Present Practical Solutions Research Articles

Flanking noise at stacked townhouse entrance stairs

In stacked, wood-framed townhouses, entry stairs for upper units pass through the footprint of lower units. The demising construction between the units, therefore, includes the stairs and floor-ceiling below, as well as the stairwell sidewalls. This irregular construction creates the possibility of significant sound flanking paths between upper and lower units, potentially leading to poor noise isolation performance and occupant dissatisfaction. This paper present practical solutions that have been used to address sound flanking in these areas, including the results of comparative field measurements to evaluate effectiveness. It is concluded that improvements are possible, although wood-framed entry stairs as typically designed are likely to remain an acoustical weakness.

Role of Artificial Intelligence in Multinomial Decisions and Preventative Nutrition in Alzheimer's Disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects 50 million people worldwide, an increase of 35 million since 2015, and it is known for memory loss and cognitive decline. Considering the morbidity associated with AD, it is important to explore lifestyle elements influencing the chances of developing AD, with special emphasis on nutritional aspects. This review will first discuss how dietary factors have an impact in AD development and the possible role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in preventative care of AD patients through nutrition. The Mediterranean-DASH diets provide individuals with many nutrient benefits which assists the prevention of neurodegeneration by having neuroprotective roles. Lack of micronutrients, protein-energy, and polyunsaturated fatty acids increase the chance of cognitive decline, loss of memory, and synaptic dysfunction among others. ML software has the ability to design models of algorithms from data introduced to present practical solutions that are accessible and easy to use. It can give predictions for a precise medicine approach to evaluate individuals as a whole. There is no doubt the future of nutritional science lies on customizing diets for individuals to reduce dementia risk factors, maintain overall health and brain function.

The use of mobile solutions for biomechanical assessment in combat sports: A narrative review

New technologies have amplified the possibilities for processing and incorporating data and scientific methods in algorithms through the integration of the use of mobile technology and a wide range of wearables that allow acquisition metrics in real-time. These technologies arise as a possible alternative to supply market demand and to present practical solutions to problems that coaches and athletes face in their daily routines. Concerning biomechanical assessment in combat sports (i.e. reaction time, velocity, and force), the literature is scarce regarding studies that carried out surveys of new assessments and monitoring technologies, with solutions for coaches and athletes. Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate, through a literature review, mobile technologies available on the market for biomechanical analyses in combat sports modalities. Significant growth has been observed in the number of studies involving mobile technologies with practical tools for biomechanical assessment in combat sports athletes. However, only seven technological proposals presented scientific reliability studies, and six assessed validity, showing the necessity of more original articles to investigate scientific validation. As a suggestion, a flowchart is presented with operational guidelines for the research and development of new technologies for biomechanical assessment and monitoring in combat sports in real-time.

Enhancing quality of qualitative evidence in food safety and food security

Qualitative research studies make up only a small portion of all publications in the food disciplines. Despite this, these approaches have offered an in-depth understanding of several food safety and food security problems over the last few decades. However, there continues to be inadequate reporting of qualitative research specific to food contexts, which results in a lack of transparency, rigour, questioning the credibility of qualitative approaches, and challenges in its uptake and synthesis. Several reviews of qualitative evidence in food safety have found reporting to be lacking in the following areas: study title, philosophical orientation, study design, researcher reflexivity, ethical approval, and qualitative analysis. In this paper, we describe the primary hurdles new qualitative researchers face in conducting and reporting research, and present practical solutions to complex qualitative challenges. For permanent and widespread changes aimed at advancing qualitative evidence in the food disciplines, we call on food educators to integrate qualitative methods training in research-based programs; journals and reviewers to appraise qualitative studies using established reporting guidelines; and appeal to academic publishers to expand current word limits to facilitate reporting of all important aspects of qualitative research.

