Measuring Productive Derivational Knowledge of the Most Frequent Words

Derivational knowledge is associated with writing and speaking skills. These skills are essential for EFL students who express themselves in oral presentations or written assignments. Therefore, diagnostic measurement of productive derivational knowledge is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families that cover 81% and 85% of written and spoken text. This study measured 46 Iranian university EFL students’ productive derivational knowledge of the words at the 1,000 word frequency level. The findings indicate that while participants had the productive form-meaning knowledge of the words at 1,000 level, they did not seem to have extensive derivational knowledge of the same words. This assists in diagnosing area of weakness and placing instructional emphasis on high frequency words.

Comparing and Combining Camera, Tracer and Distributed Temperature and Acoustic Sensing DAS+DTS for a Holistic Understanding of Stimulation and Production Performance

In the present cost-constrained environment, it is critical that operators effectively complete their wells while minimizing capital expenditure. Optimization efforts focus on increasing recovery factor by managing landing zone, increasing the number of effective fractures, increasing the size of the fractures, and increasing the length of the lateral, while reducing the total number of stages and job size, without sacrificing efficient proppant and fluid delivery. The same pressure to reduce expenditure also impacts decision making on diagnostic evaluation, reducing operators to ‘free’ or low-cost feedback, like surface production rates and decline curves. Operators are responding to these challenges by utilizing a combination of lower cost, post-completion diagnostics like deployed fiber optics, downhole camera evaluation of perforations and radioactive tracers. These less expensive options allow for a broader scope and number of diagnostic inquiries, whereas a permanent fiber may prove to be cost-prohibitive, reducing diagnostic focus to one well, in one part of a play. Combining differing diagnostic technologies enhances the overall description of the well and reservoir behaviors and improves confidence in their interpretation of stimulation and production efficiency; furthermore, where a single diagnostic measurement may be unlikely to justify dramatic change in a completion strategy, a combination of data points from different domains can and does support design change that leads to rapid, real world performance improvements. Care is needed in the conclusions drawn when utilizing complimentary diagnostics due to the differences in depth of investigation and the non-unique interpretation of some data types. This paper discusses three post-completion diagnostic technologies, perforation evaluation by downhole camera, radioactive tracers, and distributed acoustic and temperature sensing (DAS+DTS) data and their respective physical measurements, strengths and weaknesses and how they can be combined to better understand well and reservoir behavior. It concludes with a review of completion optimization efforts from the Rockies area, where these post-completion diagnostic technologies were applied in the evaluation of eXtreme Limited Entry (XLE) trials. A statistical analysis of the RA tracer, downhole camera measurement of perforation area and deployed fiber optic acquisition of DAS+DTS reveals no correlation between diagnostic answers, indicating no one diagnostic measurement can accurately predict the other, such that it could substitute for that diagnostic and provide the same answer. Asking the right question can often enhance the value of diagnostic descriptions of the system in question. Those answers often lead to the next question and clear the path forward in advancing completion optimization. Complimentary diagnostics facilitate a more complete understanding of stimulation and production performance when compared, increasing confidence when they agree. When one or more appear to disagree, the different respective physical measurements and depths of investigation often reveal a more complete and complex understanding of stimulation and production efficiency. As an aggregate they provide clarity on the effect of efforts to create conductive pathways into the reservoir, allowing operators increased control over the resulting production.

Engine Malfunctioning Conditions Identification through Instantaneous Crankshaft Torque Measurement Analysis

In this study a coupled thermodynamics and crankshaft dynamics model of a large two-stroke diesel engine was utilised, to map the relationship of the engine Instantaneous Crankshaft Torque (ICT) with the following frequently occurring malfunctioning conditions: (a) change in Start of Injection (SOI), (b) change in Rate of Heat Release (RHR), (c) change in scavenge air pressure, and (d) blowby. This was performed using frequency analysis on the engine ICT, which was obtained through a series of parametric runs of the coupled engine model, under the various malfunctioning and healthy operating conditions. This process demonstrated that engine ICT can be successfully utilised to identify the distinct effects of malfunctions (c) or (d), as they occur individually in any cylinder. Furthermore by using the same process, malfunctions (a) and (b) can be identified as they occur individually for any cylinder, however there is no distinct effect on the engine ICT among these malfunctions, since their effect on the in-cylinder pressure is similar. As a result, this study demonstrates the usefulness of the engine ICT as a non-intrusive diagnostic measurement, as well as the benefits of malfunctioning conditions mapping, which allows for quick and less resource intensive identification of engine malfunctions.

