245 research outputs found
Saddar Bazar Quarter in Karachi: A Case of British-Era Protected Heritage Based on the Literature Review and Fieldwork
No full textOn the international level, heritage is considered an essential element for the sustainable development of a country. In South Asian countries such as Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, historic cities struggle to preserve their built heritage, due to rapid urbanisation and changing contemporary urban and architectural requirements. This contribution elaborates on the effects of urbanisation, and city development on the protected heritage of Karachi, Pakistan. The city developed in the 19th century from a mud-fortified small town along the Lyari river to become one of the busiest ports of the Indian subcontinent under British rule. Karachi has now become a metropolitan city with more than sixteen million inhabitants. Due to the accelerated rate of urbanisation and trade activities, Karachi has become Pakistan’s economic capital, resulting in the oblivion of its historical sites. Most of the city’s historic sites are in a state of dereliction, from over- or under-programming, or even under the threat of demolition. The paper focuses on the present condition of a British-era protected-heritage site through a literature review and fieldwork (mapping, drawing, archival research, interviews, photographic surveys, etc.), carried out during 2019 and 2020. The first author conducted site visits to photograph buildings and interview their users to gather feedback on how they perceive the current state of these buildings. The data were analysed to investigate how many buildings from Karachi’s British era with protected status have been demolished or are at risk of demolition. At the heart of the article is the Saddar Bazar Quarter in Karachi and its historical, social, cultural, and economic importance in the city from the British period until the present. The analysis will lead the discussion on what potential these sites/buildings hold, and how to make their preservation possible and withstand the uncurbed urbanisation and the threat of land development. Through discussion, we will focus on the social, cultural and economic aspects which the area and the buildings from the British period hold, and which can be useful in the future for the continuation of the Saddar Bazaar Quarter (SBQ), the historic urban landscape (HUL) and the heritage buildings
Assessment of Oral Stereognosis and Denture Satisfaction in Old Denture Wearers: A Retrospective Study
No full textOBJECTIVES
Stereognosis has been investigated occasionally to predict the prognosis of treatment with complete dentures. This study evaluated oral stereognosis and satisfaction levels in completely edentate patients wearing prostheses for at least three months.
METHODOLOGY
From November 2014 and January 2016, data from 322 patients' follow-up visits were collected from records of the Prosthodontics department at Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, Jamshoro. Denture satisfaction was assessed using a self-structured proforma, and oral stereognosis was measured using different-shaped objects made from self-cure acrylic resin, kept in the oral cavity without showing them to the patient. The frequency of qualitative variables was determined for data analysis, and a chi-square test was applied. Significant P-values were defined as those less than 0.
RESULTSThe male-to-female ratio was 1.2:1, with 50.9% wearing a prosthesis for less than a year and the minimum range being 3-6 years (13.66 %). Only 31 had stereognosis positive but were completely satisfied with their prosthesis, while 85 who were unsatisfied were found to have positive sensory perception. Statistical analysis for all groups shows a p-value of 0.000 for patient satisfaction with denture wear which is statistically significant. Most patients with the least duration of wear found their stereognosis positive and were unsatisfied with the prosthesis and vice versa. The chi-square test shows a statistically significant value for both groups of stereognosis i-e 0.0001..
CONCLUSION
Patients with the shortest period of wear were found to be more dissatisfied, but their oral perception remained intact, while those with more experience complained less but had reduced stereognosis
Clinicopathological Profile and Surgical Treatment of Abdominal Tuberculosis: A Single Centre Experience in Northwestern Tanzania.
