68 research outputs found
A survey study analysing the impact of greenspaces on the physical and mental health of Liverpool students
No full textThis dissertation examines the physical and mental changes to students in Liverpool as a result of attending greenspaces. The main aim of the dissertation is to provide a scientific explanation behind the role of greenspace provision for the human mind and body, and what benefits greenspaces can have on an individual level. The study also examines the societal benefits greenspaces can have, such as the mitigation of climate change and the potential to reduce burdens on public health services. This study uses an online questionnaire, which recruited 63 students who are studying in Liverpool and asked them about their thoughts and feelings towards greenspaces, physical and mental wellbeing, stress, anxiety, and overall life satisfaction. The questionnaire was initially distributed through personal acquaintances, which then further developed into snowball sampling through student groups and societies. The main findings of the study are that students overall have a positive association of greenspaces, generally live near to them, and have mixed feelings towards their life happiness, and levels of stress and anxiety. The study concludes with some recommendations for future similar investigations, and possible solutions from an environmental health perspective as how to best tackle the current mental health crisis of students in Liverpool
Memory Study in The Danish Girl (2000) by David Ebershoff Through Voyant Text Mining Tools: A Digital Humanities (DH) Study: 1. Muhammad Awais 2. Adeel Khalid
No full textIn this digital era, the world has revolutionised its ways of extracting knowledge patterns based on diverse and large texts using a digital humanities (DH) approach and a range of digital text mining tools available to deconstruct and visualise literary texts. This paper attempts to explore the characters of the novel, ‘The Danish Girl’ by David Ebershoff, through the study of their individual or collective memories through Voyant, a text-mining digital tool for textual analysis. Analysis revealed knowledge patterns on memory in the text through the Voyant text mining tool, which recognizes repeating words and phrases and provides insights into the author\u27s language choices and how they relate to memory studies. It provided textual analysis and allowed data visualisation, collocations, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of the text. The study unveils the summary tool features of the overall corpus, cirrus, unique words, dense words, themes, and phrase tools using a digital humanities approach to text mining, underscoring the significance of digital tools in advancing our understanding of literature and memory
Cross genre author profilling using syntactic N-Grams
No full textTesis (Maestría en Ciencias de la Computación), Instituto Politécnico Nacional, CIC, 2017, 1 archivo PDF, (95 páginas). tesis.ipn.m
Cross-Genre Author Profile Prediction Using Stylometry-Based Approach Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2016
No full textAbstract.Author profiling task aims to identify different traits of an author by analyzing his/her written text. This study presents a Stylometry-based approach for detection of author traits (gender and age) for cross-genre author profiles. In our proposed approach, we used different types of stylistic features including 7 lexical features, 16 syntactic features, 26 character-based features and 6 vocabulary richness (total 56 stylistic features). On the training corpus, the proposed approach obtained promising results with an accuracy of 0.787 for gender, 0.983 for age and 0.780 for both (jointly detecting age and gender). On the test corpus, proposed system gave an accuracy of 0.576 for gender, 0.371 for age and 0.256 for both
Label-free electrochemical aptasensor for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein based on carbon cloth sputtered gold nanoparticles
No full textThe proliferation and transmission of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), or the (COVID-19) disease, has become a threat to worldwide biosecurity. Therefore, early diagnosis of COVID-19 is crucial to combat the ongoing infection spread. In this study we propose a flexible aptamer-based electrochemical sensor for the rapid, label-free detection of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (SP). A platform made of a porous and flexible carbon cloth, coated with gold nanoparticles, to increase the conductivity and electrochemical performance of the material, was assembled with a thiol functionalized DNA aptamer via S–Au bonds, for the selective recognition of the SARS-CoV-2 SP. The various steps for the sensor preparation were followed by using scanning electron microscopy, cyclic voltammetry and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV). The