A new Approach to Compute Convex Hull

Virtual reality techniques have proved their importance in almost every field of knowledge, particularly in medical and architecture. Convex hull is an application of virtual reality which is used to draw the boundary of some object inside an image. In this paper a hybrid method is proposed to compute convex hull. The method is based on two already existing convex hull algorithms i.e. quick hull and grahams Scan algorithm. The proposed technique is an attempt to remove the deficiencies in the two above mentioned techniques of the convex hull

Secured Overlapping Technique for Digital Watermarking

Information security is a mandatory issue in current information technology world. A secure overlapping method is proposed in this paper whose key functionality is to distribute the key words at different places inside an image. It requires the extraction of overlapping blocks of image of the size of 4x4 matrixes and taking its transpose. Afterwards arranging the block to linear form row-by-row and applying watermark on it, and finally converting the block back to its original form just like the first step. This technique results in the distribution of hidden data within the block. This scattering of data is beneficial because attacker is unable to find the precise localization of hidden data within the overlapped blocks

Adoption and Impacts of Zero-Tillage in the Rice-Wheat Zone of Irrigated Punjab, Pakistan

This study documents the adoption and impacts of zero-tillage (ZT) wheat in the ricewheat systems of Pakistan’s Punjab province primarily drawing on a detailed empirical survey of 458 rice-wheat farmers. Our random stratified sample revealed 19% to be ZT wheat adopters and a similar share of the wheat area in the surveyed communities to be under ZT. The study suggests that diffusion has stagnated and also flags the issue of disadoption (14%). ZT adopters, non-adopters, and disadopters differ significantly in terms of their resource bases, with adopters typically showing the most favorable values. ZT drastically reduces tractor operations in farmers’ ZT wheat fields from an average of 8 passes to a single pass, implying a saving of 7 tractor hours and 35 liters of diesel per hectare. ZT did not have any significant effect on the mean farmer estimated wheat yield of 3.3 tons per hectare. ZT also had no significant effect on water productivity for wheat or spillover effect on the subsequent rice crop. ZT primarily appears to be a cost-saving technology for wheat in Pakistan’s Punjab. Based on these findings, the study provides a number of recommendations for research and development in Pakistan Punjab’s rice-wheat systems.Wheat, Rice, Agricultural development, Drilling equipment, Economic analysis, Innovation adoption, Farming systems, Cropping patterns, Production costs, Zero tillage, Pakistan, Crop Production/Industries, E16, F08,

Developing a Workflow for the Integration of Patient Education Materials into EPIC

