QUALITY AND COMPETENCY FOR SUSTAINABLE DIGITAL FUTURE OF EDUCATION: CONTEXT OF DIGITAL LEARNING SYSTEM

A sustainable digital future of education is at its high call and various digital tools are being used to establish digital learning – but limited attention is paid to quality and competency for the success of DLs. This study addresses the gap and outlines satisfaction as a function of quality factors (knowledge quality and interactive quality) and virtual competency that in turn leads to net benefits (learning). Digital Learning System (DLs) Success model is proposed by mapping into sequential building blocks of DeLone and McLean IS success model and integrating social cognitive theory. A quantitative online survey data from 156 German and Swedish students confirms that knowledge quality, sociability based interactive quality, and virtual competency play an important role towards students\u27 satisfaction and learning. The salient highlighted factors provide a novel contribution deemed indispensable for DLs success. The findings suggest future research avenues for theory and practice

INVESTIGATE PERFORMANCE OF POLYMER MODIFIED ASPHALT MIXTURES

: In recent years, traffic loads have increased, and the sizes and loads of vehicles have become greater, thereby affecting the performance of asphalt pavements. Modified bituminous materials assist to add benefits to performance, maintenance and construction, in terms of better and longer lasting road, and saving in total road life cost. This study attempts to identify the influence of polymer modification in improving asphalt mixture performance. Three types of polymer resins were used, namely, Epoxy resin, Phenol resin, and Polyester resin. The physical properties of asphalt cement were tested by penetration and softening point. Apart from mix performance, the effect of modification on Marshall properties was studied. To estimate the tensile strength and evaluate the mixture’s susceptibility to temperature variations, three test temperatures were used (15, 30, and 45°C). Furthermore, modified mixtures were tested by measurement of static creep. Based on the study results, it was found that increasing the phenol or epoxy resin quantities in asphalt cement lead to an increase softening point and reduce penetration. Material properties can be improved by the incorporation of phenol and polyester resins, since recovery property can be improved. Moreover, using phenol resin in asphalt mixes can increase the resistance to deformation when exposed to traffic loading

Haemovigilance as a quality indicator in transfusion medicine: Pakistan’s perspective

In transfusion medicine, the concept of haemovigilance has emerged during the last three decades. It is structured and systematic surveillance of the entire vein-to-vein transfusion chain and a powerful quality tool. Haemovigilance has become an integral component of transfusion medicine. It helps increase safety and improves quality during blood donation and blood transfusion, from the blood donor to recipient of blood and blood components. The haemovigilance can be successfully implemented and maximum benefit obtained if the data analysis and resulting conclusions are mutually shared with the shareholders. Although haemovigilance has proven to be an effective tool to influence policy development, it is is not well established in Pakistan. The government’s Safe Blood Transfusion Programme has taken key initiatives to introduce, support, and consolidate the haemovigilance system necessitating many changes, in the system, in the institutions, in attitude, and behaviour. The implementation of haemovigilance in Pakistan will require a major paradigm shift. It will be a stepwise or staged approach, starting from institutional to regional/provincial levels and ending at the national level

Clinical Decision Support System for Unani Medicine Practitioners

Like other fields of Traditional Medicines, Unani Medicines have been found as an effective medical practice for ages. It is still widely used in the subcontinent, particularly in Pakistan and India. However, Unani Medicines Practitioners are lacking modern IT applications in their everyday clinical practices. An Online Clinical Decision Support System may address this challenge to assist apprentice Unani Medicines practitioners in their diagnostic processes. The proposed system provides a web-based interface to enter the patient's symptoms, which are then automatically analyzed by our system to generate a list of probable diseases. The system allows practitioners to choose the most likely disease and inform patients about the associated treatment options remotely. The system consists of three modules: an Online Clinical Decision Support System, an Artificial Intelligence Inference Engine, and a comprehensive Unani Medicines Database. The system employs advanced AI techniques such as Decision Trees, Deep Learning, and Natural Language Processing. For system development, the project team used a technology stack that includes React, FastAPI, and MySQL. Data and functionality of the application is exposed using APIs for integration and extension with similar domain applications. The novelty of the project is that it addresses the challenge of diagnosing diseases accurately and efficiently in the context of Unani Medicines principles. By leveraging the power of technology, the proposed Clinical Decision Support System has the potential to ease access to healthcare services and information, reduce cost, boost practitioner and patient satisfaction, improve speed and accuracy of the diagnostic process, and provide effective treatments remotely. The application will be useful for Unani Medicines Practitioners, Patients, Government Drug Regulators, Software Developers, and Medical Researchers.Comment: 59 pages, 11 figures, Computer Science Bachelor's Thesis on use of Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Decision Support System for Unani Medicine

