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Objective To investigate the dental health and caries related microflora of children with unilateral cleft lip and palate. Study Group Sixty children with unilateral cleft lip and palate and matched controls. Outcome Measures The decayed, missing, and filled teeth and surfaces in both the deciduous and permanent dentitions. The presence of developmental defects and plaque and gingivitis scores were also recorded. Plaque was collected from 25 of the children and their matched controls from three different sites, which were (1) the first approximal site distal to the cleft, (2) a contralateral anterior site, and (3) a remote site. It was cultured for Streptococcus mutansand lactobacilli. Plaque was collected from two sites in the matched controls. Results There was no significant difference in the caries, plaque, and gingivitis scores between the children with cleft palate and the controls. A greater number of enamel opacities were recorded in the control group, and there was a higher prevalence of enamel discoloration in the children with cleft lip and palate. There was no significant difference in the proportion of S. mutanso r lactobacilli at the cleft site, compared with the unaffected site in the study group, although there was an anterior-posterior gradient in the proportion of S. mutans. There was no significant association between the stagnation area at the cleft site and the bacteria associated with dental caries.

There was no significant difference in the caries, plaque, and gingivitis scores between the children with cleft palate and the controls. A greater number of enamel opacities were recorded in the control group, and there was a higher prevalence of enamel discoloration in the children with cleft lip and palate. There was no significant difference in the proportion of S. mutans or lactobacilli at the cleft site, compared with the unaffected site in the study group, although there was an anterior-posterior gradient in the proportion of S. mutans. There was no significant association between the stagnation area at the cleft site and the bacteria associated with dental caries.

The present research tested a mediation model where mindfulness is indirectly related to happiness through emotional stability and self-esteem. 302 undergraduate students from a university in India participated in the study. Data were collected using self-report questionnaires of mindfulness, emotional stability, self-esteem, and happiness. Structural Equation Modeling results showed that mindfulness was associated with happiness through the mediation of emotional stability and self-esteem. Emotional stability and self-esteem fully mediated the relationship of mindfulness with happiness. In addition, emotional stability partially mediated the relationship of mindfulness with self-esteem. The results of the study shed light on how emotional stability and self-esteem are associated with the process of mindfulness-happiness relationship. Based on the findings, implications and avenues for future research are discussed.

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As the Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining ground and becoming increasingly popular in smart city applications such as smart energy, smart buildings, smart factories, smart transportation, smart farming, and smart healthcare, the digital twin concept is evolving as complementary to its counter physical part. While an object is on the move, its operational and surrounding environmental parameters are collected by an edge computing device for local decision. A virtual replica of such object (digital twin) is based in the cloud computing platform and hosts the real-time physical object data, 2D and 3D models, historical data, and bill of materials (BOM) for further processing, analytics, and visualization. This paper proposes an end-to-end digital twin conceptual model that represents its complementary physical object from the ground to the cloud. The paper presents the proposed digital twin model’s multi-layers, namely, physical, communication, virtual space, data analytic and visualization, and application as well as the overlapping security layer. The hardware and software technologies that are used in building such a model will be explained in detail. A use case will be presented to show how the layers collect, exchange, and process the physical object data from the ground to the cloud.

Fog computing in 5G networks has played a significant role in increasing the number of users in a given network. However, Internet-of-Things (IoT) has driven system designers towards designing heterogeneous networks to support diverse demands (tasks with different priority values) with different latency and data rate constraints. In this paper, our goal is to maximize the total number of tasks served by a heterogeneous network, labeled task throughput, in the presence of data rate and latency constraints and device preferences regarding computational needs. Since our original problem is intractable, we propose an efficient solution based on graph-coloring techniques. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm using numerical results, real-world experiments on a laboratory testbed and comparing with the state-of-the-art algorithm.