Evaluation of the Efficiency of Singapore\u27s Waste Management Controls

With the constant population growth in such a limited land, Singapore is faced with multiple challenges in waste management. Over the last decades, Singapore aimed to strive for a zero-waste environment for its nation by reducing the significant amount of waste disposed of through recycling and maximizing landfills. The scope of this poster is to present whether Singapore has had an efficient control over its waste management in the last two decades. The poster took approaches to analyze statistics that concludes the recycle rates categorized into different classifications of waste disposals from 2003 to 2020 and average of total saved energy through the process of recycling. Overall, the findings suggest Singapore had an efficient waste management at the beginning with constant growth of recycle rate, but discrepancies are found starting from 2018 since the rate declined rapidly in three years. So coming to the conclusion that Singapore’s efficiency on waste management control still has the potential to develop sustainable improvement. Visualizing these data can help Singapore’s government to implement recycling policies that motivate people to improve their living environment.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/durep_posters/1081/thumbnail.jp

Runtime asynchronous fault tolerance via speculation

Transient faults are emerging as a critical reliability concern in modern microprocessors. Redundant hardware solutions are commonly deployed to detect transient faults, but they are less flexible and cost-effective than software solutions. However, software solutions are rendered impractical because of high performance overheads. To address this problem, this paper presents Runtime Asynchronous Fault Tolerance via Speculation (RAFT), the fastest transient fault detection technique known to date. Serving as a layer between the application and the underlying platform, RAFT automatically generates two symmetric program instances from a program binary. It detects transient faults in a non-invasive way and exploits high-confidence value speculation to achieve low runtime overhead. Evaluation on a commodity multicore system demonstrates that RAFT delivers a geomean performance overhead of 2.83% on a set of 30 SPEC CPU benchmarks and STAMP benchmarks. Compared with existing transient fault detection techniques, RAFT exhibits the best performance and fault coverage, without requiring any change to the hardware or the software applications

Fine-grained data access control with attribute-hiding policy for cloud-based IoT

The final publication is available at Elsevier via https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2019.02.008. © 2019. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising approach to achieve fine-grained access control over the outsourced data in Internet of Things (IoT). However, in the existing CP-ABE schemes, the access policy is either appended to the ciphertext explicitly or only partially hidden against public visibility, which results in privacy leakage of the underlying ciphertext and potential recipients. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained data access control scheme supporting expressive access policy with fully attribute hidden for cloud-based IoT. Specifically, the attribute information is fully hidden in access policy by using randomizable technique, and a fuzzy attribute positioning mechanism based on garbled Bloom filter is developed to help the authorized recipients locate their attributes efficiently and decrypt the ciphertext successfully. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves effective policy privacy preservation with low storage and computation overhead. As a result, no valuable attribute information in the access policy will be disclosed to the unauthorized recipients

A Comprehensive Framework for Comparing Textbooks: Insights from the Literature and Experts

Textbooks are essential components in the learning process. They assist in achieving educational learning outcomes and developing social and cultural values. However, limited studies provide comprehensive frameworks for comparing textbooks. Most have focused on a specific textbook perspective within a particular discipline. Therefore, this study used a triangulation method to develop a comprehensive framework for textbook comparison. Through a systematic literature review and a two-round Fuzzy Delphi method with 155 textbook experts, a textbook comparison framework with four indicators (structure, content, expectations, and language) was developed. Additionally, some of the developed framework indicators and sub-indicators could be relevant for comparing textbooks in a particular discipline. For example, the page count sub-indicator was proven to be useful for comparing humanities and social science textbooks but not natural science textbooks. The findings of this study could facilitate the process of comparing textbooks, hence promoting the understanding of knowledge design and acquisition in different contexts, such as when comparing textbooks from different countries

Meta-analysis of the association between toll-like receptor gene polymorphisms and hepatitis C virus infection

ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to investigate the association between toll-like receptor (TLR) 3/7 gene polymorphisms and the infection by hepatitis C virus (HCV).MethodsPubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Scopus, CNKI, Wanfang Data, and SinoMed were searched to identify studies focusing on the association between the TLR3 rs3775290 or the TLR7 rs179008 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and the HCV infection. All the related articles were collected from the inception of each database to 15 January 2023. Our meta-analysis was conducted using the allelic model, the dominant model, and the recessive model. Outcomes were presented by odds ratio (ORs) and 95% confidence interval (95%CI). The heterogeneity across studies was assessed by the I2 test. A subgroup analysis was performed to explore the source of heterogeneity. Funnel plots were drawn to assess the risk of publication bias. Review Manager 5.4 was used for statistical analysis.ResultsTen articles were finally included, among which six studies were analyzed for rs3775290 and five studies were analyzed for rs179008. Studies relating to rs3775290 included 801 patients and 1,045 controls, whereas studies relating to rs179008 included 924 patients and 784 controls. The results of the meta-analysis showed that there is no significant association between rs3775290 gene polymorphism and HCV infection (T vs. C: OR = 1.12, 95%CI 0.97–1.30; TT+CT vs. CC: OR = 1.20, 95%CI 0.73–1.96; TT vs. CT+CC: OR = 1.13, 95%CI 0.68–1.89). The recessive model showed that rs179008-T allele homozygotes had an 89% increased risk of infection by HCV compared with rs179008-A allele carriers (TT vs. AT+AA: OR = 1.89, 95%CI 1.13–3.16). The results of the subgroup analysis demonstrated that the characteristics of the control population may serve as an important source of heterogeneity. In the African populations, individuals with homozygous rs179008-T alleles had a higher risk of infection by HCV than rs179008-A allele carriers (OR = 2.14, 95%CI 1.18–3.87). We did not find that this difference existed in the European populations (OR = 1.24, 95%CI 0.43–3.56).ConclusionThere is no significant association between rs3775290 single nucleotide polymorphism and the infection by HCV. Individuals with homozygous rs179008-T alleles have a higher risk of an infection by HCV than rs179008-A allele carriers, which is statistically significant in the African populations

Structural changes in the progression of atrial fibrillation: Potential role of glycogen and fibrosis as perpetuating factors

Background: Previous studies of the goat heart subjected to prolonged atrial pacing induced sustained atrial fibrillation (AF). Structural changes included marked accumulation of glycogen in atrial myocytes. Aims: In the present study, we hypothesized that glycogen deposition in canine atrial myocytes promotes paroxysmal forms of AF and is involved in fibrosis development in the later stages of AF. Material & methods: In dogs under pentobarbital anesthesia, tissues were obtained from the right and left atrial appendages (LAA/RAA). Periodic acid Schiff (PAS) and Masson's trichrome staining of the LAA/RAA from normal dogs, and those subjected to atrial pacing induced AF for 48 h or 8 weeks determined glycogen and collagen concentrations, respectively, using morphometric analysis. Results: At baseline, there was a significant greater concentration of glycogen in the LAA than the RAA (P </= 0.05). Compared to the RAA, the LAA glycogen, was dense and locked against the intercalated discs. After pacing induced AF for 48 hours and 8 weeks there was a marked increase in glycogen deposition, significantly greater than in the baseline state (P </= 0.05). There was a similar and progressive increase in collagen concentrations in each group (P </= 0.05). Conclusions: The differential in glycogen concentration, in conjunction with other factors, neural and electrophysiological, provide a basis for the greater propensity of the left atrium for paroxysmal AF, at baseline and 48 hours of pacing induced AF. The marked increase in collagen at 8 weeks of pacing provides a substrate for sustained AF. Evidence is presented linking glycogen accumulation and fibrosis as factors in the persistent forms of AF.Peer reviewedVeterinary Pathobiolog

Effect of boron deficiency on the photosynthetic performance of sugar beet cultivars with contrasting boron efficiencies

Boron (B) deficiency severely affects the quality of sugar beet production, and the employment of nutrient-efficient varieties for cultivation is a crucial way to solve environmental and resource-based problems. However, the aspect of leaf photosynthetic performance among B-efficient sugar beet cultivars remains uncertain. The B deficient and B-sufficient treatments were conducted in the experiment using KWS1197 (B-efficient) and KWS0143 (B-inefficient) sugar beet cultivars as study materials. The objective of the present study was to determine the impacts of B deficiency on leaf phenotype, photosynthetic capacity, chloroplast structure, and photochemical efficiency of the contrasting B-efficiency sugar beet cultivars. The results indicated that the growth of sugar beet leaves were dramatically restricted, the net photosynthetic rate was significantly decreased, and the energy flux, quantum yield, and flux ratio of PSII reaction centers were adversely affected under B deficiency. Compared to the KWS0143 cultivar, the average leaf area ratio of the KWS1197 cultivar experienced less impact, and its leaf mass ratio (LMR) increased by 26.82% under B deficiency, whereas for the KWS0143 cultivar, the increase was only 2.50%. Meanwhile, the light energy capture and utilization capacity of PSII reaction centers and the proportion of absorbed light energy used for electron transfer were higher by 3.42% under B deficiency; KWS1197 cultivar managed to alleviate the photo-oxidative damage, which results from excessive absorbed energy (ABS/RC), by increasing the dissipated energy (DIo/RC). Therefore, in response to B deprivation, the KWS1197 cultivar demonstrated greater adaptability in terms of morphological indices and photosynthetic functions, which not only explains the improved performance but also renders the measured parameters as the key features for varietal selection, providing a theoretical basis for the utilization of efficient sugar beet cultivars in future