proposed platform displayed good mechanical stability, revealing negligible changes on voltammetric responses to bending at various angles. Quantification of SARS-CoV-2 SP was performed by DPV and chronopotentiometry (CP), exploiting the changes of the electrical signals due the [Fe(CN)6]3-/4- redox probe, when SARS-CoV-2 SP binds to the aptamer immobilized on the electrode surface. Current density, in DPV, and square root of the transition time, in CP, varied linearly with the log[ SARS-CoV-2 SP], providing lower limits of detection (LOD) of 0.11 ng/mL and 37.8 ng/mL, respectively. The sensor displayed good selectivity, repeatability, and was tested in diluted human saliva, spiked with different SARS-CoV-2 SP concentrations, providing LODs of 0.167 ng/mL and 46.2 ng/mL for DPV and CP, respectively
The Impact of Environmental Change and Water Conservation on Dryland Groundwater Resources in Northern Egypt: Modeling Aquifer Response Using Sparse Data
No full textPlease contact the author with any questions. A compressed tar.b2z file is attached with the groundwater model input files.Wadi El Naturn, located in the Western Desert in northern Egypt, has been subject to significant groundwater degradation since the 1990s, attributed primarily to agricultural development. Information required to diagnose the drivers of groundwater degradation and assess management options in dryland environments like Wadi El Natrun is however, frequently sparse. This research presents an approach for modeling the impacts of dryland environmental change on groundwater in the context of sparse data. A focus is placed on understanding the potential impacts of conservation strategies in the context of climate change. Water use, hydrostratigraphic and groundwater flow data were collected from literature, monitoring records, satellite imagery and a survey of local landholders. MODFLOW-NWT was used to model the multi-layer aquifer system, and algorithms were developed in R to create realizations of groundwater recharge, and well-pumping at a monthly time-step from 1957 to 2011. The model was deemed to be reasonably capable of capturing the cumulative impact of environmental change over this historical period. A risk assessment approach was then used to assess the impact of climate change and conservation-focused management scenarios on groundwater locally over a 50-year future planning horizon. The optimization of irrigation systems and increased cultivation of drought/salt tolerant crops have the potential to significantly reduce the risk of groundwater depletion compared to an across-the-board 20% water use reduction scenario. The influence of groundwater pumping also outweighed that of climate change, and the most vulnerable water users/ecosystem were found to be the most exposed to groundwater degradation.Master of Applied Science (MASc
Global navigation of Lithium in water bodies and emerging human health crisis
No full textThe production of lithium (Li) increased by 256% in recent years due to unprecedented demands from technological industries. Intensive harvesting poses serious impacts on the sustainability of Li production. Herein, we address the global Li cycle and predict the peak production to reach 740000 million tons in 2041. Global Li accumulation in water bodies is mapped, and the consequences on human health of a wide range (20 mg L−1) of Li concentrations in drinking water are explored. The implications to human health of Li exposure remains unresolved and needs further investigation. There are still no recommendations on safe limits of Li in drinking water for humankind. In conclusion, there is an emergency call to health governing bodies, environmental protection agencies and scientific communities for urgent efforts on sustainable production of Li and identify their thresholds levels in drinking water to minimize the emerging consequences of Li on humans.This article is published as Adeel, M., Zain, M., Shakoor, N. et al. Global navigation of Lithium in water bodies and emerging human health crisis. npj Clean Water 6, 33 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41545-023-00238-w. © The Author(s) 2023.This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Higher Education Studies
