Sustainability of Load Balancing Techniques in Fog Computing Environment: Review

The extreme workloads on the fog layer caused a misalignment in some fog nodes that affect its efficiency and degenerate fog technology's primary goal. Therefore, creating a balanced computing environment via the offloading process is the key. However, there are many obstacles to balance computing nodes in the fog environment, such as offloading strategy and its consequences due to the extreme offloading processes, and when need to offload and where. These obstacles are vital concerns among researchers. Thus, several studies have been conducted to enhance the fog system performance to increase the entire system's throughput. This paper explores the recent articles to determine the possible research gaps and opportunities to implement an efficient solution for load balancing in fog environments after analyzing and assessing the existing solutions. While most of the proposed solutions involve short-term solution, this literature review reveals the need to find out a sustainable resolution for load balancing to avoid listed obstacles by using the offloading technique with maintaining the bandwidth of the network

Work and resilience: Care leavers' experiences of navigating towards employment and independence

Poor education and employment outcomes have long been associated with care experienced young people transitioning into independence, even after adjusting for prior disadvantage. In the United Kingdom, such young people are generally referred to as care leavers. Policies that aim to reduce the gap between care leavers and non-care experienced young people's success transitioning to employment and independence have had limited success. This paper draws on a qualitative methodology that utilized theories of resilience, to glean a range of perspectives from both care leavers and their employers. All the participants were engaged in a U.K. local authority's initiative to support care leavers into employment. Drawing on resilience theory, resilience was found to be located in a complex interaction between a resilience enabling environment and, crucially, emotionally supportive networks. Uniquely, we argue that emotional support, drawn from such networks, is the key factor that facilitates young people navigating towards such resources, leading to successful outcomes. Previous studies have underplayed this aspect in favour of more tangible resources. Attention to strengthening emotional support networks is thus identified as a significant factor that supports transition to employment and successful independence for care leavers

Incidence of hip fracture in Saudi Arabia and the development of a FRAX model

Summary A prospective hospital-based survey in representative regions of Saudi Arabia determined the incidence of fractures at the hip. The hip fracture rates were used to create a FRAX® model to facilitate fracture risk assessment in Saudi Arabia. Objective This paper describes the incidence of hip fracture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that was used to characterize the current and future burden of hip fracture, to develop a country-specific FRAX® tool for fracture prediction and to compare fracture probabilities with neighbouring countries. Methods During a 2-year (2017/2018) prospective survey in 15 hospitals with a defined catchment population, hip fractures in Saudi citizens were prospectively identified from hospital registers. The number of hip fractures and future burden was determined from national demography. Age- and sex-specific incidence of hip fracture and national mortality rates were incorporated into a FRAX model for Saudi Arabia. Fracture probabilities were compared with those from Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. Results The incidence of hip fracture applied nationally suggested that the estimated number of hip fractures nationwide in persons over the age of 50 years for 2015 was 2,949 and is predicted to increase nearly sevenfold to 20,328 in 2050. Hip fracture rates were comparable with estimates from Abu Dhabi and Kuwait. By contrast, probabilities of a major osteoporotic fracture or hip fracture from the age of 70 years were much lower than those seen in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait due to higher mortality estimates for Saudi Arabia. Conclusion A country-specific FRAX tool for fracture prediction has been developed for Saudi Arabia which is expected to help guide decisions about treatment

Reinforcement optimization for decentralized service placement policy in IoT‐centric fog environment

A decentralized service placement policy plays a key role in distributed systems, such as fog computing, where sharing workloads fairly among active computing nodes is critical. A decentralized policy is an inherent feature of the service placement process that may improve load balancing among computers and can reduce the latency in many real-time Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This article proposes reinforcement optimization for a decentralized service placement policy, which attempts to mitigate some of the drawbacks of existing service placement policies. Matching task size with node specifications and the allocation of less popular but time-sensitive applications in the fog layer are the primary contributions of this study. Extensive experimental comparisons are made between the proposed algorithm and other well-known algorithms over service latency, network usage, and computing usage using the iFogSim simulator. A microservice-based application with varying sizes of computing requests are tested experimentally and show that the proposed algorithm effectively serves computing instances that are closer to users, reducing service latency and network usage. Compared to the existing models, the proposed modified algorithm reduces service latency by 24.1%, network usage by 4%, and computing usage by 20%, thus highlighting positive outcomes when using the proposed algorithm for fog analytics in future real-time IoT applications

Vitamin D status correction in Saudi Arabia: an experts' consensus under the auspices of the European Society for Clinical and Economic Aspects of Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis, and Musculoskeletal Diseases (ESCEO)