Developing a Workflow for the Integration of Patient Education Materials into EPIC Muhammad-Sharif Moustafa Mentors: Kristine Petre and Linda Schwartz Library Services Abstract The purpose of this project was to create a simple, maintainable, and flexible workflow for patient education and library staff to incorporate custom LVHN patient education documents into the EPIC medical records system so that end users of EPIC may be able to easily document that they gave patients education materials. The workflow consisted of a series of well-defined steps and a computer program that automated several steps of the workflow. Corresponding documentation was written for both the workflow and computer program to ensure the simple usage and maintenance of the workflow beyond the end of this project. The workflow was tested by converting several patient education documents to HTML and uploading the documents to EPIC. The patient education staff also tested the workflow and provided feedback, which was incorporated back into the workflow. Introduction Patient education is an important part of health care. Effective patient education can improve the health of patients by reducing anxiety and improving compliance, which in turn reduces the cost of care at hospitals. (“Patient Education in Rehabilitation”, 2010). Patient education can include providing patients with reading materials that explain their condition, possible treatments, and care instructions. At LVHN, when health professionals need to give patients education materials related to their diagnoses, it must be documented in the EPIC medical records system. To do this, they manually type in the titles of the documents that they gave to the patients and request the documents from the print shop. While this is a simple process, it is neither efficient nor free from errors. Since most of the process of documenting patient teaching is done by people, there are many opportunities for error. A health professional may make any number of these mistakes when documenting patient education: mistype the title; forget to record the title; record the title in the incorrect section of the record; etc… This issue is well known, and can be avoided by integrating the patient education process into EPIC. Integrating the patient education process into EPIC would mean that health professionals would be able to search and document the dissemination of patient education materials using interfaces in EPIC specifically built for this purpose. This would reduce the opportunities for error because EPIC will do the error-prone tasks for users (e.g. recording the title of a document) and allow users to focus on the more important aspects of the process (e.g. which patient education materials are to be given to the patient). LVHN has a repository of more than 1500 patient education documents that need to be integrated into EPIC. Thus a clear and efficient workflow that could be followed by the patient education staff needed to be formulated and tested in this project. Although not a requirement, automating the steps of the workflow greatly increased the robustness of the workflow. Methods To gather the requirements of the workflow, interviews were held with the Director of Knowledge Management, Senior Medical Librarian, and patient education staff. There was also correspondence between the director and other administrators at the University of Michigan and University of Virginia about their current workflows. Those workflows served as the starting point for our workflow. A preliminary workflow was drafted and the staff reviewed it and provided feedback. When the first version of the workflow was created after being approved by the staff, the implementation of it was detailed. The workflow consisted of a program written in-house that interfaced with Microsoft Word and other programs and led users through the process of converting documents to HTML and inserting metadata. When the workflow was in its final stages, it was tested by having the patient education staff use the program to create several HTML documents with metadata and upload them to EPIC. For the first trial run, each employee used the workflow to convert a few documents to HTML and add metadata to them under supervision so that they could ask questions and give feedback as they used it. Their documents were uploaded to EPIC and reviewed by the director. After the first trial run, they used the workflow without supervision, relying only on the documentation that was provided for the workflow. They asked questions and provided feedback after they used the workflow. Their feedback was incorporated into the documentation, workflow, and program as they tested the workflow. Results and Discussion The patient education staff wanted LVHN patient education materials to be integrated into EPIC and to utilize certain features of EPIC. Specifically, they wanted to have the documents be displayed at the top of the “Relevant Documents” section when a health professional is selecting documents to give to the patient. It was previously known from the University of Michigan and University of Virginia that documents needed to be in HTML format to be uploaded to EPIC, required the correct metadata to be displayed in the “Relevant Documents” section, and needed an asterisk in the document title in the metadata in order for the documents to appear at the top of the “Relevant Documents” section. These requirements and their corresponding actions are listed in Table 1. Table 1: Requirements for the workflow Requirement Action That Will Satisfy Requirement Integrate LVHN patient education materials into EPIC Convert the documents to HTML Display LVHN patient education documents in the “Relevant Documents” section in EPIC Insert a specific set of metadata into the HTML documents Display LVHN patient education documents at the top of the list of the “Relevant Documents” section Add an asterisk to the beginning of the title of the document in the metadata The workflow needed to accomplish each of these actions. However, it also needed to be usable by non-technical users. Thus, an unofficial fourth requirement was that the workflow needed to be designed with non-technical users in mind. Ultimately this requirement was satisfied by creating a well-documented computer program with a graphical user interface that would perform most of the technical actions in the workflow. Figure 1: Flow chart representation of the workflow. The green rounded rectangle is the start of the workflow, the blue rectangles signify usage of the program, the gray rectangles are manual steps, and the orange single snip corner rectangle is the end of the workflow. The program had three modules: a conversion module, a metadata generation module, and a metadata insertion module. In the conversion module, users placed patient education documents as Microsoft Word documents in a folder and used the program to convert them to HTML. The program achieved this by first feeding each document to a macro in Microsoft Word to convert them to HTML and then converting the documents to XHTML (a stricter form of HTML) using another program called html2xhtml. In the metadata generation module, users downloaded the metadata for the documents from LibraryWorld in MARC format and used the program to format the metadata as HTML metadata. In the metadata insertion module, users registered the HTML documents and HTML metadata with the program and proceeded to match the documents with their corresponding metadata. In the case that a document did not have its metadata in LibraryWorld, the user skipped that document and added the metadata to the document manually. This involved obtaining the metadata from another source (librarian, nurse, etc), inputting the metadata into an Excel worksheet with formulas to generate HTML metadata, and copying and pasting the metadata into the document. The graphical interface of the computer program allowed users to complete each of the workflow steps without requiring familiarity with the technical aspects involved in each step. The user interface was made to be as simple and effective as possible so that users would be able to use the computer