Development of A Fingerprint Biometric Authentication System For Secure Electronic Voting Machines

            Democratic government in the world today rely on electronic voting as the foremost means of providing credible, transparent and fair elections for the electorate. There is a need for developed electronic voting systems to be security enhanced to ensure the authenticity of the developed system. Traditional paper balloting systems suffer from vote tampering, multiple voting and illegal voting by unregistered voters. They are also, susceptible to under aged voting due to the difficulty in authenticating the identity of prospective voters. Manual collation and publication of vote results also leads to slow response times and inaccuracies in published results. This research paper proposes a system to combat the current challenges through the development of a fingerprint biometric authentication system for secure electronic voting machines. It uses a fingerprint biometric sensor, integrated via Python to verify users of the system. The inclusion of biometrics improves the security features of the system. The secure voting system is built using PHP and easy to use Graphical User Interface was designed using HTML and CSS. Users are required to interact with the machine via a 7” touchscreen interface. From the results, it shows that the developed machine has a minimum response time of 0.6 seconds for specific operation, an FAR of 2%, FRR of 10% and overall system accuracy of 94%. The developed machine is able to combat the challenges of authentication of users, thereby guaranteeing the transparency, credibility, integrity and vote authenticity of the elections

COMPARISON OF NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS FOR OVERTOPPING DISCHARGE OF THE OBREC WAVE ENERGY CONVERTER

OBREC is the latest innovation of overtopping wave energy converter (WEC) which is coalesced with the rubble mound breakwaters. The acquisition of wave overtopping in a front reservoir and consequently releasing process through turbine is the concept of energy production in OBREC. The physical scale model studies of overtopping discharge of the OBREC have recently been done by previous researcher in wave flume at Aalborg University. This paper demonstrates the overtopping behavior of OBREC device using a VOF method with capabilities to solve RANS equation in the numerical suite Flow3D. The purpose of this research is to validate the overtopping discharge performance of the numerical model against the experiments of the OBREC. Based on the observation, the results have shown a good agreement between the validation and physical experiment

Removal of heterocyclic compound carbazole using cell immobilization of thalassospira profundimaris strain M02

Cell immobilization offers promising potential to maximize microbial biodegradation activity and overcome limitations involved in bioremediation. Thalassospira profundimaris strain M02 was used to determine the effectiveness of cell immobilization for carbazole biodegradation. Effects of different matrices, effective diffusivity, mechanical strength, matrix concentration, cell mass load and reusability were investigated in this study. Results revealed that calcium alginate (Ca-Al) was better compared to gellan gum as higher carbazole biodegradation rate was observed. Diffusion analysis and mechanical strength analyses also revealed that Ca-Al possessed superior characteristics as immobilization matrix for carbazole biodegradation compared to gellan gum. Ca-Al works best at 4% (w/v) with 1.25 g of cell mass loading. In addition, immobilized strain M02 retained carbazole biodegradation activity after 6 cycles of usage

The Global Burden of Alveolar Echinococcosis

Human alveolar echinococcosis (AE), caused by the larval stage of the fox tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis, is amongst the world's most dangerous zoonoses. Transmission to humans is by consumption of parasite eggs which are excreted in the faeces of the definitive hosts: foxes and, increasingly, dogs. Transmission can be through contact with the definitive host or indirectly through contamination of food or possibly water with parasite eggs. We made an intensive search of English, Russian, Chinese and other language databases. We targeted data which could give country specific incidence or prevalence of disease and searched for data from every country we believed to be endemic for AE. We also used data from other sources (often unpublished). From this information we were able to make an estimate of the annual global incidence of disease and disease burden using standard techniques for calculation of DALYs. Our studies suggest that AE results in a median of 18,235 cases globally with a burden of 666,433 DALYs per annum. This is the first estimate of the global burden of AE both in terms of global incidence and DALYs and demonstrates the burden of AE is comparable to several diseases in the neglected tropical disease cluster

Biannual azithromycin distribution and child mortality among malnourished children: A subgroup analysis of the MORDOR cluster-randomized trial in Niger.

