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Pulmonary alveolar microlithiasis is a rare autosomal recessive condition that is characterized by the formation of excessive calcium phosphate microliths in the alveoli. Most patients are diagnosed in adulthood due to the slow progression of the disease. Children with this disease are asymptomatic, and changes in the lung parenchyma are usually discovered incidentally. The diagnosis is made by the combination of a positive chest imaging and histological examination. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic systemic autoimmune disease characterized by chronic seropositive symmetrical inflammatory polyarthritis with numerous extra-articular manifestations. It targets the lining of the synovial membranes, frequently affects females more than males, and is treated with the disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs). If left untreated, it leads to increased morbidity, mortality, and socioeconomic burdens. In this case, we report a 19-year-old young man who presented with clinical and radiographic features of PAM associated with RA.

Pilgrimage is one of the largest mass gatherings, where millions of Muslims gather annually from all over the world to perform Hajj. The stoning ritual during Hajj has been historically vulnerable to serious disasters that often cause severe impacts ranging from injuries to death tolls. In efforts to minimize the number and extent of the disasters, the stoning area has been expanded recently. However, no research has been carried out to study the evacuation effectiveness of the current exit placements in the area, which lies at the heart of effective minimization of the number and extent of the disasters. Therefore, this paper presents an in-depth study on emergency evacuation planning for the extended stoning area. It presents a simulation model of the expanded stoning area with the current exit placement. In addition, we suggested and examined four different exit placements considering evacuation scenarios in case of no hazard as well as two realistic hazard scenarios covering fire and bomb hazards. The simulation studied three stoning phases, beginning of stoning, during the peak hour of stoning, and ending of stoning at three scales of population sizes. The performance was measured in the light of evacuation time, percentage of evacuees, and percentage of crowd at each exit. The experimental results revealed that the current exits are not optimally positioned, and evacuation can be significantly improved through introducing a few more exits, or even through changing positions of the current ones.

Copper oxide thin films are prepared by radio frequency magnetron sputtering technology. The analysis of the deposited films by X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), spectrometry and electrical resistivity measurements is carried out. The results show that the working pressure and O2 flow rate have a crucial impact on copper oxides films properties. The apparition of the main copper oxides CuO and/or Cu2O phases is affected by the experimental plasma parameters, mainly the O2 flow rate. The presence of multiple peaks on XRD patterns indicates the polycrystalline nature of the deposited films. At higher O2 flow rate, single-phase composed of crystallized CuO is formed. While at lower O2 flow rate the films are two-phase (CuO and Cu2O). The study of the plasma discharge by optical emission spectrometry as function of O2 flow rate, at given pressure and power supply, is essential to find the best operating range to tune the correct stoichiometry and phases, giving therefore the preferred properties for a specific application.

In this work, nitriding by Plasma Immersion Ion Implantation (PIII) treatment of low carbon steel was performed in a plasma reactor with an inductive RF source (l3.56 MHz) at low pressure in order to investigate the influence of the process conditions on the hardness and corrosion properties. A space charge sheath region is formed in front of the sample biased with a negative DC voltage. The positive ions accelerated within this sheath reach the sample with a high kinetic energy. The micro-hardness increased by ~100% for the nitrogen-implanted samples compared to the untreated one, the nitride phases (γ’-Fe4N and e-Fe2-3N) are believed to participate to the hardening. A low corrosion rate is obtained, which indicates that nitriding by PIII improves the corrosion resistance behavior. These results are particularly interesting since they have been obtained for short treatment time (2 h) and relatively low bias voltages.

Nowadays, SMS based communication is common in almost every sector. Private and government organizations deliver and receive millions of SMSs every year. This huge amount of SMSs can be used later in several useful ways. However, the storage space required for storing these huge amount SMSs creates so much complexity for the SMS service providing organizations that they cannot save the details of every SMS. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a template-oriented SMS storage system based on a graph-theoretic approach, which reduces storage space requirements significantly. We achieve the storage space reduction through considering the fixed parts of SMSs as graph nodes and variable parts as graph edges. We perform experimentation on real SMS data collected from different telecom operators of Bangladesh. Our experimentation confirms that our proposed system substantially reduces the storage space requirement. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose such a space-saving system for storing SMSs.

