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Introduction:The Ministry of Public Health in Lebanon is in the process of converting the surveillance reporting from a cumbersome paper-based system to a web-based electronic platform (DHIS-2) to have real-time information for early detection of alerts and outbreaks and for initiating a prompt response.Objectives:This paper aimed to document the Lebanese experience in implementing DHIS-2 for the disease surveillance system. It also targets to assess the improvement of reporting rates and timeliness of the reported data and to disclose the encountered challenges and opportunities. MethodologyThis is a retrospective description of processes involved in the implementation of the DHIS-2 tool in Lebanon. Initially, it was piloted for the school-based surveillance in 2014; then its use was extended in May 2017 to cover other specific surveillance systems. This included all surveillance programs collecting aggregate data from hospitals, medical centers, dispensaries, or laboratories at the first stage. As part of the national roll-out process, the online application was developed. The customized aggregated-based datasets, organization units, user accounts, specific and generic dashboards were generated. More than 80 training sessions were conducted throughout the country targeting 1290 end-users including health officers at the national and provincial levels, focal persons working in all public and private hospitals, laboratories, and medical centers as well. Completeness and timeliness of reported data were compared before and after the implementation of DHIS-2. Challenges and lessons learned during the roll-out process are listed.ResultsFor laboratory-based surveillance, completeness of reporting increased from 70.8% in May to 89.6% in October. Timeliness has improved from 25% to 74%. For medical centers, an improvement of 8.1% for completeness and 9.4% in timeliness was recorded before and after training sessions. For zero reporting, completeness remains the same (88%) and timeliness has improved from 74% to 87%. The main challenges faced during the implementation of DHIS-2 were mainly infrastructural and system-related in addition to poor internet connectivity and limited workforce and frequent changes to DHIS-2 versions.ConclusionImplementation of DHIS-2 improved timeliness and completeness for aggregated data reporting. Continued on-site support, monitoring, and system enhancement are needed to improve the performance of DHIS-2.

Standards are a set of guidelines or criteria used to ensure consistency, quality, safety, and compatibility in products, services, and processes [...]

Graphical Abstract Illustration of the assembly, distribution, and point-of-care use of a rapidly-deployable, cell-free COVID-19 biosensor: 1) Assemble: Assembling CFPS reagents by mixing E. coli lysate, murine RNase Inhibitor (mRI), energy sources, cofactors, and toehold switch riboregulator plasmid. 2) Print: aliquoting CFPS reagents onto paper substrates housed in a plastic test cassette. 3) Dehydrate: lyophilizing CFPS reagents on paper substrates. 4) Distribute. 5) Saliva sample: applying saliva samples onto cassette without pretreatments. 6) Reaction: bioluminescent protein expression in presence of target RNA (+), or ribosome detachment in absence of target RNA (-). 7) Visual result: bioluminescent output in the presence of target RNA and NanoLuc luciferase expression., The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the global demand for rapid, low-cost, widely distributable and point-of-care nucleic acid diagnostic technologies. Such technologies could help disrupt transmission, sustain economies and preserve health and lives during widespread infection. In contrast, conventional nucleic acid diagnostic procedures require trained personnel, complex laboratories, expensive equipment, and protracted processing times. In this work, lyophilized cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) and toehold switch riboregulators are employed to develop a promising paper-based nucleic acid diagnostic platform activated simply by the addition of saliva. First, to facilitate distribution and deployment, an economical paper support matrix is identified and a mass-producible test cassette designed with integral saliva sample receptacles. Next, CFPS is optimized in the presence of saliva using murine RNase inhibitor. Finally, original toehold switch riboregulators are engineered to express the bioluminescent reporter NanoLuc in response to SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequences present in saliva samples. The biosensor generates a visible signal in as few as seven minutes following administration of 15 μL saliva enriched with high concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequences. The estimated cost of this test is less than 0.50 USD, which could make this platform readily accessible to both the developed and developing world. While additional research is needed to decrease the limit of detection, this work represents important progress toward developing a diagnostic technology that is rapid, low-cost, distributable and deployable at the point-of-care by a layperson.

