Research articles list

This paper found that 35% of Adivasis have health problems, and 73% said that they are getting treatment with RMP. 87% have toilet facility and more than 12% still defecate openly. 18.3% said that they faced different problems at open defecation, and 50% of women not using sanitary napkins. Nearly 90% of respondents wash their hands after toilets and coming from outside of the home. Ten per cent of respondents said that they do not have an awareness of sanitation. Therefore, the study confirmed that the sanitation facilities considerably made the women's dignity and quality of life better in the study area. Moreover, four case studies also focused on open defecation problems in the study area.

B Suresh Lal

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 Englishto-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles, by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.0 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature.

Kamal Singh

The purpose of the study was to find out the effect of pranayama on type-2 diabetes on metropolitan people. In the present study researcher wants to observe the effect of pranayama on type 2 diabetes on metropolitan people and to develop a specific package for type 2 diabetes. For this purpose researcher collect 60 sample from nearest diabetic Clinic and Hospital in the city and it is randomly divided into two groups one is experimental and another is control group. In the study researcher used bio-chemistry lab tools. In the study research design used Pre-test, post-test control-experimental group and researcher used two variable type 2 diabetes as dependent and pranayama used as independent variable and in the study there was significant effect of yogic practices on type 2 diabetes.

Shekhar Boro

Background Type 2 diabetes and obesity are serious public health concerns globally and a growing burden in Africa. Both conditions have serious repercussions on health when they co-occur, yet the extent of their co-occurrence in Africa remains unknown. Therefore, this review aimed to identify the prevalence and associated factors of overweight and obesity among persons with type 2 diabetes in Africa. Method A systematic search was conducted on PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, African Index Medicus (AIM), and African Journals Online (AJOL) for observational studies that reported the prevalence of overweight and/or obesity among type 2 diabetes patients in Africa. The prevalence data from individual studies were aggregated through a random-effects meta-analysis. The I2 statistic was used to evaluate between-studies heterogeneity, while subgroup analysis and mixed-effects meta-regression were performed to identify sources of heterogeneity. We assessed publication bias using funnel plots and Egger’s test. This review adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. Results Of 1753 records retrieved, 80 articles were eligible for this review, with 74 cross-sectional studies included in the meta-analysis. The pooled prevalence of overweight and obesity was 35.6% and 25.6% respectively, while the overall prevalence of both overweight and obesity was 61.4%. Also, the pooled prevalence of both overweight and obesity across the five geographical areas in Africa ranged from 56.9% in East Africa to 88.5% in Southern Africa. Nineteen factors were significantly associated with overweight and obesity among patients with type 2 diabetes. Conclusion The high prevalence of overweight and obesity among patients with type 2 diabetes is a significant public health concern that transcends geographical boundaries within Africa. The findings from this review highlight the need for innovative weight management interventions that are tailored to the cultural context of the African setting

Emmanuel Ekpor

Background Type 2 diabetes and obesity are serious public health concerns globally and a growing burden in Africa. Both conditions have serious repercussions on health when they co-occur, yet the extent of their co-occurrence in Africa remains unknown. Therefore, this review aimed to identify the prevalence and associated factors of overweight and obesity among persons with type 2 diabetes in Africa. Method A systematic search was conducted on PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, African Index Medicus (AIM), and African Journals Online (AJOL) for observational studies that reported the prevalence of overweight and/or obesity among type 2 diabetes patients in Africa. The prevalence data from individual studies were aggregated through a random-effects meta-analysis. The I2 statistic was used to evaluate between-studies heterogeneity, while subgroup analysis and mixed-effects meta-regression were performed to identify sources of heterogeneity. We assessed publication bias using funnel plots and Egger’s test. This review adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. Results Of 1753 records retrieved, 80 articles were eligible for this review, with 74 cross-sectional studies included in the meta-analysis. The pooled prevalence of overweight and obesity was 35.6% and 25.6% respectively, while the overall prevalence of both overweight and obesity was 61.4%. Also, the pooled prevalence of both overweight and obesity across the five geographical areas in Africa ranged from 56.9% in East Africa to 88.5% in Southern Africa. Nineteen factors were significantly associated with overweight and obesity among patients with type 2 diabetes. Conclusion The high prevalence of overweight and obesity among patients with type 2 diabetes is a significant public health concern that transcends geographical boundaries within Africa. The findings from this review highlight the need for innovative weight management interventions that are tailored to the cultural context of the African setting

