Developing bulletin board visualizations

Prevalent text-based representations within online communities and bulletin boards often make it difficult to contextualise the activity and interactions that are taking place. Visualisation techniques have been successfully applied in a range of domains to augment and enhance existing communication technologies such as bulletin boards. This paper presents a new approach to visualising bulletin board activity: BulB. The use of BulB visualisations enables users to gain an overall picture of bulletin board activity and develop an understanding of the overall interaction context

Supporting Members of Online Communities Through the Use of Visualisations

Growing numbers of people around the world are using online communities to stay in touch with each other. Online communities are now widespread, enabling meaningful communication, around various domains of interest, between users who are separated by time and distance. Despite the increasing numbers of people using online communities, there are many examples of communities which suffer from problems of falling levels of contributions from members. This thesis investigates the main principles involved in creating successful online communities. It develops a taxonomy of community interactions that provides a framework for investigating techniques that have the potential to encourage member participation. Within standard text-based online communities, problems of information overload can be prevalent, with extensive user participation often required in order to get an overview of the interaction environment and context. This thesis proposes the use of facilitation techniques, in the form of visualisations, as a means of helping users get a better understanding of the interaction context, reducing the amount of time spent by users in the information-discovery phase. A range of new, complementary visualisations are developed and tested in order to assess their efficacy in helping users to complete tasks that they would be likely to undertake during their information-discovery phase. The results of the experiments show that not only do visualisations help users achieve more accurate results in conducting simple information-discovery tasks, but they also help in completing such tasks in a more efficient manner, shrinking the amount of time spent in the information-discovery phase. Different visualisations are also shown to be more useful in different circumstances, pointing to the fact that the needs and requirements of users, and the tasks they undertake, should be considered when designing the exact nature of any potential visualisation intended to support users of online communities

Transversal Eccentric Domination in Graphs

We introduce transversal eccentric dominating(TED) set. An eccentric dominating set $D$ is called a TED-set if it intersects with every minimum eccentric dominating set $D'$. We find the TED-number $\gamma_{ted}$ of some standard graphs. Results are stated and proved

Septic arthritis of ankle joint in the paediatric age group: a retrospective study

Background: Septic arthritis in paediatric age group poses a significant clinical problem. Common sites are hip and knee joint. There are several orthopaedic literatures available on septic arthritis of the hip and knee joint, however, literature on epidemiology, causative organisms and outcome of septic arthritis of the ankle are very few.Methods: We conducted a retrospective study at a tertiary hospital with an aim to evaluate the incidence, causative pathogen, outcome and to identify differences, if any, between clinical features and laboratory findings of these patients when compared to those with hip and knee joint infection.Results: 47 children were diagnosed with septic arthritis, of which, 14 had septic arthritis of the ankle. Mean age was 5.2 years (8 months - 12 years). 13 children had undergone joint aspiration as a primary procedure. 50% (7) children had positive culture. Streptococcus pyogenes was the commonest causative organism in our cohort (29%) followed by Staphylococcus aureus. Mean follow-up was 36 months (16 - 56 months). 13 children (93%) had good clinical outcome. 1 child developed early arthritis.Conclusions: Septic arthritis of the ankle is a serious condition. Even-though the joint is superficial, diagnosing it clinically can be difficult due to less pronounced symptoms. This can lead to delay in establishing the diagnosis and commencing treatment, hence, it is imperative to have a high index of suspicion. We found early joint aspiration followed by a course of antibiotics to be an effective regimen in management of this devastating condition

Equitable eccentric domination in graphs

In this paper, we define equitable eccentric domination in graphs. An eccentric dominating set S ⊆ V (G) of a graph G(V, E) is called an equitable eccentric dominating set if for every v ∈ V − S there exist at least one vertex u ∈ V such that |d(v) − d(u)| ≤ 1 where vu ∈ E(G). We find equitable eccentric domination number γeqed(G) for most popular known graphs. Theorems related to γeqed(G) have been stated and proved

Coupling distance in Graphs

In this paper the coupling distance of simple connected graphs are introduced. The different parameters of coupling distance like coupling eccentricity, coupling radius, coupling diameter, coupling center and coupling periphery are defined. The coupling parameters for different standard graphs are obtained

Proteomics and bamboo research

Bamboo, being one of the fastest growing plants needs only between 3 and 4 years to mature before they are ready for harvesting and utilization. This makes bamboo the best possible alternative to replace timber in the future. As a result, bamboo has been the focus of research in recent years. Currently, there is a growing demand for thicker walled and rapidly growing bamboo from the industry due to its mechanical strength, high durability and uninterrupted as well as sustainable supply. However, the information on the physical, mechanical and chemical properties for different bamboo species and age-groups is rather limited. In the current Omics era, ‘Proteomic Analysis’ has now become one of the basic technologies to obtain essential information of the biological systems. Proteomics is a powerful tool to study the global changes in protein synthesis in response to environmental stimuli as well as during development. At present, we are performing the proteomics studies on various commercially important known species of bamboo to understand the molecular mechanisms of rapid growth as well as thick wall lumen. This will help us to better understand the growth characteristics and physical properties of bamboo at molecular level by identifying the novel proteins associated with the production of thick wall and rapidly growing culms of bamboo. We believe that the present proteomics study shall provide a new dataset and the gene screening list, which will be a useful resource for future genetic as well as genomic studies for the development of high quality bamboo cultivars

Making a difference - the appropriate use of web technology

Much has been written elsewhere about how, different Information Technology tools, can in principle be used by groups or communities to make their web sites more effective for Continued Professional Development. In practice, complex use is not often the case. In particular, three sites were studied in Scotland, which provided web facilities for the over 60s. The sites, and the communities they served, used only simple Information Technology. Nevertheless, they enabled their communities to participate effectively, on the 'right side', of the European population's 'digital divide'

Iron(III)-catalyzed chlorination of activated arenes

A general and regioselective method for the chlorination of activated arenes has been developed. The transformation uses iron(III) triflimide as a powerful Lewis acid for the activation of N-chlorosuccinimide and the subsequent chlorination of a wide range of anisole, aniline, acetanilide and phenol derivatives. The reaction was utilized for the late-stage mono- and di-chlorination of a range of target compounds such as the natural product nitrofungin, the antibacterial agent chloroxylenol and the herbicide chloroxynil. The facile nature of this transformation was demonstrated with the development of one-pot tandem iron-catalyzed dihalogenation processes allowing highly regioselective formation of different carbon-halogen bonds. The synthetic utility of the resulting dihalogenated aryl compounds as building blocks was established with the synthesis of natural products and pharmaceutically relevant targets