program with minimal technical skill and training. To build the user interface, a list of qualities of good user interfaces was compiled and adhered to as much as possible. A simple and effective user interface has these qualities (“Designing the User Interface”, 1998): Very low probability of crashing Reduces the memory load on the user Clearly shows the consequences of actions Reduces user error when using the program Clearly highlights destructive actions and prevents the user from performing them accidentally Uses color to convey nonessential information only to accommodate color-blind users Provides instruction on using the program either within the program or in an easily accessible area Clearly shows the intended workflow of the program Easy to use for novice users and efficient to use for experienced users The program was built to include as many of these qualities as possible. Table 2 lists some of the program’s features and the corresponding user interface quality each exhibits. Other features outside of the user-interface were built into the program to make it easy to use. One of these is that most of the EPIC integration workflow can be done within the program, reducing the need for users to switch to other programs. This promotes consistency, which reduces the opportunity for errors and simplifies the user experience. (“Designing the User Interface”, 1998) Using only one program to perform a task is easier and more efficient than using many programs. The program was also made to be maintainable by splitting the application logic into smaller logical parts and documenting the source code’s syntax and semantics. This will allow maintainers to work on small segments of code and be able to understand them with little effort. As a last resort in the case the program cannot be used, the lower branch of the workflow shown in Figure 1 involving Microsoft Excel can be used as a manual backup. This backup enhances the robustness of the workflow because it allows the patient education staff to use the workflow even if there is no one able to maintain the program. Table 2: A list of user interface qualities and the features of the program that exhibit that quality. User Interface Quality Corresponding Feature in Program Very low probability of crashing Extensive error checking to prevent crashes in most situations Reduces the memory load on the user Helpful hints throughout the program to remind the user of the required actions to be performed in the program Clearly shows the consequences of actions Detailed explanations of the consequences of each action are provided next to each step in the program Reduces user error when using the program Form checking to prevent errors from user input Clearly highlights destructive actions and prevents the user from performing them accidentally Avoidance of overwriting files when the program runs to protect the user from erroneous destructive actions Uses color to convey nonessential information only to accommodate color-blind users Steps are outlined in different colors depending on which module they are part of to assist users in quickly associating steps together. Modules are also labeled so that the color coding is not the only way to differentiate modules. Provides instruction on using the program either within the program or in an easily accessible area Each step has corresponding usage instructions beside it in the interface as well as a thorough user manual that is distributed with the program Workflow of the program should be obvious to the user The user interface is divided into modules, which are further divided into numbered steps that strongly suggest to the user to complete each step in order Easy to use for novice users and efficient to use for experienced users Every step has instructions beside it so that a novice will know where to look for more information about a step and an experienced user will be able to easily ignore the instructions. Figure 2: The user interface of the program features large buttons, extensive instructions, numbered steps, and color-coded groups. Testing the workflow with the patient education staff provided valuable feedback that was used to improve the usability of the workflow. User testing should be as representative as possible of the real usage of the workflow. (“Usability Engineering”, 1994) During the tests, users followed the steps detailed in the documentation with limited supervision. The tests realistically mimicked the way they would be using the workflow. The supervisor intervened when there were shortcomings in the documentation that were revealed during testing. Otherwise, users progressed through the workflow independently. These tests were then used to clarify the workflow. After the supervised test, users were able to use the workflow without supervision. When testing the HTML documents in EPIC, it was found that the language tag in the metadata was causing issues when displaying documents written in languages other than English. When different language versions of the same document were uploaded to EPIC, only the English document would display. The other versions were hidden completely from both the “Relevant Documents” section and search. This was an issue because patient education documents must be available in the languages of the patients who will read them. The issue was resolved by omitting the language tag from all foreign language documents and encoding them in the title of the document. Conclusion A workflow that performed all of the actions specified in the requirements for integrating patient education documents in EPIC was created and tested with the patient education staff. Detailed documentation was written for the workflow to guide users and standardize the procedure. The computer program was an effective component of the workflow because it allowed users to complete the majority of the workflow while requiring little technical knowledge. It also increased the efficiency of employees tasked with integrating patient education materials into EPIC. As of the end of this project, several documents have been converted and tested in EPIC using this workflow. However, they have not been tested in a clinical setting yet. Future Work The next steps for this project are to convert all of the patient education documents pertaining to a specific disease and test them in EPIC in a clinical setting. This would mean having health professionals access patient education materials in EPIC and giving materials to real patients. Currently, patient education documents are created as both Microsoft Word documents and Adobe InDesign documents. Research is needed to include the conversion of Adobe InDesign documents into the workflow so that all patient education documents can be integrated into EPIC. Acknowledgments I would like to thank my mentor Kristine Petre for guiding me in this project, familiarizing me with the library infrastructure, teaching me about MARC records, and assisting me in writing this article and the poster. I am grateful for the cooperation and leadership of Linda Schwartz on the creation of the workflow, the metadata, correspondence with other librarians, and EPIC testing. Special thanks to Laura Harstine and Marie Bartos for their time spent in testing the workflow and providing invaluable feedback. Finally, thank you to Matthew Vonfrisch for uploading our test documents to EPIC and troubleshooting EPIC issues. References Bartczak, Jeremy (May 2015). University of Virginia metadata scheme for patient education materials in EPIC. University of Virginia. Chowdhury, G. G., & Chowdhury, S. (2007). Organizing information: from the shelf to the Web. London: Facet. Dreeben, O. (2010). Patient Education in Rehabilitation. Sudbury, Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Nielsen, J. (1994). Usability Engineering. San Francisco, California: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Shneiderman, B. (1998). Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (3rd Edition ed.). Reading, Massachussetts: Addison Wesley Longman. Volk, Ruti (May 2015). University of Michigan metadata scheme for patient education materials in EPIC. University of Michigan