Emmanuel Ekpor

Pneumonia is an acute pulmonary infection that can be caused by bacteria, viruses, or fungi. It infects the lungs, causing inflammation of the air sacs and pleural effusion: a condition in which the lung is filled with fluid. The diagnosis of pneumonia is tasking as it requires a review of Chest X-ray (CXR) by specialists, laboratory tests, vital signs, and clinical history. Utilizing CXR is an important pneumonia diagnostic method for the evaluation of the airways, pulmonary parenchyma, and vessels, chest walls among others. It can also be used to show changes in the lungs caused by pneumonia. This study aims to employ transfer learning, and ensemble approach to help in the detection of viral pneumonia in chest radiographs. The transfer learning model used was Inception network, ResNet-50, and InceptionResNetv2. With the help of our research, we were able to show how well the ensemble technique, which uses InceptionResNetv2 and the utilization of the Non-local Means Denoising algorithm, works. By utilizing these techniques, we have significantly increased the accuracy of pneumonia classification, opening the door for better diagnostic abilities and patient care. For objective labeling, we obtained a selection of patient chest X-ray images. In this work, the model was assessed using state-of-the-art metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. From the statistical analysis and scikit learn python analysis, the accuracy of the ResNet-50 model was 84%, the accuracy of the inception model was 91% and lastly, the accuracy of the InceptionResNetv2 model was 96%.

Dr. Chandrashekhar Uppin

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is a branch of computer science that has gained considerable growth over the last decade. This branch of computer science deals with determining the emotions, opinions, feelings amongst others of a person on a particular topic. Social media has become an outlet for people to voice out their thoughts and opinions publicly about various topics of discussion making it a great domain to apply sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Sentiment analysis and opinion mining employ Natural Language Processing (NLP) in order to fairly obtain the mood of a person’s opinion about any specific topic or product in the case of an ecommerce domain. It is a process involving automatic feature extractions by mode of notions of a person about service and it functions on a series of different expressions for a given topic based on some predefined features stored in a database of facts. In an ecommerce system, the process of analyzing the opinions of customers about products is vital for business growth and customer satisfaction. This proposed research will attempt to implement a model for sentiment analysis and opinion mining on Twitter feeds. In this paper, we address the issues of combining sentiment classification and the domain constraint analysis techniques for extracting opinions of the public from social media. The dataset that was employed in the paper was gotten from Twitter through the tweepy API. The TextBlob library was used for the analysis of the tweets to determine their sentiments. The result shows that more tweets were having a positive subjectivity and polarity on the subject matter.

Dr. Chandrashekhar Uppin

Currently, the use of internet-connected applications for storage by different organizations have rapidly increased with the vast need to store data, cybercrimes are also increasing and have affected large organizations and countries as a whole with highly sensitive information, countries like the United States of America, United Kingdom and Nigeria. Organizations generate a lot of information with the help of digitalization, these highly classified information are now stored in databases via the use of computer networks. Thus, allowing for attacks by cybercriminals and state-sponsored agents. Therefore, these organizations and countries spend more resources analyzing cybercrimes instead of preventing and detecting cybercrimes. The use of network forensics plays an important role in investigating cybercrimes; this is because most cybercrimes are committed via computer networks. This paper proposes a new approach to analyzing digital evidence in Nigeria using a proactive method of forensics with the help of deep learning algorithms - Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to proactively classify malicious packets from genuine packets and log them as they occur.

Dr. Chandrashekhar Uppin

Due to the rapid growth in the field of science and technology, IoT (Internet of Things) has become emerging technique for connecting heterogeneous technologies related to our daily needs that can affect our lives tremendously. It allows the devices to be connected to each other and controlled or monitored through handheld devices. The IoT network is a heterogeneous network that links several small hardware restriction devices, and where conventional security architectures and techniques cannot be used. So, providing protection to the IoT network involves a diverse range of specialized techniques and architectures. This paper focuses on the requirements of defense, current state of the art and future directions in the field of IoT.

