Detection of attacker and location in wireless sensor network as an application for border surveillance

Border surveillance is one of the high priority in the security of countries around the world. Typical and traditional border observations involve troops and checkpoints at borders, but these do not provide complete security. One effective solution is the addition of smart fencing to enhance surveillance in a Border Patrol system. More specifically, effective border security can be achieved through the introduction of autonomous surveillance and the utilization of wireless sensor networks. Collectively, these wireless sensor networks will create a virtual fencing system comprising a large number of heterogeneous sensor devices. These devices are embedded with cameras and other sensors that provide a continuous monitor. However, to achieve an efficient wireless sensor network, its own security must be assured. This article focuses on the detection of attacks by unknown trespassers (perpetrators) on border surveillance sensor networks. We use both the Dempster–Shafer theory and the time difference of arrival method to identify and locate an attacked node. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is both plausible and effective

Solving the Klein-Gordon equation using Fourier spectral methods: A benchmark test for computer performance

The cubic Klein-Gordon equation is a simple but non-trivial partial differential equation whose numerical solution has the main building blocks required for the solution of many other partial differential equations. In this study, the library 2DECOMP&FFT is used in a Fourier spectral scheme to solve the Klein-Gordon equation and strong scaling of the code is examined on thirteen different machines for a problem size of 512^3. The results are useful in assessing likely performance of other parallel fast Fourier transform based programs for solving partial differential equations. The problem is chosen to be large enough to solve on a workstation, yet also of interest to solve quickly on a supercomputer, in particular for parametric studies. Unlike other high performance computing benchmarks, for this problem size, the time to solution will not be improved by simply building a bigger supercomputer.Comment: 10 page

Gastric aspiration, epithelial injury and chronic lung allograft rejection

PhD ThesisIntroduction For patients with a variety of end stage lung diseases, lung transplantation has become an effective therapy. Chronic allograft rejection occurs in over 50% of patients 5 years post transplantation however. Although alloimmune-mediated injury directed against endothelial and epithelial structures were traditionally thought to be the major culprit, non-alloimmunologic inflammation after bile acid aspiration has been implicated in cystic fibrosis (CF) lung injury, after transplantation. Hypothesis Reflux with aspiration of bile acid is present in the lower airways of people with cystic fibrosis associated lung injury before and after transplantation. Bile acid challenge would cause cytoxicity and release of inflammatory mediators from patient derived primary epithelial cells (PBECs), before and after transplantation. Methods PBECs from lung transplantation patients, explanted CF patient cultures and a goblet cell line were used to perform proof of concept experiments. In these experiments the effect of individual primary and secondary bile acids, porcine pepsin, different patient derived gastric juices (whole or filtered and dialysed) samples and an artificial bile acid mixture were evaluated. Cell death, Interleukin 8 (IL-8), Interleukin 6 (IL-6) and Granulocyte Macrophage Colony Stumulating Factor (GMCSF) production were measured by Titer blue and multiplex ELISA. Results Epithelial cells can be cultured successfully from the bronchial brushings of lung transplant recipient, CF patient explanted lungs and a Goblet cell line. In work connected with this study my research group has demonstrated that the lungs of people with advanced CF lung disease removed at the time of transplantation contained significant levels of bile acids higher than expected based on normal serum levels. I therefore tested the effects of bile acids on PBECs from lung transplant and CF patients. Challengesof ≥10mol/l was associated with significant cell death. Potentially physiological challenges with 1, 5 and 10 mol/l bile acids led to a significant release of pro-neutrophilic cytokines from lung transplant PBECs and CF PBECs .The goblet cell line HT-29 MTX was resistant to bile acids. Conclusion Aspiration of bile acids in CF lungs before and after transplantation may cause cell damage and inflammation. This injury may benefit from medical and surgical treatments for reflux, which may benefit the lung allograft generally