BACKGROUND: Biannual azithromycin distribution has been shown to reduce child mortality as well as increase antimicrobial resistance. Targeting distributions to vulnerable subgroups such as malnourished children is one approach to reaching those at the highest risk of mortality while limiting selection for resistance. The objective of this analysis was to assess whether the effect of azithromycin on mortality differs by nutritional status. METHODS AND FINDINGS: A large simple trial randomized communities in Niger to receive biannual distributions of azithromycin or placebo to children 1-59 months old over a 2-year timeframe. In exploratory subgroup analyses, the effect of azithromycin distribution on child mortality was assessed for underweight subgroups using weight-for-age Z-score (WAZ) thresholds of -2 and -3. Modification of the effect of azithromycin on mortality by underweight status was examined on the additive and multiplicative scale. Between December 2014 and August 2017, 27,222 children 1-11 months of age from 593 communities had weight measured at their first study visit. Overall, the average age among included children was 4.7 months (interquartile range [IQR] 3-6), 49.5% were female, 23% had a WAZ < -2, and 10% had a WAZ < -3. This analysis included 523 deaths in communities assigned to azithromycin and 661 deaths in communities assigned to placebo. The mortality rate was lower in communities assigned to azithromycin than placebo overall, with larger reductions among children with lower WAZ: -12.6 deaths per 1,000 person-years (95% CI -18.5 to -6.9, P < 0.001) overall, -17.0 (95% CI -28.0 to -7.0, P = 0.001) among children with WAZ < -2, and -25.6 (95% CI -42.6 to -9.6, P = 0.003) among children with WAZ < -3. No statistically significant evidence of effect modification was demonstrated by WAZ subgroup on either the additive or multiplicative scale (WAZ < -2, additive: 95% CI -6.4 to 16.8, P = 0.34; WAZ < -2, multiplicative: 95% CI 0.8 to 1.4, P = 0.50, WAZ < -3, additive: 95% CI -2.2 to 31.1, P = 0.14; WAZ < -3, multiplicative: 95% CI 0.9 to 1.7, P = 0.26). The estimated number of deaths averted with azithromycin was 388 (95% CI 214 to 574) overall, 116 (95% CI 48 to 192) among children with WAZ < -2, and 76 (95% CI 27 to 127) among children with WAZ < -3. Limitations include the availability of a single weight measurement on only the youngest children and the lack of power to detect small effect sizes with this rare outcome. Despite the trial's large size, formal tests for effect modification did not reach statistical significance at the 95% confidence level. CONCLUSIONS: Although mortality rates were higher in the underweight subgroups, this study was unable to demonstrate that nutritional status modified the effect of biannual azithromycin distribution on mortality. Even if the effect were greater among underweight children, a nontargeted intervention would result in the greatest absolute number of deaths averted. TRIAL REGISTRATION: The MORDOR trial is registered at clinicaltrials.gov NCT02047981

Burnout among surgeons before and during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: an international survey

Background: SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has had many significant impacts within the surgical realm, and surgeons have been obligated to reconsider almost every aspect of daily clinical practice. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study reported in compliance with the CHERRIES guidelines and conducted through an online platform from June 14th to July 15th, 2020. The primary outcome was the burden of burnout during the pandemic indicated by the validated Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure. Results: Nine hundred fifty-four surgeons completed the survey. The median length of practice was 10&nbsp;years; 78.2% included were male with a median age of 37&nbsp;years old, 39.5% were consultants, 68.9% were general surgeons, and 55.7% were affiliated with an academic institution. Overall, there was a significant increase in the mean burnout score during the pandemic; longer years of practice and older age were significantly associated with less burnout. There were significant reductions in the median number of outpatient visits, operated cases, on-call hours, emergency visits, and research work, so, 48.2% of respondents felt that the training resources were insufficient. The majority (81.3%) of respondents reported that their hospitals were included in the management of COVID-19, 66.5% felt their roles had been minimized; 41% were asked to assist in non-surgical medical practices, and 37.6% of respondents were included in COVID-19 management. Conclusions: There was a significant burnout among trainees. Almost all aspects of clinical and research activities were affected with a significant reduction in the volume of research, outpatient clinic visits, surgical procedures, on-call hours, and emergency cases hindering the training. Trial registration: The study was registered on clicaltrials.gov "NCT04433286" on 16/06/2020