Dr. Chandrashekhar Uppin

We designed a mobile application to deal with Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD) (Heart Attack) An Android based mobile application has been used for coordinating clinical information taken from patients suffering from Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD). The clinical information from 787 patients has been investigated and associated with the hazard factors like Hypertension, Diabetes, Dyslipidemia (Abnormal cholesterol), Smoking, Family History, Obesity, Stress and existing clinical side effect which may propose basic non-identified IHD. The information was mined with information mining innovation and a score is produced. Effects are characterized into low, medium and high for IHD. On looking at and ordering the patients whose information is acquired for producing the score; we found there is a noteworthy relationship of having a heart occasion when low and high and medium and high class are analyzed; p=0.0001 and 0.0001 individually. Our examination is to influence straightforward way to deal with recognize the IHD to risk and careful the population to get themselves assessed by a cardiologist to maintain a strategic distance from sudden passing. As of now accessible instruments has a few confinements which makes them underutilized by populace. Our exploration item may decrease this constraint and advance hazard assessment on time.

Dr. Chandrashekhar Uppin

Library automation is just not a book inventory where hold, issue and receiving of books by using technological tools and services. Our applied research was found that most of the library administrative functionalities such as ‘Acquisition and Accessioning’, ‘auto Indexing & Classification’ and auto Cataloging (Books & Non books materials)’, inventory with real-time OPAC facilities and many more library science concepts are still missing constructs in Universities/College libraries across the country. In this modern era the concept of eLibrary is more popular because availability and accessibility of digitized content sharing through IT/ICT infrastructure is huge. During our research we found that cognizance of Library automation was completely ignored and focused on only talking and establishment of eLibrary. As we all know that “Physical Library” is not a substitute for “eLibrary”. In fact eLibrary is part of a Physical Library to share authenticated digitized content through IT/ICT infrastructure. After a decade of our applied research in the area of Library science, eventually we recorded a lot of findings based on our survey and discussion with senior researchers and Librarians. Our serious and consistent effort makes to succeeds in designing comprehensively effective and efficient operational strategies to build a “world class Library Automation and Paper less Library Management System” for Universities/College libraries. This paper emphasizes about the comprehensive real-time architecture and operational modules and their effectiveness to achieve the user’s satisfaction (flow of functionalities as per the exact need of the Library Management system). This dealt with how emerging technological tools and services are effectively integrated for designing new strategies in the area of library science includes various automation process and security concepts (using Barcode/RFID). Eventually, our dream comes true in building Use of Emerging Technological Tools and Services to building world class Paper less Library Information &Management System [LIMS]. presently deployed and use of this software product in more than 300 satisfied and client locations in INDIA, this product popularly named as “eLib” by AarGees Business Solution, Hubli, India. Though, our research is still on and continuing for further development to build “Global knowledge sharing Centre”.

Dr. Chandrashekhar Uppin

This study determined the effectiveness of Differentiated Instruction in the reading comprehension level of the Grade-11 senior high school students, school year 2016-2017. Specifically, it aims to determine the reading comprehension level of the control and the experimental groups in the pre test and post-test; identify if there is a significant difference in the reading comprehension level of the control and experimental groups in the pre-test and post-test results; and identify the strengths and weaknesses in using Differentiated Instruction. Quasi-experimental method was employed in conducting the study. The respondents were the 150 Grade-11 students of a public high school grouped as control and experimental using Parallel technique. Data sources include pre-test and post-test scores, gain scores, classroom observation form, survey questionnaire, and researcher's reflective notes. The qualitative data were analysed using template analysis style and the basic approach of comprehending, synthesizing, theorizing and re-contextualizing to identify common themes and integrating thematic pieces. Based on the classroom observations, survey and researcher's reflective notes, strengths and weaknesses of Differentiated Instruction were observed. Despite the observed and encountered challenges, the statistical analysis has revealed a significant difference between pre-test and post-test results.

