Driver Heterogeneity in Willingness to Give Control to Conditional Automation

The driver's willingness to give (WTG) control in conditionally automated driving is assessed in a virtual reality based driving-rig, through their choice to give away driving control and through the extent to which automated driving is adopted in a mixed-traffic environment. Within- and across-class unobserved heterogeneity and locus of control variations are taken into account. The choice of giving away control is modelled using the mixed logit (MIXL) and mixed latent class (LCML) model. The significant latent segments of the locus of control are developed into internalizers and externalizers by the latent class model (LCM) based on the taste heterogeneity identified from the MIXL model. Results suggest that drivers choose to "giveAway" control of the vehicle when greater concentration/attentiveness is required (e.g., in the nighttime) or when they are interested in performing a non-driving-related task (NDRT). In addition, it is observed that internalizers demonstrate more heterogeneity compared to externalizers in terms of WTG

Silicon as Versatile Player in Plant and Human Biology: Overlooked and Poorly Understood

Farooq MA, Dietz K-J. Silicon as Versatile Player in Plant and Human Biology: Overlooked and Poorly Understood. Frontiers in Plant Science. 2015;6: 994.Silicon (Si) serves as bioactive beneficial element. Si is highly abundant in soil, and occurs ubiquitously in all organisms including plants and humans. During the last three decades, nutritional significance of Si for plant and human health has received increasing attention. Plant Si plays a pivotal role in growth and development, and this beneficial effect depends usually on accumulation in plant tissues, which are then protected from various forms of biotic and abiotic stresses. Likewise, human exposure to Si imparts health benefits and essentially occurs through plant-derived food products. Si bioavailability in human diet, e.g., strengthens bones and improves immune response, as well as neuronal and connective tissue health. Despite this empiric knowledge, the essentiality of Si still remains enigmatic. Thus the link between Si availability for plant development and its profound implication for human welfare should receive attention. This review aims to provide a broad perspective on Si as important element for plant and human nutrition and to define research fields for interdisciplinary research

A Strategy for the Promotion of Computer Programming Using Urdu Language in Pakistan

Software industry has proven to be a stepping stone towards changing the rank of a country in the comity of nations. In South Asian region, India has immensely excelled her economic growth by increasing its revenues with the help of software export. The development of software involves man power with technical support, where the premier focus in on computer programming. Therefore, producing a large number of skillful computer programmers in Pakistan would certainly help the cause of establishing software houses, which in turn, will attract the western world to outsource their software projects to Pakistan. Like India, this can certainly act like a game changer for Pakistan’s economy by earning a huge revenue. In this research we have presented a methodology to increase the interest of Pakistani people in computer programming by providing a bilingual computer program development environment in Urdu and English languages. This act may certainly open new dimensions of teaching computer programming, for instance, by introducing computer programming at school level. Furthermore, it may increase the interest of students and teachers to learn and teach computer programming while experiencing to program in their national language. Lastly, in technical terms, we have presented the visual design of such bilingual environment along with architectural modification in the preprocessor for C++ language to support both Urdu and English languages for writing computer program

Frequency and Anatomical Distribution of Pulmonary Embolism on CT Pulmonary Angiography

Background: Pulmonary embolism, with its growing prevalence, has become a potentially life-threatening medical condition with crucial symptoms. However, prognosis is good if timely diagnosis is made and to the level of segmental and sub segmental arteries as well. Standard computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) is thus used to diagnose acute pulmonary embolism. Objective: The primary objective of the current study was to determine and investigate the anatomical distribution frequency of pulmonary emboli, where segmental, sub segmental, and lobar arteries on CT pulmonary angiography are included. Methodology: In a descriptive cross-sectional study, single-centered studies and CTPA scans of 98 patients were included. Data was obtained from Shalimar Hospital and University of Lahore – Teaching Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan. Sample size included patients of all age groups with suspected pulmonary embolism, with no differentiation of male or female samples. Results: According to statistics and analysis, the current study results indicated the presence of pulmonary embolism in 36 patients and its absence in 62 patients. Results indicated that amongst the 98 patients scanned, the highest frequency of pulmonary emboli was found in the pulmonary trunk and lobar artery in 8 patients (8.2%). Furthermore, CTPA of the participants detected pulmonary emboli in segmental and sub-segmental arteries of 5 patients (5.1%), with another 2 patients showing pulmonary emboli in only the sub-segmental artery (2.0%). Another 2-2 patients showed pulmonary emboli in lobar and segmental artery and lobar, segmental and sub-segmental artery respectively (2.0%, 2.0%). Conclusion: The largest number of pulmonary emboli were found in the pulmonary trunk, followed by emboli of segmental and lobar arteries in patients. It is concluded that CTPA evaluates pulmonary embolism with great precision and anatomical distribution localized main trunk, and pulmonary artery emboli along with lobar, segmental and sub-segmental artery emboli. Keywords: Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA), pulmonary emboli, segmental artery, sub segmental artery, lobar arteries DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/100-02 Publication date:May 31st 202

Characterizing indigenous plant growth promoting bacteria and their synergistic effects with organic and chemical fertilizers on wheat (Triticum aestivum)