Investigation of Using Polymers to Improve Asphalt Pavement Performance

As the traffic volume becomes greater in recent years, the performance of asphalt pavement has decreased. Modified bituminous materials can increase performance and reduce highway maintenance. The goal of this study is to investigate  the influence of polymer modification for improving pavement performance. A detailed laboratory study is carried out by preparing modified asphalt mixtures specimens using (40-50) grade asphalt from dourah refinery. A comparative study of laboratory performance of application of three polymer types: Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), Phenol resin, and Polystyrene Polymer in asphalt paving mixtures is investigated. These modified asphalt mixtures were prepared with asphalt cement previously modified by using three percent of polymer (2,4and 6%) by weight of asphalt. To evaluate mix performance, effect of  polymer modification was studied by performing indirect tensile strength and retained stability test. In order to evaluate the mixture behavior due to temperature change, two different testing temperatures are used (25,45C?). From the results of this study, it is concluded that with the incorporation of low percentage of polystyrene polymer  tensile strength increase, therefore polystyrene modified asphalt mixtures can be used in cold climate conditions. In addition, it can indicate, that using phenol resin in modified asphalt mixes will increase strength and resistance to deformation, then it can be used in hot climate conditions. The results of the present study indicated that the modified mixtures exhibited improved performance when the polymer was used.

Evaluation of Elasticity Modulus of Clayey Soil from Undrained Shear Strength

The modulus of elasticity represents the soil stiffness; it was used to design and analyze the foundation, slope stability, retaining structure, etc. It is one of the main input parameters used in the finite element method for analyzing soil behavior. The scope of this study is to evaluate the correlation between the modulus of elasticity (E) and the cohesion of the soil (cu) for the remolded and undisturbed samples of clayey soil so it can assess the effect of lateral confining pressure on the soil modulus of elasticity. The unconfined test is chosen for remolded soil to identify the stress-strain behavior. After the experimental utilized is done, the test is modeled using the finite element method to study several states of soil. The PLAXIS program is utilized, and the results are compared with the practical results. The mohr-Coulomb model is chosen for this study because it is commonly used. Based on the results throughout this study, it can be concluded the simulation using the Mohr-Coulomb model of PLAXIS software gives good results for representing the unconfined compression test, so that for soft clay, the ratio between modulus of elasticity and cohesion is equal to (Eu = 30 cu) for remolded clay and (Eu = 55 cu) for undisturbed clay. While for stiff clay, it was equal (Eu = 65 cu) for remolded and (Eu = 120 cu) for undisturbed clay. The modulus of elasticity for the undisturbed is higher than for remolded clay, so the difference is almost double in the case of stiff clay. The lateral confining pressure affects the modules of soil; however, for soft clay, the range of soil modulus in the case of the drained test was (5 to 25 MPa), while the range is higher for the undrained case (18 to 54 MPa). Moreover, for stiff clay, the range was equal (11 to 100 MPa) for a drained test and between (18 to 100 MPa) for an undrained case

Using soft soil models in geotechnical engineering: a review paper

Soil is considered a complicated material as, in general, the behavior under loading is non-linear in addition it is anisotropic material and its behavior is time-dependent. Various models were developed in the method of finite element for modeling the behavior of soil under different loading cases, and it must be known that no constitutive model is available that can simulate completely the actual soil behavior under all conditions. This paper attempts to investigate the soft soil model and present a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages for the purpose of giving an overview, and discussing the main finding of the previous studies regarding using the Soft Soil model in the numerical analysis of geotechnical engineering problems and applications. In this research, it was observed from the previous studies that the relation between the modified compression index (λ*) and unloading index (κ*) is from (5 to 10). The Soft Soil model gives a stiffer stress-strain behavior compared to Hardening model. Using this model for compressible soils needs a longer calculation time than other models as the material stiffness matrix was included in each calculation step. It shows satisfactory results in the analysis of the settlement of immediate and consolidation cases of foundation in clayey soil than the model of Mohr-Coulomb

Role of Strategic Thinking in Corporate Identity

In this paper, an attempt has been made to unveil how strategic thinking contributes to corporate identity and survival. The instrument used to collect the data was a questionnaire which included a scale on creativity, pragmatic opportunism and intellectual informatism. The sample included the middle and top management of the telecom organizations in Pakistan. The questionnaires were distributed to 125 respondents and an 80% response was received. Results showed that strategic thinking has a fairly positive effect on corporate identity (CI). Among the creativity, intellectual informatism and pragmatic opportunism and when regressed with CI, pragmatic opportunism has the strongest effect on CI; creativity has a fairly positive impact on CI, whereas, intellectual informatism does not show significant impact on CI. Hopefully, this study will be informative for management about learning how they can use the available yet unfound opportunities and information within their creativity to build and maintain a good corporate identity