Darrel Ocampo

This study aims to determine the functional literacy acquisition of Alternative Learning System learners and make a sound basis for strategic planning and pedagogical intervention that will help promote and develop the said program. The descriptive-evaluative method of research was used in the study. The descriptive method was used to identify the respondents' profile based on (a) age, (b) gender, (c) civil status, and (d) employment status. The evaluative method was used to determine the respondents' functional literacy acquisition in (a) communication skills, (b) scientific and critical thinking skills, (c) mathematical and problem solving skills, (d) life and career skills, (e) understanding the self and society, and (f) digital citizenship (formerly digital literacy). Frequency Count and Percentage Technique was used to describe the functional literacy acquisition of the respondents. Meanwhile, a modified survey questionnaire based on the functional literacy, education and mass media survey ("National Profile of Adult Literacy and Numeracy Skills," 2004, p. 91) was used as the primary tool to gather the data. The respondents in this study were the students enrolled in ALS-Sipocot (North and South District), the school year 2019-2020. Due to COVID restrictions, other ALS learners from other municipalities were not covered as part of the study. Findings revealed that ALS learners do not yet manifest the complete acquisition of functional literacy needed to face the globalized world's challenges because their attainment of the required functional literacy skills is generally low. Moreover, the study disclosed that sex, age, civil status, and employment status affect the acquisition of functional literacy skills among ALS learners in Sipocot, Camarines Sur. Based on the results, the researcher developed an extension activity to help the ALS learners improve their functional literacy, particularly in the digital citizenship area, where they got the lowest score.

Darrel Ocampo

This study investigated the connection between translanguaging and reading comprehension of Filipino ESL intermediate learners. The respondents were intermediate pupils enrolled in the selected central schools in Bicol, Philippines. The respondents' ages range from 8 to 12 years old, and 124 students (27.55%) were males while 326 students (72.44%) were females. The descriptive-correlational method was used in the study. The descriptive method was used to describe the reading performance of the ESL intermediate learners and their translanguaging factors, while Pearson Product Moment Correlation was used to determine the relationship between the two variables. The primary instruments used were validated teacher-made reading comprehension test and translanguage factors survey questionnaire. Data disclosed that the general reading comprehension of the ESL intermediate learners along with vocabulary, drawing inferences, and getting the main idea, are very satisfactory. Meanwhile, the different translanguaging factors, along with personal, teacher, and social, were surveyed and identified in the study. The statistical test revealed that the reading comprehension of the respondents was significantly correlated with the identified translanguaging factors. Thus, it is recommended that teachers should promote group discussions and allow open interactions in the classroom. Teachers should allow the use of both the home language and English; employ translanguaging pedagogy in teaching reading; foster an understanding and acceptance of linguistic differences; promote multilingualism, and allow indigenous languages to be used in education to facilitate meaningful learning.

Darrel Ocampo

The study aimed to determine the effectiveness of gamifying instruction in the English language proficiency of Grade 8 Filipino ESL students in one University in Bicol, Philippines, that offers Junior High School. The quasi-experimental single pretest-posttest design was used in the study. The researcher-made test which underwent series of validation was given before and after the intervention period to determine the level of English proficiency and level of effectiveness of the games. Statistical treatment was done employing frequency count, T-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The findings revealed that there was significant difference between the pretest and posttest of the respondents using gamification. Thus, it can be inferred that the games helped in improving the level of English proficiency of the Grade 8 students. The statistical test results disclosed further that the effectiveness of the three games introduced to the students were significantly high. With these findings, it was recommended that language teachers should use gamification as supplementary instructional material in improving the English proficiency of the students.

Darrel Ocampo

Power and dominance exist everywhere and occur at the macro and micro levels. Being powerful and domineering are factors that serve as emblems for the people in the realm of politics. Power relations are overtly exercised in such discourse. But what is interesting is how power and dominance exist between or among those people who are branded as “powerful;” thus, using the Face Theory of Brown and Levinson (1978), this discourse analysis paper analyzed the power relations that transpired in a senate hearing and its relationship with the Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) used by the people involved in the discourse. A Philippine Senate hearing excerpt served as the primary corpus for analysis. Results showed that the people in the discourse were all powerful, creating tension when they projected their dominance on one another. Each member threatened and challenged their positive and negative faces. The power play evolved into a "pass-theball" effect, and no one has absolute power because it weakens once the person wielding its face is threatened. Hence, to disempower the empowered, a person must learn how to play and use FTAs such as insulting, disagreeing, disapproving, provoking, commanding, and demanding against the powerful to strike a social balance.