Habitatval och rörelsemönster hos ren (Rangifer t. tarandus) : en jämförelse mellan fritt bete och stödutfodring

Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) husbandry mainly relies on natural pastures to ensure a sustainable animal production. In Sweden, coniferous forest areas are most commonly utilized as grazing grounds during winter. Additionally, supplementary feeding is sometimes provided for free-ranging animals to ensure their survival. The main reasons for the provision of supplementary feeding are loss of lichen pastures due to modern forestry practices and climate change. It is important to understand habitat selection of reindeer and how this selection differs when supplementary food is provided during winter. To answer these questions, GPS collared reindeer data was analyzed for winters between years 2007 – 2010 and 2014 – 2016, comparing time periods when animals relied on natural pasture with periods when animals were provided with supplementary feeding. The study area is situated within Malå herding district in Västerbotten County in northern Sweden. The aim of this project was to investigate 1) habitat selection and space use pattern, 2) differences in home range size between supplementary fed and naturally grazing reindeer, 3) to what extent reindeer move during the winter period when they are not supplementary fed, and 4) how often they re-visit and stay close to the feeding stations when they are supplementary fed. The results clearly showed that reindeer select for lichen-rich forests, open areas and clear cuts both when freely ranging or supplementary fed. The choice of lichen-rich forest habitat becomes stronger when animal were not supplementary fed. The results also showed that reindeer avoided roads during winter. In addition, utility distribution covered a larger geographical area when they were feeding on natural pastures as reindeer covered large geographical area. The frequency of revisitations and time spent around the feeding stations varied between years. The findings of this research can be useful to face the future challenges associated with reindeer husbandry management in different areas with respect to their home range size, habitat selectivity, re-visitation frequency and time spend inside the feeding stations. The study results could be compared with the herders’ knowledge and shared with them for coordination and dialogue between different sectors

Factors Affecting Cotton Production in Pakistan:Empirical Evidence from Multan District

This paper attempts to examine the factors affecting cotton production in Multan region using primary source of data. A sample of 60 small farmers, 25 medium and 15 large farmers was randomly selected from two Tehsils namely Multan and Shujabad of district Multan. The Cobb-Douglas Production Function is employed to assess the effects of various inputs like cultivation, seed and sowing, irrigation, fertilizer, plant protection, inter-culturing / hoeing and labour cost on cotton yield. The results depicted that seed, fertilizer and irrigation were found scarce commodity for all category of farmers in district Multan. The Cobb-Douglas Production Function results revealed that the coefficients for cultivation (0.113) and seed (0.103) were found statistically significant at 1 percent level. The Cost-Benefit Ratio for the large farmers was found higher (1.41) than that of small (1.22) and medium (1.24) farmers. There is a dire need to ensure the availability of these scarce inputs by both public and private sectors as these inputs were major requirement of the cotton crop.Cotton; Cobb- Douglas Production Function; Cost Benefit Ratio; Marginal Value Product; Allocate Efficiency of Critical Inputs; Multan District; Pakistan

The Socio-Economic and Demographic Determinants of Women Work Participation in Pakistan: Evidence from Bahawalpur District

The analysis of labour market participation is useful for formulating employment and human resource development policies. Females form almost more than half of the total population in Pakistan play a very important role in the country. The present study endeavors to estimate the various factors which affect the women work participation. The study is based on the cross-section data collected through field survey. The logistic regression technique is employed to estimate the determinants of female labour force participation. Educational attainment levels turn out to be very significant determinant. Female’s labour force participation rises with increasing level of education. Presence of children in early age groups reduces the female labour force participation. The results of the study conclude that female education is necessary for better employment opportunities.Female labor force participation; Female education; Household Income; Family Dependents; Marital Status; Children; Logit Model; Pakistan