A critical review of design features of LMOOCs

This project is funded by the Teaching Development Grant, the Education University of Hong Kong (T0226).There has been an exponential growth in Language Massive Open Online Courses (LMOOCs) in the past decade. LMOOCs have also become an emergent and topical area of research in CALL, in particular, vis-a-vis learners’ perceptions and experiences. However, not much attention has been paid to analysing the features of LMOOCs. We argue that a systematic investigation of LMOOC design features is vital, especially in light of recent criticisms by some CALL and language education scholars regarding the incompatibility between LMOOC designs and language teaching and learning theories and methodologies. This systematic review, which employs Hall’s (2013) framework of web-based instruction, addresses this gap by analysing instructional and assessment features of 100 LMOOCs on edX and Coursera. The synthesised findings suggest three strengths of LMOOCs: Most LMOOCs are introductory, suitable for beginning language learners (directionality). Most are easy to navigate because of their consistency in format and features. And most employ a range of multimodal instructional materials (multimodality). Three limitations are also identified: There are few opportunities for instructor-learner and learner-learner interaction (interactivity) and learner-centred, formative assessments (accountability). Besides, LMOOCs are designed with a prescribed learning sequence without addressing individual learner differences (adaptability). Based on our analysis, practical suggestions for LMOOC developers are discussed. Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Pleural Tuberculosis and its Treatment Outcomes

Purpose: To evaluate the incidence, treatment and clinical outcomes of tuberculosis pleuritis at a hospital in the state of Penang, Malaysia.Methods: A retrospective study was conducted in Hospital of Penang, Malaysia. Patient records were reviewed retrospectively to identify patients with confirmed diagnosis of tuberculous pleuritis from January 2006 to December 2008. Chest x-ray (CXR) and pleural biopsy were carried out on all patients. Directly observed therapy (DOT) was given to all patients. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 16.Results: Of 1548 tuberculosis cases, 80 (5.2 %) patients had tuberculous pleuritis. The mean age of the patients was 35.4 ± 12.87 years, with a male to female ratio of 3.4:1. Ethnically, a plurality (n = 30, 37.7 %) of cases among tuberculosis pleuritis patients were Chinese, followed by Malay (31.2 %). Out of the 80 patients with tuberculous pleuritis, 10 (12.5 %) also had diabetes mellitus, and 8 (10.0 %) HIV/AIDS. Fever, cough, chest pain and shortness of breathing were the most frequently reported symptoms. Treatment success rate was 1.558 times higher among TB group than pleuritis TB group (Odds ratio, 95 % CI, 1.06 – 2.59, p = 0.025).Conclusion: The incidence of TB pleuritis was gender- and race-related, with DM and HIV the most commonly reported risk factors. Treatment success rate was higher among pulmonary TB group than in those with TB pleuritis (extra pulmonary TB).Keywords: Tuberculosis, Pleuritis, HIV/AIDS, Biopsy, Pulmonary

Electromyography (EMG) based Classification of Neuromuscular Disorders using Multi-Layer Perceptron

Electromyography (EMG) signals are the measure of activity in the muscles. The aim of this study is to identify the neuromuscular disease based on EMG signals by means of classification. The neuromuscular diseases that have been identified are myopathy and neuropathy. The classification was carried out using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). There are five feature extraction techniques that were used to extract the signals such as Autoregressive (AR), Root Mean Square (RMS), Zero Crossing (ZC), Waveform length (WL) and Mean Absolute Value (MAV). A comparative analysis of these different techniques were carried out based on the results. The Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) was used for carrying out the classification

Visual function due to regeneration of optic nerve or optic tract through peripheral nerve homografts

Segments of sciatic nerve from one leg were used to induce regeneration of transected optic nerve (ON) or tract in Syrian hamsters. In the first group, the nerve graft was sutured to the stump of the transected ON of the right eye in young adult animals, and the other end was placed below the surface of the ipsilateral superior colliculus (SC); the opposite eye was removed. In one animal, orienting movements in the wrong direction were elicited and recorded on videotape, beginning when the animal was more than 1.5 yr old, over 1 yr after surgery. In the second group, a similar procedure was used but with the nerve going to the contralateral SC. In 3 of 4 long-term survivors, visually elicited turning was obtained and recorded, most reliably in the final 4 mo of their 2-yr life. Regenerating retinofugal axons were traced and their terminations in SC reconstructed using a CT-B procedure and immunohistochemistry (secondary AB conjugated to Alexa-488) and fluorescence microscopy. The visually unresponsive animal had no regeneration, and the most responsive animal had the greatest amount of regeneration. In a 3rd procedure, the right brachium of SC was transected, and 2 or 3 segments of sciatic nerve were implanted as bridges to elicit optic tract regeneration. The first 3 of these animals were operated at age 13-19 days; considerable regeneration was verified anatomically in each case, after behavioral demonstration of visual orienting. Supported by NIH grant EY00126.published_or_final_versio

Selective production of volatile fatty acids at different pH in an anaerobic membrane bioreactor

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd This study investigated the production of major volatile fatty acid (VFA) components in an anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) to treat low-strength synthetic wastewater. No selective inhibition was applied for methane production and solvent-extraction method was used for VFA extraction. The results showed acetic and propionic acid were the predominant VFA components at pH 7.0 and 6.0 with concentrations of 1.444 ± 0.051 and 0.516 ± 0.032 mili-mol/l respectively. At pH 12.0 isobutyric acid was the major VFA component with a highest concentration of 0.712 ± 0.008 mili-mol/l. The highest VFA yield was 48.74 ± 1.5 mg VFA/100 mg CODfeed at pH 7.0. At different pH, AnMBR performance was evaluated in terms of COD, nutrient removal and membrane fouling rate. It was observed that the membrane fouled at a faster rate in both acidic and alkaline pH conditions, the slowest rate in membrane fouling was observed at pH 7.0

