Complex Socio-technical Problems for Engineers: Pedagogical Motivation and Experience at the Undergraduate Level

Engineering courses, focused on complex, large-scale, sociotechnical systems, at the undergraduate level, have been rare. Traditionally, most students develop a deep technical understanding in a specific engineering discipline, but get little opportunity to analyze engineered complex systems, where both technical and social issues need to be well understood for devising long lasting solutions. The development of analytical skills for studying interdisciplinary problems has so far been largely limited at the graduate-level. In this paper we describe the motivation, design, and learning outcomes of an introductory course on Engineering Systems that has been developed and offered to primarily first and second year engineering students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The course has been centered around the theme of critical contemporary issues (CCIs) including energy, mobility, sustainability etc. The aim of the course is to expose undergraduates to quantitative tools that are available for rigorously and methodically analyzing some of our most complex contemporary engineering challenges. The course consists of introductory lectures on system dynamics, networks and uncertainty, along with semester-long team-based projects. The projects focus on different topics related to CCIs and the students work in small teams on a project of their interest throughout the term. For the first pilot offering of the class (in Spring semester 2011), the students gave an average rating of 5.9/7.0 regarding how likely they were to recommend this class to others (with 7 being absolutely certain). There was also evidence (however based on limited and anecdotal data) of continued student interest (outside of class) in engaging with the complex socio-technical problems they worked on during the term

Introducing Complex Sociotechnical Systems to First-and Second-Year Students

Retention of undergraduate engineering students remains a key challenge faced across the globe; in particular, the first two years of the required curriculum is often cited as a significant hurdle. Many students are attracted to engineering in order to solve important real-world problems. However, in the first two years, the majority of students find themselves in classes focused on the fundamentals of math and science, with little or no apparent connection to the real-world issues they care deeply about. Furthermore, most students traditionally develop a deep understanding in a specific engineering discipline, with limited opportunity to consider or analyze complex, sociotechnical systems (e.g. energy systems, transportation networks, healthcare) – systems that are the focus of critical engineering challenges. Although the subject of large-scale, sociotechnical systems has been successfully integrated into the realm of graduate education, it has seen limited attention in undergraduate studies where it has the potential to inspire and help retain the next generation of engineers. This paper describes the development and implementation of a novel course, intended for freshmen and sophomores, that has been designed to address some of the needs of a new generation of students who are passionate and more engaged than ever before in understanding and impacting contemporary problems. The new course centers around the theme of Critical Contemporary Issues (CCI) – important and difficult problems pertinent to our present times on topics of sustainability, mobility, energy and the environment, healthcare, communication, the internet etc. In this course, we weave introductory instruction in system dynamics, networks and uncertainty with teams working on different semester-long projects. Through this approach, we enable students to engage in and understand the issues at play in a problem of their interest, appreciate the scope of the sociotechnical complexities in CCIs, and gain an introduction to analytical tools that can help in addressing some of these issues. This paper discusses the overall philosophy and motivation for establishing the course, the design of the curriculum, and the approach, execution, and integration of team-based projects

Household environmental conditions are associated with enteropathy and impaired growth in rural Bangladesh.

We assessed the relationship of fecal environmental contamination and environmental enteropathy. We compared markers of environmental enteropathy, parasite burden, and growth in 119 Bangladeshi children (≤ 48 months of age) across rural Bangladesh living in different levels of household environmental cleanliness defined by objective indicators of water quality and sanitary and hand-washing infrastructure. Adjusted for potential confounding characteristics, children from clean households had 0.54 SDs (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.06, 1.01) higher height-for-age z scores (HAZs), 0.32 SDs (95% CI = -0.72, 0.08) lower lactulose:mannitol (L:M) ratios in urine, and 0.24 SDs (95% CI = -0.63, 0.16) lower immunoglobulin G endotoxin core antibody (IgG EndoCAb) titers than children from contaminated households. After adjusting for age and sex, a 1-unit increase in the ln L:M was associated with a 0.33 SDs decrease in HAZ (95% CI = -0.62, -0.05). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that environmental contamination causes growth faltering mediated through environmental enteropathy

Twin pregnancy, the study of maternal and perinatal outcome: what being a twin is like?

