Diverse Setups Research Articles

Audiologist’s perspective on newborn hearing screening in a developing nation: a questionnaire-based survey

IntroductionHearing is crucial for a child's development, influencing speech, cognition, and emotional well-being. Early detection of hearing disorders is vital, yet India faces challenges in implementing effective newborn hearing screening (NBHS) programs. This research explores the perspectives of audiologists, focusing on the major and minor challenges faced and current protocols followed across diverse setups in India.MethodA two-phase study involved questionnaire development and data collection from 116 audiologists nationwide. The survey addressed demographics, current practices, challenges faced, and opinions on NBHS improvements.ResultsFindings revealed disparities in screening protocols, with 42 variations reported. Challenges included ambient noise control, communication gaps, and lack of interdisciplinary support. Audiologists emphasized the need for sensitizing healthcare professionals, free screening, and increased manpower to enhance NBHS efficacy.ConclusionThe study aligns with global challenges in NBHS program implementation. Rural areas face a shortage of audiologists, emphasizing the necessity to train community health workers. The varied screening protocols and delays in screening timeframe underscore the need for standardized guidelines and increased funding.Audiologists play a pivotal role in NBHS success. To overcome challenges, standardizing protocols, sensitizing healthcare professionals, and promoting community-based screening are crucial. The study emphasizes proactive measures among audiologists, continual research, and collaboration to enhance evidence-based practices and policy improvements in newborn hearing screening.

Pioneering Maintenance Strategies for Enhanced Reliability of Low Voltage Switchboards

This study highlights the critical need for rigorous maintenance protocols, focusing on routine inspections, preventative measures, and timely corrective actions. Low voltage switch panels (PHB-TR) are vital for ensuring the efficiency and reliability of electricity distribution systems. Through systematic analysis of existing maintenance procedures and field evaluations across diverse setups, the research confirms that structured maintenance not only mitigates the risk of failures but also significantly reduces workplace accidents. The findings advocate for strict adherence to standard operating procedures and improved coordination among technicians, suggesting these strategies as global standards for enhancing the safety and functionality of electrical distribution networks. Highlights: Proper maintenance ensures optimal performance and reduces the risk of system failure. Adherence to applicable SOPs is crucial to prevent work accidents. Coordination and adherence to job distribution streamline work execution. Keywords: PHB-TR Maintenance, Split Switch Panel Maintenance, Low Voltage Split Switch Board

A Graph-Attention-Based Method for Single-Resident Daily Activity Recognition in Smart Homes.

In ambient-assisted living facilitated by smart home systems, the recognition of daily human activities is of great importance. It aims to infer the household's daily activities from the triggered sensor observation sequences with varying time intervals among successive readouts. This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework based on embedding technology and graph attention networks, namely the time-oriented and location-oriented graph attention (TLGAT) networks. The embedding technology converts sensor observations into corresponding feature vectors. Afterward, TLGAT provides a sensor observation sequence as a fully connected graph to the model's temporal correlation as well as the sensor's location correlation among sensor observations and facilitates the feature representation of each sensor observation through receiving other sensor observations and weighting operations. The experiments were conducted on two public datasets, based on the diverse setups of sensor event sequence length. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method achieved favorable performance under diverse setups.

A Steiner Tree based efficient network infrastructure design in 5G urban vehicular networks

Autonomous or assisted driving under next-generation vehicular applications requires a very high data rate with ultra-reliable low latency. The design of a proper network infrastructure plays a primary role in supporting these demands. This necessitates the network infrastructure nodes, i.e., the edge nodes and 5G RSUs, to be efficiently placed and connected across a smart city in a cost-effective manner. Such planning under a restricted capital expenditure budget presents a significant research challenge. We address this issue by formulating it as a Steiner Tree with Profits, Budget and Hop constraint problem for designing cost-efficient network infrastructure in an urban vehicular scenario. The optimization maximizes the long-term profits under the budget and hops constraint. The problem under consideration is a known NP-hard problem, and therefore, we have employed a Breakout Local Search based heuristic to solve it. Performance evaluation with actual traffic in real cities with diverse setups reveals crucial insights for designing cost-efficient network infrastructure in 5G urban vehicular networks.