No full textAbdominal tuberculosis continues to be a major public health problem worldwide and poses diagnostic and therapeutic challenges to general surgeons practicing in resource-limited countries. This study was conducted to describe the clinicopathological profile and outcome of surgical treatment of abdominal tuberculosis in our setting and compare with what is described in literature. A prospective descriptive study of patients who presented with abdominal tuberculosis was conducted at Bugando Medical Centre (BMC) in northwestern Tanzania from January 2006 to February 2012. Ethical approval to conduct the study was obtained from relevant authorities. Statistical data analysis was performed using SPSS version 17.0. Out of 256 patients enrolled in the study, males outnumbered females. The median age was 28 years (range = 16-68 years). The majority of patients (77.3%) had primary abdominal tuberculosis. A total of 127 (49.6%) patients presented with intestinal obstruction, 106 (41.4%) with peritonitis, 17 (6.6%) with abdominal masses and 6 (2.3%) patients with multiple fistulae in ano. Forty-eight (18.8%) patients were HIV positive. A total of 212 (82.8%) patients underwent surgical treatment for abdominal tuberculosis. Bands /adhesions (58.5%) were the most common operative findings. Ileo-caecal region was the most common bowel involved in 122 (57.5%) patients. Release of adhesions and bands was the most frequent surgical procedure performed in 58.5% of cases. Complication and mortality rates were 29.7% and 18.8% respectively. The overall median length of hospital stay was 32 days and was significantly longer in patients with complications (p < 0.001). Advanced age (age ≥ 65 years), co-morbid illness, late presentation, HIV positivity and CD4+ count < 200 cells/μl were statistically significantly associated with mortality (p < 0.0001). The follow up of patients were generally poor as only 37.5% of patients were available for follow up at twelve months after discharge. Abdominal tuberculosis constitutes a major public health problem in our environment and presents a diagnostic challenge requiring a high index of clinical suspicion. Early diagnosis, early anti-tuberculous therapy and surgical treatment of the associated complications are essential for survival
RAMP: RDMA Migration Platform
No full textRemote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) can be used to implement a shared storage abstraction or a shared-nothing abstraction for distributed applications. We argue that the shared storage abstraction is overkill for loosely coupled applications and that the shared-nothing abstraction does not leverage all the benefits of RDMA. In this thesis, we propose an alternative abstraction for such applications using a shared-on-demand architecture, and present the RDMA Migration Platform (RAMP). RAMP is a lightweight coordination service for building loosely coupled distributed applications. This thesis describes the RAMP system, its programming model and operations, and evaluates the performance of RAMP using microbenchmarks. Furthermore, we illustrate RAMPs load balancing capabilities with a case study of a loosely coupled application that uses RAMP to balance a partition skew under load
Modeling and simulation of PI-Fuzzy Control on Gas Pilot Plant via Matlab/Simulink and Industrial PC
No full textPID controllers are most commonly used in the industrial plants because of their good
performance and easiness of use. Due to growth technology, new advanced
techniques have come into existence either to produce new things or to improve
existing ones. Several techniques can be used but having advanced control system, we
are looking forward to design system which behaves in the same way as to what
human do, and this is known as artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence
techniques have been used to convert human experience into a form understandable
by computers. Intelligent systems are usually describes by analogies with biological
systems, for example looking at human beings perform control tasks, recognize
patterns, or make decisions. Notably fuzzy logic emerged as a tool to deal with
uncertain, imprecise or qualitative decision making problem, controllers that combine
intelligent and conventional techniques are commonly used in the intelligent control
of complex dynamic systems. In this work the pilot fuzzy control used to improve
existing traditional control systems by adding and an extra layer of intelligence to
current control method to make it more efficient, the focus of this work is to design,
analysis and implementation of PI-fuzzy control on a gas pilot plant using industrial
PC
Writer Identification Using Microblogging Texts for Social Media Forensics