Lightweight community-driven approach to support ontology

The challenge for businesses today is to operate efficiently and effectively by ensuring the availability of updated information necessary for business activities. At situations where daily operations require collaborative communication among staff working in dispersed locations - characterised by different time zones and working conditions - it is essential that the staff have and share common knowledge, especially since staff members may have diverse understandings and perceptions of an issue.In order to overcome such challenge in business, using the oil and gas industry as a case study, this research proposes a platform based on a Lightweight Community-driven approach whereby staff are presented with opportunities to raise and discuss a particular issue in a systematic manner. In addition, ontology is used to support the representation of domain knowledge in which evolution is expected as human knowledge is not static. The fundamental principle of the Lightweight Community-driven approach is to involve organisation personnel in an exchange of ideas and opinions that lead to a higher quality of output. Staff are categorised in two groups, the Contributor Group and the Admin Group, each of which has a different role and responsibility in the whole process of communication. Members of the Contributor Group are those who are actively participating in the discussion by raising issues, providing feedback, and voting on an issue. This group is responsible for the quality of the discussion result which includes reliability of the ontology. The Admin Group are tasked with the managerial aspects of discussion to ensure the eligibility of every participant.Ontology evolution, subsequently, takes place to incorporate the result of the discussion. When there is a need to revise the intended ontology, the current ontology will be improved and archived ontology is created. Otherwise, ontology will remain the same as it is considered relevant by employees of the oil and gas industry. The proposed platform is explained and validated in detail in this thesis. The outcomes of the collective efforts to improve the quality of information within the domain are: a decrease of day-to-day work, cost saving, increased productivity and the availability of a communication forum

Molecular typing and epidemiology of Clostridium difficile in respiratory care wards of central Taiwan

Background/purposeIn industrialized countries, Clostridium difficile is the major cause of nosocomial diarrhea. This study involved a broad overview of baseline epidemiology for C. difficile in Taiwan.Materials and methodsPoint prevalence was estimated from a prospective survey conducted in the respiratory care wards of six hospitals in central Taiwan. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) ribotyping and multiple-locus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis (MLVA) were performed on all toxigenic C. difficile isolates, including asymptomatic and symptomatic strains.ResultsA total of 149 patients were screened for C. difficile; the point prevalence for C. difficile infection (CDI) and C. difficile colonization was 4% and 19%, respectively. CDI cases were significantly related to end-stage renal disease, and C. difficile colonization cases were significantly associated with previous admission to an acute-care facility. No hypervirulent PCR ribotype 027 strain was found. MLVA detected two clusters of CDI-related and three clusters of asymptomatic C. difficile strains circulating in wards.ConclusionOur results demonstrate a high prevalence of toxigenic C. difficile colonization in hospitals. Infection control personnel should pay attention to the increasing numbers of CDI cases, and molecular typing for C. difficile should be performed when necessary

The conjugacy diameters of non-abelian finite pp-groups with cyclic maximal subgroups

Let $G$ be a group. A subset $S$ of $G$ is said to normally generate $G$ if $G$ is the normal closure of $S$ in $G.$ In this case, any element of $G$ can be written as a product of conjugates of elements of $S$ and their inverses. If $g\in G$ and $S$ is a normally generating subset of $G,$ then we write $\| g\|_{S}$ for the length of a shortest word in \mbox{Conj}_{G}(S^{\pm 1}):=\{h^{-1}sh | h\in G, s\in S \, \mbox{or} \, s{^{-1}}\in S \} needed to express $g.$ For any normally generating subset $S$ of $G,$ we write \|G\|_{S} =\mbox{sup}\{\|g\|_{S} \,|\,\, g\in G\}. Moreover, we write $\Delta(G)$ for the supremum of all $\|G\|_{S},$ where $S$ is a finite normally generating subset of $G,$ and we call $\Delta(G)$ the conjugacy diameter of $G.$ In this paper, we determine the conjugacy diameters of the semidihedral $2$-groups, the generalized quaternion groups and the modular $p$-groups. This is a natural step after the determination of the conjugacy diameters of dihedral groups, which were recently found by the first author (finite case) and by Kedra, Libman and Martin (infinite case).Comment: 25 page

The Reality of Professional Development of Mathematics and Science Teachers at Elementary Schools in Najran, Saudi Arabia

This study aimed to identify the practice extent of mathematics and science teachers of professional development activities, its sources and obstacles at elementary schools in Najran, and its relationship with specialty, gender, number of training courses. To achieve the study aims, the research questionnaire was prepared and consisted of (70) items distributed to three fields related to the activities, sources, and obstacles of the professional development in curriculum developed of the American McGraw Hill Education. Validity of the questionnaire was asserted by submitting it to a number of specialist arbitrators. Reliability was also verified and Cronbach Alpha correlation coefficient was (0.97). The study sample consisted of (201) teachers among which (103) mathematics teachers and (98) science teachers who were all teaching the developed mathematics and science curricula at the elementary schools in Najran during the academic year 2014/2015. Findings showed that the practice level of teachers’ practice degree of professional development activities was moderate.  The sources of which they receive professional development programs and obstacles they face were moderate, too. Results indicated that there were no statistically significant differences due to specialization and training courses, while there were significant differences (α=0.01) among teachers with regard to the practice degree of professional development activities and the number of training courses due to gender in favor of females. The study recommended paying attention to the programs of teachers’ professional development and their participation to meet their needs and requirements to attend conferences, seminars, workshops at the universities. Keywords: Curriculum development, Mathematics and science education, Najran University, teachers’ professional development.