Identifying the feasibility of ‘travelator roads’ for modern-era sustainable transportation and its prototyping using additive manufacturing

With the rising human population, travelling on static roads is insufficient to meet modern mobility demands. The global economy loses hundreds of billions of dollars yearly due to traffic inefficiencies, including accidents, pollution etc. We undertake an idea engineering exercise to propose a new concept of travelator roads for future sustainable transportation which has been unexplored for vehicular mobility and is thus the novelty of this work.The proposal offers a paradigm shift from static roads and provides a more generic solution than other advanced transportation technologies. It caters to various United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and provides a safer, self-sustainable, energy-efficient & environment-friendly solution for overcoming traffic violations, jams, road accidents etc. Travelator roads offer easy & quick installation for transportation in rugged terrains & congested areas thereby finding applications in diverse setups like defence, urban & smart cities.Design model and possible calculations are provided to evaluate it as a solution addressing various transportation-related issues. The research methodology in this work entails a review of the literature on current and contemporary transport technologies, followed by an idea engineering exercise to construct a new concept of Travelator roads from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Further, we propose the application of Additive Manufacturing (AM) for adapting this concept into reality. An AM technology-based prototype for a travelator road can be manufactured to provide a better idea for its effective adaptation in transportation system because AM offers flexibility in design, the opportunity for shape optimization, simplicity in making modifications, shortened time to market, cheap capital needs. Due to material-efficient designs, less waste, and a decreased requirement for production tools, moulds, and dies, AM is projected to result in a significant reduction of raw materials and overall cost involved in actually realizing the concept of travelator roads for future sustainable transportation. Although, there are a number of potential technical issues with AM-based technologies, such as the durability of materials generated by AM for roads, the amount of time required to build sizable amounts of roads, and the upkeep and repair of these roads, which must be addressed.

Symbol Diversity as a Means to Make PAM-4 Modulation More Resilient in Harsh Electromagnetic Environments

In this article, symbol diversity is presented for the pulse amplitude modulation PAM-4 encoding scheme. This technique is implemented in order to incorporate electromagnetic resilience in a triple modular redundant communication channel that is subjected to electromagnetic disturbances in reverberant environments. An in-depth numerical study is carried out in light of new electromagnetic disturbance condition monitoring definitions that provide a better insight into the actual state of the system. An explanation of the different fault mechanisms based on the new definitions is provided for the proposed PAM-4 symbol diversity setup and is compared with an undiverse PAM-4 system with a two-out-of-three majority voter. The results show that the proposed symbol diversity technique is quite an effective measure for incorporating fault tolerance in the system design.

Where do all my smart home data go? Context-aware data generation and forwarding for edge-based microservices over shared IoT infrastructure

With the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the advent of the edge computing paradigm, and the rise of intelligent applications for smart infrastructure surveillance, in-network data management is gaining a lot of research attention these days. The challenge lies in accommodating multiple application microservices with varying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements to share the sensing infrastructure for better resource utilization. In this work, we propose a novel data collection framework, CaDGen (Context-aware Data Generation) for such a shared IoT infrastructure that enables integrated data filtration and forwarding towards minimizing the resource consumption footprint for the IoT infrastructure. The proposed filtration mechanism utilizes the contextual information associated with the running application for determining the relevance of the data. Whereas the proposed forwarding policy aims to satisfy the diverse QoS requirements for the running applications by selecting the suitable next-hop forwarder based on the microservices distribution across different edge devices. A thorough performance evaluation of CaDGen through a testbed implementation as well as a simulation study for diverse setups reveals promising results concerning network resource utilization, scalability, energy conservation, and distribution of computation for optimal service provisioning. It is observed that the CaDGen can achieve nearly 35% reduction in the generated data for a moderately dynamic scenario without compromising on the data quality.