Background: Twin pregnancy is considered as a high-risk pregnancy due to associated high maternal and perinatal morbidity mortality in comparison with singleton pregnancy. The objectives of this study were to study the maternal and perinatal complications in twin pregnancies. To find out various factors that contribute to adverse perinatal outcome.Methods: This retrospective study was conducted at Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences Hospital, Bengaluru. 92 women with twin pregnancies admitted in KIMS Hospital from September 2014 to September 2018, both booked and referred patients were studied. Individual patient parameters like age, parity, gestational age, mode of delivery, maternal complications were tabulated. Neonatal morbidity and mortality were noted, data thus obtained was analysed and results studied.Results: In the study the incidence of twin pregnancies was more in second gravida (53%). 72% of the patients were admitted between 28-36 weeks of gestation with preterm labour (23%) as the main cause for admission. Anaemia (8.69%), hypertensive disorders of pregnancies (17.39%), PPROM (21%), single foetal demise (5%) and IUGR (5.4%) were the antenatal complications observed. Out of the 92 patients, 29 (35.4%) patients delivered by vaginal route whereas 53 (64.6%) had to undergo C-section. DCDA twin constituted 66% of twins in the study and mal presentation was the commonest indication for caesarean section (50%). Among the 164 babies out of 92 twin pregnancies 8 babies were still born and 12 babies died by the end of one week due to complications related to prematurity like hyaline membrane disease, IVH.Conclusions: Early detection of twin pregnancies and proper antenatal care reduces both maternal and perinatal complication thereby improving maternal and perinatal outcome

In vitro cryopreservation of date palm caulogenic meristems

Cryopreservation is the technology of choice not only for plant genetic resource preservation but also for virus eradication and for the efficient management of large-scale micropropagation. In this chapter, we describe three cryopreservation protocols (standard vitrification, droplet vitrification, and encapsulation vitrification) for date palm highly proliferating meristems that are initiated from vitro-cultures using plant growth regulator-free MS medium. The positive impact of sucrose preculture and cold hardening treatments on survival rates is significant. Regeneration rates obtained with standard vitrification, encapsulation-vitrification, and droplet-vitrification protocols can reach 30, 40, and 70%, respectively. All regenerated plants from non-cryopreserved or cryopreserved explants don't show morphological variation by maintaining genetic integrity without adverse effect of cryogenic treatment. Cryopreservation of date palm vitro-cultures enables commercial tissue culture laboratories to move to large-scale propagation from cryopreserved cell lines producing true-to-type plants after clonal field-testing trials. When comparing the cost of cryostorage and in-field conservation of date palm cultivars, tissue cryopreservation is the most cost-effective. Moreover, many of the risks linked to field conservation like erosion due to climatic, edaphic, and phytopathologic constraints are circumvented. (Résumé d'auteur

Tweeting the Meeting: An In-Depth Analysis of Twitter Activity at Kidney Week 2011

In recent years, the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) has increased its efforts to use its annual conference to inform and educate the public about kidney disease. Social media, including Twitter, has been one method used by the Society to accomplish this goal. Twitter is a popular microblogging service that serves as a potent tool for disseminating information. It allows for short messages (140 characters) to be composed by any author and distributes those messages globally and quickly. The dissemination of information is necessary if Twitter is to be considered a tool that can increase public awareness of kidney disease. We hypothesized that content, citation, and sentiment analyses of tweets generated from Kidney Week 2011 would reveal a large number of educational tweets that were disseminated to the public. An ideal tweet for accomplishing this goal would include three key features: 1) informative content, 2) internal citations, and 3) positive sentiment score. Informative content was found in 29% of messages, greater than that found in a similarly sized medical conference (2011 ADA Conference, 16%). Informative tweets were more likely to be internally, rather than externally, cited (38% versus 22%, p<0.0001), thereby amplifying the original information to an even larger audience. Informative tweets had more negative sentiment scores than uninformative tweets (means −0.162 versus 0.199 respectively, p<0.0001), therefore amplifying a tweet whose content had a negative tone. Our investigation highlights significant areas of promise and improvement in using Twitter to disseminate medical information in nephrology from a scientific conference. This goal is pertinent to many nephrology-focused conferences that wish to increase public awareness of kidney disease

