Despondent

This paper will discuss creating my thesis film, Despondent, taking it from a concept on paper to the screen. The reflection will focus on the pre-production, production, and post-production phases. This paper will also address the lessons I have learned and my growth as a filmmaker through working on this project and being part of the film production program at UNO

Carbon diffusion in 304I austenitic stainless steel at 650 steel at 650 -750°c in carburizing environment

A 304L austenitic stainless steel is widely used in the petrochemical industry. As it is exposed to carburizing environment, carbon diffuses into metal and form carbides. Effect of the environment on the carbon diffusion is interesting to be known. This study will evaluate the effect of CH4 /H2 gas concentration and carburizing temperature on carbon diffusion in 304L austenitic stainless steel. Horizontal furnace equipped with a quartz tube and vacuum pump was used to expose the samples to carburizing environment at 650°C - 750°C and 20% - 40% CH4 /H2 gas composition for 100 hours. Optical microscopy examination of cross-sectioned specimens of 304L stainless steel showed that no carburizing zone formed after the samples subjected to 20% CH4 /H2 gas composition at 650˚C. It is observed that low carbon deposited on substrates with an average 0.0011g and carbon activity, ac , equal to 0.31. In comparison, with 40% CH4 /H2 gas composition at 650˚C, the average carbon deposited on the surface was two times more and carbon activity increased more than one, known as carburizing zone. Carbon diffusion at 750°C was deeper than at 650°C for both CH4 /H2 gas concentrations 20% - 40%. In conclusion the depth of the carburization zone increases with increasing the temperature from 650˚C to 750˚C and increases with increasing percentage of CH4 /H2 gas composition

Singularity avoidance of a six degree of freedom three dimensional redundant planar manipulator

AbstractThis paper focuses on the improvement of singularity avoidance of three dimensional planar redundant manipulators by increasing its degrees of freedom without increasing the number of motors controlling the manipulator. Consequently, the method to build a three dimensional planar manipulator with six-degrees of freedom using three motors instead of six is discussed in detail. A comparison of the manipulability index values for the proposed manipulator is made with the manipulability index values of PUMA arm to demonstrate the effectiveness of using the proposed manipulator for singularity avoidance

Performance Prediction of Computer Science Students in Capstone Software Engineering Course Through Educational Data Mining

Educational data mining has been extensively used to predict students’ performance in university courses to plan improvements in teaching and learning processes, achieve academic goals, and timely support interventions. Computer Science (CS) courses focus on promoting problem solving skills through writing of software code and developing solutions using computing technologies. Within a four-year CS curriculum, the sequencing of courses is deliberately designed so that knowledge gained in a prerequisite lower level course is critical for success in upper-level courses. Overall, the CS curriculum prepares the students for a capstone experience in a final year Software Engineering (SE) course. The student success in SE course is dependent on skills such as requirement analysis, design, implementation, and testing gained in lower-level prerequisite courses. In this paper, we analyze grades data of 531 students in all under-graduate CS courses at a public university in the United States over a period of 8 years (2010 to 2018). Statistical analysis techniques including multiple linear regression, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, and paired samples t-test are used to analyze the data. The performance of students in SE course is investigated based on their grades in sequence of prerequisite courses including CS I, CS II, Data Structures and Object-oriented Programming. These prerequisite courses teach and test fundamental and advanced programming skills essential for success in SE course. The analysis shows CS II is a significant predictor of students’ success in the SE course. We also investigate the relationship between study of theoretical concepts and their application by examining the correlation between CS II (theory) and Data Structures (application) courses. Results shows a strong and positive correlation between students’ academic performance in the Data Structures course and CS I. We also observe the correlation between CS I and CS II. CS I builds fundamental concepts such as syntax, data types, control structures, selection statements, functions, and recursion while CS II focuses on advanced tools to use the concepts studied in CS I for problem solving. The results indicate a significant difference in mean grades in both courses. Conclusion, interpretations, and implications of these findings for the CS students will be discussed in detail in the full paper

The role of interactions of long non-coding RNAs and heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins in regulating cellular functions

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are emerging as critical regulators of various biological processes and human diseases. The mechanisms of action involve their interactions with proteins, RNA and genomic DNA. Most lncRNAs display strong nuclear localization. Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins (hnRNPs) are a large family of RNA-binding proteins that are important for multiple aspects of nucleic acid metabolism. hnRNPs are also predominantly expressed in the nucleus. This review discusses the interactions of lncRNAs and hnRNPs in regulating gene expression at transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels or by changing genomic structure, highlighting their involvements in glucose and lipid metabolism, immune response, DNA damage response, and other cellular functions. Toward the end, several techniques that are used to identify lncRNA binding partners are summarized. There are still many questions that need to be answered in this relatively new research area, which might provide novel targets to control the biological outputs of cells in response to different stimuli

The role of interactions of long non-coding RNAs and heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins in regulating cellular functions

