Awareness Level of Visually Impaired College Students about Urdu Poets and Poetry in Punjab: A Qualitative Inquiry

Language has been the most popular source of communication in human society since the start of civilization. The tradition of Folk Tales appeared as the foundation of literature in ancient times. Poetry is a significant way of expression in human literature. Urdu language possesses uncountable master pieces of prose and poetry. Visually impaired persons have proved themselves as literature lovers, good readers and visionary poets in past and present. This study is an effort to depict the awareness level of visually impaired college students about Urdu poets and their creations. The population of the study consisted of all visually impaired students enrolled in public and private sector colleges located in the district Lahore and Okara. A self developed and validated structured interview schedule containing 10 open ended questions was used to collect data from conveniently selected sample of 30 visually impaired students (males= 18, females=12). Descriptive statistics (percentages of responses) were calculated, collected information was coded; major themes were derived and interpreted by qualitative data analysis technique. The Study reflected that the visually impaired college students were having a lot of information about Urdu poets and their creations although there seemed a lack of in depth knowledge. They reported the lack of talking books and material in Braille on Urdu poetry of great and famous poets. They suggested the establishment of talking libraries throughout the country. Major findings were reported, conclusions were drawn and recommendations were made to Punjab Higher Education Department.&nbsp

Inclusive Education Facilities in Secondary Schools of Pakistan: A Gender Based Comparison

Man is the most civilized and enlightened creation of Allah. Man and women formulate the basic unit of civilization. A comparison about provision of rights and facilities in every field of life has been going on since their creation. Nowadays inclusive education has proved a successful educational system for persons with disabilities. In this study, researchers have tried to explore difference between inclusive education facilities in male and female secondary schools of the province of Punjab, Pakistan. In order to attain this goal the survey technique was used to collect the data from 196 male and female secondary school teachers working in rural and urban secondary schools conveniently selected from five districts viz Okara, Sahiwal, Lahore, Pakpattan and Kasur by a self developed and validated questionnaire i.e. Research Questionnaire about the Condition of Available Inclusive Education Facilities and Opportunities in Secondary Schools of Punjab. For cross validation of data, interview schedule was used to collect data from 17 secondary school students with disabilities. Both the descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the collected data. This study describes that there is no significant difference in inclusive education facilities between male and female secondary schools. Moreover special students denied provision of inclusive education facilities as claimed by the teachers. Conclusions were drawn and recommendations were made

Demographic Characteristics of Students with Visual impairment enrolled at Primary Level in Government Special Education Institutions of Punjab

Learner is the key element of the whole teaching-learning process. All the efforts made by any educational body rotate round the academic betterment of learner in some particular direction. So learning process and learner; both affect each other especially in the case of learners with special needs. This study is an effort to depict the diversities or similarities among demographic characteristics of students with visual impairment enrolled at primary level in Government Special Education Institutions of the Punjab. It is a descriptive quantitative research by nature. Survey method was applied to collect data from 214 randomly selected students with visual impairment (124 males and 90 females) enrolled at primary level in Government Special Education Institutions from randomly selected four districts includingSahiwal, Okara, Lahore and Gujranwala. A self developedand validated demographic information sheet consisting of 24 items about various characteristics of students with visual impairment was applied for data collection.  Instrument was validated by a panel of three experts. At the phase of pilot testing; instrument was applied on 27 students with visual impairment. Chronbach alpha was applied to calculate the reliability index of instrument which was 0.86. Data was analyzed by using SPSS and descriptive statistics including percentages and frequencies were used. The study reflected that most of the students with visual impairment enrolled at primary school level were from urban areas and belonged to lower middle class. Most of them used school transport. They had no extra coaching at home. Most of them were male and most of their siblings were without any disability. Similarly the condition of their personal hygiene was below average. The study recommended that the individualized family service plans should be organized for counseling and facilitation of the care takers and families of VI students. The route of school buses may be expanded so that a number of children who live in rural areas and peripheries could be accommodated

Energy Consumption, Financial development and CO2 emissions in Pakistan

In this study, we analyzed the effects of financial development, per capita real income, the square of per capita real income, per capita energy consumption and openness on per capita CO2 emissions in the context of Pakistan during 1971-2011. The bound F-test for cointegration yielded evidence of a long-term relationship among these variables. The results confirm the existence of an environmental Kuznets curve in Pakistan for both the short and long term. This finding indicates that at the initial stage of development, the level of CO2 increases with income, and after some threshold level of income, this relationship may change from positive to negative as more efficient infrastructure and energy-efficient technology are implemented during the development of the country. The findings of this study also reveal a significantly positive sign for the coefficient of financial development, suggesting that financial development has occurred at the expense of environmental quality. The findings of this study indicate that the key contributing factors of carbon emissions in Pakistan are income, energy consumption and financial development. In addition, the openness variable has no significant influence on carbon emission in either the short or long term