Acid-suppression medications and bacterial gastroenteritis:a population-based cohort study

AIMS: To investigate whether acid suppression medicines (ASMs) increase the risk of bacterial gastroenteritis. METHODS: A population-based, propensity-score matched cohort study using a record-linkage database in Tayside, Scotland. The study consisted of 188,323 exposed to ASMs [proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) and H2 receptor antagonists (H2RA)] and 376,646 controls (a propensity-score matched cohort from the rest of population who were not exposed to ASMs) between 1999 and 2013. The main outcome measure was a positive stool test for C. difficile, Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shigella or Escherichia coli O157. The association between ASMs and risk of bacterial gastroenteritis was assessed by a Cox regression model. RESULTS: There were 22,705 positive test results (15,273 Clostridium difficile (toxin positive), 6,590 Campylobacter, 852 Salmonella, 129 Shigella and 193 Escherichia coli O157, not mutually exclusive) with a total of 5,729,743 person-years follow up time in Tayside, 1999-2013. The adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) for culture positive diarrhoea for the PPIs and H2RA exposed vs unexposed cohort were 2.72 [95% confidence interval (CI) 2.33, 3.17] during follow up time for samples submitted from the community and 1.28 (95% CI 1.08, 1.52) for samples submitted from hospitals. Compared with the unexposed cohort, patients in the exposed group had increased risks of C. difficile and Campylobacter [adjusted HRs of 1.70 (95% CI 1.28, 2.25), 3.71 (95% CI 3.04, 4.53) for community samples, and 1.42 (95% CI 1.17, 1.71), 4.53 (95% CI 1.75, 11.8) for hospital samples, respectively]. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that community prescribed ASMs were associated with increased rates of C. difficile and Campylobacter positive gastroenteritis in both the community and hospital settings

Systematic review of the safety of medication use in inpatient, outpatient and primary care settings in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries

Background Errors in medication use are a patient safety concern globally, with different regions reporting differing error rates, causes of errors and proposed solutions. The objectives of this review were to identify, summarise, review and evaluate published studies on medication errors, drug related problems and adverse drug events in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Methods A systematic review was carried out using six databases, searching for literature published between January 1990 and August 2016. Research articles focussing on medication errors, drug related problems or adverse drug events within different healthcare settings in the GCC were included. Results Of 2094 records screened, 54 studies met our inclusion criteria. Kuwait was the only GCC country with no studies included. Prescribing errors were reported to be as high as 91% of a sample of primary care prescriptions analysed in one study. Of drug-related admissions evaluated in the emergency department the most common reason was patient non-compliance. In the inpatient care setting, a study of review of patient charts and medication orders identified prescribing errors in 7% of medication orders, another reported prescribing errors present in 56% of medication orders. The majority of drug related problems identified in inpatient paediatric wards were judged to be preventable. Adverse drug events were reported to occur in 8.5–16.9 per 100 admissions with up to 30% judged preventable, with occurrence being highest in the intensive care unit. Dosing errors were common in inpatient, outpatient and primary care settings. Omission of the administered dose as well as omission of prescribed medication at medication reconciliation were common. Studies of pharmacists’ interventions in clinical practice reported a varying level of acceptance, ranging from 53% to 98% of pharmacists’ recommendations. Conclusions Studies of medication errors, drug related problems and adverse drug events are increasing in the GCC. However, variation in methods, definitions and denominators preclude calculation of an overall error rate. Research with more robust methodologies and longer follow up periods is now required.Peer reviewe

Medical health knowledge management using wireless network: Moroccan hospitals case study

Hospitals and medical health services are large business that we have to make them successful for their earned profits and incomes. Unifying the communication in hospitals can approve the environments and avoid the problems faced. Wireless networks are very useful in large crowded places like hospitals. Wireless technology has empowered the medical health systems by reducing the paperwork that nurses or doctors have to deal with them whole day. Its primary purpose is to ensure effective care of patients by increasing the accuracy and speed of health care. This paper highlights patients' knowledge management in hospitals using the wireless communication since the rate of medical errors has increased lately. The intention of this paper is to utilize an advanced technology to help hospitals raise the rate of care of patients throughout the use of mobile data collection device that transmits data to a centralized database to raise the visibility of data to the receivers