Efficient and Secured Mechanisms for Data Link in IoT WSNs: A Literature Review

The Internet of things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been rapidly and tremendously developing recently as computing technologies have brought about a significant revolution. Their applications and implementations can be found all around us, either individually or collaboratively. WSN plays a leading role in developing the general flexibility of industrial resources in terms of increasing productivity in the IoT. The critical principle of the IoT is to make existing businesses sufficiently intelligent to recognize the need for significant fault mitigation and short-cycle adaptation to improve effectiveness and financial profits. This article presents efficiently applied security protocols at the data link layer for WSN and IoT-based frameworks. It outlines the importance of WSN–IoT applications as well as the architecture of WSN in the IoT. Our primary aim is to highlight the research issues and limitations of WSNs related to the IoT. The fundamental goal of this work is to emphasize a suggested architecture linked to WSN–IoT to enhance energy and power consumption, mobility, information transmission, QoS, and security, as well as to present practical solutions to data link layer difficulties for the future using machine learning. Moreover, we present data link layer protocol issues, attacks, limitations, and research gaps for WSN frameworks based on the recent work conducted on the data link layer concerning WSN applications. Current significant issues and challenges pertain to flow control, quality of service (QoS), security, and performance. In the context of the literature, less work has been undertaken concerning the data link layer in WSN and its relation to improved network performance.

On Model Transmission Strategies in Federated Learning With Lossy Communications

Recently, federated learning (FL) has received tremendous attention in both academia and industry, in which decentralized clients collaboratively complete model training by exchanging model updates with a parameter server through the Internet. Its distributed nature well utilizes the localized data and preserves clients' privacy, but also incurs heavy communication overhead. Existing studies on model update have mostly focused on the bandwidth constraint of the communication channels. Today's Internet however is highly unreliable. Simply using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) would lead to low network utilization under frequent losses. In this paper, we closely examine the optimal transmission strategies in FL over the realistic lossy Internet. We systematically integrate model compression, forward error correction (FEC) and retransmission towards Federated Learning with Lossy Communications (FedLC). We derive the convergence rate of FedLC under non-convex loss with the optimal transmission. We then decompose this non-convex problem and present effective practical solutions. Public datasets are exploited for performance evaluation by varying the packet loss rate from 10% to 50%. In a fixed training time budget, FedLC can improve model accuracy by 3.91% on average or reduce the communication traffic by 34.27%-47.57% in comparison with state-of-the-art baselines.

Family medicine in rural areas - perspectives and development opportunities

Access to health care should be universal and equal regardless of health needs, socio-economic status and place of residence. Empirical research confirms, however, that there are differences in access to health care between people in urban and rural areas. The main challenges for the health care system in rural areas are staff shortages, greater distance from large hospitals, difficult access to specialist and preventive services, and lower effectiveness of emergency care. The aim of the study was to analyze practical solutions to improve the organization of care in POZ, taking into account the principles of coordinated care in rural areas. As part of this study, an attempt was made to present practical solutions that may help to improve the organization of care in primary health care in rural areas. It is worth emphasizing once again that effective and efficient care for the population must be consistent with the concept of care coordination. In addition, the work shows how important from the perspective of the development of medicine in rural areas can be the inclusion of teamwork, financial motivators, including the so-called 'Rural addition' and the impact of modern technologies based on self-care and remote monitoring of patients' health.

Circuit-Level Exploration of Ternary Logic Using Memristors and MOSFETs

In recent decades, the performance of binary computers has escalated through transistor scaling. However, due to the impotent forecasts of transistor scaling, ternary systems are regaining attention. Among many ternary device candidates, a passive device called memristor that is based on resistance switching is considered a good candidate when integrated with MOSFETs. Therefore, in this paper, we design various terna-ry logic based on memristors and MOSFETs from primitive logic to sequential logic and perform a thorough diagnosis for circuit design. We highlight design issues that should be resolved (e.g., signal distortion and high static current) and present practical solutions such as “Strength Design.” Then, we report a proper design methodology of sequential circuits considering the spike phenomena of memristor-based gates. We present 16 novel ternary logic cells and circuitry, including the design of the first balanced ternary full-adder (TFA) and memristor-based ternary pulsed-latch (MTPL). By our TFA, we emphasize that it is possible to design the most practical ternary circuits using memristors and MOSFETs. Our TFA uses 97 transistors and 87 memristors, which is the most reasonable TFA design that has the highest potential to be implemented in the near future. Besides, the proposed MTPL uses 16 transistors and 10 memristors, and it occupies only 72.7% of the silicon area, compared to the master-slave ternary flip-flop.

