The Introduction of Informal Cooperative Learning into our Programming Laboratories

Presentation given at the Midwest SoTL Conference. Discusses the effects of implementing informal cooperative learning techniques in an introductory programming course

Achieving K-Anonymity Using Parallelism in Full Domain Generalization

Preserving privacy while publishing data has emerged as key research area in data security and has become a primary issue in publishing person specific sensitive information. How to preserve one’s privacy efficiently is a critical issue while publishing data. k - Anonymity is a key technique for de-identifying the sensitive datasets. In our work, we have described an approach to implement various k anonymity algorithms and also propose a parallelism method that produces better results with the real-world datasets. Additionally, we suggest a new approach that attains better results by applying a parallelism approach and exploiting various characteristics of our suggested approach. The proposed approach uses the concept of samarati algorithm to generalize the lattice and uses the binary search method. The proposed algorithm generates the levels using binary search in the lattice and then uses the parallel mechanism for evaluating the nodes. The proposed algorithm has less execution time than other full domain generalization algorithms for k -anonymization

Adverse drug reactions observed in treatment of gastro intestinal and respiratory tract infections: a prospective analysis

Background: The aim of the study was to observe common adverse drug reactions in treatment of gastro intestinal and respiratory tract infections in a tertiary care hospitals.Methods: A prospective observational study was conducted by Departments of Pharmacology for a period of one year from prescriptions and case sheets of medical record section. Adverse drug reaction reporting forms and alert cards were used for reporting.Results: The drugs most commonly used for gastrointestinal tract and respiratory diseases are tablets norflox 400 mg, norflox-tz, taxim 200 mg, IV amikacin and iv amoxicillin (500 mg) and clavulanic acid (125 mg) combination. Systems affected by use of above drugs were skin and gastrointestinal tract. Urticaria on skin, abdominal pain, itching in genital area, ulcer on oral mucosa are the common adverse drug reactions observed.Conclusions: Drugs used for common gastrointestinal tract and respiratory tract infections alert cards should be issued to patients when prescribing and adverse drug reactions should be reported to higher centres. Brand names causing adverse reactions should be monitored regularly and their further usage should be based on signals from other centres. All tertiary care hospitals should have antimicrobial guidelines policy to reduce adverse drug reactions

Prescription audit of patients in a teritiary care hospital

Background: This study was prescribed errors to promote irrational use of drug and decrease patience compliance. Prescription audit can improve prescribing practices and patients to receive high quality drugs.Methods: The study was observational carried out in 150 patients attending outpatient department for period of 6 months from April 2019 to October 2019. Data was analysed using WHO core indicatorsResults: 16% of prescriptions demographic details like age, sex, age were incomplete. In few (15%) prescriptions omission of diagnosis and irrational combination was reported. Dosing errors like doses and duration of treatment were not mentioned in some of prescriptions. Percentage of antibiotics per prescription was found to be 23.64%, which is much higher than the ideal value recommended by WHO.Conclusions: The average number of drugs was higher in prescriptions and trend of polypharmacy was noted with antibiotics usage. Dosing error and few prescriptions were irrational FDCs. Generic drugs were written in majority of prescriptions from essential drug list. Our study need to highlight to write rational prescription by adhering to WHO guidelines with feed back to prescribers and training session regarding safe use of drugs

Performance prediction of riser termination devices using barracuda

In fluidized bed reactors, one of the locations where attrition is significant is cyclones. One way to reduce the attrition in cyclones is to reduce the amount of catalyst going into the cyclones. This is achieved by separating the catalyst particles from the combined gas solid flow before the stream enters the cyclones. Using a riser flow along with a riser terminator, some of the catalyst particles can be separated from gas stream. In this work, we will discuss how Barracuda has been used at The Dow Chemical Company to investigate two riser termination devices for separating catalyst particles from gas phase. The two types of riser terminators simulated are (1) flat disk and (2) slots-elbow, as shown below in Figure 1. The results indicate that the slots-elbow type terminator has an overall separation efficiency of more than 95% whereas the disk terminator has approximately 80% efficiency. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

An Empirical Case Study of Knowledge Transfer within an Organization

The paper focuses on how the knowledge is being transferred from peer to peer in an organization. Knowledge can be transferred in a number of ways. Knowledge is being considered as the essential resource by most of the organizations. Knowledge gives the richness to the organization, has to be managed to fulfill its aims and targets. Knowledge of individual / organization can be improved by transferring it. We also emphasize the knowledge transformation between entities to discover the central aspect of knowledge transfer by considering two different IT companies as a case study

Remdesivir use in pregnant women with severe COVID-19

Numerous therapeutic strategies are proposed and tested for SARS CO-V2 infection. Remdesivir is researched and proposed by various societies. Studies about efficacy and safety in pregnancy are limited. A case series of 22 pregnant women effected with severe COVID disease and who received remdesivir, over a period of 1 year from May 2020 to May 2021 is presented. The 12 antenatal and 10 post-partum women were included. Demographic factors, baseline, day 3 and day 7 blood values of haemoglobin, total leukocyte count, platelets, liver enzymes, serum creatinine and D-dimers were collected. Adverse events were reported. Pregnancy complications and foetal and neonatal complications were studied. Pre-eclampsia was the most common comorbidity. The 99% of pregnant women and 100% of postpartum women recovered from COVID disease after remdesivir use. Lab investigations did not change considerably during the week of remdesivir use, suggesting its safety. Incidence of adverse events reported is 36.3%, of these 9% are serious adverse events. There are no antenatal or post-natal complications. No incidence of teratogenicity, foetal or neonatal complications. Incidence of feto-maternal transmission was 9%. Remdesivir is effective in treating severe SARS-CoV2 infection and has safety profile in pregnancy with regard to maternal and foetal effects

A generic contact detection framework for cylindrical particles in discrete element modelling

This paper aims to develop a generic framework for detecting contact between cylindrical particles in discrete element modelling based on a full exploitation of the axi-symmetrical property of cylinders. The main contributions include: (1) A four-parameter based local representative system is derived to describe the spatial relationship between two cylinders so that the 3D cylinder-cylinder intersection problem can be reduced to a series of 2D circle-ellipse intersections, which considerably simplifies the contact detection procedure. (2) A two-stage contact detection scheme is proposed in which no-overlap contact pairs are identified in the first overlap check stage, and then the actual overlap region is determined in the second resolution stage and represented by two schemes: the layered representation which is generic, and the edge representation which is numerically more efficient but less accurate. (3) The most significant contribution is the development of two theorems that establish a fundamental relationship between the contact point and contact normal of two contacting cylinders, offering a simple approach to determining the normal direction based on the contact point and vice versa. These theorems are valid not only for cylinders, but also for any axi-symmetrical shapes and their combinations. Some numerical issues are discussed. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the capability and applicability of the proposed methodologies