Enhancing Learning Technology: By Incorporating Social Media Platforms in Language Teaching Classrooms

Social Media performs a high-surpassed position in English, as it allows English language beginners to improve their studying and writing abilities. Social media is utilized in classrooms, wherever students can begin their blogs. They will make their connections with humans more prominent and construct a social community known as PLN (Personal Learning Network). Throughout COVID-19, all social media networks became popular, and plenty of used sites for an off-the-cuff time-pass. With the assistance of web 2.0 technology, blogs became treasured and engaging equipment for English and Foreign Languages, teachers the scope of these social networks, significantly blogs, thus, will broaden the learner-learner and learner-teacher interactions. The researcher will analyze the difficulties of EFL learners and suggest technical remedies to eliminate the problem and face barriers in writing English via educational technology

Enhancement in Speaker Identification through Feature Fusion using Advanced Dilated Convolution Neural Network

There are various challenges in identifying the speakers accurately. The Extraction of discriminative features is a vital task for accurate identification in the speaker identification task. Nowadays, speaker identification is widely investigated using deep learning. The complex and noisy speech data affects the performance of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC); hence, MFCC fails to represent the speaker characteristics accurately. In this proposed work, a novel text-independent speaker identification system is developed to enhance the performance by fusion of Log-MelSpectrum and excitation features. The excitation information is obtained due to the vibration of vocal folds, and it is represented using Linear Prediction (LP) residual. The various types of features extracted from the excitation are residual phase, sharpness, Energy of Excitation (EoE), and Strength of Excitation (SoE). The extracted features were processed with the dilated convolution neural network (dilated CNN) to fulfill the identification task. The extensive evaluation showed that the fusion of excitation features gives better results than the existing methods. The accuracy reaches 94.12% for 11 complex classes and 91.34% for 80 speakers, and Equal Error Rate (EER) is reduced to 1.16% for the proposed model. The proposed model is tested with the Librispeech corpus using Matlab 2021b tool, outperforming the existing baseline models. The proposed model achieves an accuracy improvement of 1.34% compared to the baseline system

Evaluation of role of laparoscopy in determining etiology of infertility

Background: Although population explosion is a major problem in India, infertility appears to be a problem in 5-15% of Indian population. All these patients require evaluation. Laparoscopy plays a valuable role in the diagnosis of infertility. After thorough clinical examination and specific investigations, diagnostic laparoscopy is performed to detect patency of tubes, morphological defects in uterus, ovaries and tuboperitoineal factors. This study was conducted to assess the role of diagnostic laparoscopy in the investigation of female infertility and to evaluate the various causes of infertility like endometriosis, PCOD tubal and peritoneal factors, uterine anomalies, tuberculosis etc. by using diagnostic laparoscopy.Methods: Study was carried out in 60 infertile patients attending outpatient department of hospitals attached to Sri Siddhartha Medical College Hospital, Tumkur.  Both primary and secondary infertility patients who were anxious to conceive and undergo diagnostic laparoscopy were evaluated. Those who were not willing and who were contraindicated for the procedure were excluded.Results: Diagnostic laparoscopy was performed in 72% of primary and 28% of secondary infertility patients. Majority of the patients of primary infertility were in age group 21-25 years and that of secondary were between 26-30 years. Majority of patients in both the groups had duration of 1-5 year of infertility. In our study tubal factors (50%) contributed to majority of the infertility causes. Complication rate was minimum and was comparable to other standard studies.Conclusions: Laparoscopic is the gold standard for diagnosing tubal and peritoneal disease, endometriosis and other pelvic pathology, because no other imaging technique gives the same degree of sensitivity or specificity. Hence diagnostic laparoscopy is an indispensable tool in the evaluation in the evaluation infertility

Obstetric outcome study of oligohydramnios beyond 34 completed weeks of gestation