Analyzing the relationship between barriers to women's political participation and relevant laws In the system of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Women's political rights and how they participate in the public sphere in contemporary Iran are always challenging, given the frameworks derived from the religion, tradition, culture and custom that govern society. From this perspective, the explanation of the main question of this article is due to the lack and capacity of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran for the presence of women in politics. The structure of the research is based on telling the history of women's participation and presence in the public arena from the constitutional era until now, the position of women's political rights in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, women's performance and presence in the public forces of Iran (by the country's basic institutions). Has been. Also in the field of theoretical framework, in addition to the subject laws, some views opposing women's participation in public affairs have been raised and criticized. In this process, the research method is descriptive-analytical; The purpose of this article, in addition to recognizing the capacities of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is to examine the challenges and shortcomings in the theoretical and practical field. Also, in this regard, relying on the high power of the epistemological frameworks of Islamic laws and considering the conditions of the present era, practical and appropriate contexts and solutions to address this issue in the field of politics and legislation are examined.

Sexuality in Ageing Male: Review of Pathophysiology and Treatment Strategies for Various Male Sexual Dysfunctions.

Sexual function among older men is often thought to decrease as part of normal ageing biology despite the fact that sexuality remains an important issue in the elderly. Sexual dysfunction in the aged male is likely multifactorial in nature, with the development and/or progression of medical comorbidities often resulting in decline in male sexual function and poor treatment response. At present, sexual dysfunction in the ageing male is poorly investigated and understood, and current treatment strategies aim at improving sexual desire and erectile function with limited data on ejaculatory and orgasmic dysfunctions. In addition, men are often reticent to seek help for health concerns including sexual dysfunction. The following article provides a narrative review of strategies to address various aspects of sexual dysfunction in the ageing male. Clinicians need to be educated to be sensitive when discussing sexuality issues among older men and to present practical solutions that take into account individual and cultural differences.

The ‘Mind the Gap’ project : Investigating the difference, in performance, between design and the building ‘in-use’

We have the ability to design and construct high performance buildings and the knowledge and skills to operate them in an effective and efficient manner — so why does it not happen? The difference in performance between those predicted from the design and those found in actual operation are well documented.1,2 However, the underpinning reasons for this gap in performance are generally unknown; there is a lot of speculation and hypothesis but little investigation and hard evidence. This paper discusses the ‘Mind the Gap’ project aims to collect evidence from typical exemplars of office buildings which exhibit a range of performances; investigate the reasons for their performance; determine the underpinning causes; and then present practical solutions to solve any underperformance issues. The project, and hence the paper, is aimed at all those stakeholders involved in real estate sector; from portfolio investment and management through to individual building management including all associated professions and the often-forgotten building occupiers. The first phase of the project will produce a methodology based on the learnings from five trial buildings. This will be streamlined with the process then rolled out in a second phase over a larger number of buildings to produce a statistically significant sample which covers office buildings with a full range of servicing strategies and ages. This paper: introduces and explains the concept of the performance gap; describes the ‘Mind the Gap’ project and its methodology; presents some initial data and findings.

Optimum Design of Braced Steel Space Frames Using Teaching Learning Based Optimization

In this study, optimum design of braced steel space frames is obtained via a novel metaheuristic method, teaching learning based optimization. This algorithm method consists of the two basic phases. The first phase is called as teaching; In this phase, the knowledge interaction occurs between students and teacher. In the second phase, learning phase, the knowledge interaction occurs among students in the class. Optimum profiles are selected among 128 W taken from American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC). The constraints imposed on the frame example are stress constraints as stated in AISC-ASD specifications, geometric constraints and displacement constraints. To obtain optimum solutions, a program is coded in MATLAB programming to incorporate with SAP2000 - Open Application Programming Interface (OAPI). The results are compared through tables and figures. The results indicate that teaching learning based optimization method and MATLAB SAP2000 OAPI technique are applicable even for complex problems and present practical solutions.

