Electronic Waste Generation by Selected Students of a University in Bangladesh : A Case Study

The creation of electronic waste (e-waste) has increased as a result of advances in recent tools and digital technologies. Consequently, there is a need to forecast the amount of e-waste generated over a specific period of time in order for society to be able handle this e-waste environmentally safely. This study focused on forecasting the generation of e-waste by a specific number of students in a university in Bangladesh––Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), Sylhet––in order to achieve this goal. The students were chosen from several departments. Estimates of the e-waste generated by the students from electronic items, such as mobile phones, laptops, desktops, pen drives, headphones, and computer components such as keyboards, motherboards, and mouses are described in this paper. The volume of the e-waste was estimated using consumption-and-use and waste-stream approaches. The total amount of electronic waste generated at SUST in 2016 was 2,494.38 kg, estimated using the linear-trend forecasting approach. Our forecasting also revealed that the e-waste generated will gradually increase, reaching 4,070.62 kg in 2024, more than double the amount generated in 2016. The basic ideas behind, and terminology of, e-waste management, as they relate to environmental sustainability, are also discussed.© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers. This material may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the American Society of Civil Engineers. This material may be found at https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)HZ.2153-5515.0000719fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Formulation, in vitro evaluation and characterization of atorvastatin solid dispersion

Purpose: To formulate a polymer-incorporated solid dispersion preparation for enhancing the dissolution and bioavailability of atorvastatin calcium trihydrate (ATV), while maintaining oral compatibility.Method: Four different methods, i.e., physical mixing (PM), fusion (F), solvent evaporation (SE) and kneading (K), as well as three different excipients i.e. croscarmellose sodium (CCS), microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) and lactose (LAC) were used to formulate various drug-carrier combinations.Results: In SE method, the rank order of magnitude of drug release was CCS > LAC > MCC, while in fusion and kneading methods, the rank order of release was MCC > CCS > LAC and MCC > CCS > LAC, respectively. Drug release of atorvastatin was maximum (103 %) in FM2 formulation. However,this formulation was non-compatible based on spectroscopic analysis. In contrast, SC2 formulations at 1:2 ratio were compatible in terms of cumulative drug release (99 %), and based on spectroscopic data, thermal analysis and microscopic evaluation.Conclusion: These results confirm that CCS forms a superior interface with atorvastatin when SE formulation method is used. Thus, solid dispersion is a promising approach for enhancing the oral bioavailability of atorvastatin. Keywords: Atorvastatin, Solid dispersion, Bioavailability, Solvent evaporatio

CovTiNet: Covid text identification network using attention-based positional embedding feature fusion

Covid text identification (CTI) is a crucial research concern in natural language processing (NLP). Social and electronic media are simultaneously adding a large volume of Covid-affiliated text on the World Wide Web due to the effortless access to the Internet, electronic gadgets and the Covid outbreak. Most of these texts are uninformative and contain misinformation, disinformation and malinformation that create an infodemic. Thus, Covid text identification is essential for controlling societal distrust and panic. Though very little Covid-related research (such as Covid disinformation, misinformation and fake news) has been reported in high-resource languages (e.g. English), CTI in low-resource languages (like Bengali) is in the preliminary stage to date. However, automatic CTI in Bengali text is challenging due to the deficit of benchmark corpora, complex linguistic constructs, immense verb inflexions and scarcity of NLP tools. On the other hand, the manual processing of Bengali Covid texts is arduous and costly due to their messy or unstructured forms. This research proposes a deep learning-based network (CovTiNet) to identify Covid text in Bengali. The CovTiNet incorporates an attention-based position embedding feature fusion for text-to-feature representation and attention-based CNN for Covid text identification. Experimental results show that the proposed CovTiNet achieved the highest accuracy of 96.61±.001% on the developed dataset (BCovC) compared to the other methods and baselines (i.e. BERT-M, IndicBERT, ELECTRA-Bengali, DistilBERT-M, BiLSTM, DCNN, CNN, LSTM, VDCNN and ACNN)

N-AquaRAM: A Cost-Efficient Deep Learning Accelerator for Real-Time Aquaponic Monitoring

Aquaponics is an emerging area of agricultural sciences that combines aquaculture and hydroponics in a symbiotic way to increase crop production. Though it offers a lot of advantages over traditional techniques, including chemical-free and soil-less farming, its commercial application suffers from some problems such as the lack of experienced manpower. To operate a stable smart aquaponic system, it is critical to estimate the fish size properly. In this context, the use of dedicated hardware for real-time aquaponic monitoring can greatly resolve the issue of inexperienced handlers. In this article, we present a complete methodology to train a deep neural network to perform fish size estimation in real time. To achieve high accuracy, a novel implementation of swish function is presented. This novel version is far more hardware efficient than the original one, while being extremely accurate. Moreover, we present a deep learning accelerator that can classify 40 million fish samples in a second. The dedicated real-time system is about 1600 times faster than the one based on general-purpose computers. The proposed neuromorphic accelerator consumes about 2600 slice registers on a low-end model of Virtex 6 FPGA series

The emergence of scholarly literature on physical/social distancing related to Coronavirus: A bibliometric analysis