Background: Perinatal morbidity and mortality are significantly increased when oligohydramnios is present. As the amniotic fluid volume decreases, the perinatal mortality rate increases. The incidence of major congenital anomalies with IUGR also increases as the amniotic fluid volume declines. There is a close association between declining placental function in the latter part of the third trimester and amniotic fluid volume1. Thus, post term patients are at a greater risk for development of oligohydramnios. Fetal anomalies that results in oligohydramnios classically involve the urinary tract. The most frequently mentioned renal anomalies include bilateral renal agenesis, multicystic dysplastic kidneys, bladder outlet obstruction and infantile polycystic kidneys.Methods: All antenatal patients seen in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Sri Siddhartha Medical College and Research Centre between January 2015 to January 2017, who were willing to participate in the trial study were enrolled. Ultrasound GE Voulson S8-PRO equipped with 3.5 MHz transducer was used to measure the amniotic fluid index. The AFI in each group was noted and the pregnancy outcome in each group was determined. At the time of delivery following data variables were collected and compiled.Results: There were 105 women, who were divided into three groups of 35 each. Those women with AFI<5 had more chances of emergency caesarian section, the causes were fetal distress with variable and late fetal heart decelerations. The incidence of meconium stained liquor and NICU admission were more.Conclusions: The women with AFI<5 had more chances of emergency caesarian section, the causes were fetal distress with variable and late fetal heart decelerations. Amniotic Fluid Index is a valuable screening test for detecting fetuses that may have poor perinatal outcome

Antibiotic susceptibility pattern of organisms causing surgical site infection

Background: Approximately 30-50% of antibiotic use in hospitals is now for pre-surgical prophylaxis. Selection of antibiotics for prophylaxis should be based on its activity against expected bacteria at the desired surgical site. Appropriate antibiotic prophylaxis can reduce the risk of postoperative morbidity and mortality. Abuse of antimicrobials increases the cost of treatment and supports the emergence of resistant bacteria. This study was undertaken with the primary objective of to test the antibiotic susceptibility pattern of organisms causing SSIs.Methods: A descriptive study was carried out in general surgical wards of KR hospital, Mysore for a period of 18 months (2015-2016). The relevant data was collected from the case sheets of patients who were diagnosed with SSI. Pus samples were collected, and culture-sensitivity was done. Collected data were analysed using appropriate statistical tests.Results: A total of 263 study subjects including both males and females were enrolled in the study. Out of 263 pus samples 92% were culture positive. The most common organisms causing SSI were E. Coli-ESBL (n=73) and MRSA (n=44). Gram-negative organisms were highly resistant to β-lactam antibiotics and Gram-positive organisms were resistant to cotrimoxazole, erythromycin, clindamycin, cefoxitin and ciprofloxacin.Conclusions: Good hygienic measures should be followed by the patients and health-workers. A revision of hospital antibiotic policy according to the local antibiotic susceptibility pattern is recommended

Antigenic repertoire of Plasmodium vivax transmission-blocking vaccine candidates from the Indian subcontinent

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Genetic polymorphism is an inevitable component of a multistage infectious organism, such as the malaria parasite. By means of genetic polymorphism, parasite opts particular polymorph and reveals survival advantage. <it>Pvs25 </it>and <it>pvs28 </it>are sexual stage antigen genes, expressed at the ookinete stage inside the mosquito gut, and considered as potential transmission-blocking vaccine candidates. This study presents sequence variations in two important transmission blocking antigen genes <it>pvs25 and pvs28 </it>in the field isolates of <it>P. vivax </it>from the Indian subcontinent.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>One hundred microscopically diagnosed <it>P. vivax </it>isolates were collected from five geographical regions of India. <it>Pvs25 and pvs28 </it>genes were PCR amplified and sequenced to assess sequence variation among field isolates.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 26 amino acid substitutions were observed in Pvs25 (10) and Pvs28 (16) among field isolates of <it>P. vivax</it>. Tandem repeat polymorphism observed in <it>pvs28 </it>shows 3-6 tandem repeats in the field isolates. Seven and eight novel amino acid substitutions were observed in Pvs25 and Pvs28, respectively in Indian isolates. Comparison of amino acid substitutions suggests that majority of substitutions observed in global isolates were also present in Indian subcontinent. A single haplotype was observed to be major haplotype among isolates of Delhi, Nadiad, Chennai and Panna except in isolates of Kamrup. Further, population comparison analyses suggest that <it>P. vivax </it>isolates inhabiting in north-eastern region (Kamrup) were distantly related with the isolates from remaining parts of the country. Majority of the amino acid substitutions observed in Indian isolates were more identical to the substitutions reported from isolates of Thailand and Bangladesh.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Study uncovered many new amino acid substitutions as well as a predominance of single haplotype in Indian subcontinent except in north-eastern region of the country. The amino acid substitutions data generated in this study from different geographical regions of the Indian subcontinent could be helpful in designing a more effective anti-malarial transmission-blocking vaccine.</p