We attempt to replicate 67 papers published in 13 well-regarded economics journals using author-provided replication files that include both data and code. Some journals in our sample require data and code replication files, and other journals do not require such files. Aside from 6 papers that use confidential data, we obtain data and code replication files for 29 of 35 papers (83%) that are required to provide such files as a condition of publication, compared to 11 of 26 papers (42%) that are not required to provide data and code replication files. We successfully replicate the key qualitative result of 22 of 67 papers (33%) without contacting the authors. Excluding the 6 papers that use confidential data and the 2 papers that use software we do not possess, we replicate 29 of 59 papers (49%) with assistance from the authors. Because we are able to replicate less than half of the papers in our sample even with help from the authors, we assert that economics research is usually not replicable. We conclude with recommendations on improving replication of economics research. JEL Codes: B41; C80; C82; C87; C88; E01

This chapter describes the concept of paper space. Covered are the primary reasons for using paper space, how to get in/out of paper space, and how to set up title blocks (layouts), viewports and their properties, viewport scale assignments, controlling what is visible in viewports, setting up text and dim styles in viewports, and the annotative concept.

In recent times, it has been witnessed that wireless systems based on IoT-based have developed rapidly in various sectors. The IoT (Internet of Things) is the network in which physical devices, equipment, sensors and other objects can communicate among themselves without human involvement. The WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) is a central component of the IoT, which has proliferated into several different applications in real-time. The IoT and WSNs now have various critical and non-critical applications impacting nearly every area of our everyday life. WSN nodes are usually small and battery-driven machines. Thus, the energy effective data aggregation techniques that increase the lifespan of the network are highly significant. Various approaches and algorithms for energy-efficient data aggregation in IoT-WSN systems were presented. This paper reviews the literature with specific attention to aspects of wireless networking for the preservation of energy and aggregation of data.

Replication data and results for Langenhorst, Jan/Frommherz, Yannick/Meier-Vieracker, Simon: Keyness in song lyrics. Challenges of highly clumpy data. In: Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics. This data set contains * Python module used to obtain results presented in paper * Jupyter Notebooks to generate results and create plots * Complete keyword/key-ngram lists * A 'shuffled' version of the songkorpus used in our analysis (replication of ngrams not possible, only keywords)

The Internet was initially used to transfer data packets between users and data sources with a specific IP address. Due to advancements, the Internet is being used to share data among different small, resource constrained devices connected in billions to constitute the (IOT) Internet of things .In addition, the paper discusses about wireless LAN Wi-Fi technology i.e. wireless local area network protocol and on a larger scale, mobile communication technology, that is used to provide connectivity to the internet, the wide area network. The paper draws an attention towards the background of IOT and its distinction with other technologies, discussion on network optimization in IOT. This paper not only reviews, compares and consolidates the recent related works, but also admires the author’s findings, solutions and discusses its usefulness towards network optimization in IOT. The uniqueness of this paper lies in the review of network optimization issues and challenges in IOT. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the network optimization in IOT is presented.

One way of exposing predatory journals is to submit a spoof article to see if it gets accepted. We investigate one journal, looking at how it has performed since a spoof paper it accepted came to light. We find that it has published almost 20% more papers following the acceptance of the spoof paper. The journal has a new web site, which appears to show that it did not publish its first paper until 2018. However, there is an old web site that lists 321 papers dating back to 2012. The editors said that this is due to a new workflow system, which meant that previously published papers could not be listed on the new web site. Moreover, the number of papers could be not accommodated, as a high configuration server would be required to provide a responsive web site. We found some plagiarism, which looks quite serious. We conclude that the spoof paper had little effect on the journal, which continues to operate, seven years after the spoof paper was accepted.

PurposeProductivity improvement is key to sustainability performance improvements of organizations. In a real-world scenario, the nature of inputs and outputs is likely to be imprecise and vague, leading to complexity in comparing firms' efficiency measurements. Implementation of fuzzy-logic based measurement systems is a method for dealing with such cases. This paper presents a fuzzy weight objective function to solve Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) CCR model for measuring paper mills' performance in India for 15 years.Design/methodology/approachAn integrated methodology is proposed to solve DEA models having fuzzy weights. The fuzzy DEA methodology is an extended version of the DEA approach that researchers have used for performance measurement purposes in imprecise and vague scenarios. The ecological performance of the paper industry is evaluated, considering some desirable and undesirable outputs. The effect of non-discretionary input on the performance of a paper mill is also analyzed.FindingsAnalysis suggests that the productivity of the paper industry is improving consistently throughout the period. The comparative evaluation of methods suggests that a diverse cluster of DMUs and integration of DEA with the fuzzy logic increases the diversity in the efficiency score while DEA-DE imitates the results of CCR DEA.Originality/valueProposed a fuzzy DEA-based analytical framework for measuring the paper industry's ecological performance in an imprecise and vague scenario. The model is tested on data from the paper industry in a developing country context and comparative performance analysis using DEA, fuzzy DEA and DE algorithm is done.