Identifying physical traits and emotions based on system-sensed physical activities is a challenging problem in the realm of human-computer interaction. Our work contributes in this context by investigating an underlying connection between head movements and corresponding traits and emotions. To do so, we utilize a head movement measuring device called eSense, which gives acceleration and rotation of a head. Here, first, we conduct a thorough study over head movement data collected from 46 persons using eSense while inducing five different emotional states over them in isolation. Our analysis reveals several new head movement based findings, which in turn, leads us to a novel unified solution for identifying different human traits and emotions through exploiting machine learning techniques over head movement data. Our analysis confirms that the proposed solution can result in high accuracy over the collected data. Accordingly, we develop an integrated unified solution for real-time emotion and trait identification using head movement data leveraging outcomes of our analysis., 9 pages, 7 figures, NSysS 2019

Conflict in the household is a normal thing. Usually, conflicts in the household are caused by husbands' and wives' rights that have not been fulfilled. This study aims to examine the quality of the hadith regarding the rights of wives in the household. The literature review method is used in this research. Researchers found several matan of hadiths that explain the rights of a wife in the household narrated by Abu Dawud. The hadith that describes the rights of the wife in the household, the history of Abu Dawud has a good sanad quality, has a good matan quality, and meets the criteria of sahih hadith. Furthermore, this study's results will benefit society; especially will benefit husbands, to fulfill their wives' rights in the household.

Magnetron sputtering erodes the target non-uniformly, leading to the formation of a circular deep trench called groove, which will have a direct effect on plasma and thin film deposition properties. These effects are highlighted by measurements of the electrical parameters and the deposition rate. Moreover, the measurements of the discharge electrical equivalent plasma impedance indicate clearly, that the occurrence of the target erosion effects is related to the ion sheath thickness formed in front of the eroded target groove. The effects of the eroded target, on discharge parameters, appear from a certain pressure transition range (0.1–0.5 Pa). The eroded target lowers the self-bias voltage by 50%, reduces the deposition rate by almost 40% and increases the ion current density at the substrate. The use of an eroded target improves the plasma confinement, and the electrical equivalent impedance becomes less capacitive and more resistive. Our results show that measuring the plasma impedance might be used as a tool for monitoring the groove formation.

With growing real-time traffic and limited spectrum resources, the communication system must adopt reliable and efficient spectrum sharing techniques for providing improved services to end users. Cooperative cognitive radio network (CCRN) offers a promising solution based on the principle of cooperative diversity where primary users offer transmission opportunities to secondary users in exchange for their relay services. However, existing CCRN models ignore the overhead of cooperation formation and the potential interference introduced by secondary users’ transmissions. This may hurt successful packet delivery, and therefore, they cannot be applied to real-time systems. In this paper, we propose an interference aware reliable communication system for real-time applications exploiting the flexibility of a cooperative cognitive network. We formulate the communication system as a Markov decision process and quantify the impact of cooperation overhead and secondary interference on successful packet delivery through its actions and reward functions. We present a distributed algorithm for use in a realistic multi-user setting where a user applies the algorithm to determine cooperation gain, select cooperation pairs, and schedule cooperative transmissions. The simulation results show that the proposed model improves packet reception rate with low cooperation overhead compared to an existing cooperation model.