Background: The world is witnessing new public health crises due to the emergence of the novel coronavirus. This study aims to present a bibliometric analysis of research on coronavirus-related physical/social distancing.Design and Methods: In this study, a bibliometric analysis was applied to see the research productivity and its impact on coronavirus-related physical/social distancing. For this purpose, Scopus was used to retrieve the data for the analysis. A total of 2900 records was downloaded from the database for analysis.Results: The findings revealed that the top four authors published their research in the year 2020. The study ranked the British Medical Journal (BMJ) at the top position on publishing the research on the topic. Similarly, the USA took the lead in all countries in producing research on the topic. The researchers preferred the document type ‘Article’ for sharing their research, and a single authorship pattern was dominated on all other patterns.Conclusion: Plenty of bibliometric studies are available on coronavirus, but not a single study is found on coronavirus-related physical/social distancing. This study will be valuable in identifying different bibliometric dimensions on the topic

Childhood Mortality Due to Drowning in Rural Matlab of Bangladesh: Magnitude of the Problem and Proposed Solutions

Drowning is an important cause of mortality among children in rural Bangladesh. Children aged 1–4 year(s) are at a high risk of death from drowning. Although deaths of children due to drowning in Bangladesh are acknowledged as an important cause of death, little effort has been made to address the issue of preventing deaths from this cause. This study has attempted to describe the problem and suggests possible prevention strategies, which may contribute to reducing childhood mortality from drowning. Data presented in this study were collected from Matlab where ICDDR, B has been maintaining a demographic surveillance since 1966. During the study period from 1985 to 2000, 989 deaths from drowning were reported, of which 796 (80.5%) were children in the age-group of 1–4 year(s), 48 (4.8%) were in the age-group of less than one year, and 145 (14.7%) in the age-group of 5–19 years. During 1985–2000, death rate per 1,000 children due to all causes among children of 1–4-year age-group decreased appreciably from 20.7% to 5.2%, while drowning-related deaths did not. Forty-five percent (n=359) of drowning-related deaths occurred in ponds, 16.8% (n=134) in ditches, 8.1% (n=64) in canals, and 4.4% (n=35) in rivers. The sites of more than 25% of drowning-associated deaths were not recorded. Analysis of seasonal variation revealed that most deaths due to drowning occurred during April-October, i.e. mostly during the monsoon months. It was also observed that the majority (67%) of mothers of victims had no formal education. Deaths due to drowning were mostly associated with children aged 1–4 year(s) and were 20% more common among boys than among girls (odds ratio=1.2, 95% confidence interval 1.04–1.38, p<0.012). The paper recommends some interventions to reduce the number of deaths due to drowning in rural Bangladesh, which include: (a) increasing awareness among mothers and close family members about the risk of drowning, (b) door-fencing, and (c) filling of unused ditches and water holes around households

Heritability estimates and traits association in wheat advanced lines

Development of superior genotypes is the main aim all breeding programs. For this purpose comprising 14 spring wheat advanced lines with four checks were evaluated for six yield parameters during 2011-12 in an RCB design with three replications. Analysis of variance revealed highly significant differences (P?0.01) for all the studied traits except harvest index which showed significant differences (P?0.05). Mean values ranged between 87.7 to 110.4 cm for plant height, 29.1 to 38.1 cm for peduncle length, 1.91 to 2.89 g for grain weight spike-1, 5617.3 to 7197.5 kg for grain yield ha-1, 15679 to 20123 kg for biological yield ha-1 and 34.94 to 42.40% for harvest index. Grain yield has significant correlation with grain weight spike-1 (0.407**), biological yield (0.486**) and harvest index (0.549**). High heritability was observed for grain weight spike-1 (71.74%), grain yield ha-1 (69.01%) and biological yield ha-1 (71.87%)

A rare case of constrictive pericarditis as initial manifestation of paediatric anaplastic large cell lymphoma requiring urgent pericardiectomy

Constrictive pericarditis (CP) is a rare end stage inflammatory disorder affecting both parietal and visceral pericardium leading to a right heart failure. Malignancy is the least common cause of CP. Anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) accounts for 10-15% of all Non-Hodgkin lymphomas in children. Very few case reports have reported ALCL that is involving the heart and only two have been published involving pericardium but all were managed medically. We present an interesting case of an 11 year old child who presented with an effusive CP that required urgent Pericardiectomy for managing right heart failure. His histopathology was positive for ALK + ALCL

EVALUATION OF ANTIOXIDANT AND FREE RADICAL SCAVENGING ACTIVITY OF SELECTED MEDICINAL PLANTS USING DIFFERENT MODELS IN SWISS ALBINO MICE BRAIN

The current research was aimed to estimate and compare the antioxidant effect of selected medicinal plants collected from different areas of Balochistan, Pakistan. The antioxidant activitywas determined by 2, 2-diphenyl-1- picryl hydrazyl(DPPH) a radical scavenging assay, lipid peroxidation assay and total antioxidant assay. Plant extracts demonstratedhangups alongside thiobarbituric acid reactive species (TBARS) tempted by pro-oxidant 10uM ferroussulphate (FeSO4) or sodium nitroprusside in the brain region of mice. Plants extracts showed significantferric reducing and free radical scavenging activity and also showed the higher concntration of both flavonoids and phenols. It was observed that higher thetotal polyphenolicand falavonoidscontentsbetter the antioxidant effect. All the plant samples showed the order of their antioxidant activity as SolanumNigram>Momordicacharantia>SolanumVillosum>TinosporaCordifolia> Ginkgo Biloba>Cuscutareflexa. The data obtained in the present study shows that all selected plants have inhibitory effect and antioxidant activity. The antioxidant effect of the selected plants might be related to the higher concentration of phenolic. Contents,ferric reducing ability and free radical scavenging activity.In this study we tried to provide the scientific proof for the traditional use of the selectedmedicinal plants as antioxidants. Key Words: Antioxidant activity, Free radical, DPPH, Medicinal plants, Oxidative stress, Mice brain