Impact of Community Service Learning on the Social Skills of Students

Nowadays many high schools and universities are promoting community service-learning program by making it a part of the admission process; therefore, students participate in community service learning program to get admission in an institution of their choice. However, after completing the community service program, they see themselves as more socially responsible citizens. This qualitative study aimed to explore the impact of community service learning on the social skills of students. The study employed a qualitative method by randomly selecting twenty-five students for the focused group interviews from five different O- level schools situated in middle socio-economic locality. The results revealed that a community service-learning program has a positive impact on the social skills of O-level students.  Besides, students had also a positive learning experience. Findings of the study indicated that the awareness to encourage community service in schools is grounded on the acceptance that it does not only give students extra credit points but serving others or one’s community also makes them better citizens. Based on the advantages and positive experiences of students, the study recommends to include a more inclusive model of service-learning to a school curriculum.

Role of Gal and GalNAc containing glycans in various physiological processes

Glycoconjugates are involved in the vital physiological functions including blood group determination, cancer recognition, protein stabilization, sperm-egg adhesion and pathogenic interaction in body. These diverse biological functions of glycoconjugates are regulated by complex oligosaccharide structures linked with proteins and lipids in macromolecular assemblies. The diversity in oligosaccharide chains attached with lipids and proteins is specifically linked with the conformational behavior of sugar residues giving rise to unique carbohydrate structures with wide range of sequence and anomeric linkage. This is a challenging task to explore the relationship between biological processes and stereochemical behavior of sugar residues. Current review article focuses the specific stereochemical involvement (anomery and linkages) of Gal and its derivative GalNAc in wide range of cellular activities. These sugar residues exhibit different physiological functions at the terminal and subterminal position in glycans.Keywords: D-Galactose; N-Acetyl-D-Galactosamine; Oligosaccharides; Sequence and anomeric linkages; Physiological efficac

Exploring the Issue of ‘Run-away Women’ in Pakistan: A Call for Social and Legal Change

Women are considered as vulnerable members of almost every society. In Pakistan the scenario is no different. ‘Run-away women’ is one of the socio-legal problems faced by women. Women who consider running away from their families often face difficult situations, which may result in being trapped into prostitution or even being murdered by their own families in certain cases. In runaway cases, the majority of women do return to their families after reconciliation. However, what happens to these women after reconciliation remains unknown. This paper aims to highlight the causes of running away and its consequences in Pakistani society. It also intends to examine the existing legal mechanisms and their role in dealing with this problem. This study also analyzes the Islamic and customary laws of Pakistan to identify whether both respect the decisionmaking authority and freedom of women, or whether they create any hindrances to women’s rights and their freedom to decide. Finally, measures for improvements in the legal and social system are suggested. analyzes the Islamic and customary laws of Pakistan to identify whether both respect the decision-making authority and freedom of women, or whether they create any hindrances to women’s rights and their freedom to decide. Finally, measures for improvements in the legal and social system are suggested. Key words: runaway women, runaway girls, runaway marriage, women’s rights, women’s protectio

A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON PERFORMANCE OF BASIC AND ENSEMBLE CLASSIFIERS WITH VARIOUS DATASETS

Classification plays a critical role in machine learning (ML) systems for processing images, text and high -dimensional data. Predicting class labels from training data is the primary goal of classification. An optimal model for a particular classification problem is chosen on the basis of the model's performance and execution time. This paper compares and analyses the performance of basic as well as ensemble classifiers utilizing 10 -fold cross validation and also discusses their essential concepts, advantages, and disadvantages. In this study five basic classifiers namely Naïve Bayes (NB), Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), and Random Forest (RF) and the ensemble of all the five classifiers along with few more combinations are compared with five University of California Irvine (UCI) ML Repository datasets and a Diabetes Health Indicators dataset from kaggle repository. To analyze and compare the performance of classifiers, evaluation metrics like Accuracy, Recall, Precision, Area Under Curve (AUC) and F-Score are used. Experimental results showed that SVM performs best on two out of the six datasets (Diabetes Health Indicators and waveform), RF performs best for Arrhythmia, Sonar, Tic-tac-toe datasets, and the best ensemble combination is found to be DT+SVM+RF on Ionosphere dataset having respective accuracies 72.58%, 90.38%, 81.63%, 73.59%, 94.78% and 94.01% and the proposed ensemble combinations outperformed over the conventional models for few datasets

Distribution of sensory taste thresholds for phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) taste ability in North Indian Muslim populations