Effective Recruitment of Schools for Randomized Clinical Trials: Role of School Nurses.

In school settings, nurses lead efforts to improve the student health and well-being to support academic success. Nurses are guided by evidenced-based practice and data to inform care decisions. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is considered the gold standard of scientific rigor for clinical trials. RCTs are critical to the development of evidence-based health promotion programs in schools. The purpose of this article is to present practical solutions to implementing principles of randomization to RCT trials conducted in school settings. Randomization is a powerful sampling method used to build internal and external validity. The school's daily organization and educational mission provide several barriers to randomization. Based on the authors' experience in conducting school-based RCTs, they offer a host of practical solutions to working with schools to successfully implement randomization procedures. Nurses play a critical role in implementing RCTs in schools to promote rigorous science in support of evidence-based practice.

Population Redistribution to Achieve Balanced Regional Sustainable Development in Upper Egypt (2006-2027)

The main objective of the study is to present practical solutions for the problem of building (and demolition) on agricultural lands in Upper Egypt; shortage of available lands for urban expansion; limiting slum areas at cities margins and random building in rural areas; creating new communities that achieve sustainable regional development; and redistribution of population and labor force in Upper Egypt. The study depends on population census data of 2006 for future estimates. The study adopts the descriptive analytical approach. The main results were as follows: - The problem of building (and demolition) on agricultural lands in Egypt represents a matter of life or death for the Egyptians. - The present pattern of random housing in cities and villages is neither sustainable nor balanced. - The traditional Egyptian villages must be re-planned without allowing for rebuilding old houses. - It is imperative to look for new locations to establish new communities to absorb the population increase and satisfy housing needs. The most important recommendations were as follows: - Preventing building in old cities, especially at the margins close to agricultural lands. - Preventing building on agricultural lands for any reason. - Establishing new twin cities (and villages) at the western desert highway, from Giza to Aswan. - Adopting the desert housing pattern (Hassan Fatehy engineering) to reduce costs and materials consumption. - Relocating specific governmental agencies from old to new communities. - Relocating boys secondary schools from old to new communities. - Utilizing the evacuated buildings of secondary schools to decrease densities of primary and preparatory schools in old communities. - Adoption of new and renewable energy sources, such as solar energy and biogas. - Establishing factories for wastes re-cycling at suitable sites in new communities. - Declaring a clear-cut stand as for no conciliation with building on agricultural lands, and imposing severe penalties up to land confiscation.

The impact of fraudulent and irreproducible data to the translational research crisis - solutions and implementation.

One of the aims of basic neuroscience research is ultimately the development of therapeutics to cure diseases. Funders granting money to research institutions increasingly express interest into how their financial resources are used and look for successful translation in clinical practice. Disappointingly, many findings that started out promising in basic research projects and phase I trials did not live up to the promise of therapeutic efficacy in later phase II or III trials. An inordinately high amount of time and money is thus spent on research that does not always have the required human impact. Potential reasons for these problems are numerous. Although research misconduct occurs and contributes to this shortcoming, it is not the only important factor. Frequently, basic science results turn out to be irreproducible. Irreproducibility, outside of malfeasance, is multifactorial and can include poor experimental design, conduct, statistical analysis, reporting standards, and conceptual flaws. Further confounding problems include an insufficient transferability of animal to human physiology, as well as intersubject group variability, for example, sexual dimorphisms. While the causes of poor data reproducibility are therefore numerous, equally there are many groups that can contribute to improvements in how basic science is reported. Here, we will review how the Journal of Neurochemistry can contribute to increasing the value of preclinical and translational research. Despite a vast amount of very promising basic research findings, these failed to successfully translate into the clinical practice so far. The reasons for this 'data reproducibility crisis' are numerous, for example, rooting in insufficient experimental design, conceptual flaws, incorrect statistical planning and evaluation, incomplete model system that do not adequately reproduce the human physiology, and further reasons discussed in this Review with the aim to present practical solutions that can be implemented by researchers, journals editors, and reviewers. We will also explain measures the Journal of Neurochemistry have implemented to overcome these issues and weaknesses in preclinical research. These includes adherence to the ARRIVE ( www.nc3rs.org) guidelines, NINDS standards (doi: 10.1038/nature11556), and The Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (TOP) Committee guidelines (https://cos.io/top/#TOP). This article is part of the 60th Anniversary special issue.