MSCs derived extracellular vesicles as a therapeutic paragon for neurodegenerative disorders: A viewpoint

Neurodegenerative disorders are a vicious woe to the public health and wellness. Uncertainty in their underlying causes, lack of effective biomarkers for their early detection, existence of only supportive therapy, and their ever rising incidence creates an unmatched need for targeted therapies. Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs) have found to be promising candidates for regenerative and remedial therapy in neurodegenerative disorders, however several biological risks and practical issues impede in their translational utility. Deriving from MSCs are certain Extracellular Vesicles (EVs), which aid in the paracrine action of MSCs and have lately gained the scientific interest for their implacability in diverse set ups. Their cargo is of utmost importance and is being explored in various different diseases like heart diseases, neuronal diseases, respiratory diseases and hepatic diseases. They thereby hold the position of a likely prospective remedial candidate for therapy against neurodegenerative disorders.

Regularized Tapered Sample Covariance Matrix

Covariance matrix tapers have a long history in signal processing and related fields. Examples of applications include autoregressive models (promoting a banded structure) or beamforming (widening the spectral null width associated with an interferer). In this paper, the focus is on high-dimensional setting where the dimension <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$</tex-math></inline-formula> is high, while the data aspect ratio <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n/p$</tex-math></inline-formula> is low. We propose an estimator called <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Tabasco</small> (TApered or BAnded Shrinkage COvariance matrix) that shrinks the tapered sample covariance matrix towards a scaled identity matrix. We derive optimal and estimated (data adaptive) regularization parameters that are designed to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between the proposed shrinkage estimator and the true covariance matrix. These parameters are derived under the general assumption that the data is sampled from an unspecified elliptically symmetric distribution with finite 4th order moments (both real- and complex-valued cases are addressed). Simulation studies show that the proposed <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Tabasco</small> outperforms all competing tapering covariance matrix estimators in diverse setups. An application to space-time adaptive processing (STAP) also illustrates the benefit of the proposed estimator in a practical signal processing setup.

A strategy to determine off-axis dosimetric leaf gap using OSLD and EPID.

BackgroundThe aim of the study was to investigate the dosimetric feasibility of using optically stimulated luminescence dosimeters (OSLD) and an electronic portal imaging device (EPID) for central axis (CA X) and off-axis (OAX) dosimetric leaf gap (DLG) measurement.Materials and methodsThe Clinac 2100C/D linear accelerator equipped with Millennium-120 multileaf collimator (MLC) and EPID was utilized for this study. The DLG values at CA X and ± 1 cm OAX (1 cm superior and inferior to the CA X position, respectively along the plane perpendicular to MLC motion) were measured using OSLD (DLGOSLD) and validated using ionization chamber dosimetry (DLGICD). The two-dimensional DLG map (2D DLGEPID) was derived from the portal images of the DLG plan using a custom-developed software application that incorporated sliding aperture-specific correction factors.ResultsDLGOSLD and DLGICD, though measured with diverse setup in different media, showed similar variation both at CA X and ± 1 cm OAX positions. The corresponding DLGEPID values derived using aperture specific corrections were found to be in agreement with DLGOSLD and DLGICD. The 2D DLGEPID map provides insight into the varying patterns of the DLG with respect to each leaf pair at any position across the exposed field.ConclusionsCommensurate results of DLGOSLD with DLGICD values have proven the efficacy of OSLD as an appropriate dosimeter for DLG measurement. The 2D DLGEP ID map opens a potential pathway to accurately model the rounded-leaf end transmission with discrete leaf-specific DLG values for commissioning of a modern treatment planning system.