Biohydrogen production from anaerobic digestion and its potential as renewable energy

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd The current demand-supply scenario for fossil fuels requires an alternative energy source with cleaner combustion products whilst production of hydrogen from anaerobic digestion involves the utilization of waste materials and zero emission of greenhouse gasses. However, large scale industrial application has yet not been implemented due to numerous challenges in its production, storage, and transportation. This review study demonstrates that production of hydrogen from anaerobic digestion is potentially a worthy alternative regarding energy density, environmental impact, and cost. Moreover, dependence on fossil fuel systems in the future could be minimized when biohydrogen production is feasible from renewable energy sources

Optimization of hydraulic retention time and organic loading rate for volatile fatty acid production from low strength wastewater in an anaerobic membrane bioreactor

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd This study aims to investigate the production of volatile fatty acids (VFAs) from low strength wastewater at various hydraulic retention time (HRT) and organic loading rate (OLR) in a continuous anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) using glucose as carbon source. This experiment was performed without any selective inhibition of methanogens and the reactor pH was maintained at 7.0 ± 0.1. 48, 24, 18, 12, 8 and 6 h-HRTs were applied and the highest VFA concentration was recorded at 8 h with an overall VFA yield of 48.20 ± 1.21 mg VFA/100 mg COD feed . Three different ORLs were applied (350, 550 and 715 mg COD feed ) at the optimum 8 h-HRT. The acetic and propanoic acid concentration maximums were (1.1845 ± 0.0165 and 0.5160 ± 0.0141 mili-mole/l respectively) at 550 mg COD feed . The isobutyric acid concentration was highest (0.3580 ± 0.0407 mili-mole/l) at 715 mg COD feed indicating butyric-type fermentation at higher organic loading rate

An Efficient Anomaly Recognition Framework Using an Attention Residual LSTM in Surveillance Videos

Video anomaly recognition in smart cities is an important computer vision task that plays a vital role in smart surveillance and public safety but is challenging due to its diverse, complex, and infrequent occurrence in real-time surveillance environments. Various deep learning models use significant amounts of training data without generalization abilities and with huge time complexity. To overcome these problems, in the current work, we present an efficient light-weight convolutional neural network (CNN)-based anomaly recognition framework that is functional in a surveillance environment with reduced time complexity. We extract spatial CNN features from a series of video frames and feed them to the proposed residual attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) network, which can precisely recognize anomalous activity in surveillance videos. The representative CNN features with the residual blocks concept in LSTM for sequence learning prove to be effective for anomaly detection and recognition, validating our model’s effective usage in smart cities video surveillance. Extensive experiments on the real-world benchmark UCF-Crime dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed model within complex surveillance environments and demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models with a 1.77%, 0.76%, and 8.62% increase in accuracy on the UCF-Crime, UMN and Avenue datasets, respectively

Making Neural Networks FAIR

Research on neural networks has gained significant momentum over the past few years. Because training is a resource-intensive process and training data cannot always be made available to everyone, there has been a trend to reuse pre-trained neural networks. As such, neural networks themselves have become research data. In this paper, we first present the neural network ontology FAIRnets Ontology, an ontology to make existing neural network models findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable according to the FAIR principles. Our ontology allows us to model neural networks on a meta-level in a structured way, including the representation of all network layers and their characteristics. Secondly, we have modeled over 18,400 neural networks from GitHub based on this ontology, which we provide to the public as a knowledge graph called FAIRnets, ready to be used for recommending suitable neural networks to data scientists

Modern eminence and concise critique of solar thermal energy and vacuum insulation technologies for sustainable low-carbon infrastructure

A concise critique on harnessing the abundant solar thermal energy and improvement with vacuum insulation for the utilization and conversion is presented. This research implicates that the world is becoming a global solar smart city prompted by increasing daily demand of energy by the global population and land-use. Amongst all the renewable energy resources available, solar thermal energy collectors (STC) are the most copious because it is accessible in both direct and indirect modes with global solar thermal capacity in operation in 2019 was 479 GWth and annual energy yield estimated to be 389 TWh. Hybridization has been found to be the only way of improving the existing performance of (STC) such as hybrid photovoltaic thermal (PVT) with phase-change material (PCM) for energy storage and magneto-thermoelectric generators (MTEGs) and/or vacuum insulated TEG (VTEG) for waste heat energy conversion to electrical power. The concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies were also precisely studied and yet parabolic trough collector, dish sterling and solar tower are amongst the top solar thermal heat energy harvesters and its electrical power generation has also been comprehended. The modern eminence of vacuum insulation technologies on thermal comfort and sound insulation in sustainable low-carbon buildings is presented. The research implicates that there is still a scope of improving the building and construction sector and target to achieve not only zero-energy buildings (ZEB) but generating-energy buildings (GEB). A concise critique on vacuum insulated smart glazed windows is presented and the review implicates that the hybridization with PV and TEG and novelty in the constructional materials of vacuum glazing (VG) and translucent vacuum insulation panel (TVIP) are vital in the realistic move towards the GEB. The future of vacuum insulation is not only limited to GEB but vital applications occur in medical, imaging, mechatronics and manufacturing industries