Background: BCL-2 is an antiapoptotic protein that regulates apoptosis and has been associated with poor prognosis for many cancer sites. Despite a function that encourages tumorigenesis, increased BCL-2 expression has been associated with improved clinical outcomes in ER+ breast cancers, with mixed results observed for ER/PR- cancers. BCL-2 has been hypothesized to be an indicator of intact and fully functioning hormone receptor pathways and has also been hypothesized to facilitate cell death after treatment through mitochondrial priming. BCL-2 expression correlates strongly with hormone receptor expression; therefore, its association with better prognosis may be due to the strong effect ER/PR status has on survival, or due to its own biologic mechanism. To date, no studies have been conducted on racial differences in BCL-2 expression. We characterized racial/ethnic differences in BCL-2 expression and the association of BCL-2 expression with breast cancer specific survival among participants in the Breast Cancer Care in Chicago Study (BCCC). Methods: The BCCC was a cross-sectional study of 989 recently diagnosed non-Latina (nL) White, nL Black and Latina breast cancer patients diagnosed with a first primary breast cancer aged 30-79 in Chicago from 2005-2008. Tumor tissue was available for BCL-2 immunohistochemical staining for 264 patients. BCL-2 staining scores of 0 were classified as negative and all positive scores (1D, 1H, 2D, 2H, and 3) were classified as positive. Cox proportional hazards models were conducted to estimate the association of BCL-2 expression with breast cancer-specific death. Results: Roughly three-fourths of tumors (77%) stained positive for BCL. The prevalence of positive BCL staining varied by race/ethnicity (p=0.007), being highest for nL Whites (87%) and lowest for nL Blacks (68%); variability in BCL staining appeared to be limited to ER/PR-negative tumors (N=53), for which prevalence of positive BCL staining appeared to be much higher for nL whites than for minority patients (44% vs. 16%, p=0.054). BCL-2 expression was associated with a strong protective effect on BC survival in age and race-adjusted models (HR=0.40, 95% CI: 0.19, 0.84) and BCL-2 expression remained strongly positively associated with protection from breast cancer death with additional adjustment for ER/PR status (HR=0.33, 95% CI: 0.12, 0.89). Within subgroups defined by ER/PR status, BCL2 expression was qualitatively associated with better survival for both ER/PR positive and ER/PR negative subtypes, although sample size was insufficient to conduct a formal stratified analysis. Conclusions: BCL-2 appears to be an independent predictor of improved prognosis for breast cancer even after controlling for ER/PR status. The apparently higher prevalence of BCL2 expression for nL White vs. nL Black patients may provide etiologic clues regarding disparities in BC survival. Citation Format: Jibril M. Alim, Kent Hoskins, Abeer M. Mahmoud, Virgilia Macias, Andre Kadjascy-Balla, Garth H. Rauscher. Racial disparity in the prevalence of BCL-2 expression and associations with breast cancer survival in the Breast Cancer Care in Chicago study [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2018 Nov 2-5; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(6 Suppl):Abstract nr C098.

He also shows how Muslim should do ideal interaction with sunnah. This research is a literature study namely analyzing data related to the topic by checking the references related to the main study especially Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s thought about hadith. In addition, other books are also used as secondary sources of the research. In analyzing the data, this research employs hermeneutic analysis namely describing the discussion object systematically and then analyzing it by using hermeneutic paradigm. In conclusion, the Qaradawi’s theories are not something new and original since they are related to the thoughts developed previously. However, the important contribution of Qaradawi’s theories is placed in the implementation of the theories on the cases related to the contemporary problems. Keywords: al-Qaradawi, hadist, hermeneutica

Recent emergence of new vulnerabilities is an epoch-making problem in the complex world of website security. Most of the websites are failing to keep updating to tackle their websites from these new vulnerabilities leaving without realizing the weakness of the websites. As a result, when cyber-criminals scour such vulnerable old version websites, the scanner will represent a set of vulnerabilities. Once found, these vulnerabilities are then exploited to steal data, distribute malicious content, or inject defacement and spam content into the vulnerable websites. Furthermore, a combination of different vulnerabilities is able to cause more damages than anticipation. Therefore, in this paper, we endeavor to find connections among various vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting, local file inclusion, remote file inclusion, buffer overflow CSRF, etc. To do so, we develop a Finite State Machine (FSM) attacking model, which analyzes a set of vulnerabilities towards the road to finding connections. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model by applying it to the set of vulnerabilities found on two live websites.

Multicast is an efficient method for sending data to multiple destinations in a single transmission. Conventional multicast routing often suffers from scalability issues. Here, the number of forwarding states maintained in the Network layer generally increases with the number of concurrently active multicast groups. Consequently, large-size routing tables get generated, which in turn causes degradation in router performance. There exist only a limited number of studies on aggregated multicast to address this issue. The existing studies such as AM (Aggregated Multicast), STA (Scalable Tree Aggregation for Multicast), and STS (Shared-Tree Selection for Aggregated Multicast) attempt to perform tree aggregation, however, still retain high number of forwarding states in the routers. Besides, they mostly ignore the effect of tree aggregation ratio in terms of network performance metrics (for example delay and throughput). Hence, the research on aggregated multicast is still at an elementary stage. To this extent, in this study, we propose a novel aggregated multicast approach to reduce Network layer forwarding states. Our approach proposes new methods for selecting aggregated multicast trees, refining search range, and replacing stale trees in process of the aggregation. We show the effect of our proposed tree aggregation in terms of network performance metrics (delay and throughput). We also show that performance of our approach is better than previous approaches by comparing different performance metrics such as the number of trees, the number of forwarding states, delay, and throughput. Ns-3 simulation results confirm that our approach can reduce up to 92% forwarding states and 34% delay compared to conventional multicast, and reduce up to 88% forwarding states and 29% delay compared to the STS method.

