Editorial: Surrogacy around the world

Surrogacy is an encouraging management for many childless couples and can hypothetically resolve many unbearable pain that they are confronted. Initially surrogacy treatment was frowned upon, however, surrogacy is more popularly accepted now a day. But different country has different regulations on surrogacy. However, there are some degree of divergence between official discourse and actual practice of surrogacy throughout world. There are positive changes in attitude toward surrogacy has been seen for some countries as well. This editorial brief about surrogacy around the world

Peer Review system: A Golden standard for publications process

Peer review process helps in evaluating and validating of research that is published in the journals. U.S. Office of Research Integrity reported that data fraudulence was found to be involved in 94% cases of misconduct from 228 identified articles between 1994–2012. If fraud in published article are significantly as high as reported, the question arise in mind, were these articles peer reviewed? Another report said that the reviewers failed to detect 16 cases of fabricated article of Jan Hendrick Schon. Superficial peer reviewing process does not reveals suspicion of misconduct. Lack of knowledge of systemic review process not only demolish the academic integrity in publication but also loss the trust of the people of the institution, the nation, and the world. The aim of this review article is to aware stakeholders specially novice reviewers about the peer review system. Beginners will understand how to review an article and they can justify better action choices in dealing with reviewing an article

Performance Evaluation of a Modified Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection Protocol

Using Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMMCD), Ethernet Local Area Networks (LANs) suffers from capture effect in packet loss. As a result of capture effect, some nodes may be locked-out of using the medium for a period of time. Hence, CSMAICD based Ethernet is unsuitable for real-time multimedia traffic. It does not guarantee delay bound, behaves poorly under heavy load conditions. To overcome these shortcomings and enhance performance of CSMAKD based LAN, three new concepts are added to the conventional CSMMCD. Firstly, each node in the LAN has a finite buffer. A node competes for access to the medium after its buffer is full. It will transmit all packets in the buffer if access is permitted. To minimize the waiting delay of packets in the buffer prior to transmission, a time-out period is set, beyond which a node tries to transmit considering its buffer is full.Due to buffer, the number of nodes trying to transmit at a time is reduced, thereby collision rate is reduced. Capture effect, locked-out probability, bandwidth loss and backoff delays are also reduced. To support all types of traffic (mainly real-time traffic), the optimum buffer size obtained is 10 packetsibuffer. Using this buffer, multimedia traffic can be sent in a streamed fashion within a delay bound. Secondly, the maximum retransmission attempt limit and backoff limit are reduced to 10 and 8 times respectively to guarantee a tolerable delay for multimedia applications. A new special-jamming signal is introduced. It gives transmission priority to the node that already has finished its maximum retransmission attempt. This prevents packet loss and quality degradation of received normal data traffic and multimedia traffic. The final one is the priority scheduler, which is activated when multiple nodes send the special-jamming signal at a time. It gives permission to the node having either the lowest timestamp or the smallest source address (SA) to transmit while other nodes wait until their access is permitted accordingly. The proposed protocol is based on bus topology for a single channel LAN. Throughput, transmission efficiency, average delay and percentage of collision of the proposed network is evaluated against number of nodes, bus length and offered load within two environments, i.e. Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet. The results show significant performance improvement. Throughput, transmission efficiency are increased more than 10% in average. On the other hand, average delay and percentage of collision are reduced to less than 2 ms and 3.5% respectively compared to the conventional CSMA/CD based LAN

Knowledge and attitude of ethics committee (EC) members on bioethics and structure & function of EC in Bangladesh: A pilot study

Having scandalous unethical research practices in the mid and late 20th century, study protocols of biomedical research reviewed by the Ethics Committee (EC) has become the accepted international standard. The Declaration of Helsinki uniformly requires that all biomedical research involving human participants, including research on identifiable human material or data, should be approved by the EC. Today, concerns over the quality of the EC functions worldwide. There are research globally in this regard but no data are available from Bangladesh. Hence, we conducted a questionnaire based pilot study on knowledge and attitude of EC members on bioethics and structure & function of EC in Bangladesh