A RAPID ASSAY METHOD DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION FOR THE ESTIMATION OF EPLERENONE IN TABLETS BY UV SPECTROPHOTOMETRY

Objective: To develop a rapid, simple and a cheap UV spectrophotometric assay method for the estimation of Eplerenone in tablets and validate as per ICH guidelines.Methods: The optimized method uses 0.05N HCl as a solvent for the estimation of assay of Eplerenone in tablets at a detection wavelength of 245 nm.Results: System precision and intra-day precision are exemplified by relative standard deviation of 1.5% and 1.3% respectively. Method was found to be rugged as precision was found to be 1.2%. The developed method resulted in Eplerenone exhibiting linearity in the range 5-15μg/ml. Percentage Mean recovery was found to be in the range of 98â€102, during accuracy studies. Conclusion: A rapid, simple and a cheap UV spectrophotometric assay method was developed and validated for the estimation of Eplerenone in tablets as per ICH guidelines and hence it can be used for the routine analysis in various pharmaceutical industries.Â

Towards Explainable Educational Recommendation through Path Reasoning Methods

Current recommender systems in education lack explainability and interpretability, making it challenging for stakeholders to understand how the recommended content relates to them. Path reasoning methods are an emerging class of recommender systems that provides users with the reasoning behind a recommendation. While these methods have been shown to work well in several domains, there is no extensive research on their effectiveness in the context of education. In this ongoing project, we investigate the extent to which the existing path reasoning methods meet utility and beyond utility objectives in educational data. Experiments on two large-scale online course datasets show that this class of methods yields promising results and poses the ground for future advances

Widespread fear of dengue transmission but poor practices of dengue prevention : A study in the slums of Delhi, India

Background This study has been conducted to throw light on the knowledge and practices related to dengue fever among the poor population living in Delhi's slums. Materials A household survey was conducted in 2013 among 3,350 households. The households were stratified by a number of variables related to socio-economic status and health events such as hospitalisation. The data collection was completed through face-to-face interviews conducted with the help of 25 field investigators. Results About 8% of the households had at least one diagnosed dengue case. In comparison to the population surveyed, teenagers (15-19 years) and adults (30-34 years) were more affected whereas children under four years of age were underrepresented. Housewives are more affected by dengue (24%) compared to their share of the population surveyed (17%). Despite the fact that 77% of the respondents are worried about mosquitoes, only 43% of them monitor environment to avoid the presence of breeding sites. Conclusion One cannot exclude the possibility that though young children under the age of four years are exposed to the virus, either their cases were asymptomatic or family members infected during this period had potentially more serious symptoms leading to hospitalisation. This result could thus be explained by budget-related health choices made by this population which do not favour small children. Educational programs should target housewives to improve their impact, as they are the ones mostly responsible for water storage and cleanliness of the house and its neighbourhood. Even with a dengue experience and potentially an acute perception of the risk and its factors, a proper management of environmental conditions is lacking. This along with the fact that word-of-mouth is the main source of information quoted should be a message for municipality health workers to give door-to-door information on how to prevent breeding sites and dengue infection

Fish processing wastes used as feed ingredient for animal feed and aquaculture feed

Fish wastes management has become a global problem from the last years. Dispose of seafood wastes cause environmental pollution. To overcome this issue these unwanted seafood products are used for the formation of animal feed and aquaculture feed. These unwanted products include small fish and those parts of fish which are not used as human food. These unwanted parts include viscera, head, fins and skin of fish. These byproducts are rich source of protein, minerals and vitamins so these can be used as a supplement in animal feed. These are also used to fulfill the deficiency of protein in animals. These byproducts can be used in the form of fish meal, fish oil, and protein hydrolysates and fish silage. Protein hydrolysates provide high amount of nitrogen and fish oil provide triglycerides of fatty acids and phospholipids in the animal feed industry. These are also used in the formation of pet feed and in the formation of fertilizers. These byproducts are processed for feeding by using fermentation, biotechnological and bio preservation techniques. © 2020, Green Wave Publishing of Canada. All rights reserved