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Preserving quantifiable ethnographic records of disappearing human lifeways

Kraft TS, Venkataraman VV, Endicott KL, Endicott KM

Evol. Anthropol., 2020 May;29(3):117-124.
PMID: 32472595 DOI: 10.1002/evan.21835

The human evolutionary sciences place high value on quantitative data from traditional small-scale societies that are rapidly modernizing. These data often stem from the sustained ethnographic work of anthropologists who are today nearing the end of their careers. Yet many quantitative ethnographic data are preserved only in summary formats that do not reflect the rich and variable ethnographic reality often described in unpublished field notes, nor the deep knowledge of their collectors. In raw disaggregated formats, such data have tremendous scientific value when used in conjunction with modern statistical techniques and as part of comparative analyses. Through a personal example of longitudinal research with Batek hunter-gatherers that involved collaboration across generations of researchers, we argue that quantifiable ethnographic records, just like material artifacts, deserve high-priority preservation efforts. We discuss the benefits, challenges, and possible avenues forward for digitizing, preserving, and archiving ethnographic data before it is too late.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic/standards*; Records as Topic/statistics & numerical data
Fulltext Ethical challenges of digital health technologies: Aadhaar, India

Gopichandran V, Ganeshkumar P, Dash S, Ramasamy A

Bull World Health Organ, 2020 Apr 01;98(4):277-281.
PMID: 32284652 DOI: 10.2471/BLT.19.237123

Problem: The proliferation of information and communication technologies in India has enabled the emergence of health-related digital applications, from which important ethical issues arise.
Approach: The Aadhaar identification system provides each resident in India with a 12-digit unique identification number, linked to demographic and biometric data. Identification by Aadhaar in welfare programmes has the important advantage of ensuring targeted benefits reach the intended recipients.
Local setting: Some of the major issues faced by the public health sector in India are inadequate funding and inefficient utilization of the funds allocated. The enhancement of currently available digital health records will greatly increase the efficiency of the health care services.
Relevant changes: The Aadhaar identification system has been linked to several health programmes since 2013. Success was achieved in a programme encouraging pregnant women to undergo delivery at a health facility, as use of Aadhaar number ensured that cash incentives reached the correct recipient. However, interruptions in the treatment of patients with tuberculosis and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome have been reported in other health programmes, due to patients fearing a breach of their confidentiality.
Lessons learnt: Although the proposed merging of the Aadhaar identification system with digital health care records could enable greater efficiency in monitoring public health and welfare programmes, important ethical issues of privacy and data ownership and use must be considered. In joining the digital revolution, low- and middle-income countries must also develop strict legal regulation to protect data and avoid information technology companies exploiting such databases for profit.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic*
Fulltext Analysis of the dynamics of a vector-borne infection with the effect of imperfect vaccination from a fractional perspective

Tang TQ, Jan R, Khurshaid A, Shah Z, Vrinceanu N, Racheriu M

Sci Rep, 2023 Sep 01;13(1):14398.
PMID: 37658134 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-41440-7

The burden of vector-borne infections is significant, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where vector populations are high and healthcare infrastructure may be inadequate. Further, studies are required to investigate the key factors of vector-borne infections to provide effective control measure. This study focuses on formulating a mathematical framework to characterize the spread of chikungunya infection in the presence of vaccines and treatments. The research is primarily dedicated to descriptive study and comprehension of dynamic behaviour of chikungunya dynamics. We use Banach's and Schaefer's fixed point theorems to investigate the existence and uniqueness of the suggested chikungunya framework resolution. Additionally, we confirm the Ulam-Hyers stability of the chikungunya system. To assess the impact of various parameters on the dynamics of chikungunya, we examine solution pathways using the Laplace-Adomian method of disintegration. Specifically, to visualise the impacts of fractional order, vaccination, bite rate and treatment computer algorithms are employed on the infection level of chikungunya. Our research identified the framework's essential input settings for managing chikungunya infection. Notably, the intensity of chikungunya infection can be reduced by lowering mosquito bite rates in the affected area. On the other hand, vaccination, memory index or fractional order, and treatment could be used as efficient controlling variables.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic
Fulltext Effect of temporal relationships in associative rule mining for web log data