No full textAbstract Outsourcing is seen from various points of views by individuals in different industries. When it comes to educating science and technology students, and for that matter, students of any discipline, up until recently, outsourcing was not a possibility. With the recent advances in computer and network technology, it is now possible to teach a live online distance-learning course from anywhere around the world. The need for the instructor and the students to be physically present in a common classroom is eliminated. In an on-line course, students and teacher get the opportunity to interact with each other. The computer-based distance learning approach is still in its relative infancy. But since the teaching and learning is done online, via the use of computers connected to inter-connected networks and satellites, the need to be geographically co-located does not exist any longer. The instructor and the students can be physically distributed at various locations, around the city, around the country, or around the world and still be able to teach and learn from each other as if they were present together in the same classroom. Since the medium of instruction is computers, the instructors and students can be outsourced. The flip side of the argument is that since the instructor is not physically present in the same room with the students, they do not get to interact with each other face to face. The instructor can continue to derive a complex mathematical equation without realizing that a student has walked away from their computer. This paper explores the positives and negatives of distance learning distributed education. Advantages and disadvantages of DL are discussed and a few solutions to the challenges, experienced by the instructors, are addressed. The research is based on the author's experience of teaching online courses from within the city, across the states, and finally across the continents. Amongst other findings, the author discovered that when teaching an online distance learning class, distance is not a factor. While teaching online classes, the author travelled across different cities, states, and internationally and the students did not realize that the instructor was out of town and could not meet with them in the office after class
Inayatullah, Rubina Saigol, and Pervez Tahir (eds). Social Sciences in Pakistan: A Profile. Islamabad: Council of Social Sciences, 2005. 512 pages. Hardbound. Rs 500.00.
No full textCommissioned by the Council of Social Sciences (COSS), this
volume evaluates the seventeen social sciences departments in the public
universities in Pakistan for a given set of parameters. The social
sciences departments or the topics covered in this volume and their
respective authors include: Teaching of International Relations in
Pakistani Universities (Rasul Bakhsh Rais); Development of the
Discipline of Political Science in Pakistan (Inayatullah); The
Development of Strategic Studies in Pakistan (Ayesha Siddiqa); The State
of Educational Discourse in Pakistan (Rubina Saigol); Development of
Philosophy as a Discipline (Mohammad Ashraf Adeel); The State of the
Discipline of Psychology in Public Universities in Pakistan: A Review
(Muhammad Pervez and Kamran Ahmad); Development of Economics as a
Discipline in Pakistan (Karamat Ali); Sociology in Pakistan: A Review of
Progress (Muhammad Hafeez); Anthropology in Pakistan: The State of [sic]
Discipline (Nadeem Omar Tarar); Development of the Discipline of History
in Pakistan (Mubarak Ali); The Discipline of Public Administration in
Pakistan (Zafar Iqbal Jadoon and Nasira Jabeen); Journalism and Mass
Communication (Mehdi Hasan); Area Studies in Pakistan: An Assessment
(Muhammad Islam); Pakistan Studies: A Subject of the State, and the
State of the Subject (Syed Jaffar Ahmed); The State of the Discipline of
Women’s Studies in Pakistan (Rubina Saigol); Peace and Conflict
Resolution Studies (Moonis Ahmar and Farhan H. Siddiqi); and Linguistics
in Pakistan: A Survey of the Contemporary Situation (Tariq
Rahman)
Time-dependent analysis of cable-stayed bridges
No full textCable-stayed bridges are constructed using the cantilever method of construction and generally take a long time to build. In a concrete cable-stayed bridge, concrete properties change with time causing a change in the position of the neutral axis. In different parts of a concrete bridge creep and shrinkage develop at different rates which depend upon various environmental factors and the intrinsic properties of the concrete. In bridges with a variable depth to the soffit, the analysis requires the use of average cross section properties of each element.Within the premise of the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory, a procedure has been developed to calculate the flexibility and stiffness matrices of nonprismatic beam-column elements with reference to an arbitrarily chosen reference axis. New shape functions have been developed for the nonprismatic beams to interpolate the axial and transverse displacements at the reference axis. The reference axis may lie outside the body of the element. The theory has been extended to incorporate geometric nonlinearity. The shape functions for nonprismatic beams yield the exact stiffness matrix for beams with variable depth. A step-by-step method is suggested to analyze structures for the effects of creep and shrinkage of concrete.Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-07T12:38:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2
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