Scalable, Solar Powered Membrane-Based Water Purification Systems for Community Development in Developing Countries

This manuscript style thesis presents a community development model developed at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) to deliver sustainable water purification systems and originate a companion micro-business to sell excess clean water in communities in Haiti. Since 2010, students and faculty from ERAU have partnered with strategic partners to not only provide clean water to their in-country operations but also provide an opportunity for economic growth through a clean water selling micro-business. Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) training is also implemented to aid in community buy-in. Lessons learned from the history of foreign aid to developing countries is taken into account but it is the lessons learned from implementing the model that the project has been able to improve significantly year after year. This model is a short-term, focused, and specialized approach that has a well-defined process and has proven to be successful and is described throughout the thesis and in the conference paper in Appendix C

TCAD Simulation Models, Parameters, and Methodologies for β-Ga2O3 Power Devices

β-Ga2O3 is an emerging material and has the potential to revolutionize power electronics due to its ultra-wide-bandgap (UWBG) and lower native substrate cost compared to Silicon Carbide and Gallium Nitride. Since β-Ga2O3 technology is still not mature, experimental study of β-Ga2O3 is difficult and expensive. Technology-Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) is thus a cost-effective way to study the potentials and limitations of β-Ga2O3 devices. In this paper, TCAD parameters calibrated to experiments are presented. They are used to perform the simulations in heterojunction p-NiO/n-Ga2O3 diode, Schottky diode, and normally-off Ga2O3 vertical FinFET. Besides the current-voltage (I-V) simulations, breakdown, capacitance-voltage (C-V), and short-circuit ruggedness simulations with robust setups are discussed. TCAD Sentaurus is used in the simulations but the methodologies can be applied in other simulators easily. This paves the road to performing a holistic study of β-Ga2O3 devices using TCAD

Visualization of UTP‘s Energy Consumption And Its Carbon Footprint (ENVISION)

The author has done the research on the field of Green IT and the required primary analysis on implementing Green IT in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP). This lead the author to believe that the first step to implementing Green IT policies in UTP is to make the UTP‘s senior management aware of the current situation in UTP in terms of UTP‘s energy consumption and carbon footprint levels. In order to raise awareness, the author has developed a visualization based system for visualizing UTP‘s energy consumption and its carbon footprint levels. This system can help UTP‘s management to review the general energy consumption of UTP in order to take immediate action or suggest future energy saving policies. As such, the objective of this project is to study the potential of the project regarding energy consumption and then based on the study, model, and design and develops a user interface that allows the UTP management to make analysis and review on UTP‘s energy consumption and its carbon footprint levels. This system is developed using web programming such as PHP and XHTML by using Dreamweaver CS5 in order to develop an interactive webpage. This project focused on how to effectively and efficiently visualize the data regarding energy consumption and carbon footprint. Critical review of related works on data visualization has been conducted to develop an optimized user interface that is effective. The review will focuses on how to show the data in graphical form so that the senior management in UTP can survey the rough estimate of the current energy consumption and carbon footprint in UTP over a specific period of time and make an analysis from the visual graphics provided by the system

Risk factors associated with refractory epilepsy in children

Posters: no. P7BACKGROUND: There is a lack of consensus about the definition of intractable or refractory epilepsy in children. Medically intractable epilepsy occurred in 10 to 20% of epilepsy with childhood onset. Patients with medical intractability had immense resource implication and lifelong disability/disabilities. Early identification of risk factors for refractory epilepsy offers a chance of appropriate and timely treatment thus affecting prognosis. METHODS: A retrospective study was performed for our cohort of 505 children aged below 18 years with new-onset epilepsy, diagnosed between 1979 and 2006, and actively managed at the Comprehensive Epilepsy Clinic, Department of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine of the University of Hong Kong. We arbitrarily defined refractory epilepsy as those who had never been seizure-free for more than 12 months despite receiving anti-epileptic drug (AED) treatment. Responders were arbitrarily defined as those who had at least been seizure-free for consecutive 12 months. All patients had been on one or more AEDs and were followed up for at least 24 months after AED initiation. The demographic, clinical, diagnostic, investigative, management and seizure outcome at 2 years were analysed. RESULTS: At 2 years’ follow up, 42% (n=212) had refractory epilepsy. Risk factors significantly correlated with refractory epilepsy included history of status epilepticus (P<0.001), symptomatic aetiology (P<0.001), use of two or more AEDs (P=0.001), abnormal neurological co-morbidities including mental retardation (IQ<70) [P<0.001], learning disabilities (IQ=70-90) [P=0.009], cerebral palsy (P=0.011), abnormalities in EEG (P<0.001) and neuroimaging (P<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Early identification of risk factors to predict possible medical intractability is important in improving treatment strategies especially in the selection of traditional versus newer AEDs, mono- versus poly-pharmacy or even earlier alternative epilepsy management decision plans including evaluation for possible surgical therapies.published_or_final_versionThe 1st Hong Kong Neurological Congress cum 22nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the Hong Kong Neurological Society, Hong Kong, 6-8 November 2009. In Hong Kong Medical Journal, 2009, v. 15 n. 6, suppl. 7, p. 42, abstract P