We consider the problem of communicating over a channel that randomly “tears” the message block into small pieces of different sizes and shuffles them. For the binary torn-paper channel with block length $n$ and pieces of length ${\mathrm{ Geometric}}(p_{n})$ , we characterize the capacity as $C = e^{-\alpha }$ , where $\alpha = \lim _{n\to \infty } p_{n} \log n$ . Our results show that the case of ${\mathrm{ Geometric}}(p_{n})$ -length fragments and the case of deterministic length- $(1/p_{n})$ fragments are qualitatively different and, surprisingly, the capacity of the former is larger. Intuitively, this is due to the fact that, in the random fragments case, large fragments are sometimes observed, which boosts the capacity.

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have been investigated as a promising device to harvest mechanical energy into electricity. At present, paper-based triboelectric nanogenerators (P-TENGs) have been widely researched because paper features with lightweight, low cost, abundance, renewability and biodegradability. In this paper, the operating principles and operation modes of TENGs, the development progress and performance enhancement routes of P-TENGs are comprehensively reviewed. Additionally, the overview, challenges and opportunities of P-TENGs applications are also presented.

These days, we receive most information through digital mediums such as emails and social networking applications. Investigating the characteristics of human-paper interactions can help us design more meaningful interactions and better understand why people use paper documents in the age of digitalization. In this study, the interaction of people with physical documents was studied through a mixed-method of conducting a literature review, gathering expert opinions, interviewing subjects, and analysing Instagram photos. By codifying the gathered information, the human-paper interaction framework was developed. This framework articulates the advantages of physical documents compared to electronic documents and serves researchers and practitioners by providing insightful human factors about human-document interaction. Finally, we propose six design themes as the solutions to the findings of this study. These implications can provide practical foundations for future design and research.

A point-of-care (POC) can be defined as an in vitro diagnostic test that can provide results within minutes. It has gained enormous attention as a promising tool for biomarkers detection and diagnosis, as well as for screening of chronic noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes mellitus. Diabetes mellitus type 2 is one of the metabolic disorders that has grown exponentially in recent years, becoming one of the greatest challenges to health systems. Early detection and accurate diagnosis of this disorder are essential to provide adequate treatments. However, efforts to reduce incidence should remain not only in these stages but in developing continuous monitoring strategies. Diabetes-monitoring tools must be accessible and affordable; thus, POC platforms are attractive, especially paper-based ones. Paper-based POCs are simple and portable, can use different matrixes, do not require highly trained staff, and are less expensive than other platforms. These advantages enhance the viability of its application in low-income countries and hard-to-reach zones. This review aims to present a critical summary of the main components required to create a sensitive and affordable enzymatic paper-based POC, as well as an oriented analysis to highlight the main limitations and challenges of current POC devices for diabetes type 2 monitoring and future research opportunities in the field.

Space Resource Utilization could reduce the mass, cost, and risks of future space activities. The many nonlinear and compounding effects mean that seemingly insignificant concept of operations choices can invalidate the conclusions of sophisticated analyses. Here we successively relax self-imposed constraints in a recent publication to demonstrate that the proximity of a market and the benefits of aerobraking cannot be omitted.

Internet of Things (IoT) has drawn important attention in recent years since it has made revolutionary changes in human life. The IoT enables the exchange of information or data in a wide variety of applications such as smart buildings, smart health, smart transport, and so on. As billions of connected things communicate with each other and can interchange sensitive information that may be revealed. Hence, strengthening IoT’s security and preserving users’ privacy is a crucial challenge. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive study of the IoT security. Several IoT security attacks are examined and a taxonomy of the security requirements based on the attacks purposes is proposed. Furthermore, recent security solutions are described and classified based on their application area. Ultimately, open research directions and security challenges are discussed.