Khairudin NM, Mustapha A, Ahmad MH

ScientificWorldJournal, 2014;2014:813983.
PMID: 24587757 DOI: 10.1155/2014/813983

The advent of web-based applications and services has created such diverse and voluminous web log data stored in web servers, proxy servers, client machines, or organizational databases. This paper attempts to investigate the effect of temporal attribute in relational rule mining for web log data. We incorporated the characteristics of time in the rule mining process and analysed the effect of various temporal parameters. The rules generated from temporal relational rule mining are then compared against the rules generated from the classical rule mining approach such as the Apriori and FP-Growth algorithms. The results showed that by incorporating the temporal attribute via time, the number of rules generated is subsequently smaller but is comparable in terms of quality.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic*
Fulltext Medical Experts' Agreement on Risk Assessment Based on All Possible Combinations of the COVID-19 Predictors-A Novel Approach for Public Health Screening and Surveillance

Ibrahim MS, Naing NN, Abd Aziz A, Makhtar M, Mohamed Yusoff H, Esa NK, et al.

Int J Environ Res Public Health, 2022 Dec 10;19(24).
PMID: 36554487 DOI: 10.3390/ijerph192416601

During the initial phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there was a critical need to create a valid and reliable screening and surveillance for university staff and students. Consequently, 11 medical experts participated in this cross-sectional study to judge three risk categories of either low, medium, or high, for all 1536 possible combinations of 11 key COVID-19 predictors. The independent experts' judgement on each combination was recorded via a novel dashboard-based rating method which presented combinations of these predictors in a dynamic display within Microsoft Excel. The validated instrument also incorporated an innovative algorithm-derived deduction for efficient rating tasks. The results of the study revealed an ordinal-weighted agreement coefficient of 0.81 (0.79 to 0.82, p-value < 0.001) that reached a substantial class of inferential benchmarking. Meanwhile, on average, the novel algorithm eliminated 76.0% of rating tasks by deducing risk categories based on experts' ratings for prior combinations. As a result, this study reported a valid, complete, practical, and efficient method for COVID-19 health screening via a reliable combinatorial-based experts' judgement. The new method to risk assessment may also prove applicable for wider fields of practice whenever a high-stakes decision-making relies on experts' agreement on combinations of important criteria.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic
Insight into global mosquito biogeography from country species records

Foley DH, Rueda LM, Wilkerson RC

J Med Entomol, 2007 Jul;44(4):554-67.
PMID: 17695008

To advance our limited knowledge of global mosquito biogeography, we analyzed country occurrence records from the Systematic Catalog of the Culicidae (http://www.mosquitocatalog. org/main.asp), and we present world maps of species richness and endemism. A latitudinal biodiversity gradient was observed, with species richness increasing toward the equator. A linear log-log species (y)-area (x) relationship (SAR) was found that we used to compare observed and expected species densities for each country. Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand had the highest numbers of species, and Brazil also had the highest taxonomic output and number of type locations. Brazil, Australia, the Philippines, and Indonesia had the highest numbers of endemic species, but excluding small island countries, Panama, French Guiana, Malaysia, and Costa Rica had the highest densities of total species and endemic species. Globally, 50% of mosquito species are endemic. Island countries had higher total number of species and higher number of endemic species than mainland countries of similar size, but the slope of the SAR was similar for island and mainland countries. Islands also had higher numbers of publications and type locations, possibly due to greater sampling effort and/or species endemism on islands. The taxonomic output was lowest for some countries in Africa and the Middle East. A consideration of country estimates of past sampling effort and species richness and endemism is proposed to guide mosquito biodiversity surveys. For species groups, we show that the number of species of Anopheles subgenus Anopheles varies with those of subgenus Cellia in a consistent manner between countries depending on the region. This pattern is discussed in relation to hypotheses about the historical biogeography and ecology of this medically important genus. Spatial analysis of country species records offers new insight into global patterns of mosquito biodiversity and survey history.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic
Person identification in irregular cardiac conditions using electrocardiogram signals