Robust cryogenic ab-initio quantum transport simulation for L\u3csub\u3eG\u3c/sub\u3e = 10 nm nanowire

In this paper, we propose a simulation methodology for robust and accurate ab-initio quantum transport simulation down to 3 K of an n-type Si nanowire. This is important to understand the subthreshold swing (SS) at cryogenic temperature. We show that for LG = 10 nm, the SS is fully dominated by direct tunneling at cryogenic temperature, which is the first time to be demonstrated using ab-initio simulation, to the best of our knowledge. We propose a method to achieve more than 2x speed up in the simulation time and achieve convergence at high gate biases. It is also shown that from the leakage perspective, there is no advantage in operating LG = 10 nm transistor below 77 K

A Content Analysis of Interviewee Reports of Medical School Admissions Interviews

Introduction. Prospective medical school applicants use Internet websites to gain information about medical school interviews as well as to offer their experience in such interviews. This study examined applicants’ reported experiences of interviews and compared them to the purposes of the interview as purported by medical schools. Method. Content analysis of student feedback regarding medical school interviews at 161 medical schools was conducted for entries of over 4600 students applying to medical school who anonymously and voluntarily completed an online questionnaire. Results. Across all medical schools, nearly one half of all cited interview questions addressed non-cognitive characteristics of the applicants. Top ranked medical schools were reported to ask significantly more interpersonal and illegal questions and fewer academic/general knowledge questions than other medical schools. Lower ranked schools did not differ significantly in the types of questions reportedly asked applicants compared to other medical schools. Discussion. Medical school interviews are generally gathering types of information about applicants that admissions personnel identify as important in the admission decision. In addition to measuring interpersonal characteristics, medical school admissions interviews are assessing cognitive abilities and ethical decision-making. Sources on the Internet provide actual medical school interview questions to prospective students. This practice can help them gain an undue advantage in interviewing. Admissions committees and faculty who interview students may want to consider how best to obtain accurate and valid responses from applicants

The perception of lexical tone contrasts in Cantonese children with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Purpose: This study examined the perception of fundamental frequency (f0) patterns by Cantonese children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants were 14 five-year-old children with SLI, and 14 age-matched (AM) and 13 four-year-old vocabulary-matched (VM) controls. The children identified a word from familiar word pairs that illustrated the 8 minimally contrastive pairs of the 6 lexical tones. They discriminated the f0 patterns within contrastive tonal pairs in speech and nonspeech stimuli. Results: In tone identification, the SLI group performed worse than the AM group but not the VM group. In tone discrimination, the SLI group did worse than the AM group on 2 contrasts and showed a nonsignificant trend of poorer performance on all contrasts combined. The VM group generally did worse than the AM group. There were no group differences in discrimination performance between speech and nonspeech stimuli. No correlation was found between identification and discrimination performance. Only the normal controls showed a moderate correlation between vocabulary scores and performance in the 2 perception tasks. Conclusion: The SLI group's poor tone identification cannot be accounted for by vocabulary knowledge alone. The group's tone discrimination performance suggests that some children with SLI have a deficit in f0 processing. © American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.postprin

Local Statistics for Generative Image Detection

Diffusion models (DMs) are generative models that learn to synthesize images from Gaussian noise. DMs can be trained to do a variety of tasks such as image generation and image super-resolution. Researchers have made significant improvement in the capability of synthesizing photorealistic images in the past few years. These successes also hasten the need to address the potential misuse of synthesized images. In this paper, we highlight the effectiveness of computing local statistics, as opposed to global statistics, in distinguishing digital camera images from DM-generated images. We hypothesized that local statistics should be used to address the spatial non-stationarity problem in images. We show that our approach produced promising results and it is also robust to various perturbations such as image resizing and JPEG compression

Molecular mechanisms mediating the G protein-coupled receptor regulation of cell cycle progression

G protein-coupled receptors are key regulators of cellular communication, mediating the efficient coordination of a cell's responses to extracellular stimuli. When stimulated these receptors modulate the activity of a wide range of intracellular signalling pathways that facilitate the ordered development, growth and reproduction of the organism. There is now a growing body of evidence examining the mechanisms by which G protein-coupled receptors are able to regulate the expression, activity, localization and stability of cell cycle regulatory proteins that either promote or inhibit the initiation of DNA synthesis. In this review, we will detail the intracellular pathways that mediate the G protein-coupled receptor regulation of cellular proliferation, specifically the progression from the G1 phase to the S phase of the cell cycle