Due to the growth of e-commerce, most of the banking transactions are made on the online platform and all these transactions are made on the websites provided by the merchant or the payable apps and because of this the vulnerability of attacks has increased and there are also chances of using fraudulent websites and apps by the attackers though there are many high-security algorithms are been used for safeguarding against vulnerabilities. The way of judging the relation of trust on the online platform has become a major issue, so a proper trust model also needs to be maintained. In this paper, we reviewed various security algorithms which involve cryptographic algorithms, machine learning, anonymization, and masking techniques, blockchain, distributed networks, and many more to provide integrity, privacy, reliability, authentication, security, and risk-less e-commerce platform.

Microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (μPADs) have attracted much attention over the past decade. They embody many advantages, such as abundance, portability, cost-effectiveness, and ease of fabrication, making them superior for clinical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and food safety assurance. Despite these advantages, μPADs lack the high sensitivity to detect many analytes at trace levels than other commercial analytical instruments such as mass spectrometry. Therefore, a preconcentration step is required to enhance their sensitivity. This review focuses on the techniques used to separate and preconcentrate the analytes onto the μPADs, such as ion concentration polarization, isotachophoresis, and field amplification sample stacking. Other separations and preconcentration techniques, including liquid-solid and liquid-liquid extractions coupled with μPADs, are also reviewed and discussed. In addition, the fabrication methods, advantages, disadvantages, and the performance evaluation of the μPADs concerning their precision and accuracy were highlighted and critically assessed. Finally, the challenges and future perspectives have been discussed.

The development of low-cost analytical devices for on-site water quality monitoring is a critical need, especially for developing countries and remote communities in developed countries with limited resources. Microbial electrochemical cell-based (MXC) biosensors have been quite promising for quantitative and semi-quantitative (often qualitative) measurements of various water quality parameters due to their low cost and simplicity compared to traditional analytical methods. However, conventional MXC biosensors often encounter challenges, such as the slow establishment of biofilms, low sensitivity, and poor recoverability, making them unable to be applied for practical cases. In response, MXC biosensors assembled with paper-based materials demonstrated tremendous potentials to enhance sensitivity and field applicability. Furthermore, the paper-based platforms offer many prominent features, including autonomous liquid transport, rapid bacterial adhesion, lowered resistance, low fabrication cost (

Paper-based microfluidic devices have undergone rapid development and offered a promising low-cost platform for disease diagnostics in poor-resource areas. Recently, paper-hybrid microfluidic devices have attracted much attention and been applied in various low-cost point-of-care testings, due to multiple merits derived from both paper and other substrates. This chapter summarizes the recent progress of low-cost paper and paper-hybrid microfluidic devices for rapid diagnostics of human diseases. The commonly used fabrication techniques are first introduced, and the applications of numerous paper and paper-hybrid microfluidic devices are then elaborated with an emphasis on rapid disease diagnostics in terms of the nature of biomolecules in three major categories, namely, protein-, gene-, and cell-based diagnostics. Both advantages and disadvantages of using these devices are discussed, followed by the perspectives for broad applications in low-cost diagnostics.

Freight conveyances on signalized city street are perceived as path hindrances all through the span of conveyance. Traffic sticking related with metropolitan cargo conveyances has acquired expanding consideration as of late. As traffic architects and organizers are entrusted with discovering answers for achieve complete interest all the more economically with confined street limit. Despite the fact that trucks make up just a minor extent of vehicular traffic, however they gain a more prominent measure of the absolute expense of postponements. Developing discussion of arrangements to move conveyances to off hours are proposed to moderate the impacts of on traffic sticking. This paper audits on how the cargo conveyances effect on street limit and postpone time. This paper reviews various related research paper that how actually freight delivery effect on street capacity of road and also greater impact on travel time. Because if proper planning is not going to done it leads to traffic congestion problem. Keywords: Signalized City road, Cargo delivery, Capacity, Delay time

Bovine pestiviruses are the causative agents of Bovine viral diarrhea, a disease that generates severe economic losses in cattle. The aim of this study was to improve its diagnosis by means of developing a RT-qPCR to detect bovine pestiviruses A, B and H; and to set a protocol for collecting, shipping and conserving bovine pestiviral RNA in filter papers. The developed RT-qPCR showed high sensitivity in detecting these viruses in different matrixes: viral stocks, semen and serum samples. Regarding the possibility of using the technique to test serum pools, it was possible to identify a positive serum sample within a pool containing 30 sera. In addition to evaluating the qPCR from fresh samples, the use of filter papers to sow bovine samples was analyzed. The sampling method in two different filter papers using bovine blood drops was a useful alternative for diagnosis purposes and allowed the preservation of pestiviral RNA up to 12 months under refrigeration.