Beyond Comparison? Literary Appropriation and Its Effects on (Post-)Augustan Greco-Roman Text Production

This article centers, first, on the Roman reception of earlier Greek literature, which is considered less a simple “receiving” of foreign influence and rather an active “taking” and act of appropriation, and, second, on the effects that this process had on Imperial Greek Literature. Thus, it deals with the question whether Greek literature—at least in part—during the Imperial Period can be considered an autonomous, cosmopolitan, and many-centered phenomenon in its own right and impetus, with its independent production centers that constructed and defined their particular identity. Or, alternatively, whether in the Imperial Age up to the second century CE we encounter a dominating perspective in literary texts, which contributed to strengthen and redefine the Roman viewpoint and the center’s identity from the periphery. The Greek texts which are discussed in this essay invite the interpretation that the Post-Augustan Age, despite its locally diverse and multi-ethnical setup, monopolized a perspective, which encouraged the Greek elite to join the Imperial project, thus resulting in a Greco-Roman literature that appears to be beyond comparison.

Microbial study of lettuce and agriculture water used for lettuce production at Singapore urban farms

Singapore in recent years is dedicating great efforts in developing urban agriculture in production of leafy green vegetables. Considering the small scales and diverse set-ups of local farms, it is necessary to collect baseline data to evaluate the microbial safety of local leafy green production. In this study, we collected lettuce crops and agriculture water used in lettuce production from ten different farms (five soil-based farms and five hydroponic farms, 100 samples over a period of five months) and tested with multiple microbial parameters. As a result, 16 out of the 50 agriculture water samples were enumerated with Escherichia coli (4.15 ± 0.81 log CFU/100 ml from 9 samples collected at soil-based farms, 3.79 ± 0.91 log CFU/100 ml from 7 samples collected at hydroponic farms). For the lettuce crops, 7 out of 25 samples from the soil-based farms (with overhead irrigation) were enumerated with an average of 3.28 ± 1.45 log CFU E. coli/g fresh matter, while all of the 25 samples from the hydroponic farms were below 10 CFU E. coli/g fresh matter. Within the 11 Salmonella strains isolated in this study, six strains were from soil-based agriculture water, four strains were from hydroponic agriculture water, only one strain was isolated from lettuce crops and it was from a hydroponic farm. When tested with lettuce crops grown in the laboratory, the five Salmonella isolates from the hydroponic farms showed a higher likelihood of internalization and translocation from the roots to the aerial parts (6/40 [15%] plants tested positive) than the six Salmonella isolates from the soil-based farms (2/48 [4%] plants tested positive). The opportunistic pathogen Stenotrophomonas maltophilia was detected with higher presence at hydroponic farms than the soil-based farms. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) analysis were performed over all of the Salmonella and S. maltophilia isolates and no AMR strain has been identified so far. Taken together, these results suggested the great needs of both soil-based and hydroponic farms to improve their good agriculture practices such as to implement effective agriculture water treatment and to avoid using overhead irrigation with sprinkler systems.

Novel 3D Flower Like ZnO/MnV 2O 6 Heterojunction as an Efficient Adsorbent for the Removal of Imidacloprid and Photocatalyst for Degradation of Organic Dyes in Waste Water

In this investigation, a novel 3D flower like ZnO/MnV2O6 heterojunction was successfully constructed via facile hydrothermal method, and employed to remove most consumable imidacloprid pesticide and photocatalytic deterioration of methylene blue (MB) and methyl orange (MO) dyes from aqueous system. The photocatalytic activities of the heterojunction samples with different dosage amount were estimated by UV-vis spectroscopy. Nearly, 95.2% of MB and 91.8% of MO dye was break down in 60 and 90 minutes, respectively. The 3D flower like ZnO/MnV2O6 heterojunction demonstrated great percentage adsorption for imidacloprid, with 99% removal in 200 minutes. The effect on adsorption of diverse set-up like pH, contact time and adsorbent dosage was investigated. The removal efficiency was observed at pH 4 with 0.03 g of adsorbent. The kinetic data was fitted into pseudo first and second order, and intraparticle diffusion kinetics models. It was observed that the kinetic data for adsorption of imidacloprid on ZnO/MnV2O6 adsorbent fits better into pseudo second order kinetic model. The adsorption isotherms fit well into Langmuir adsorption isotherm model than Freundlich and Temkin models. The maximum adsorption capacity of S-I (0.01g), S-II (0.02g), S-III (0.03g) & S-IV (0.05g) samples was observed as 81.3, 89.3, 128.2 and 147.1 mg g -1, respectively.