Darrel Ocampo

The study employed Appreciative Inquiry framework to have an in-depth investigation in the personal lives of the participants and to draw connections between their beliefs and practices in taking Licensure Examination for Teachers and how these superstitions reflect and affect their moral principles. Specifically, it aimed to: (1) determine the superstitious beliefs followed by the examinees before, during, and after taking the Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET); (2) determine the positive and negative impact of these superstitions in the aspect of taking LET; and, (3) identify the effects of these superstitions in the characters and principles of the teachers. Semi-structured interview and focus group discussion were used and the data-sources were triangulated to come-up with a stronger analysis. Audit trail and member checking were followed to ensure that there were no biases in the interpretation of the data and to establish the validity of the results. Findings revealed that the student examinees followed different superstitious beliefs before, during and after the exam which have positive and negative effects. The motive of avoiding failure in the examination predominates over the motive of achieving success. The positive and negative effects of superstitions vary from one person's experience to another. Moreover, the assertion and personal disposition to pass the exam became the product of student examinees' projection. The superstitious notions were initiated to discard the student examinees' fears and to safeguard their emotional sphere against negative feelings and any untoward possibilities. Meanwhile, in the development of moral principle, the student examinees' family, peers and the society are important factors in the establishment of their belief system which later on reflects the moral principles they uphold.

Darrel Ocampo

This study intends to describe assessment strategies for young students' online learning. The participants in this descriptive qualitative study were 15 primary school principals and 35 teachers teaching Years 4 and 5 in urban and rural schools on the island of Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara Province, who volunteered their participation after undergoing comparable procedures. Using operational concepts of assessment of learning for online learning, class observation, and interview were organized. The content and structure validity of the measures were evaluated in accordance with the developmental periods of young learners. The findings showed that the teachers assessed the primary students' cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains interactively during the online class meetings, in their portfolio, and through attitude direct observation. Several assessment strategies were advocated to circumvent the shortcomings of online learning. A criterion-referenced evaluation was used to conduct the analysis. The theoretical implications of the findings suggest that the various assessment procedures adopted have decreased the negative washback of online exams; however, further research is required to determine the consistency of the outcomes of online tests with other types of evaluation.

Darrel Ocampo

Lexical and structural levels of language abound ambiguities that are good source of humor. Consequently, violations of the maxims of conversation are leeway to induce humor in any type of discourse. Adding these two precepts and considering pragmatics as its foundation became the bases in analysing the top-grossing films of Vice Ganda. It sought to identify the verbal linguistic jokes and ambiguities present in the top-grossing films of Vice Ganda; determine on how these ambiguities create devaluation of Grice’s maxims of conversation; and determine on how the ambiguities in verbal linguistic jokes and devaluation of Grice’s maxims of conversation were used as ingredients in Vice Ganda’s top-grossing films. Discourse analysis was used in the study and the analytical framework to induce humor by Taghiyev (2018) was used in analysing the corpora. A priori coding was used to identify the recurring ambiguities and devaluation of maxims in the films. Findings show that lexical-semantic and structural-syntactic ambiguities were present in the films. It was intentionally used in order to create humorous effect in the dialogues of the films. Moreover, the devaluation of the maxims of conversation quietly and unostentatiously, opting out, coping with a clash between maxims, and flouting was deemed an effective ingredient to make the films become comical and appealing to the audience.

Darrel Ocampo

his study explored the English Language Teaching appraisal of teachers in the trifocal Philippine education system in the Bicol Region as a basis for policy and advancement programs. This study used the descriptive-comparative-associational method using a content-validated and reliability-tested questionnaire. The frequency and percentage technique, weighted mean, Chi-Square, and Anova Test of Variance were used in the data treatment. Findings revealed that ELT teachers were predominantly females with 73.97%, CHED, 80.21%, DepEd, and 71.43% TESDA along age groups of early and mid-30s and 46 years above. They served the agencies for less than 10 years, mostly married. Professionally, these teachers were still pursuing post-graduate education and attending training. Along with appraisals on their professional and work responsibility, ELT Trifocal teachers very evidently performed their professional and work responsibilities; on the delivery system, respondents conveyed the mastery and application of theoretical and pedagogical knowledge; on their communicative competencies, they were classified as experts. Meanwhile, there was no significant difference among ELT teachers’ appraisal in the three systems (F–value 2.21< t-value 3.35; 5% level of significance). It follows that Philippine education has maintained an undeviating quality of ELT teachers regardless of which system of education they belong. The result showed no variations in ELT competencies despite differences in modalities, urgencies, and the attainment of quality education. Findings also unveiled that the ELT teachers’ appraisal and integration of ICT to language teaching are directly associated with their age, sex and civil status, and educational attainment. The higher the educational attainment, the higher the integration of ICT in language teaching. With these results, a policy development for the Professional Advancement Program in ELT was crafted.

Darrel Ocampo