Core procedural skills competencies and the maintenance of procedural skills for medical students: a Delphi study

Background: It is well recognised that medical students need to acquire certain procedural skills during their medical training, however, agreement on the level and acquisition of competency to be achieved in these skills is under debate. Further, the maintenance of competency of procedural skills across medical curricula is often not considered. The purpose of this study was to identify core procedural skills competencies for Australian medical students and to establish the importance of the maintenance of such skills.Methods: A three-round, online Delphi method was used to identify consensus on competencies of procedural skills for graduating medical students in Australia. In Round 1, an initial structured questionnaire was developed using content identified from the literature. Respondents were invited experts that rated their agreement on the inclusion of teaching 74 procedural skills and 11 suggested additional procedures. In Round 2, experts re-appraised the importance of 85 skills and rated the importance of maintenance of competency (i.e., Not at all important to Extremely important). In Round 3, experts rated the level of maintenance of competence (i.e., Observer, Novice, Competent, Proficient) in 46 procedures achieving consensus. Subjects: Thirty-six experts representing medical education and multidisciplinary clinicians involved with medical students undertaking procedural skills.Results: Consensus, defined as >80% agreement, was established with 46 procedural skills across ten categories: cardiovascular, diagnostic/measurement, gastrointestinal, injections/intravenous, ophthalmic/ENT, respiratory, surgical, trauma, women’s health and urogenital procedures. The procedural skills that established consensus with the highest level of agreement included cardiopulmonary resuscitation, airway management, asepsis and surgical scrub, gown and gloving. The importance for medical students to demonstrate maintenance of competency in procedural skills was assessed on the 6-point Likert scale with a mean of 5.03. Conclusions: The findings from the Delphi study provided critical information about procedural skills for the Clinical Practice domain of Australian medical curricula. The inclusion of experts from medical faculty and clinicians provided opportunities to capture a range of experience independent of medical speciality. These findings demonstrate the importance of maintenance of competency of procedural skills and provides the groundwork for further investigations into monitoring medical students’ skills prior to graduation.

A Need for Consistency in Behavioral Phenotyping for ASD: Analysis of the Valproic Acid Model

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly prevalent and impairing neurodevelopmental disorder that affects 1 : 54 persons. Over the last several decades, the reported incidence of ASD in the US has increased potentially due to increased awareness and improved diagnostic measurement. Although ASD prevalence is increasing, the etiology of ASD remains relatively unknown. To better understand the neurological basis of ASD, rodent models of ASD have been developed for research. Currently, there is not a standardized set of behavioral tests to quantify ASD-like behavior in rodents. The goal of this review is to present an overview of the methodologies used to analyze ASD-like behaviors in rodents, focusing on the valproic acid (VPA) model, and illustrate inconsistencies between different approaches. Despite that the in utero VPA rodent model for ASD is widely used and extensively characterized, behaviors vary substantially between different researchers. Moving forward, consistency in behavioral method analytics would benefit progress in evaluating interventions for all models of ASD and help to uncover unique qualities underlying mechanisms causing ASD signs and symptoms.

Attenuation Imaging with Ultrasound as a Novel Evaluation Method for Liver Steatosis

In recent years, ultrasound attenuation imaging (ATI) has emerged as a new method to detect liver steatosis. However, thus far, no studies have confirmed the clinical utility of this technology. Using a retrospective database analysis of 28 patients with chronic liver disease who underwent ultrasound liver biopsy and ATI, we compared the presence and degree of steatosis measured by ATI with the results obtained through liver biopsy. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of the ATI for differentiating between normal and hepatic steatosis was 0.97 (95% confidence interval: 0.83–1.00). The AUROC of the ATI was 0.99 (95% confidence interval: 0.86–1.00) in grade ≥2 liver steatosis and 0.97 (95% confidence interval: 0.82–1.00) in grade 3. ATI showed good consistency and accuracy for the steatosis grading of liver biopsy. Therefore, ATI represents a novel diagnostic measurement to support the diagnosis of liver steatosis in non-invasive clinical practice.

Hardware Acceleration of Convolution Neural Network for AI-Enabled Realtime Biomedical System

COVID-19 is currently on the rage all over the world and has become a pandemic. To efficiently handle it, accurate diagnosis and prompt reporting are essential. The AI-Enabled Real-time Biomedical System (AIRBiS) research project aims to develop a system that handles diagnosis using chest X-ray images. The project is divided into UI, network, software and hardware. This work focuses on the hardware, which uses CNN technology to create a model that determines the presence of pneumonia. This CNN model is designed on an FPGA to speed up diagnostic results. The FPGA increases the flexibility of circuit design, allowing us to optimize the computational processing during data transfer and CNN implementation, reducing the diagnostic measurement time for a single image.