Fracture mechanics of the endocarp of Cocos nucifera

Fracture mechanics and form-structure-function relationships were studied in the hierarchically structured endocarp of the coconut (Cocos nucifera). We mechanically tested various endocarp sample types: (1) whole endocarp; (2) arch-shaped samples prepared from the endocarp in either an equatorial or a meridional orientation; (3) small endocarp samples. The last-mentioned were tested either in their naturally grown state or with both surfaces ground coplanarly. Samples were either compression- or impact-loaded in various orientations and/or diverse setup configurations (constrained vs. un-constrained).The results establish (1) that the orientation of the whole endocarp has no significant effect on the fracture force, (2) that the orientation of arch-shaped samples affects fracture behaviour, whereas (3) test velocity does not and (4) that the compressive strength of rectangular samples is highest when applied normal to the endocarp surface.Thus, on a comparatively small scale, the endocarp is a transversely isotropic material, whereas on a larger scale, the ellipsoidal shape of the coconut compensates for weaknesses introduced by the main vascular bundles. Coconut shells are therefore good examples of the way in which potential disadvantages that concern stability and that arise from biological necessities and evolutionary constraints can be counteracted by clever material arrangements and designs.

Algorithms for joint activity\u2013attenuation estimation from positron emission tomography scatter

BackgroundAttenuation correction in positron emission tomography remains challenging in the absence of measured transmission data. Scattered emission data may contribute missing information, but quantitative scatter-to-attenuation (S2A) reconstruction needs to input the reconstructed activity image. Here, we study S2A reconstruction as a building block for joint estimation of activity and attenuation.MethodsWe study two S2A reconstruction algorithms, maximum-likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) with one-step-late attenuation (MLEM-OSL) and a maximum-likelihood gradient ascent (MLGA). We study theoretical properties of these algorithms with a focus on convergence and convergence speed and compare convergence speeds and the impact of object size in simulations using different spatial scale factors. Then, we propose joint estimation of activity and attenuation from scattered and nonscattered (true) emission data, combining MLEM-OSL or MLGA with scatter-MLEM as well as trues-MLEM and the maximum-likelihood transmission (MLTR) algorithm.ResultsShortcomings of MLEM-OSL inhibit convergence to the true solution with high attenuation; these shortcomings are related to the linearization of a nonlinear measurement equation and can be linked to a new numerical criterion allowing geometrical interpretations in terms of low and high attenuation. Comparisons using simulated data confirm that while MLGA converges largely independent of the attenuation scale, MLEM-OSL converges if low-attenuation data dominate, but not with high attenuation. Convergence of MLEM-OSL can be improved by isolating data satisfying the aforementioned low-attenuation criterion. In joint estimation of activity and attenuation, scattered data helps avoid local minima that nonscattered data alone cannot. Combining MLEM-OSL with trues-MLEM may be sufficient for low-attenuation objects, while MLGA, scatter-MLEM, and MLTR may additionally be needed with higher attenuation.ConclusionsThe performance of S2A algorithms depends on spatial scales. MLGA provides lower computational complexity and convergence in more diverse setups than MLEM-OSL. Finally, scattered data may provide additional information to joint estimation of activity and attenuation through S2A reconstruction.