The excessive use of chemical fertilizers is deteriorating both the environment and soil, making it a big challenge faced by sustainable agriculture. To assist the efforts for the solution of this burning issue, nine different potential native strains of plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB) namely, SA-1(Bacillus subtilis), SA-5 (Stenotrophomonas humi),SA-7(Azospirillum brasilense), BH-1(Azospirillum oryzae), BH-7(Azotobacter armeniacus), BH-8(Rhizobium pusense), BA-3(Azospirillum zeae), BA-6(Rhizobium pusense), and BA-7(Pseudomonas fragi) were isolated that were characterized morphologically, biochemically and molecularly on the basis of 16S rRNA sequencing. Furthermore, the capability of indigenous PGPB in wheat (Triticum aestivum, Chakwal-50) under control, DAP+FYM, SA-1,5,7, BH-1,7,8, BA-3,6,7, DAP+ FYM + SA-1,5,7, DAP+FYM+ BH-1,7,8 and DAP+FYM+ BA-3,6,7 treatments was assessed in a randomized complete block design (RCBD). The results of the study showed that there was a significant increase in plant growth, nutrients, quality parameters, crop yield, and soil nutrients at three depths under SA-1,5,7, BH-1,7,8, and BA-3,6,7 in combination with DAP+FYM. Out of all these treatments, DAP+ FYM + BA-3,6,7 was found to be the most efficient for wheat growth having the highest 1000-grain weight of 55.1 g. The highest values for plant height, no. of grains/spike, spike length, shoot length, root length, shoot dry weight, root dry weight, 1000 grain weight, biological yield, and economic yield were found to be 90.7 cm, 87.7 cm, 7.20 cm, 53.5 cm, 33.5 cm, 4.87 g, 1.32 g, 55.1 g, 8209 kg/h, and 4572 kg/h, respectively, in the DAP+FYM+BA treatment. The DAP+FYM+BA treatment had the highest values of TN (1.68 µg/mL), P (0.38%), and K (1.33%). Likewise, the value of mean protein (10.5%), carbohydrate (75%), lipid (2.5%), and available P (4.68 ppm) was also highest in the DAP+FYM+BA combination. C:P was found to be significantly highest (20.7) in BA alone but was significantly lowest (11.9) in DAP+FYM+BA. Hence, the integration of strains BA-3, BA-5, and BA-7 in fertilizers can be regarded as the most suitable choice for agricultural growth in the sub-mountainous lower region of AJK. This could serve as the best choice for sustainable wheat growth and improved soil fertility with lesser impacts on the environment

Enhancement of magnetic and dielectric properties of Ni0.25Cu0.25Zn0.50Fe2O4 magnetic nanoparticles through non-thermal microwave plasma treatment for high-frequency and energy storage applications

Spinel ferrites are widely investigated for their widespread applications in high-frequency and energy storage devices. This work focuses on enhancing the magnetic and dielectric properties of Ni0.25Cu0.25Zn0.50 ferrite series through non-thermal microwave plasma exposure under low-pressure conditions. A series of Ni0.25Cu0.25Zn0.50 ferrites was produced using a facile sol-gel auto-ignition approach. The post-synthesis plasma treatment was given in a low-pressure chamber by sustaining oxygen plasma with a microwave source. The structural formation of control and plasma-modified ferrites was investigated through X-ray diffraction analysis, which confirmed the formation of the fcc cubical structure of all samples. The plasma treatment did not affect crystallize size but significantly altered the surface porosity. The surface porosity increased after plasma treatment and average crystallite size was measured as about similar to 49.13 nm. Morphological studies confirmed changes in surface morphology and reduction in particle size on plasma exposure. The saturation magnetization of plasma-exposed ferrites was roughly 65% higher than the control. The saturation magnetization, remnant magnetization, and coercivity of plasma-exposed ferrites were calculated as 74.46 emu/g, 26.35 emu/g, and 1040 Oe, respectively. Dielectric characteristics revealed a better response of plasma-exposed ferrites to electromagnetic waves than control. These findings suggest that the plasma-exposed ferrites are good candidates for constructing high-frequency devices.Web of Science1519art. no. 689

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

Fake news detection in Urdu language using machine learning

With the rise of social media, the dissemination of forged content and news has been on the rise. Consequently, fake news detection has emerged as an important research problem. Several approaches have been presented to discriminate fake news from real news, however, such approaches lack robustness for multi-domain datasets, especially within the context of Urdu news. In addition, some studies use machine-translated datasets using English to Urdu Google translator and manual verification is not carried out. This limits the wide use of such approaches for real-world applications. This study investigates these issues and proposes fake news classier for Urdu news. The dataset has been collected covering nine different domains and constitutes 4097 news. Experiments are performed using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and a bag of words (BoW) with the combination of n-grams. The major contribution of this study is the use of feature stacking, where feature vectors of preprocessed text and verbs extracted from the preprocessed text are combined. Support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, and ensemble models like random forest (RF) and extra tree (ET) were used for bagging while stacking was applied with ET and RF as base learners with logistic regression as the meta learner. To check the robustness of models, fivefold and independent set testing were employed. Experimental results indicate that stacking achieves 93.39%, 88.96%, 96.33%, 86.2%, and 93.17% scores for accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, MCC, ROC, and F1 score, respectively