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Global environmental change is a defining issue of our time. The ocean is a key component of the Earth system, and yet, in-depth understanding of its roles in sustaining life has not received the attention which it deserves. Humanity must develop a new relationship with the ocean characterized by protection, sustainable production, and prosperity. Society has too much to gain by implementing sustainability solutions and too much to lose by ignoring them. Our actions or inaction now will have far-reaching implications for future of all life on Earth. Ocean blueprint that calls for enforcing 30% Marine Protected Areas by 2030 requires real transformative action. This paper contains new ideas for combining the efforts of natural and social scientists, and traditional users of sea, and explores the potential of modern technologies to assist in this campaign. ‘Smart Sea’ concept introduced in this paper envisages synergies among the problem-solving approaches including digital tools, and eco-engineering and eco-mimicry solution options. Knowledge gaps have been highlighted and relevance of new knowledge systems emphasized together with enabling conditions to address the uncertainties associated with the ocean ecosystem. The ocean has a central position in actions towards preventing global warming of 1.5oC but measures to achieve it should consider that the ocean carbon sink is dynamic and is adversely affected when excessive carbon dioxide produces acidification. The selected measures are likely to have trade-offs, requiring analysis of multiple dimensions, for ensuring sustainable outcomes. The prevailing ocean health and urgency to mitigate it calls for combining global and local solutions, technologies and actions driven by safe and innovative solutions, and wherever possible, based on proof-of-concept. Deviating from the on-going incremental data collection systems to new forms of data-sharing using modern technological tools will contribute to addressing the glaring vacuum in knowledge of the ocean and facilitating a concerted global action for maintaining its ecosystem services. An attempt has been made in this paper to consolidate different opinions and experiences in moving from generalities to specifics for sustainable solutions that support economies, food security and the society.

Background: Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI) is a major global safety concern for the health system as it increases mortality, morbidity, and length of hospital stay and contributes to the economic burden. These infections are prevalent in hospitals of developing countries such as Pakistan, due to limited resources, unsafe infection control practices and under reporting. However, post-operative patients are more prone to these infections due to immunocompromised state, antibiotic resistance, and most importantly lack of awareness regarding HAIs and their respective preventive measures. Therefore, the objective of this study was to highlight some of the serious but avoidable aspects of this largely ignored but important issue of HAIs in public and private tertiary care hospitals by assessing and comparing the need of knowledge and awareness in post-operative patients to minimize risks which in turn will decrease incidence, morbidity and mortality. Materials and Methods: A descriptive cross sectional study was conducted among post-operative patients of Liaquat National Hospital and Civil Hospital (private and public tertiary care hospital, respectively), over a period of 1 year (July 2017-2018) in Karachi. Individual interviews following verbal consent were taken using a pre-coded questionnaire, which was divided into 3 sections to analyze the social and demographic, knowledge and practices of the patients. We excluded patients with impaired comprehension, less than 15 years of age and those who were reluctant to participate. Data was analyzed using SPSS v.22.0. Pearson’s chi-square was used as the primary statistical test. Results: Three-fifty post-operative patients from each, public and private hospital were enrolled. The mean age was found to be 38.41 ± 16.57 years and 40.3% of patients were uneducated. Knowledge regarding the modes of spread, types and risk factors for hospital acquired infections was significantly associated with patients admitted in private hospital, female gender and a higher education level.

In this paper, a 16-channel 40 Gb/s wave division multiplexing lightwave system is simulated using OptiSystem version 14 and optimized. This paper proposes a Pareto optimization and particle swarm optimization algorithms to find optimum launch power for minimum bit error rate (BER). However, simulation results show that the proposed algorithms proved to be a good solution and take considerable computational time to converge and reach global optimum. It is concluded that return-to-zero modulation format has higher-quality factor, lower BER, and lower distortion and it is less affected by the fiber nonlinearity.