Gamification in education – practical solutions for educational courses

Abstract Gamification can be defined as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. The aim of this article is to present practical solutions for a gamified educational course. The solutions are based on mechanisms used in online games and on the results of empirical research on motivation. The first part of the article analyzes theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The second part discusses the motivational aspects of one of the most popular games (World of Warcraft). The final part presents a detailed sample project for a gamified educational course. It proposes that – among classical solutions – a monetary schedule of reinforcement as well as a number of features based on the natural needs to cooperate and compete be included.

A Practical Method for High‐Resolution Embedded Liquid Surfaces

AbstractCombining high‐resolution level set surface tracking with lower resolution physics is an inexpensive method for achieving highly detailed liquid animations. Unfortunately, the inherent resolution mismatch introduces several types of disturbing visual artifacts. We identify the primary sources of these artifacts and present simple, efficient, and practical solutions to address them. First, we propose an unconditionally stable filtering method that selectively removes sub‐grid surface artifacts not seen by the fluid physics, while preserving fine detail in dynamic splashing regions. It provides comparable results to recent error‐correction techniques at lower cost, without substepping, and with better scaling behavior. Second, we show how a modified narrow‐band scheme can ensure accurate free surface boundary conditions in the presence of large resolution mismatches. Our scheme preserves the efficiency of the narrow‐band methodology, while eliminating objectionable stairstep artifacts observed in prior work. Third, we demonstrate that the use of linear interpolation of velocity during advection of the high‐resolution level set surface is responsible for visible grid‐aligned kinks; we therefore advocate higher‐order velocity interpolation, and show that it dramatically reduces this artifact. While these three contributions are orthogonal, our results demonstrate that taken together they efficiently address the dominant sources of visual artifacts arising with high‐resolution embedded liquid surfaces; the proposed approach offers improved visual quality, a straightforward implementation, and substantially greater scalability than competing methods.

Solutions to the anti-piracy problem in oblivious transfer

In this paper, we consider the applications of digital fingerprinting in oblivious transfer (OT) and present the solutions to the anti-piracy problem in OT protocols. OT protocols can be applied to goods purchasing, pay-per-view TV and sensitive database access while maintaining the users' privacy. In these applications, if the users redistribute the messages that they acquired from the server's database or sell them to others, then both of the server's privacy and benefits will be damaged. Prior to this work, such an anti-piracy problem has never been considered in the OT protocols, even though it is an essential problem to make OT protocols adoptable in practice. In this work, we consider this problem for the first time and present practical solutions, by combining a digital fingerprinting scheme into OT, to provide the pirate-tracing in OT protocols. By performance analysis, our solutions turn out to be practical.

The analysis of glass ceiling phenomenon in the promotion of women’s abilities in organizations

Women constitute almost half of the workforce of a society and there has been considerable increase in women employment rate in recent years. However, their promotion to management positions has not been very tangible. Gender inequalities in the workplace especially in the domain of management have resulted in the lack of efficient use of potential capacities of women. Even though the previous research demonstrates that women are not less ambitious than men, wrong beliefs which attribute management to men make a kind of invisible barrier, known as glass ceiling, which prevents women’s promotion to top organizational positions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the reasons for the lack of promotion of women to top management levels in the society. It was conducted with a descriptive analytic method through the review of the related literature and emphasis on the concept of glass ceiling to present practical solutions to solve the problem.

Numerical Robustness in Geometric Computation: An Expository Summary

This paper attempts to present an expository summary on the numerical non-robustness issues in geometric computation. We try to give the answers to two questions: (1) why numerical non-robustness issues occur in geometric computing, and (2) how to deal with them in practice. We first describe the theoretical causes of the problematic robustness behaviors, and then present several popular and practical solutions to the non-robustness problem. Note that these algorithm-specific or general solutions are only part of the existing efforts to attack the numerical robustness problem, but are quite useful in practical applications. Additionally, geometric examples and sample codes are included for illustrations.