Correlation of Maternal Anemia with Sonographic Placental Thickness

Anemia is a condition in which hemoglobin (Hb) concentration and/or red blood cell (RBC) numbers are lower than normal and insufficient to meet an individual’s physiological needs, it affects roughly one-third of the world’s population.Objective: To correlate the maternal anemia with placental thickness ultrasonographically.Methodology: Toshiba Nemio17 with Convex array transducer 3-5 MHz frequency was used. Patient were in spine position. Measurements of placental thickness were performed in the mid portion of the placenta, perpendicular to its long axis. The study was conducted at Gillani Ultrasound Centre and Mansoorah Teaching Hospital Lahore. Data of 110 patients was collected through cross-sectional, analytical study. Convenient Sampling Technique was used to analyze data. Statistical software for social sciences (SPSS version 22.0) is used for the analysis of data.Results: Out of 110 patients 44.5% patients were in 2nd trimester and 55.5% patients were in their 3rd trimester. In our study 26.4% patients had normal hemoglobin, 43.6% patients were diagnosed with moderate anemia and 30% patients were diagnosed with mild anemia. Hemoglobin rates varied between 7 g/dL to 15.40 g/dL. Placental thickness varied between 10.50mm and to 56.50mm. 9 patients had normal placental thickness, 89 had thick placenta and 12 had thin placenta. In 2nd trimester minimum placental thickness was noted 15.7 mm and maximum placental thickness was 47.2 mm. In 3rd trimester minimum placental thickness was noted as 10.5 mm and maximum thickness 56.5 mm. In normal placental thickness minimum hemoglobin was noted as 7 g/dL and maximum was 15.5 g/dL. In thick placenta minimum hemoglobin noted was; 7.8 g/dL and maximum hemoglobin was 15.4 g/dL. In thin placental thickness minimum hemoglobin was 8.9 g/dL and maximum was 11.2 g/dl. Majority patients came with hemoglobin rates between 8 to 11 (g/dL) and less than 5 patients came with hemoglobin 7 g/dL. In patients with mild anemia mean placental thickness was 30.57 mm. In patients with moderate anemia had mean placental thickness of 33.72 mm and in patients with normal anemia had mean placental thickness of 30.39 mm. Out of 110 patients, 29 had no anemia and from these 3 patients were found with normal placental thickness 4 with thick placenta and 2 were with thin. 81 patients who were diagnosed with anemia had normal placental thickness in 6 patients, 65 had thick placenta and 10 patients were found with thick placenta.Conclusion:We concluded that, maternal anemia has adverse effects on placental thickness and gestational age. In the present study we found that morphological and histological changes in placenta of anemic mother is undertaken, to study the effects of anemia on morphology of placenta and fetal outcomes. Keywords: Ultrasound (US), anemia, placenta, placental thickness DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/81-02 Publication date:October 31st 202

Probiotic Supplement Improves the Health Status and Lactation Performance in Dairy Animals

Probiotics are essential for the effective growth of beneficial bacteria present in enteric line. They help in the physiological functions of new-born calves that are highly susceptible to a variety of fatal syndromes. The criterion for the selection of strains for the design of probiotic products are based on retaining functional health characteristics. Samples from Nili-Ravi buffaloes were collected, and rumen strains are identified for probiotic product. Microscopic techniques with different biochemical tests and molecular techniques such as BLAST have performed for identification. Following species of Weisella has been identified based on genotypic analysis (16S rRNA) under accession number MK336765 (F2) and MK336779 (F4) in the NCBI GenBanK. The strains sharing some of the specific properties evaluated were identified genetically, and their compatibility and exopolysaccharide production were assayed. All of this will be helpful in the production of multi-stain-probiotic product for the nourishment of dairy calves

Cr-resistant rhizo- and endophytic bacteria associated with Prosopis juliflora and their potential as phytoremediation enhancing agents in metal-degraded soils