Sidek KA, Khalil I

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc, 2011;2011:3772-5.
PMID: 22255160 DOI: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6090644

This paper presents a person identification mechanism in irregular cardiac conditions using ECG signals. A total of 30 subjects were used in the study from three different public ECG databases containing various abnormal heart conditions from the Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation Predicition Challenge database (AFPDB), MIT-BIH Supraventricular Arrthymia database (SVDB) and T-Wave Alternans Challenge database (TWADB). Cross correlation (CC) was used as the biometric matching algorithm with defined threshold values to evaluate the performance. In order to measure the efficiency of this simple yet effective matching algorithm, two biometric performance metrics were used which are false acceptance rate (FAR) and false reject rate (FRR). Our experimentation results suggest that ECG based biometric identification with irregular cardiac condition gives a higher recognition rate of different ECG signals when tested for three different abnormal cardiac databases yielding false acceptance rate (FAR) of 2%, 3% and 2% and false reject rate (FRR) of 1%, 2% and 0% for AFPDB, SVDB and TWADB respectively. These results also indicate the existence of salient biometric characteristics in the ECG morphology within the QRS complex that tends to differentiate individuals.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic
Fulltext A Multiobjective, Lion Mating Optimization Inspired Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Sensor Network Based Healthcare Applications

Faheem M, Butt RA, Raza B, Alquhayz H, Abbas MZ, Ngadi MA, et al.

Sensors (Basel), 2019 Nov 20;19(23).
PMID: 31757104 DOI: 10.3390/s19235072

The importance of body area sensor networks (BASNs) is increasing day by day because of their increasing use in Internet of things (IoT)-enabled healthcare application services. They help humans in improving their quality of life by continuously monitoring various vital signs through biosensors strategically placed on the human body. However, BASNs face serious challenges, in terms of the short life span of their batteries and unreliable data transmission, because of the highly unstable and unpredictable channel conditions of tiny biosensors located on the human body. These factors may result in poor data gathering quality in BASNs. Therefore, a more reliable data transmission mechanism is greatly needed in order to gather quality data in BASN-based healthcare applications. Therefore, this study proposes a novel, multiobjective, lion mating optimization inspired routing protocol, called self-organizing multiobjective routing protocol (SARP), for BASN-based IoT healthcare applications. The proposed routing scheme significantly reduces local search problems and finds the best dynamic cluster-based routing solutions between the source and destination in BASNs. Thus, it significantly improves the overall packet delivery rate, residual energy, and throughput with reduced latency and packet error rates in BASNs. Extensive simulation results validate the performance of our proposed SARP scheme against the existing routing protocols in terms of the packet delivery ratio, latency, packet error rate, throughput, and energy efficiency for BASN-based health monitoring applications.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic
Fulltext Endodontic Microbiology: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Top 50 Classics

Karobari MI, Maqbool M, Ahmad P, Abdul MSM, Marya A, Venugopal A, et al.

