Uncontrolled exposure of active and passive smokers to trace metals causes increase in health ris... more Uncontrolled exposure of active and passive smokers to trace metals causes increase in health risks. The primary objective of this study was to determine whether local and imported cigarette brands used in Pakistan, have elevated levels of metals or not. Six metals manganese (Mn), cobalt (Co), copper (Cu), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb) and zinc (Zn) were determined in tobacco of twenty cigarette contamination chances and for complete digestion of analytes a microwave digester was used. The analytical results showed highest concentration of Mn (84.78 μg/g dry weight), Cd (0.525 μg/g dry weight) and Zn (14.34 μg/g dry weight) metals in imported brands in relation to counterparts from the local brands. Certain elevated levels were observed for Co (3.344 μg/g dry weight), Pb (14.16 μg/g dry weight) and Cu (7.889 μg/g dry weight) metals in local brands. The inter-metal relationships in the tobacco of local and imported cigarette brands showed some integrated variation in the selected metal levels. In view of health risk associated with the above metals, there should be a strict quality control over monitoring of heavy metals during growing, processing and smoking of tobacco. Therefore, it is prudent to minimize exposure to toxic substances whenever possible because smoking and exposure to cigarette smoke is a confounder to be taken into account when carrying out epidemiological studies on human exposure to metals.
Background: The aim of study was to assess differences in reporting of violence and deliberate se... more Background: The aim of study was to assess differences in reporting of violence and deliberate self harm (DSH) related injuries to police and emergency department (ED) in an urban town of Pakistan.
Ontologies are the building blocks of semantic web. In recent year's further advancements in the ... more Ontologies are the building blocks of semantic web. In recent year's further advancements in the area of semantic web has led to refinement and specialization of the existing frameworks for ontological development. These advancements include merging, alignment, unification, mapping etc. of ontologies usually belonging to similar domains. These operations are useful in their own respect but also bring along many inconsistencies in the ontological information. The removal of these inconsistencies is in itself an open horizon for researchers of semantic web and ontologies. In this paper, we review the different issues causing inconsistencies and some frameworks used for handling inconsistencies.
It is the need of hour to get ourselves acquainted with the communication technology, its tools a... more It is the need of hour to get ourselves acquainted with the communication technology, its tools and its trends. Mobile communication is an important technology in this regard and mobile phone has become the most common tool of communication over the recent years. As several innovative improvements regarding mobile communication technologies have been made by developing various multiple-access schemes used for wireless communication (such as TDMA, FDMA, CDMA, WCDMA, EDGE etc) but a big challenge is to select the right technology for the applications and systematically identify the factors that influence the overall performance. In this research paper, we present the detail comparison of the different generations of the mobile communication technologies in a tabular form to have a better knowledge and understanding in the advancement of mobile communication systems. The survey presented here will be helpful for designing the new strategies for the development of 4 th generation mobile communication systems. This research work can steer all those learners who are trying to enhance their acquaintance in the field of mobile communication system, and also for such mentors and researchers who desire to have a foundation for further research and study in this field.
In recent years, we have witnessed the dramatic increase in the volume of mobile SMS (Short Messa... more In recent years, we have witnessed the dramatic increase in the volume of mobile SMS (Short Messaging Service) spam. The reason is that operators -owing to fierce market competition -have introduced packages that allow their customers to send unlimited SMS in less than $1 a month. It not only degrades the service of cellular operators but also compromises security and privacy of users. In this paper, we analyze SMS spam to identify novel features that distinguishes it from benign SMS (ham). The novelty of our approach is that we intercept the SMS at the access layer of a mobile phone -in hexadecimal format -and extract two features:
Incidence of burns and factors associated with their hospitalisation in Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Burns, Jan 1, 2011
The burden of burns is largely underreported due to the lack of a surveillance system in Pakistan... more The burden of burns is largely underreported due to the lack of a surveillance system in Pakistan. The aim of our study was to determine the incidence of burns and factors associated with their hospitalisation in the city of Rawalpindi, Pakistan. A prospective observational study from July 2007 to June 2008 was conducted. All the burn-related injury patients presenting to emergency departments (EDs) of the three public teaching hospitals in Rawalpindi city were included. A standard World Health Organization questionnaire was used to record the information about injury victims. A total of 1498 burned patients presented to EDs. Females accounted for 40% of the patients. The majority of patients were ≤ 46 years. Most of the burns occurred at home (79.2%). The overall incidence of burn-related injuries per 100,000 inhabitants was 76.3 for emergency visits, 17.0 for hospitalisation and 0.3 for ED deaths. Female patients (adjusted odds ratio (aOR)=1.49, 95% confidence interval (95% CI)=1.09, 2.06), intentional burns (aOR=5.25, 95% CI=2.17-12.74) and injuries at work (aOR=3.81, 95% CI=2.40, 6.07) and in a market area (aOR=2.25, 95% CI=1.36-3.74) were more likely to result in hospitalisation. Rawalpindi city has a significant burden of burns. These results showed that investigating further factors leading to burns at home and work could be useful for future safety education campaigns. Moreover, continuous surveillance is warranted to decrease burns in Pakistan.
Before the Web era various software development methodologies have been proposed for the developm... more Before the Web era various software development methodologies have been proposed for the development of software applications for different domains. The main objectives of those methodologies were to meet user's requirements, find out means to suggest a systematic software development and reduce the maintenance cost of the developed software. On the emergence of the Web and to develop the web-based software systems, some existing methodologies have been extended. Also, new approaches (or informal methodologies) are introduced for the development of web-based systems because the development process for these systems is not considered as an extension of the classical software engineering, although both development processes for web-based systems and non web-based systems have the same basic objective which is software development. Of course, the development of the web-based systems needs a new kind of development methodologies which should meet and capture their unique and different requirements. Currently available software development methodologies are inappropriate and unsuitable to use for the development of web-based software systems, especially for the third generation web, called Semantic Web. In this paper, we present a brief review of the existing software development methodologies for the development of web-based systems. Some informal software development methodologies (or approaches) for the semantic web are also reviewed. Then, based on this analytical review, we propose a model for the development of semantic web systems. This model can be used as a benchmark to propose formal methodologies for the development of the semantic web systems. [New York Science Journal 2010;3(9):34-39]. (ISSN: 1554-0200).
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