The Australian living guidelines for the clinical care of people with COVID-19: What worked, what didn’t and why, a mixed methods process evaluation

Introduction The Australian National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce is producing living, evidence-based, national guidelines for treatment of people with COVID-19 which are updated each week. To continually improve the process and outputs of the Taskforce, and inform future living guideline development, we undertook a concurrent process evaluation examining Taskforce activities and experience of team members and stakeholders during the first 5 months of the project. Methods The mixed-methods process evaluation consisted of activity and progress audits, an online survey of all Taskforce participants; and semi-structured interviews with key contributors. Data were collected through five, prospective 4-weekly timepoints (beginning first week of May 2020) and three, fortnightly retrospective timepoints (March 23, April 6 and 20). We collected and analysed quantitative and qualitative data. Results An updated version of the guidelines was successfully published every week during the process evaluation. The Taskforce formed in March 2020, with a nominal start date of March 23. The first version of the guideline was published two weeks later and included 10 recommendations. By August 24, in the final round of the process evaluation, the team of 11 staff, working with seven guideline panels and over 200 health decision-makers, had developed 66 recommendations addressing 58 topics. The Taskforce website had received over 200,000 page views. Satisfaction with the work of the Taskforce remained very high (>90% extremely or somewhat satisfied) throughout. Several key strengths, challenges and methods questions for the work of the Taskforce were identified. Conclusions In just over 5 months of activity, the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce published 20 weekly updates to the evidence-based national treatment guidelines for COVID-19. This process evaluation identified several factors that enabled this achievement (e.g. an extant skill base in evidence review and convening), along with challenges that needed to be overcome (e.g. managing workloads, structure and governance) and methods questions (pace of updating, and thresholds for inclusion of evidence) which may be useful considerations for other living guidelines projects. An impact evaluation is also being conducted separately to examine awareness, acceptance and use of the guidelines.

A Review on process validation of solid dosage form

Objective: The purpose of this work is to perform a study on concurrent validation of levonorgestrel tablet BP 0.03mg that will deliver process validation approach as a quality assurance means. The process validation program will be investigated so that the plan will be designed to the character of the procedure under study. This can be performed by checking and controlling the various critical in process parameters. Method: The samples from the three consecutive batches of levonorgestrel tablet 0.03mg are collected at the different stages of the manufacturing from dispensing, mixing, granulation process, drying process, blending process, compression process. Each and every parameter are analyzed and tested as per the specifications and all the data are recorded. The obtained results must be within the specified limit range. Result: The results obtained from the evaluation of different parameters like bulk density, tapped density, friability, hardness, weight variation, and assay were found to be within specification limit range. Conclusion: The conclusion of the concurrent process validation of levonorgestrel tablet BP 0.03mg is based on the result of the validation data of three consecutive batches. It is concluded that the manufacturing process used for levonorgestrel consistently producing the stable product meeting it is predetermined specification and quality attributes. Keywords: Concurrent process validation, Process validation, Levonorgestrel, Critical process parameter.

An Exploratory Study on Optimal Iterative Design Schedules with the Consideration of Design Quality and Resource Constraints

The classical dependency structure matrix (DSM) can effectively deal with iterative schedules that are highly coupled and interdependent, such as the design process and the concurrent process. Classical DSM generally follows the assumption that the least iteration occurs to achieve the shortest completion time. Nevertheless, the assumption may not hold because tasks ought to be re-visited several times if the design qualities do not meet the requirements. This research proposed a novel iterative scheduling model that combines the classical DSM concept with quality equations. The quality equations were used to determine the number of tasks that ought to be re-visited for fulfilling quality requirements during the iterative design process. Moreover, resources for concurrent activities are generally limited in the real world. Resource allocation should be incorporated in scheduling to avoid the waste and shortage of resources on a design project. This research proposed a new iterative scheduling model based on the classical DSM to optimize the iterative activities’ structure in terms of minimizing completion time with the consideration of design quality under resource constraints. A practical design schedule was introduced to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed DSM algorithm.

CONCURRENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Concurrent development model which is also referred to as concurrent engineering, is an approach to design and develop products where different stages are executed simultaneously. The product development time and the time to market are decreased, leading to improved productivity and reduced costs. In this paper, we will discuss about the process involved in the development, the model of organization of the development process, and further we will focus on various attributes and elements of concurrent process development and we will also discover how it finds its application in today’s world.