BlogSum: A Query-based Summarization Approach to Make Sense of Social Media

With the rapid growth of the Social Web, a large amount of informal opinionated texts are available on numerous topics. However, people can be overwhelmed with this vast amount of information and they need help to find the information of their interests. Natural language tools for automatically analyzing these opinions become necessary to help individuals, organizations, and governments in making timely decisions. To address this need, I proposed a summarization approach for opinionated texts. To validate my approach, BlogSum is developed and evaluated experimentally using current benchmarks. Users can ask BlogSum any question (e.g. Why do people like Chrome better than Firefox?). To answer user's question, BlogSum first retrieves relevant blogs, reviews from the web then generates a concise summary that represents people opinions expressed towards the topic. Since blog summarization is a more recent endeavor, an error analysis was conducted by manually analyzing blog summaries to find there is any information processing difference needed for blogs compared to factual data. This analysis shows that question irrelevance and discourse incoherence, which decrease the overall quality of a summary and reduces the summary coherence, are two major issues for blog summaries. To address question irrelevance and discourse incoherence, in this work a domain-independent schema-based summarization approach is developed that utilizes discourse structures. This approach is based on the automatic identification of discourse relations within candidate sentences in order to instantiate the most appropriate discourse schema and filter and order candidate sentences in the most effective way. BlogSum also needs to deal with opinions, emotions effectively to be successful. BlogSum's overall performance as well as performance for question relevance and coherence was evaluated using various dataset. These results show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce question irrelevance and discourse incoherence and satisfy user's information need

Designing a Course with Critical Thinking Focus : Developing Basic English Skills for the Students of Computer Science and Engineering at a Private University of Bangladesh

This article suggests some critical thoughts about a four months English course for the students of Computer Sciences and Engineering titled Developing Basic English Skills for general academic and professional purposes The primary aim of this paper is to exhibit how the course can be designed by critical thinking and by following some wellestablished strategies with the help of needs analysis Some new approaches like flipped approach along with lecture and multimedia presentation the class was conducted by the researcher for the group of students from CSE first semester in a private university in Banglades

The molecular basis of cytochrome oxidase deficiency in childhood

The mitochondrial respiratory chain and oxidative phosphorylation system (complexes I-V) produce ATP by aerobic metabolism. Complex IV or cytochrome c oxidase (COX) catalyses transfer of electrons from reduced cytochrome c to molecular oxygen, coupled with proton pumping across the inner mitochondrial membrane. Human COX has 13 polypeptide subunits. Three subunits (I, II and III) constitute the enzyme's catalytic core and are encoded on the mitochondrial genome. The remaining subunits are nuclear-encoded. COX deficiency, either total or partial, is the most commonly recognised respiratory chain defect in childhood. This may be an isolated defect, or combined with deficiencies of other respiratory chain components. Clinical presentations are heterogeneous but most patients with COX deficiency remain uncharacterised at the molecular level. COX subunit expression patterns were analysed in 5 patients with known mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations and 36 uncharacterised patients. A specific pattern of COX subunit loss was identified in COX deficiency secondary to mtDNA mutations. This suggested that immunohistochemistry using monoclonal antibodies may distinguish between mtDNA defects and nuclear defects in COX deficiency. Subsequent sequence analysis, targeted by immunohistochemistry findings, led to identification of a missense mutation of COX subunit II that causes defective assembly and myopathy. Characterisation of this mutation provided information about assembly of the metal centres of COX. Thus identification of naturally occurring COX mutations allows insight into structure-function relationships within the enzyme. The majority of children with COX deficiency did not have selective loss of mtDNA- encoded subunits, suggesting that nuclear gene defects account for many cases of childhood-onset COX deficiency. One nuclear gene SURF1 is responsible for COX assembly or maintenance. Four patients had homozygous SURF1 mutations, associated with reduced expression of both mtDNA- and nuclear-encoded COX subunits. Studying patterns of subunit expression in COX-deficient patients is fundamental to understanding the pathogenesis of respiratory chain enzyme deficiencies

Holding multinational corporations accountable for human rights violations under International, African regional and South African Law

This thesis will focus on examining MNCs violation of human rights with specific reference to the environment and child labour. This paper will critique existing measures South Africa has adopted and implemented to prevent MNCs from committing such harmful practices and to hold them accountable for violating the aforementioned rights. This will be done by focusing in particular on MNCs operating in the extractive industry in South Africa. The study will consider the nature of human rights violations MNCs in this sector have been accused of and how, if at all, they are being held accountable. Lastly, this thesis will provide recommendations in respect to better prevention and accountability of MNCs of human rights violations