Formulaic expressions, such as 'in this paper we propose', are helpful for authors of scholarly papers because they convey communicative functions; in the above, it is showing the aim of this paper'. Thus, resources of formulaic expressions, such as a dictionary, that could be looked up easily would be useful. However, forms of formulaic expressions can often vary to a great extent. For example, 'in this paper we propose', 'in this study we propose' and 'in this paper we propose a new method to' are all regarded as formulaic expressions. Such a diversity of spans and forms causes problems in both extraction and evaluation of formulaic expressions. In this paper, we propose a new approach that is robust to variation of spans and forms of formulaic expressions. Our approach regards a sentence as consisting of a formulaic part and non-formulaic part. Then, instead of trying to extract formulaic expressions from a whole corpus, by extracting them from each sentence, different forms can be dealt with at once. Based on this formulation, to avoid the diversity problem, we propose evaluating extraction methods by how much they convey specific communicative functions rather than by comparing extracted expressions to an existing lexicon. We also propose a new extraction method that utilises named entities and dependency structures to remove the non-formulaic part from a sentence. Experimental results show that the proposed extraction method achieved the best performance compared to other existing methods., 21 pages, 11 figures

This paper presents a critical review of laser pyrolysis. Although this technology is almost 60 years old, in literature many researchers, both from academia and industry, are still developing and improving it. On the contrary industrial applications are struggling to take off, if not in very restricted areas, although the technology has undoubted advantages that justify future development. The aim of this work consists in analysing a representative pool of scientific papers (230) and patents (121), from the last 20 years, to have an overview about the evolution of the method and try to understand the efforts spent to improve this technology effectively in academia and in industry. This study is important to provide a complete review about the argument, still missing in the literature. The objective is to provide an overview sufficiently broad and representative in the sources and to capture all the main ways in which laser pyrolysis has been used and with what distribution. The main focuses of the study are the analyses of the functions carried out by laser technologies, the application fields, and the types of used laser (i.e. models, power and fluence). Among the main results, the study showed that the main use of laser pyrolysis is to produce nanoparticles and coatings, the main materials worked by laser pyrolysis are silicon and carbon dioxide and the main searched properties in the products of laser pyrolysis are catalysts activity and electrical conductivity. CO2 lasers are the most used and the have high versatility compared to others. In conclusion, the study showed that laser pyrolysis is a consolidated technology within its main application fields (nanoparticles and coatings) for several years. Within this context, the technology has been developed on very different sizes and processes, obtaining a very wide range of results. Finally, these results may also have stimulated new areas of experimentation that emerged mainly in recent years and which concern biomedical applications, additive manufacturing, and waste disposal. Graphical abstract

Three-dimensional visualization of cellular and subcellular-structures in histological-tissues is essential for understanding the complexities of biological-phenomena, especially with regards structural and spatial relationships and pathologlical-diagnosis. Recent advancements in tissue-clearing technology, such as Magnified Analysis of Proteome (MAP), have significantly improved our ability to study biological-structures in three-dimensional space; however, their wide applicability to a variety of tissues is limited by long incubation-times and a need for advanced imaging-systems that are not readily available in most-laboratories. Here, we present optimized MAP-based method for paper-thin samples, Paper-MAP, which allow for rapid clearing and subsequent imaging of three-dimensional sections derived from various tissues using conventional confocal-microscopy. Paper-MAP successfully clear tissues within 1-day, compared to the original-MAP, without significant differences in achieved optical-transparency. As a proof-of-concept, we investigated the vasculature and neuronal-networks of a variety of human and rodent tissues processed via Paper-MAP, in both healthy and diseased contexts, including Alzheimer’s disease and glioma.