malformations are essential to reduce medical termination of pregnancies