Prosopis juliflora is characterized by distinct and profuse growth even in nutritionally poor soil and environmentally stressed conditions and is believed to harbor some novel heavy metal-resistant bacteria in the rhizosphere and endosphere. This study was performed to isolate and characterize Cr-resistant bacteria from the rhizosphere and endosphere of P. juliflora growing on the tannery effluent contaminated soil. A total of 5 and 21 bacterial strains were isolated from the rhizosphere and endosphere, respectively, could tolerate Cr up to 3000 mg l-1. These isolates also exhibited tolerance to other toxic heavy metals such as, Cd, Cu, Pb and Zn, and high concentration (174 g l-1) of NaCl. Moreover, most of the isolated bacterial strains showed one or more plant growth-promoting activities. The phylogenetic analysis of the 16S rRNA gene indicated a higher and wider range of population of Cr-resistant bacteria in the endosphere than rhizosphere and the predominant species included Bacillus, Staphylococcus and Aerococcus. As far as we know, this is the first report detecting rhizo- and endophytic bacterial population associated with P. juliflora growing on the tannery effluent contaminated soil. The inoculation of three isolates to ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum L.) improved plant growth and heavy metal removal from the tannery effluent contaminated soil suggesting that these bacteria could enhance the establishment of the plant in contaminated soil and also improve the efficiency of phytoremediation of heavy metal-degraded soils

Physical layer authentication using ensemble learning technique in wireless communications

Cyber-physical wireless systems have surfaced as an important data communication and networking research area. It is an emerging discipline that allows effective monitoring and efficient real-time communication between the cyber and physical worlds by embedding computer software and integrating communication and networking technologies. Due to their high reliability, sensitivity and connectivity, their security requirements are more comparable to the Internet as they are prone to various security threats such as eavesdropping, spoofing, botnets, man-in-the-middle attack, denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) and impersonation. Existing methods use physical layer authentication (PLA), the most promising solution to detect cyber-attacks. Still, the cyber-physical systems (CPS) have relatively large computational requirements and require more communication resources, thus making it impossible to achieve a low latency target. These methods perform well but only in stationary scenarios. We have extracted the relevant features from the channel matrices using discrete wavelet transformation to improve the computational time required for data processing by considering mobile scenarios. The features are fed to ensemble learning algorithms, such as AdaBoost, LogitBoost and Gentle Boost, to classify data. The authentication of the received signal is considered a binary classification problem. The transmitted data is labeled as legitimate information, and spoofing data is illegitimate information. Therefore, this paper proposes a threshold-free PLA approach that uses machine learning algorithms to protect critical data from spoofing attacks. It detects the malicious data packets in stationary scenarios and detects them with high accuracy when receivers are mobile. The proposed model achieves better performance than the existing approaches in terms of accuracy and computational time by decreasing the processing time

SonoGames: Sounds of the right kind introducing gamification into radiology training

Background: Radiology as compared to other fields of medicine has lagged, in incorporating modern training modalities such as gamification and simulation into its teaching curriculum.Objective: This study aims to evaluate effectiveness of simulation-based teaching in collaboration with gamification. Bandura\u27s conception of self-efficacy was used to provide qualitative assessment of participants\u27 learning process through training event. Modified competitive game-based teaching methodology was utilized in an experimental study conducted for radiology residents. Workshop was divided into two sessions, first being three interactive didactic lectures followed by three competitive rounds. All participants were required to fill pre and post-self-efficacy questionnaire along with an activity evaluation form.Results: Significant self-efficacy scores were calculated for simulation-based stations of knowledge assessment and hands-on stations. Whereas significant association was also found between gender and knowledge assessment in communication skill (0.054), Professionalism (0.004), and general knowledge (0.018). Similarly, noteworthy correlation was found between gender and all hands-on skills. In conclusion, study reported an overall increase in knowledge of post-test scores compared to pre-test scores due to use of gamification in combination with simulation-based teaching which shows a positive role in clinical training. However, further consideration is needed to improve process of integrating simulation in clinical training of participants

Ventricular fibrillation with intracoronary adenosine during fractional flow reserve assessment.

Fractional flow reserve (FFR) measurement provides useful hemodynamic assessment of intermediate coronary stenoses affecting long term outcomes. While the gold standard remains intravenous adenosine, intracoronary (IC) bolus administration of adenosine is routinely used in clinical practice because of its ease of use and lower dose providing comparative hyperemia with the most common side effect being a transient atrioventricular block. A 62year old male underwent left heart catheterization after ruling in for non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI). Presenting electrocardiogram (ECG) showed an old left bundle branch block and T-wave inversions in lateral leads (QTc 494ms) with no significant electrolyte abnormalities. Coronary angiography revealed an intermediate lesion in mid left anterior descending coronary artery. FFR assessment with IC adenosine (24μg/mL of normal saline) was performed inducing ventricular fibrillation (VF). He was successfully defibrillated with a single 200J shock and no further arrhythmias were noticed during rest of his hospital stay