RASSLE: Return Address Stack based Side-channel LEakage

Microarchitectural attacks on computing systems often stem from simple artefacts in the underlying architecture. In this paper, we focus on the Return Address Stack (RAS), a small hardware stack present in modern processors to reduce the branch miss penalty by storing the return addresses of each function call. The RAS is useful to handle specifically the branch predictions for the RET instructions which are not accurately predicted by the typical branch prediction units. In particular, we envisage a spy process who crafts an overflow condition in the RAS by filling it with arbitrary return addresses, and wrestles with a concurrent process to establish a timing side channel between them. We call this attack principle, RASSLE 1 (Return Address Stack based Side-channel Leakage), which an adversary can launch on modern processors by first reverse engineering the RAS using a generic methodology exploiting the established timing channel. Subsequently, we show three concrete attack scenarios: i) How a spy can establish a covert channel with another co-residing process? ii) How RASSLE can be utilized to determine the secret key of the P-384 curves in OpenSSL (v1.1.1 library)? iii) How an Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) secret key on P-256 curve of OpenSSL can be revealed using Lattice Attack on partially leaked nonces with the aid of RASSLE? In this attack, we show that the OpenSSL implementation of scalar multiplication on this curve has varying number of add-and-sub function calls, which depends on the secret scalar bits. We demonstrate through several experiments that the number of add-and-sub function calls can be used to template the secret bit, which can be picked up by the spy using the principles of RASSLE. Finally, we demonstrate a full end-to-end attack on OpenSSL ECDSA using curve parameters of curve P-256. In this part of our experiments with RASSLE, we abuse the deadline scheduler policy to attain perfect synchronization between the spy and victim, without any aid of induced synchronization from the victim code. This synchronization and timing leakage through RASSLE is sufficient to retrieve the Most Significant Bits (MSB) of the ephemeral nonces used while signature generation, from which we subsequently retrieve the secret signing key of the sender applying the Hidden Number Problem. 1RASSLE is a non-standard spelling for wrestle.

Correlation between Microstructure and Chemical Composition of Zinc Oxide Gas Sensor Layers and Their Gas-Sensitive Properties in Chlorine Atmosphere

In this article, we present results concerning the impact of structural and chemical properties of zinc oxide in various morphological forms and its gas-sensitive properties, tested in an atmosphere containing a very aggressive gas such as chlorine. The aim of this research was to understand the mechanism of chlorine detection using a resistive gas sensor with an active layer made of zinc oxide with a different structure and morphology. Two types of ZnO sensor layers obtained by two different technological methods were used in sensor construction. Their morphology, crystal structure, specific surface area, porosity, surface chemistry and structural defects were characterized, and then compared with gas-sensitive properties in a chlorine-containing atmosphere. To achieve this goal, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL) methods were used. The sensing properties of obtained active layers were tested by the temperature stimulated conductance method (TSC). We have noticed that their response in a chlorine atmosphere is not determined by the size of the specific surface or porosity. The obtained results showed that the structural defects of ZnO crystals play the most important role in chlorine detection. We demonstrated that Cl2 adsorption is a concurrent process to oxygen adsorption. Both of them occur on the same active species (oxygen vacancies). Their concentration is higher on the side planes of the zinc oxide crystal than the others. Additionally, ZnO sublimation process plays an important role in the chlorine detection mechanism.

Do cultural norms influence how teacher noticing is studied in different cultural contexts? A focus on expert norms of responding to students’ mathematical thinking

As an important component of teaching expertise, teacher noticing is gaining growing attention in our intercultural mathematics education community. However, it is likely that in many cases the researchers’ perspectives on what characterizes high instructional quality in mathematics classrooms shape what they expect teachers to notice. In particular, it is an open question how potentially different norms of instructional quality influence how teacher noticing is operationalized in East Asian and Western cultures. Consequently, in a first step, this bicultural research project on teacher noticing in Taiwan and Germany focuses on exploring the researchers’ frames of reference for investigating teacher noticing. In this paper, we thus propose a concurrent process for developing vignettes and eliciting corresponding expert norms as a prerequisite to investigating teacher noticing in a way that is sensitive to different cultural contexts. In this process, the research teams in both countries developed in parallel, text vignettes in which, from their perspective, a breach of a norm regarding a specific aspect of instructional quality was integrated. In an online expert survey, these vignettes were then presented to German and Taiwanese researchers in mathematics education (19 from each country) to investigate whether these experts recognize the integrated breach of a norm. This approach allows researchers to identify potentially different norms of instructional quality in mathematics classrooms. In particular, by means of a specific representation of practice, it became visible how expert norms of responding to students’ mathematical thinking can be different from a Taiwanese compared to a German perspective.