Educational reforms and internationalization of universities: evidence from major regions of the world

Internationalization of universities has become a worldwide phenomenon as global economic integration continues to make its way forcefully into the higher education. The objective of the study is to develop a model for internationalization of universities with the transformation of some promising macroeconomic variables i.e., educational reforms and economic growth in the seven largest regions of the world [namely, East Asia and Pacific (sample 25 countries); Europe and Central Asia (40 countries); Latin America and Caribbean (27 countries); Middle East and North Africa (17 countries); North America (22 countries); South Asia (7 countries) and Sub-Saharan Africa (21 countries)]. The data has been analyzed by panel fixed effect regression from the period of 1990–2011. In addition to transform inputs into output, the study employed eleven indicators of education and five indicators for growth, where the resulting vector is internationalization. The results show the dynamic linkages between educational indicators and economic factors in the selected regions of the World. In East Asia and Pacific region, tertiary and higher education expenditures per student increase the economic factors. Higher education is a powerful driver of long-term growth in Europe and Central Asia. Governments of the state should have to focus on higher education enrolment, as it does not have any significant contribution to increase GDP; gross capital formation and FDI in Latin America and Caribbean region. Higher education enrolment in MENA region significantly increases growth factors on the cost of increase gross national expenditures. Investment in general education and other generic human capital is of the utmost importance in creating an enabling environment for FDI in North America. It is imperative for South Asia to encourage the skill levels and education opportunities for females, in order to maximize the effects of FDI on the female human capital stock and therefore economic growth. Tertiary school enrolment and tertiary expenditures per student identified the importance of tertiary education in Sub-Saharan Africa. The results conclude that educational indicators improve the economic gains, which ultimately reap out the benefit of internationalization.     

New video discarding policies for improving UDP performance over wired/wireless networks

Multimedia communication over wired and wireless networks becomes a compulsory need for many recent applications. To effectively react to the tremendous demand of video streaming over the Internet, videos are usually compressed by utilizing spatial and temporal redundancy. It is noteworthy to mention that compressing videos may degrade their quality if it is not investigated properly. In other words, as a consequence of exploiting redundancies, frame dependencies emanate, which make discarding frames, because of occupying the whole capacity of network elements, have severe implications on the video quality. Furthermore, transmitting videos over capacity‐limited links owing to error‐prone channels, power constraints and bandwidth variations will severely affect the video quality. Additionally, as the current coding schemes are characterized by being able to afford high compression efficiency, sensitivity to packet losses becomes untolerated. Therefore, insuring the perceived quality of the delivered videos to be always high in spite of aforementioned challenges is the primary focus of current researchers. In this paper, we propose efficient and novel video discarding policies that mainly aim to reduce the number of frames being lost through substitution of those frames that are very difficult or even impossible to decode at the receiver side. This is accomplished by controlling and maintaining the buffer occupancy of network elements. Our proposed policies are evaluated in terms of frameput, rate of non‐decodable frames, peak signal‐to‐noise ratio, structural similarity index and average buffer occupancy. Our proposed policies behave very well and achieve a remarkable enhancement over what is closely connected in the literature. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Porous silicon nanowires fabricated by electrochemical and laser-induced etching

Electrochemical and laser-induced etching processes were simultaneously used to synthesize the nanowires structure of porous silicon (PS). Surface morphology and structural properties of nanostructured silicon were characterized by using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic forces microscopy (AFM) images. Nanowires with dimensions of few nanometers were formed on the whole etched surface. The optical properties of silicon nanostructures were studied. Raman spectra were shifted and broadened relatively to 519.9 cm⁻¹ of PS prepared by electrochemical etching, and shifted to 517.2 cm⁻¹ for laser-induced etching process and to 508.9 cm⁻¹ for electrochemical and laser etching simultaneously. Blue shift luminescence was observed at 649.6 nm for PS produced by electrochemical etching, and at 629.5 nm for laser-induced etching. PS produced a blue shift at 626.5 nm using both etching procedures simultaneously. X-Ray diffraction (XRD) was used to investigate the crystallites size of the PS as well as to provide an estimate of the degree of crystallinty of the etched sample.     