No full textEstablishing authorship of online texts is fundamental to combat cybercrimes. Unfortunately, text length is limited on some platforms, making the challenge harder. We aim at identifying the authorship of Twitter messages limited to 140 characters. We evaluate popular stylometric features, widely used in literary analysis, and specific Twitter features like URLs, hashtags, replies or quotes. We use two databases with 93 and 3957 authors, respectively. We test varying sized author sets and varying amounts of training/test texts per author. Performance is further improved by feature combination via automatic selection. With a large amount of training Tweets (>500), a good accuracy (Rank-5>80%) is achievable with only a few dozens of test Tweets, even with several thousands of authors. With smaller sample sizes (10-20 training Tweets), the search space can be diminished by 9-15% while keeping a high chance that the correct author is retrieved among the candidates. In such cases, automatic attribution can provide significant time savings to experts in suspect search. For completeness, we report verification results. With few training/test Tweets, the EER is above 20-25%, which is reduced to < 15% if hundreds of training Tweets are available. We also quantify the computational complexity and time permanence of the employed features. © 2019 IEEE.Funding: This work was supported in part by the project 2016-03497 of the Swedish Research Council. Naveed Muhammad has been funded by European Social Fund via IT Academy programme. The authors also thank the CAISR Program of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.</p
An organic route for the synthesis of cationic porous graphite nanomaterial used as photocatalyst and electrocatalyst for dye-sensitized solar cell
No full textAn organic synthesis route is proposed to fabricate cationized porous graphite (cpG) for photocatalyst and electrocatalyst nanomaterial. High crystalline structure of graphite possesses few defects and porous channels. In the proposed research, cpG is fabricated by sonicating graphite in cationized enzyme media followed by exfoliating in the activated charcoal filler. The cationic lipase solution distributed positive surface charges over a bare graphitic sheet, and sonication with activated charcoal filler divulges porous channels along graphite exfoliated matrix structure. The charcoal doping in graphite was modified with the different charcoal content percentage ranging from 0 to 100%. The cationized porous graphite (cpG) material possess high surface area, pore volume and conductivity leads to high photoresponse and electrocatalytic reaction. As photocatalyst, the proposed graphite provide fast degradation of methylene blue dye observed by UV-Vis spectrophotometer. As cathode for dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSCs), cpG provides high electrocatalytic activity with low charge transfer resistance (R-CT = 0.95 Omega) and high photovoltaic performance with 9.59% efficiency. The positive charge distribution over graphite sheet attracts plenty of negative iodide ions present in the electrolyte, provide fast reduction-oxidation reaction. Furthermore, porous charcoal filler doping accepts a large amount of gel electrolyte, and fasten interfacial reaction between electrolyte and CE. This cost-effective cationized porous graphite (cpG) nanomaterial can provide new ways towards sustainable energy resources.This work was supported by the Korea Research Fellowship Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (2017H1D3A1A01055133
Corporate Governance, Ownership Structure, SOEs and CFO Gender Impact on Investment Efficiency: Evidence from Chinese listed firms.
No full textThis paper is aimed at to investigate the ownership mechanism, corporate governance, SOEs and CFO gender association with investment efficiency in the context of Chinese economy. In order to measure efficiency of investment, a famous method developed by Richardson (2006) was utilized in this study. To assess the impact of corporate governance mechanism and ownership structure on the investment efficiency of Chinese-listed companies in Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges, it employed OLS regressions with year and industry effect fixed effect. This study determines that ownership concentration holds a negative relationship with investment efficiency, however, no. of senior executives on the board keep a positive association with investment efficiency. Further, executives and institutional investors in the Chinese firms are increasing investment efficiency. In addition, investment efficiency pronounced more in SOEs firms and when CFO is a male in Chinese listed firms. Furthermore, for policy makers, corporate governance improvement helps to support the managerial interests and institutional investments is required to enhance investment efficiency
Predictability of Surgical Apgar Score for postoperative outcomes in hip fractures: A prospective observational study
No full textRetinal gene therapy for Stargardt disease with dual AAV intein vectors is both safe and effective in large animal models
No full textRetinal gene therapy using dual adeno-associated viral (AAV) intein vectors can be applied to genetic forms of blindness caused by mutations in genes with coding sequences that exceed single AAV cargo capacity, such as Stargardt disease (STGD1), the most common inherited macular dystrophy. In view of clinical translation of dual AAV intein vectors, here we set to evaluate both the efficiency and safety of their subretinal administration in relevant large animal models. Accordingly, we have developed the first pig model of STGD1, which we found to accumulate lipofuscin similarly to patients. This accumulation is significantly reduced upon subretinal administration of dual AAV intein vectors whose safety and pharmacodynamics we then tested in nonhuman primates, which showed modest and reversible inflammation as well as high levels of photoreceptor transduction. This bodes well for further clinical translation of dual AAV intein vectors in patients with STGD1 as well as for other blinding diseases that require the delivery of large genes
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