Frequency and Progression of Gliomas in Pregnancy in Population Presenting at Lahore General Hospital, Pakistan

Objective:  To study the frequency and progression of gliomas in pregnant patients in our population. Materials and Methods:  A retrospective study of 30 pregnant patients between 18 to 40 years of age with confirmed gliomas from July 2015 to July 2020 was conducted at the Department of Neurosurgery, Punjab Institute of Neurosciences, Lahore. Time of diagnosis, grade of glioma, the outcome of pregnancy, and mode of treatment were studied in these patients. Results:  Out of 30 patients, 29 were freshly diagnosed during pregnancy. All patients underwent cesarean section. If the patient presented before 30 weeks of pregnancy, irrespective of the outcome of the baby, the caesarian section was done. If a patient presented after 7 months, in case of low-grade glioma, the patient was in-house transferred and operated for tumor after delivery. A total of 17 patients had low-grade glioma and 12 patients had high-grade glioma. One patient had a recurrent disease during pregnancy, with the progression of tumor from low grade to high grade. Conclusion:  There is an association between pregnancy and the incidence of gliomas. They can be both high or low grades. The mode of delivery is preferably the caesarian section because the stress of labor causes an increase in the frequency of seizures. There is the possibility of recurrence as well as progression to higher grade during pregnancy

Comparison of Alveolar Osteitis (AO) occurrence after impacted mandibular third molar removal with and without post-extraction socket irrigation

Objective: We wanted to see whether impacted third mandibular molar extractions resulted in Alveolar Osteitis if post-extraction socket irrigation was used or not. Methodology: A randomized control experiment on 70 patients study was conducted from July 2019 to January 2020 at Islamabad Dental Hospital's OMFS department. Patients presenting with the mandibular third molars fulfilling the inclusion criteria had their teeth extracted with and without socket irrigation using the computer lottery method. In cases of dry socket, clinical diagnosis was made between the 3rd, 5th, and 7th postoperative days. Results: 70 patients/sockets were evaluated with 35 having been irrigated and 35 non-irrigated. The age range was 16-50years with a mean of 29.49 and most patients were between the 16-35 age group. There were 48.6% males and 51.4% females. Dry Socket was evaluated on the 3rd, 5th, and 7th day between groups (A=irrigation, B=Non-irrigation). On the 3rd postop day, 14 (40%) patients in group A and 15(42.9%) patients were diagnosed as dry Sockets. A similar number of patients in both groups (20%) exhibited symptoms of dry socket on the fifth and seventh postoperative days, as did 5 (14.3 %) in group A, 3 (8.6 %) in group B, and 1(2.9 %t) in group A, all on the fifth postoperative day. Conclusion: On the third, fifth, and seventh postoperative days, there was no significant difference in the result of Alveolar Osteitis between the groups

The Effect of Mental Pressure Due to Covid-19 on Students’ Educational Performance: A Study from Karachi, Pakistan

Coronavirus pandemic had not only affected the physical health of people but also the mental health of people globally. It has developed a fear in the minds of people regarding their selves as well as their loved ones. The essential change in the lifestyles of people and the need for social distancing has stopped the normal activities of people which caused mental disturbance among them. The present quantitative survey-based research has been led to know the impression of COVID 19 on the mental pressure of the students regarding their academic progress. The hypothesis were developed from which one was a null hypothesis;  H1, was to find that whether there is a positive relationship between mental stress and COVID and third, H2, was to find whether there is any negative relationship between mental stress and academic progress. Both, H1 and H2, were accepted through conducting quantitative research by circulating an online survey that consists of 14 close-ended questions regarding the 2 research questions made. Respondents were taken from 5 universities of Karachi, Iqra university, Jinnah university for women, NED university of Engineering and Technology, University of Karach, and ZABIST university.  The samples was consist of   90 students (54) were females and (36) were male selected by simple random sampling. The statistical method used to analyze the results was the simple percentage method as it clearly defines what percentages of the students were affected by COVID and how it impacted their mental pressure. It was found that there was a positive relationship of COVID on mental pressure that means the complex spread of COVID 19, higher the mental pressure and there was a negative relationship between COVID 19 and academic performance that means that high mental pressure was the cause of the lower performance

Kotha Bondhu

Sign languages are the only communication medium for mute and deaf people all over the world, but all the general people are not familiar with it. It is really tough for these people to make other people understand their voices. In the context of Bangladesh, we have studied these community people specifically from the Tablighi Jamaat community who use different sign language to communicate with people. By studying them we have gathered the local signs along with global standard sign languages in an application named Kotha Bondhu. It is a very simpler application that is understandable to any community people and is able to translate the sign languages into Bengali voic

