Psychological Morbidity in Students of Medical College and Science and Art College Students - A Comparative Study

Considering the importance of quality of life in medical students we have conducted a cross sectional & descriptive study on screening of mental illness of 60 medical students of prefinal year and comparing it with 60 students of third year of Science and Art College. Students were selected via random sampling. GHQ-12 was used as a screening tool and after obtaining scores students were graded in 3 categories - individuals screened positive for psychological morbidity were of Grades 2 and 3 and individuals screened negative for psychological morbidity were of Grade 1 and they were compared according to college, gender & residence. Students screened positive for psychological morbidity as per GHQ-12 were found higher in medical college (87%) as compared to Science and Art College (45%) and a statistically significant association was found between psychological morbidity and medical students. Psychological morbidity was not significantly associated with residence and gender

Data Mining Concepts - A survey paper

Data Mining is a significant field in today’s data-driven world. Understanding and implementing its concepts can lead to discovery of useful insights. This paper discusses the main concepts of data mining, focusing on two main concepts namely Association Rule Mining and Time Series Analysi

An optimized Load Balancing Technique for Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing (CC) is a service that uses subscription storage & computing power. Load balancing in distributed systems is one of the most critical pieces. CC has been a very interesting and important area of research because CC is one of the best systems that stores data with reduced costs and can be viewed over the internet at all times. Load balance facilitates maintaining high user retention & resource utilization by ensuring that each computing resource is correctly and properly distributed. This paper describes cloud-based load balancing systems. CC is virtualization of hardware like storage, computing, and security by virtual machines (VM). The live relocation of these machines provides many advantages, including high availability, hardware repair, fault tolerance, or workload balancing. In addition to various VM migration facilities, during the migration process, it is subject to significant security risks which the industry hesitates to accept. In this paper we have discussed CC besides this we also emphasize various existing load balancing algorithms, advantages& also we describe the PSO optimization technique

Digital library: process, services, challenges and opportunities

If technology push, crashing costs, and global connectivity are the signposts for the coming decade, digital libraries are the next step in the convergence revolution. Digital libraries are innovations, the implementation of which is nascent in the developing countries. However, they hold the promise of becoming key technologies for knowledge creation and management in the future. The purpose of this article is to describe basic concepts, processes and services of digital libraries, discuss challenges and opportunities offered/faced by digital libraries

Patient experiences of adjusting to life in the first two years after bariatric surgery: a qualitative study

Background: There is a limited amount of research into the experiences of those who have undergone bariatric surgery, and how this impacts on their everyday lives and social interactions. Methods Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 18 participants (11 female, 7 male) who had undergone permanent bariatric surgical procedures 5-24 months prior to interview at a large NHS hospital in North East England. Constructivist grounded theory was used, with a constant comparative analytic framework. Results Participants conceptualised social encounters after bariatric surgery as being underpinned by risk. Their attitudes towards social situations guided their actions in the context of social interaction. Three profiles of attitudes towards risk were constructed: Risk Accepters, Risk Contenders and Risk Challengers. These profiles were based on participant-reported narratives of their experiences in the first two years post-surgically Conclusions The social complexities occurring as a consequence of bariatric surgery require adjustments to patients’ lives. Participants reported that the social aspects of bariatric surgery do not appear to be widely understood by those who have had bariatric surgery. The three risk attitude profiles that emerged from our data offer an understanding of ways in which patients adjust to life and can be used reflexively by healthcare professionals in the support of patients both pre- and post-operatively

Parallel algorithms for inductance extraction

In VLSI circuits, signal delays play an important role in design, timing verification and signal integrity checks. These delays are attributed to the presence of parasitic resistance, capacitance and inductance. With increasing clock speed and reducing feature sizes, these delays will be dominated by parasitic inductance. In the next generation VLSI circuits, with more than millions of components and interconnect segments, fast and accurate inductance estimation becomes a crucial step. A generalized approach for inductance extraction requires the solution of a large, dense, complex linear system that models mutual inductive effects among circuit elements. Iterative methods are used to solve the system without explicit computation of the system matrix itself. Fast hierarchical techniques are used to compute approximate matrix-vector products with the dense system matrix in a matrix-free way. Due to unavailability of system matrix, constructing a preconditioner to accelerate the convergence of the iterative method becomes a challenging task. This work presents a class of parallel algorithms for fast and accurate inductance extraction of VLSI circuits. We use the solenoidal basis approach that converts the linear system into a reduced system. The reduced system of equations is solved by a preconditioned iterative solver that uses fast hierarchical methods to compute products with the dense coefficient matrix. A GreenâÃÂÃÂs function based preconditioner is proposed that achieves near-optimal convergence rates in several cases. By formulating the preconditioner as a dense matrix similar to the coefficient matrix, we are able to use fast hierarchical methods for the preconditioning step as well. Experiments on a number of benchmark problems highlight the efficient preconditioning scheme and its advantages over FastHenry. To further reduce the solution time of the software, we have developed a parallel implementation. The parallel software package is capable of analyzing interconnects con- figurations involving several conductors within reasonable time. A two-tier parallelization scheme enables mixed mode parallelization, which uses both OpenMP and MPI directives. The parallel performance of the software is demonstrated through experiments on the IBM p690 and AMD Linux clusters. These experiments highlight the portability and efficiency of the software on multiprocessors with shared, distributed, and distributed-shared memory architectures

Who Publishes in Leading General Surgical Journals? The Divide Between the Developed and Developing Worlds

BackgroundMost articles in top general surgical journals seem to originate from a limited few developed countries. The purpose of this study was to establish which countries publish the most in leading general surgical journals.MethodsWe analysed all the studies, reviews and case reports published in 2003-2004 in 10 leading English-language general surgical journals with the highest impact factors to obtain country-wise data with regard to the origin of articles. Editorials, historical articles, commentaries, guidelines, biographies, interviews and letters to editors were excluded from the analysis.ResultsA total of 5,081 articles were reviewed. Out of these, 834 were excluded as detailed above and the remaining 4,247 articles were analysed. Most of these were from USA, European countries, Japan, and Australia. It seems that the vast majority of the world's population living in the developing countries do not find adequate representation in leading general surgical journals.ConclusionVery few articles are published from developing countries in leading general surgical journals. Both developing countries and medical journals need to take steps to curb this trend. Steps are suggested to improve the situation so that the developing world is also adequately represented in the surgical literature