AbstractThe ability to taste Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), a bitter organic compound has been described as a bimodal autosomal trait in both genetic and anthropological studies. This study is based on the ability of a person to taste PTC. The present study reports the threshold distribution of PTC taste sensitivity among some Muslim populations of North India, as till now no detailed information is available. A survey was conducted among healthy individuals within the age range of 10–45years who were randomly selected from among six populations viz; Syed, Sheikh, Pathan, Ansari, Qureshi and Saifi. The PTC tasting ability was measured using a serial dilution method of Harris and Kalmus. A bimodal distribution was observed from the graphs plotted for the PTC threshold distribution. The mean PTC threshold values (±SD) of the male and female individuals were calculated as 8.12±0.21 and 8.39±0.20, respectively. The threshold values among the six populations ranged from 7.71 to 8.81 among males, 7.44–9.04 among females and 7.86–8.91 as combined. The results found that females show a higher mean threshold value than males, though of no statistical significance. This type of study will provide brief information on the distribution of PTC sensory thresholds among some Muslim populations of North India. This study has some physiological relevance to highlight the adaptability of endogamous groups to behavioral traits in the same place

Drop size in a liquid pulsed sieve-plate extraction column

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Genetic study of phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) taste perception among six human populations of Jammu and Kashmir (India)

Background: The ability to taste phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), a bitter chemical has long been known to be a bimodal autosomal trait inherited in a simple Mendelian recessive pattern which is being widely used for both genetic and anthropological studies. The frequency of taster and non-taster allele is found to vary in different populations. The present paper deals with the distribution of PTC tasting ability as a marker to study the genetic structure among Muslim populations of Jammu; as no detailed information is available.Aim: To investigate the prevalence and gene frequencies of PTC taste sensitivity among male and females.Subjects and methods: We have undertaken a survey of gene frequencies of PTC taste ability for six different endogamous groups including tribal population. PTC serial dilution method was used to assess the PTC taster and non-taster phenotypes. Hardy–Weinberg method was used to determine allele frequencies.Results: Gujjar and Bakarwal population showed highest PTC threshold while Syed had the least. The phenotypic frequency for PTC taste ability varies within six populations; Syed were observed with highest taster frequency while Gujjar and Bakarwal had lowest taster frequency. The taster frequency of six different populations showed that the percentage of taster frequency was more frequent than that of the non-tasters. Also, females (x2= 4.563, df =5, p= 0.471) had more PTC tasters than males (x2= 5.254, df =5, p= 0.385), being statistically significant. The allelic frequencies in Gujjar and Bakarwal for non-taster (t) males and females were 55.86 and 54.55, respectively. In Syed population, t-allele frequencies for males and females were 45.75 and 37.79, respectively, while the other four populations showed intermediate t-allele frequencies. The heterozygosity showed little variation among all of the six populations.Keywords: Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC); PTC threshold; Gene frequency; Genotype frequency; Heterozygosity; Human populatio

Rare Case of Giant Asymptomatic Left Coronary Artery Aneurysm of 10 cm Associated with Coronary Cameral Fistula

A giant coronary artery aneurysm (CAA) associated with a coronary cameral fistula is an extremely rare finding. Most cases of CAAs are asymptomatic. The incidence of CAA varies between 0.3% to 5.3%. Due to advancements in diagnostic technologies, the incidence of CAA is on the rise. Even in the modern days of medical science, the clinical course of CAA is still unpredictable and the suitable timing for the treatment of CAA is still open to debate. We reported a case of a giant coronary artery aneurysm in a 38-year-old female, which was 9.4 x 9.7 x 9.2cm in size, arising from the left coronary artery, extending into the proximal circumflex, and draining into the right atrium, forming a fistula tract. The patient was diagnosed with the help of coronary computed tomography (CT) and cardiac catheterization after which surgery was performed to repair the aneurysm and fistula. Postoperatively, the patient recovered without any complication

Meaningful Information Extraction from Unstructured Clinical Documents

Medical concept and entity extraction from the medical narrative unstructured documents is the crucial step in most of the contemporary health systems. For the extraction of medical concepts and entities, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus is a big source of biomedical and health-related concepts. Recently various tools like Sophia, MetaMap and cTAKES, and many other rules-based methods and algorithm like Quick UMLS etc. have been developed which are performing a successful role in the process of medical concept extraction. The goal of this paper is to design a generic algorithm to identify a package consisting of standard concepts, their semantic types, and entity types on the basis of medical phrases and terms used in the clinical unstructured documents. The proposed algorithm implements the UMLS terminology service (UTS) and customizes to extract concepts for all the meaningful phrases and terms used in the narratives and determine their semantic and entity types in order to find exact categorization of the concepts. The proposed algorithm has produced a very useful set of results to use for labeling the biomedical data, which could in term be used for training data-driven approaches such asmachine learning