Carbon-Dot-Sensitized, Nitrogen-Doped TiO2in Mesoporous Silica for Water Decontamination through Nonhydrophobic Enrichment-Degradation Mode

Mesoporous silica synthesized from the co-condensation of tetraethoxysilane and silylated carbon dot containing amide group has been adopted as the carrier for the in-situ growth of TiO2 through an impregnation-hydrothermal crystallization process. Benefitted from the initial complexing between the titania precursor and carbon dot, highly dispersed anatase TiO2 nanoparticles can be formed inside the mesoporous channel. The hybrid material possesses ordered hexagonal mesostructure with a p6mm symmetry, high specific surface area (446.27 m2g-1), large pore volume (0.57 cm3g-1), uniform pore size (5.11 nm) and a wide absorption band between 300-550 nm. TiO2 nanocrystals are anchored to carbon dot through bonds of Ti-O-N and Ti-O-C as revealed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Moreover, the nitrogen doping of TiO2 is also verified by the formation of Ti-N bond. This composite shows excellent adsorption capability to organic 2, 4-dichlorophenol and acid orange 7 with electron-deficient aromatic ring through the electron donor-acceptor interaction between carbon dot and organics instead of hydrophobic effect as analyzed by the contact angle analysis, which can be photocatalytically recycled through visible light irradiation after the adsorption. The narrowed bandgap by nitrogen doping and the photosensitization effect of carbon dot are revealed to be co-responsible for the visible-light activity of TiO2. The adsorption capacity does not suffer obvious loss after being recycled 3 times

Investigating the ICT Needs of ‘Digital Natives’ in the Learning of English in a Public University in East Malaysia

This paper examined the undergraduates‟ patterns and perceptions of technology use in the teaching and learning of English in an attempt to throw further light into the current debate of the need to change the knowledge content and method of delivery in universities to cater to the needs of “digital natives.� A questionnaire survey was used to collect data and was analysed quantitatively through the use of descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings revealed a large majority of the university students surveyed are comfortable with the use of technology, and are incorporating a range of traditional and emerging technologies in their daily and academic lives. However, areas where the use of and familiarity with technology based tools are far from universal or uniform among the students, implying that any effort to optimise the use of technology in language teaching and learning in the university has to be appropriate to the learning environment

Cost-minimization analysis of oral versus intravenous antibiotic treatment for Klebsiella pneumoniae liver abscess

A cost-minimization analysis was conducted for Klebsiella pneumoniae liver abscess (KLA) patients enrolled in a randomized controlled trial which found oral ciprofloxacin to be non-inferior to intravenous (IV) ceftriaxone in terms of clinical outcomes. Healthcare service utilization and cost data were obtained from medical records and estimated from self-reported patient surveys in a non-inferiority trial of oral ciprofloxacin versus IV ceftriaxone administered to 152 hospitalized adults with KLA in Singapore between November 2013 and October 2017. Total costs were evaluated by category and payer, and compared between oral and IV antibiotic groups over the trial period of 12 weeks. Among the subset of 139 patients for whom cost data were collected, average total cost over 12 weeks was $16,378 (95$14,620-$18,136) for the oral ciprofloxacin group and$20,569 (95% CI, $18,296-$22,842) for the IV ceftriaxone group, largely driven by lower average outpatient costs, as the average number of outpatient visits was halved for the oral ciprofloxacin group. There were no other statistically significant differences, either in inpatient costs or in other informal healthcare costs. Oral ciprofloxacin is less costly than IV ceftriaxone in the treatment of Klebsiella liver abscess, largely driven by reduced outpatient service costs.Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT01723150 (7/11/2012)

Frequent Gene Amplification Predicts Poor Prognosis in Gastric Cancer

Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignancies worldwide. However, genetic alterations leading to this disease are largely unknown. Gene amplification is one of the most frequent genetic alterations, which is believed to play a major role in the development and progression of gastric cancer. In the present study, we identified three frequently amplified genes from 30 candidate genes using real-time quantitative PCR method, including ERBB4, C-MET and CD44, and further explored their association with clinicopathological characteristics and poor survival in a cohort of gastric cancers. Our data showed amplification of these genes was significantly associated with certain clinicopathological characteristics, particularly tumor differentiation and cancer-related death. More importantly, amplification of these genes was significantly related to worse survival, suggesting that these amplified genes may be significant predictors of poor prognosis and potential therapeutic targets in gastric cancer. Targeting these genes may thus provide new possibilities in the treatment of gastric cancer

Recent Advances in Transport Level Error Control Techniques for Wireless Video Transmission

Transmission of compressed video over wireless channels remains a challenging task due to the noisy nature of the wireless channels and a single bit error in the compressed video bit-stream might cause the reconstructed video to be severely distorted. Numerous error control techniques have been proposed in the literature in order to minimize the video quality degradation caused by transmission errors in wireless channels. This paper provides a brief review of the recent advances in transport level error control techniques for wireless video transmission. In addition, the transport level error control techniques implemented in the latest mobile TV and digital TV standards will also be briefly discussed

Unequal error protection of H.264/AVC video over wireless using hierarchical QAM

In this paper, unequal error protection (UEP) of H.264/AVC coded video using hierarchical quadrature amplitude modulation (HQAM), which takes into consideration the non-uniformly distributed importance of intracoded frame (I-frame) and predictive coded frame (P-frame) is proposed. In order to optimally assign the hierarchical QAM high priority (HP) and low priority (LP) bits to the H.264/AVC coded video, a low-complexity optimal allocation algorithm is also proposed. The proposed low-complexity algorithm reduces the computational complexity of the optimal allocation problem, compared with the exhaustive search process. Simulation results demonstrate that our UEP scheme outperforms the conventional UEP scheme

An Efficient FEC Allocation Algorithm for Unequal Error Protection of Wireless Video Transmission

Transmission of compressed video over wireless channels remains a challenging task due to the inherent high bit error rate (BER) and channel quality fluctuation of a typical wireless channel. An improved wireless video transmission scheme is proposed in this paper. First, an enhanced video error propagation model, namely expected number of macroblocks error propagation (ENMEP), is proposed. A new unequal error protection (UEP) scheme which takes into consideration the non-uniformly distributed importance of frames in a group of pictures (GOP) and macroblocks in a video frame is also proposed in this paper. Finally, an efficient forward error correction (FEC) allocation algorithm for our UEP scheme is proposed by making use of our ENMEP video error propagation model. Simulation results show that our proposed UEP scheme using efficient FEC allocation algorithm outperforms the classical equal error protection (EEP) scheme and also the previous UEP scheme