Performance-Oriented Contracting—A Review

This paper provides a systematic review of multiple writings addressing quality performance-oriented contracting and individual driven performance. The study systematically reviewed 155 refereed papers across various fields published between from 2000 to 2018. A categorization framework of performance-oriented contracting is proposed addressing key dimensions of its plan and management. The relative analysis of fundamental articles advancing interdisciplinary perspective encourages learning, supports strategic decision making, and provides knowledge about quality management in firms especially at individual and organizational stages. The paper reviews performance contracting articles in public and private organizations, which are a milestone toward quality performance. These outcomes demonstrate that performance contracting is useful in performance improvement if job design and knowledge sharing exist across the organization. The results indicate that much of the contemporary wide-ranging performance contracting study do not have robust theoretical grounds. The review submits managerial implications which potentially assist practitioners, consultants, and academicians understand the concept of performance contracting, quality design, and management. This paper proposes a categorization structure of performance contracting study and proposes directions for future study on performance contracting, which should explicitly connect to contemporary study themes. This paper informs further systematic endeavours to conduct more beneficial literature reviews about performance contracting in diverse organizational setups.

Dielectric Broadband Metasurfaces for Fiber Mode‐Multiplexed Communications

AbstractA subwavelength‐thick spatial‐mode multiplexer based on a highly transparent all‐dielectric Mie‐resonant metasurface is demonstrated with a broadband response covering major optical communication wavelength bands. The metasurface is employed to convert simultaneously each orthogonal polarization of LP01 inputs into individual higher‐order TM01 and TE01 vectorial modes, without the need of a polarization diversity setup. This is not feasible using current mode multiplexing approaches. An LP01 polarization‐multiplexed 51 × 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) superchannel, with a 10.3 bits s−1 Hz−1 spectral‐efficiency and total bit‐rate of 13.2 Tb s−1, is converted to higher‐order modes with the metasurface multiplexer, and then mode‐multiplexed data is transmitted over a multimode fiber. The results demonstrate the potential application of these metadevice‐based mode multiplexers in space‐division multiplexed systems.

Optimal Dynamic Capacity Allocation for High Throughput Satellite Communications Systems

In this letter, a simple engineering scheme for achieving optimal dynamic capacity allocation in geostationary and medium Earth orbit multi-beam high throughput satellite systems is presented. Exploiting smart gateway diversity setup and considering users’ requested and gateways’ offered capacities, we propose a theoretically optimal, based on Monge arrays, capacity allocation scheme for minimization of both system’s capacity losses and rate matching performance metrics. This scheme has low complexity considering the appropriate sorting of system’s offered and requested capacities. Finally, simulation results also confirm its optimality by presenting its identical performance with the much more complicated and time consuming exhaustive mechanism.

Selection of plant physiological parameters to detect stress effects in pot experiments using principal component analysis

Appropriate selection and well-timed measurement of plant developmental, morphological and physiological parameters are essential to maximize efficacy and minimize time consumption of experiments. To select for the most sensitive indicators of drought or salt stress, three independent pot experiments with diverse setups were analysed with 20–20 measured parameters. Parameters of plant growth, phenology and symbiotic interactions, visual stress symptoms, photosynthetic activity, nutrient composition and vitality were studied and the result matrices were evaluated with principal component analysis (PCA). Stress effects manifested in PC1 of two experiments and in PC2 of the third one. Traits assumed to be adequate for stress indication were characterized by high PC1 or PC2 loading values. Beside parameters of biomass production, growth and visible stress symptoms, less evident traits e.g. root electrical capacitance, membrane stability index in roots and leaves, relative water content of leaves and SPAD units were identified.

Optimal Capacity Allocation Strategies in Smart Gateway Satellite Systems

This Letter examines optimal capacity allocation schemes in multi-beam high-throughput satellite systems exploiting the smart gateway diversity setup. Considering user beams’ requested and gateways’ offered capacities, we propose theoretically optimal, based on Monge arrays, different capacity allocation schemes for maximization of minimum and total system’s satisfaction ratios. These schemes have low complexity based on appropriate sorting of offered and requested capacities. Furthermore, theoretical analysis results in the dilemma of giving priority to the performance, considering satisfaction ratio, of total system or individual pairs. Finally, simulations confirm proposed schemes’ optimality presenting their identical performance with the more complicated exhaustive mechanisms.