Community Libraries in the Capital of Pakistan: current status, issues, and perspectives

The aim of this study was to explore the status, collection, and challenges of community libraries in the capital of Pakistan. A purposive sampling technique was used for data collection from 12librarians/library in-charges working in these community libraries. This study found that the collection of reading materials in the community libraries was between 4000 to 7000 and offered Web-OPAC, interlibrary loan, books borrow services. These libraries have proper websites, classified books, adequate sitting arrangements, and a heating and cooling system to support the community. Though, these libraries were facing some major challenges such as lack of sufficient funds, lack of training opportunities for LIS, old library building, lack of attention of Government, and non-availability of electronic resources. Similarly, uncomfortable furniture and lack of knowledge about new library trends among librarians were the major obstacles in the effective utilization of community libraries in the capital of Pakistan. Through reliable research work, the findings of this study highlight certain recommendations for developing these community libraries into learning resource centers that could support truly the information needs of the community at large

Sinus of valsalva aneurysm rupturing into main pulmonary artery: A rare paediatric cardiac emergency

Congenital Sinus of Valsalva aneurysm is a rare congenital cardiac disease. Most common site of origin is the right sinus. It ruptures into right ventricle or right atrium most of the times. Only in less than 2% of the cases it ruptures into the pulmonary artery. We report a rare case of right sinus of valsalva aneurysm rupturing into pulmonary artery

Serological and molecular detection of bovine brucellosis at institutional livestock farms in Punjab, Pakistan

Bovine brucellosis remains a persistent infection in ruminants in Pakistan. A total of 828 (409 buffaloes and 419 cattle) sera were collected from 11 institutional-owned livestock farms in Punjab, Pakistan. The samples were tested by rose bengal plate agglutination test (RBPT) and indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (iELISA). The seroprevalence along with 95% confidence interval (CI) was determined. Univariable and multivariable analysis of the epidemiological background data was conducted and odds ratio (OR) was calculated to understand any association between the risk factors and the seroprevalence. An overall seroprevalence of 3.9% (Positive/Tested = 32/828) and 3.3% (27/828) was detected by RBPT and iELISA, respectively. The seroprevalence of 5.6% (CI 3.6–8.3) and 4.7%, (CI 2.8–7.2) and the odds ratio of 2.63 (CI 1.20–5.77) and 2.50 (CI 1.08–5.78) for testing positive by RBPT and iELISA, respectively were significantly higher (p < 0.05) in buffaloes than in cattle. Breed, sex, history of abortion and retention of fetal membranes (RFM) in the animals were not found statistically significantly associated with the infection. RBPT and iELISA based results agreed almost perfect (k = 0.877). In total, Brucella abortus-DNA (9/27) was amplified from seropositive samples by real-time polymerase chain reaction. This study identified for the first time the etiological agents of brucellosis at a molecular level at institutional-owned livestock farms in Pakistan. View Full-Tex

Congestion avoidance in wireless sensor network using software defined network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a core component of multiple smart city applications. Utilizing the same WSN for multiple applications helps reduce cost. However, satisfying quality of service requirements of these independent applications is very challenging. For instance, uncoordinated path selection for data dissemination may result in the formation of queues in the WSN violating end-to-end delay requirements of several applications. To this end, we propose a software defined network based approach to ensure satisfaction of individual delay constraints while ensuring minimal increase in the average queue length of the WSN. The approach utilizes a logically centralized controller to generate a comprehensive view of the whole network in a scalable manner. We develop several graph theoretic algorithms to reduce the number of nodes and edges in the communication paths and to identify the most suitable communication paths for each application so that end-to-end delays are minimized. The evaluations demonstrate that our approach performs up to 34% better than existing works and up to 14% worst in comparison to the optimal solution for different topologies, network sizes, and end-to-end delay requirements. Moreover, performance of the proposed graph theoretic algorithms is also measured w.r.t. time

Efficient Data Analytics on Augmented Similarity Triplets

Many machine learning methods (classification, clustering, etc.) start with a known kernel that provides similarity or distance measure between two objects. Recent work has extended this to situations where the information about objects is limited to comparisons of distances between three objects (triplets). Humans find the comparison task much easier than the estimation of absolute similarities, so this kind of data can be easily obtained using crowd-sourcing. In this work, we give an efficient method of augmenting the triplets data, by utilizing additional implicit information inferred from the existing data. Triplets augmentation improves the quality of kernel-based and kernel-free data analytics tasks. Secondly, we also propose a novel set of algorithms for common supervised and unsupervised machine learning tasks based on triplets. These methods work directly with triplets, avoiding kernel evaluations. Experimental evaluation on real and synthetic datasets shows that our methods are more accurate than the current best-known techniques