A complex interface can disorient the user in a mild situation while designing web-based application. Thus, measure should be taken to reduce the complexity and provide reasonable qualities ...(simplicity, generality and usability) to the user. This paper evaluates Interface Complexity Metric (ICM) between two xml schema languages: World Wide Web Consortium XML Schema (WXS) and Regular Language for Next Generation (RNG) to weigh human insight on the factors affecting effort for comprehending schema documents; taking into account elements and attributes of xml documents; acquired from Web Services Description Language (WSDL). It is probable to lure decisions about the professed qualities; that out of one hundred and twenty (120) schema documents implemented in rng and wxs; rng has the lowest complexity values for almost all the schema documents when compared with wxs because rng exhibits better presentation with high degree of simplicity, generality and usability qualities than wxs. Therefore, this is benefited to developers in assisting them in writing less lengthy code and simplifying software modularization.
The presence of emerging contaminants such as pharmaceutical and personal care products in many aqueous matrices have been reported. One of such matrix is streams of wastewater, including wastewater ...treatment plants inflows and outflows and wastewater flow by-passing wastewater treatment plants. Their persistence arises from their resistant to breakdown, hence they may remain in the environment over long time, with a potential to cause adverse effects including endocrine disruption, gene toxicity, the imposition of sex organs, antibiotic resistance and many others in some aquatic organisms exposed to arrays of residues of pharmaceutical and personal care products. Among the treatment techniques, advanced oxidation processes have been reported to be a better technique through which these PPCPs can be degraded in the WWTPs. Heterogeneous photocatalysis using various photocatalyst immobilized on solid support such as activated carbon, graphene and carbon nanotubes in AOPs have been shown to be a viable and efficient method of PPCPs degradation. This is because, the performance of most WWTPs is limited since they were not designed to degrade toxic and recalcitrant PPCPs. This review highlight the occurrence, concentration of PPCPs in wastewater and the removal efficiency of heterogeneous photocatalysis of TiO
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immobilized on solid supports.
Pharmaceutical compounds (PCs) have globally emerged as a significant group of environmental contaminants due to the constant detection of their residues in the environment. The main scope of this ...review is to fill the void of information on the knowledge on the African occurrence of selected PCs in environmental matrices in comparison with those outside Africa and their respective toxic actions on both aquatic and non-aquatic biota through ecotoxicity bioassays. To achieve this objective, the study focused on commonly used and detected pharmaceutical drugs (residues). Based on the conducted literature survey, Africa has the highest levels of ciprofloxacin, sulfamethoxazole, lamivudine, acetaminophen, and diclofenac while Europe has the lowest of all these PC residues in her physical environments. For ecotoxicity bioassays, the few data available are mostly on individual groups of pharmaceuticals whereas there is sparsely available data on their combined forms.
Diisononyl phthalate (DINP) is a commonly used polyvinyl chloride product in industrial and consumer products with the ability to induce severe hepatotoxicity via oxidative stress. Piperine (PIPE) is ...an alkaloid from black pepper with proven antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. This study investigated whether piperine could promote hepatoprotection against DINP-induced hepatotoxicity in rats. Thirty-two rats were grouped into four treatment groups (n = 8/group): Control, 200 mg/kg/day DINP, 200 mg/kg/d DINP + 60 mg/kg/d PIPE and 60 mg/kg/d PIPE. Oral exposure to DINP induced oxidative damage in the liver via elevated nitric oxide, malondialdehyde, protein carbonyls, as well as depletion of hepatic antioxidants (reduced glutathione, superoxide dismutase, and catalase). These contributed to an increase in plasma levels of liver biomarkers (alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase, alkaline phosphatase and total bilirubin) and hepatic histopathological alterations. Our data suggest that PIPE alleviated the oxidative stress, depleted antioxidants, and elevated hepatic function biomarkers induced by DINP.
AfriSenti-SemEval Shared Task 12 of SemEval-2023. The task aims to perform monolingual sentiment classification (sub-task A) for 12 African languages, multilingual sentiment classification (sub-task ...B), and zero-shot sentiment classification (task C). For sub-task A, we conducted experiments using classical machine learning classifiers, Afro-centric language models, and language-specific models. For task B, we fine-tuned multilingual pre-trained language models that support many of the languages in the task. For task C, we used we make use of a parameter-efficient Adapter approach that leverages monolingual texts in the target language for effective zero-shot transfer. Our findings suggest that using pre-trained Afro-centric language models improves performance for low-resource African languages. We also ran experiments using adapters for zero-shot tasks, and the results suggest that we can obtain promising results by using adapters with a limited amount of resources.
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