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are emerging as critical regulators of various biological processes and human diseases. The mechanisms of action involve their interactions with proteins, RNA and genomic DNA. Most lncRNAs display strong nuclear localization. Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins (hnRNPs) are a large family of RNA-binding proteins that are important for multiple aspects of nucleic acid metabolism. hnRNPs are also predominantly expressed in the nucleus. This review discusses the interactions of lncRNAs and hnRNPs in regulating gene expression at transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels or by changing genomic structure, highlighting their involvements in glucose and lipid metabolism, immune response, DNA damage response, and other cellular functions. Toward the end, several techniques that are used to identify lncRNA binding partners are summarized. There are still many questions that need to be answered in this relatively new research area, which might provide novel targets to control the biological outputs of cells in response to different stimuli

Nanostructured Lipid Carriers for Delivery of Chemotherapeutics: A Review

The efficacy of current standard chemotherapy is suboptimal due to the poor solubility and short half-lives of chemotherapeutic agents, as well as their high toxicity and lack of specificity which may result in severe side effects, noncompliance and patient inconvenience. The application of nanotechnology has revolutionized the pharmaceutical industry and attracted increasing attention as a significant means for optimizing the delivery of chemotherapeutic agents and enhancing their efficiency and safety profiles. Nanostructured lipid carriers (NLCs) are lipid-based formulations that have been broadly studied as drug delivery systems. They have a solid matrix at room temperature and are considered superior to many other traditional lipid-based nanocarriers such as nanoemulsions, liposomes and solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) due to their enhanced physical stability, improved drug loading capacity, and biocompatibility. This review focuses on the latest advances in the use of NLCs as drug delivery systems and their preparation and characterization techniques with special emphasis on their applications as delivery systems for chemotherapeutic agents and different strategies for their use in tumor targeting.This research was funded by Aljalila foundation, grant number AJF201777

Management of benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) by combinatorial approach using alpha-1-adrenergic antagonists and 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors.

Currently, the main available treatments for benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) are alpha-1 adrenergic receptor antagonists (ARAs), 5-alpha reductase inhibitors (5-αRI), anticholinergics, and Phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors. Recent studies support the combined therapy approach using ARAs with 5-αRI for lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in BPH patients at risk of clinical progression. We aimed to review BPH management in select group of randomized controlled trials by combination therapy with ARAs and 5-αRIs compared to monotherapy with either drug with respect to the safety and efficacy. A total of 6 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving comparison of combination therapy with monotherapy using ARAs and 5-αRIs were retrieved from PubMed Central and reviewed for international prostate symptom score (IPSS), quality of life (QoL), post-residual urinary flow rate (PUF), and clinical progression. The results significantly favour the treatment group that received the combination therapy in comparison with the groups receiving monotherapy. However, outcome with regard to prostate volume showed insignificant improvement when the combination therapy is compared with 5- αRIs alone, rather than ARAs. In conclusion, combination therapy using ARAs and 5-αRI is better than monotherapy in the patients of BPH. Fixed dose combination (FDC), a type of combination, is also cost-effective and its sideeffects profile resembles to that of monotherapy

Finding the discriminative frequencies of motor electroencephalography signal using genetic algorithm

A crucial part of the brain-computer interface is a classification of electroencephalography (EEG) motor tasks. Artifacts such as eye and muscle movements corrupt EEG signal and reduce the classification performance. Many studies try to extract not redundant and discriminative features from EEG signals. Therefore, this study proposed a signal preprocessing and feature extraction method for EEG classification. It consists of removing the artifacts by using discrete fourier transform (DFT) as an ideal filter for specific frequencies. It also cross-correlates the EEG channels with the effective channels to emphases the EEG motor signals. Then the resultant from cross correlation are statistical calculated to extract feature for classifying a left and right finger movements using support vector machine (SVM). The genetic algorithm was applied to find the discriminative frequencies of DFT for the two EEG classes signal. The performance of the proposed method was determined by finger movement classification of 13 subjects and the experiments show that the average accuracy is above 93 percent

Effect of Diameter of Micropile on the Minaret Behavior during Earthquake, Virtual study

This study aims to suggest a technique for soil properties improvement of AL- Kadhimin shrine Minaret and to support the foundation, which has a tilt of roughly 80 cm from the vertical axis. The shrine of the AL- Kadhimin is made up of four minarets with two domes set in a large courtyard. The four minarets have skewed to varying degrees due to uncontrolled dewatering inside the shrine in recent years. However, the northeast minaret was the most inclined due to its proximity to the well placed inside shrine courtyard. When the well near the minaret is operated, the water level drops, increasing the effective stresses of the soil and causing differential settling of the minaret foundation. To maintain the minaret's foundation from potential lateral stresses, a micropile system has been proposed around it. PLAXIS 3D is used to do a three-dimensional numerical analysis in this study. A micropile system of several diameters has been considered for the suggested technique. In the analysis, the modeling and verification findings revealed that the suggested micropile system plays a significant role in incrementing the minaret's lateral load resistance (earthquake)