Energy-efficient operation of indirect adiabatic data center cooling systems via Newton-like phasor extremum seeking control

This paper considers the problem of optimizing the operation of Indirect Adiabatic Cooling (IAC) systems with application to data centers. Optimal operation is achieved when the required cooling demand is satisfied at the minimum energy cost. For this purpose, we design a supervisory control system, where the higher layer determines the optimal set-points for the local controllers by employing an Extremum Seeking Control (ESC) scheme. In particular, we consider a Newton-like phasor ESC, which augments the derivative estimator underlying the phasor approach to capture also the Hessian of the plant index and then it uses these estimates to steer the system along a Newton-like direction. The effectiveness of the considered approach is tested in simulation by exploiting a Matlab-based simulation environment including an IAC system and a computer room.     

Estimation of SPIO Nanoparticles Uptakes by Macrophages Using Transmission Electron Microscopy

Due to their interesting size-dependent magnetic characteristics and relative biocompatibility, magnetic superparamagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) nanoparticles have been widely exploited as probes for cell and subcellular structure identification, as well as medication and gene delivery. A thorough understanding of the mechanics of the interaction between nanoparticles and macrophages is vital in managing dynamic processes in nanomedicine. In this study, the interaction behavior and uptake of SPIO nanoparticles by M1- and M2-type macrophages were investigated. Mice monocytes were differentiated into M1 and M2 macrophages, and the uptake of SPIO nanoparticles was studied using a TEM microscope. A high resolution image of 1 nm resolution, an image processing technique, was developed to extract the SPIO-NPs from tomographic TEM microscopic images. Lysosomes appear to be the zones of high concentrations of SPIO inside macrophages. Lysosomes were first selected in each image, and then segmentation by the Otsu thresholding method was used to extract the SPIO-NPs. The Otsu threshold method is a global thresholding technique used to automatically differentiate SPIOs from the background. The SPIO-NPs appear in red colors, and the other pixels in the image are considered background. Then, an estimation of the SPIO-NP uptakes by lysosomes is produced. Higher uptake of all-sized nanoparticles was observed in M1- and M2-type macrophages. An accurate estimation of the number of SPIO-NPs was obtained. This result will help in controlling targeted drug delivery and assessing the safety impact of the use of SPIO-NPs in nanomedicine for humans.     

Pelvic spleen masquerading as an ovarian neoplasm

A case of a 53-year-old perimenopausal woman who presented with an 18-month history of irregular vaginal bleeding is reported. Vaginal ultrasonography revealed a 10 x 7 cm pelvic mass with an increased blood flow. Her serum CA125 was within the normal range. At laparotomy a normal spleen was found within the pelvic cavity.     

Velocity-image model for online signature verification.

In general, online signature capturing devices provide outputs in the form of shape and velocity signals. In the past, strokes have been extracted while tracking velocity signal minimas. However, the resulting strokes are larger and complicated in shape and thus make the subsequent job of generating a discriminative template difficult. We propose a new stroke-based algorithm that splits velocity signal into various bands. Based on these bands, strokes are extracted which are smaller and more simpler in nature. Training of our proposed system revealed that low- and high-velocity bands of the signal are unstable, whereas the medium-velocity band can be used for discrimination purposes. Euclidean distances of strokes extracted on the basis of medium velocity band are used for verification purpose. The experiments conducted show improvement in discriminative capability of the proposed stroke-based system.     

Hydrochloric acid extractable minerals and phytate and polyphenols contents of sprouted faba and white bean cultivars

Two faba bean (Hudieba-72 and Bsabir) and three white bean (Serge, Giza and RO21) cultivars were sprouted for 6 days. The sprouted grains were dried and milled. Phytic acid and polyphenols contents and hydrochloric acid (HCl) extractability of minerals from the malt flours were determined at intervals of 2 days during sprouting. Phytic acid and polyphenols contents decreased significantly (P ? 0.01) with increase in sprouting time with concomitant increase in HCl extractable major and trace minerals. The contents of both major and trace minerals were slightly increased with sprouting time. When faba bean seeds were sprouted for 6 days, Bsabir had higher extractable Ca, while Hudieba-72 had higher P, whereas Fe and Mn recorded high level in Hudieba-72. When white bean seeds were sprouted for 6 days, RO21 cultivar had higher extractable Ca, while Giza-3 cultivar had higher P, whereas Fe and Mn recorded high levels in Serge and RO21 cultivars, respectively. There was a good correlation between phytate and polyphenols reduction and increase in extractable minerals with increase in sprouting time for all cultivars.