Most of the research studies available to date on communication protocols for Body Area Nanonetworks (BANs) using molecular communication deals with the protocol stack’s lower layers (such as physical, MAC layer), even though the upper layers also (such as transport layer, application layer) play a significant role on the overall performance of the network. Besides, the applicability of classical upper layer protocols for molecular communication in BANs have scopes to be investigated in this context. Therefore, we center our study in developing a specialized transport layer protocol with a view to achieving a delicate balance among throughput, delivery ratio, energy consumption, end-to-end delay etc. network-level performance metrics for molecular communication in BANs. To do so, we exploit a notion of conjugate congestion control mechanism from the perspective of both the sender and receiver to attain the desired performance level as well as produce limited complexity and overhead. We evaluate and compare the performance of our proposed protocol with the existing alternatives through rigorous ns-2 simulation. The results demonstrate that compared to the other transport layer protocols, our proposed one provides a better balance among different performance metrics.

Recent boost in development and usage of wearable devices, in particular for emerging alert generation, portrays a necessity for availing an open platform to enable future expansions and enhancements. However, to the best of our knowledge, little effort has been spent in the literature in this regard. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a rich, yet simple, independent open platform for wearable devices that can generate emergency alarms. We present detailed design and development of the platform, which we name as Supersavior. We implement a prototype of Super-savior using low-power COTS hardware. We devise and implement an algorithm to predict the location of the user based on GSM locations provided. Afterwards, we perform real experimentation and user evaluation of the prototype by letting a group of people use it for extended periods. The experimentation reveals several system-level measures indicating effectiveness of the device in terms of both accuracy and marginal operational overheads. We compare these measures along with offered functionality of Super-savior against that of a few currently-available alternatives. Finally we analyze and present data from field experiments to demonstrate functionality of the device.

Nowadays, Internet-based technologies possess immense processing power, capacity, flexibility, and are gradually moving towards a service- oriented functionality in order to build new distributed storage systems in the cloud. Several distributed systems are currently running in different geographically located data centers for successful deployment of modern web and social services such as Facebook, Twitter, ringID, etc. Both cache and backend servers in such distributed systems must be functional and reliable for incoming workloads by means of efficient allocation of capacity along with proper configuration and tuning of multiple system resources. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a test-driven automated architecture for load testing, named as 'svLoad' to compare the performance of cache and backend servers. Here, we designed test cases considering diversified real scenarios such as different protocol types, same or different URLs, with or without load, cache hit or miss, etc. using tools namely JMeter, Ansible, and some custom utility bash scripts. To validate the efficacy of our proposed methodology, we conduct a set of experiments by running these test cases over a real private cloud development setup using two open source projects - Varnish as the cache server and OpenStack Swift as the backend server. Our focus is also to find out bottlenecks of Varnish and Swift by executing load requests, and then tune the system based on our load test analysis. After successfully tuning the Swift, Varnish, and network system, based on our test analysis, we were able to improve the response time by up to 80%.

Increased processing power of MapReduce clusters generally enhances performance and availability at the cost of substantial energy consumption that often incurs higher operational costs (e.g., electricity bills) and negative environmental impacts (e.g., carbon dioxide emissions). There exist a few greening methods for computing clusters in the literature that focus mainly on computational energy consumption leaving cooling energy, which occupies a significant portion of the total energy consumed by the clusters. To this extent, in this paper, we propose a machine learning based approach named as Green MapReduce Cluster (GMC) that reduces the total energy consumption of a MapReduce cluster considering both computational energy and cooling energy. GMC predicts the number of machines that results in minimum total energy consumption. We perform the prediction through applying different machine learning techniques over year-long data collected from a real setup. We evaluate performance of GMC over a real testbed. Our evaluation reveals that GMC reduces total energy consumption by up to 47% compared to other alternatives while experiencing marginal throughput degradation in a few cases.