Analyses of Life Skills Development Practices in Secondary Schools of Islamabad

The study was designed to make analysis for developing Life Skills practices in the secondary schools of Islamabad. It was descriptive survey study. All 1039 SSTs, all 146 principals of public secondary schools working under FDE at Islamabad were population of the study. Five hundred and seventy (570) SSTs; one hundred and forty (140) principals were selected by using stratified random sampling technique. A questionnaire having 36 items were developed by the researcher on five point Likert scale. Mean, Standard Deviation, and t-test, were applied to analyze the data. There was moderate level of practice of skill development in secondary schools. Male teachers were better performing in developing communication skills and critical thinking while female teachers were better for developing problem solving skills. Development of strategy and proper training of teachers and principals, by the government, for life base skill education was recommended.</jats:p

ERP issues and challenges: a research synthesis

PurposeDespite more than two decades of experience regarding the adoption and implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in organizations, ERPs success is questionable. Though ERPs success stories are published in past research studies, the failure rate of ERP systems is relatively high. The purpose of this study was to find issues and challenges and assess the degree of criticality of these issues/challenges faced by organizations during ERP implementation.Design/methodology/approachFor doing systematic review/research synthesis systematic literature review (SLR) was carried out considering research studies published within the time period, i.e. 1999-2018. Three major steps such as planning, conducting and reporting were followed to proceed further in this study. This study attempted to accomplish a critical review of 53 studies out of 103 studies identified, which were published in reputable journals to synthesize the existing literature in the ERP domain. The studies selected have almost addressed different challenges/issues faced by small and large organizations during ERP implementation.FindingsResearch synthesis/SLR led to the identification of 31 issues/challenges, which may be termed as most critical based on their occurrence/frequency in past studies included. The topmost ten issues/challenges amongst 31 identified include top management approach, change management, training and development, effective communication, system integration, business process reengineering, consultants/vendors selection, project management, project team formation, team empowerment/skilled people and data conversing/migration. However, other issues/challenges identified such as security risks/data security, cloud awareness, functionality limitations, service level agreements and subscription expenses are more related to cloud ERPs.Originality/valueThe current study is unique in its kind, focusing on the issues and challenges faced by organization during implementing ERP projects. Moreover, this study contributes to understanding and further analyzing management capabilities for developing remedial measures while planning the implementation of an enterprise system in their organizations prior to the occurrence of different issues and challenges ahead. The study also led to understanding and explaining socio-technical issues and their severity.</jats:sec

Verifying File System Consistency at Runtime

Existing file-system reliability methods, such as checksums, redundancy, or transactional updates, provide limited defenses against file-system bugs that cause disk corruption. The existing workarounds, based on using backups or repairing the file system, are painfully slow. Worse, the recovery is performed much after the error occurred, and thus may result in further corruption and data loss. We present a system that protects file system metadata from buggy file system operations. Our approach leverages modern file systems that provide crash consistency using transactional updates. We define declarative statements called "consistency invariants" for a file system. These invariants must be satisfied by each transaction being committed to disk to preserve file system integrity. By checking each transaction before it commits, we can minimize the damage caused by buggy file systems. The major challenges to this approach are specifying invariants, and correctly interpreting file system behaviour without relying on the file system code. Our prototype system, called Recon, provides a framework for file-system specific metadata interpretation and invariant checking. We show the feasibility of interpreting metadata and writing consistency invariants for the Linux ext3 and btrfs file systems in this framework. For ext3, Recon can detect random as well as targeted file-system corruption at runtime as effectively as the offline e2fsck file-system checker, with low performance overhead

A Comparative Study of Support Vector Machine and Maximum Likelihood Classification to Extract Land Cover of Lahore District, Punjab, Pakistan

The advent of technological era, the scientists and researchers develop machine learning classification techniques to classify land cover accurately. Researches prove that these classification techniques perform better than previous traditional techniques. In this research main objective is to identify suitable land cover classification method to extract land cover information of Lahore district. Two supervised classification techniques i.e., Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC) (based on neighbourhood function) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) (based on optimal hyper-plane function) are compared by using Sentinel-2 data. For this optimization, four land cover classes have been selected. Field based training samples have been collected and prepared through a survey of the study area at four spatial levels. Accuracy for each of the classifier has been assessed using error matrix and kappa statistics. Results show that SVM performs better than MLC. Overall accuracies of SVM and MLC are 95.20% and 88.80% whereas their kappa co-efficient are 0.93 and 0.84 respectively.&#x0D;  </jats:p