Biomed Res Int, 2021;2021:6657167.
PMID: 34746305 DOI: 10.1155/2021/6657167

Background: Citation analysis has emerged to play a significant role in recognition of the most useful areas of research. Endodontic microbiology has been a topic of interest for endodontists as well as periodontists and oral surgeons. This bibliometric analysis is aimed at identifying and reporting the characteristics of the top 50 cited articles on endodontic microbiology.
Methods: The articles were identified through a search on Web of Science (WoS), property of Clarivate Analytics database published on endodontic microbiology. The citation information of the selected articles was recorded. The Journal of Endodontics, International Endodontic Journal, Oral Surgery Oral Medicine Oral Pathology Oral Radiology and Endodontology, Dental Traumatology, and Australian Endodontic Journal were searched in the search title. Descriptive and bivariate analyses were performed using a statistical software package SPSS. Statistical analysis was performed using Shapiro-Wilk, Kruskal-Wallis, Post hoc, Mann-Kendall trend, and Spearman-rank tests.
Results: The 50 most cited articles were published from 1965 to 2012 with citation count varying from 1065 to 103 times. The total citation counts of articles recorded were 11,525 (WoS), 12,602 (Elseviers' Scopus), and 28,871 (Google Scholar). The most prolific years in terms of publications were 2001, 2002, and 2003, with five publications each, followed by 2005 with four. The year with most citations was 1998, with 1,330 citations, followed by 1965 and 2001, with 1,065 and 1,015 citations, respectively. A total of 136 authors contributed to the top 50 most cited articles with 27 corresponding institutions from 12 different countries. The most common methodological design was in vitro study, followed by clinic-laboratory study, literature review, systematic review and meta-analysis, and animal study.
Conclusions: The present study provided a detailed list of the top 50 most cited and classic articles on microbiology in endodontics. This will help researchers, students, and clinicians in the field of endodontics as an impressive source of information.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic
Fulltext DAD-match; Security technique to prevent denial of service attack on duplicate address detection process in IPv6 link-local network

Al-Ani AK, Anbar M, Manickam S, Al-Ani A

PLoS One, 2019;14(4):e0214518.
PMID: 30939154 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214518

An efficiently unlimited address space is provided by Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). It aims to accommodate thousands of hundreds of unique devices on a similar link. This can be achieved through the Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) process. It is considered one of the core IPv6 network's functions. It is implemented to make sure that IP addresses do not conflict with each other on the same link. However, IPv6 design's functions are exposed to security threats like the DAD process, which is vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Such a threat prevents the host from configuring its IP address by responding to each Neighbor Solicitation (NS) through fake Neighbor Advertisement (NA). Various mechanisms have been proposed to secure the IPv6 DAD procedure. The proposed mechanisms, however, suffer from complexity, high processing time, and the consumption of more resources. The experiments-based findings revealed that all the existing mechanisms had failed to secure the IPv6 DAD process. Therefore, DAD-match security technique is proposed in this study to efficiently secure the DAD process consuming less processing time. DAD-match is built based on SHA-3 to hide the exchange tentative IP among hosts throughout the process of DAD in an IPv6 link-local network. The obtained experimental results demonstrated that the DAD-match security technique achieved less processing time compared with the existing mechanisms as it can resist a range of different threats like collision and brute-force attacks. The findings concluded that the DAD-match technique effectively prevents the DoS attack during the DAD process. The DAD-match technique is implemented on a small area IPv6 network; hence, the author future work is to implement and test the DAD-match technique on a large area IPv6 network.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic
Approaches for controlling illicit tobacco trade--nine countries and the European Union

Ross H, Husain MJ, Kostova D, Xu X, Edwards SM, Chaloupka FJ, et al.

MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep, 2015 May 29;64(20):547-50.
PMID: 26020137

An estimated 11.6% of the world cigarette market is illicit, representing more than 650 billion cigarettes a year and $40.5 billion in lost revenue. Illicit tobacco trade refers to any practice related to distributing, selling, or buying tobacco products that is prohibited by law, including tax evasion (sale of tobacco products without payment of applicable taxes), counterfeiting, disguising the origin of products, and smuggling. Illicit trade undermines tobacco prevention and control initiatives by increasing the accessibility and affordability of tobacco products, and reduces government tax revenue streams. The World Health Organization (WHO) Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products, signed by 54 countries, provides tools for addressing illicit trade through a package of regulatory and governing principles. As of May 2015, only eight countries had ratified or acceded to the illicit trade protocol, with an additional 32 needed for it to become international law (i.e., legally binding). Data from multiple international sources were analyzed to evaluate the 10 most commonly used approaches for addressing illicit trade and to summarize differences in implementation across select countries and the European Union (EU). Although the WHO illicit trade protocol defines shared global standards for addressing illicit trade, countries are guided by their own legal and enforcement frameworks, leading to a diversity of approaches employed across countries. Continued adoption of the methods outlined in the WHO illicit trade protocol might improve the global capacity to reduce illicit trade in tobacco products.

Matched MeSH terms: Records as Topic

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