Background :Vitamin D deficiency is common in the Middle East and in Saudi Arabia, in particular. While several international recommendations on the management of vitamin D deficiency have been documented and practiced globally, these recommendations should be adapted to the conditions of the Middle Eastern region. To address this challenge, the Prince Mutaib Chair for Biomarkers of Osteoporosis (PMCO) in King Saud University (KSU), Riyadh, KSA, together with local experts and in cooperation with the European Society for Clinical and Economic Aspects of Osteoporosis and Osteoarthritis (ESCEO), organized a panel that ormulated unified recommendations in the diagnosis and treatment of vitamin D deficiency in the region. Methods: The selection of local and international experts commenced during the 2nd International Vitamin D Symposium conducted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last January 20-–21, 2016. Reviews of the most recent literature were done, and face-to-face meetings were conducted for revisions and final recommendations.Results: Vitamin D sufficiency is defined as circulating serum 25(OH)D ≥50 nmol (≥20 ng/ml) for the general population and vitamin D adequacy as serum 25(OH)D >75 nmol/L l (>30 ng/ml) for the frail and osteoporotic elderly. Despite overwhelming prevalence of vitamin D deficiency, universal screening is not recommended. Recommendations for the general population, children, pregnant/lactating women, postmenopausal women, the elderly, and those with subsequent metabolic diseases were provided. Results: Vitamin D sufficiency is defined as circulating serum 25(OH)D ≥50 nmol (≥20 ng/ml) for the general population and vitamin D adequacy as serum 25(OH)D >75 nmol/L l (>30 ng/ml) for the frail and osteoporotic elderly. Despite overwhelming prevalence of vitamin D deficiency, universal screening is not recommended. Recommendations for the general population, children, pregnant/lactating women, post-menopausal women, the elderly, and those with subsequent metabolic diseases were provided. Conclusion: Vitamin D supplementation/correction is advised in all persons whose serum 25(OH)D falls below 50 nmol/l (20 ng/ml), and achieving a target of 75 nmol/l (30 ng/ml) is particularly suited for frail, osteoporotic, and older patients. Conductingwelldesigned clinical trials in the region that will address economic implications and investigations on the treatment persistence and compliance to vitamin D treatment in the region are encouraged

Association of ANGPTL8 (Betatrophin) Gene Variants with Components of Metabolic Syndrome in Saudi Adult population

Angiopoietin-like protein 8 (ANGPTL8) has a role in lipid metabolism, beta-cell proliferation and diabetes progression, however, the association between different variants in the ANGPTL8 gene and metabolic syndrome (MetS) components has not been studied widely especially in Arab ethnic groups. In this study, the associations of ANGPTL8 variants on MetS risk in Saudi Arab adults were investigated. A total of 905 unrelated Saudi adults (580 healthy controls and 325 MetS) were included. MetS was screened based on the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) criteria. The genotype and allele frequency distribution of rs737337 (T/C) and rs2278426 (C/T) polymorphism in ANGPTL8 gene was studied. Participants with MetS were significantly older, had higher BMI, and rs737337 polymorphism frequency was significantly lower than in control. Furthermore, the TC+CC genotype and C allele of rs737337 (T/C) was associated with decreased risk of hypercholesterolemia and hyperglycemia [odds ratio (OR) 0.61, 95%CI 0.40-0.93, p=0.016 and OR 0.58, 0.39-0.86, p=0.007 respectively for hypercholesterolemia; and OR 0.66, 0.45-0.97, p=0.032 and OR 0.65, 0.46-0.93; p=0.016 respectively for hyperglycemia]. Similarly, CT, CT+TT genotype and T allele of rs2278426 (C/T) were associated with decreased risk of hyperglycemia (p<0.05). In conclusion, the study suggests that the gene variants in SNPs rs 737337 (T/C) and rs 2278426 (C/T) are associated with lower risk of hypercholesterolemia and hyperglycemia. These findings supplement the growing literature supporting the role of ANGPTL8 in lipid and glucose metabolism

Prevalence of Glomerular Diseases: King Khalid University Hospital, Saudi Arabia

To obtain a more recent and comprehensive insight into the prevalence of glomerular diseases in our patient population, medical records of 200 patients with biopsy proven glomerulonephritis (GN), between January 1994 and June 1999, at the King Khalid University Hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were analyzed. Primary glomerular disease was found to be the most prevalent, accounting for 63.5% of all glomerular diseases. Among primary glomerular diseases, focal and segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) was the most common histological lesion (34.6%) and was associated with a high prevalence of hypertension (86.4%), nephrotic syndrome (68.18%), hematuria (63.6%) and renal functional impairment (27.3%). Mesangioproliferative GN was the second most common lesion (25.1%) followed by mesangiocapillary GN (15.7%), IgA nephropathy (10.2%), and minimal change disease (8.5%). Amongst secondary glomerular diseases, lupus nephritis was the most prevalent (24.5%). In conclusion, primary glomerular diseases constituted the commonest group encountered and the prevalence of FSGS was quite high with male sex and young adults predominating. FSGS was also associated with a high prevalence of end-stage renal disease. Further collaborative studies are necessary to explore the predisposing factors and associations of glomerular disease, especially FSGS