First-year students undergo several transformations like the transition from high school to university schedules, teaching methods, and discipline specificities to social changes that come with meeting new colleagues or moving to other locations far from family and friends. The COVID-19 outbreak brought additional concerns and uncertainties once educational systems implemented distance learning schemes for public health management. Nevertheless, higher educational organizations preferred to implement hybrid approaches for student engagement motivation and high dropout rate avoidance. In Romania, such an educational system has been applied with caution. Since the pandemic needs to be understood as an opportunity for adaptation and education improvements, the purpose of the present paper is to uncover lessons learned and to develop a systematized model based on students’ perception regarding face-to-face, online and hybrid systems. For this reason, a grounded theory approach has been preferred. Thus, 149 Romanian students enrolled in the first year in engineering specialities with ages between 18–26 years both male (50.3%) and female (49.7%) have answered the research questions in an online environment due to pandemic restrictions. Based on the online asynchronous student interviews, 220 codes and a further 13 categories have been developed. After a pertinent analysis of the relationships between categories and relevant literature sorting, a theoretical model for the Romanian higher educational current pandemic situation has been proposed. The main face-to-face and online education characteristics are outlined, the hybrid approach becoming a bridge between the two systems. Management implications are outlined together with further research directions.

The CAD/CAM techniques, especially additive manufacturing such as 3D printing, constitute an ever-growing part of obtaining different dental appliances and restorations. Of these, provisional restorations are of frequent use in daily dental practice and are the object of this study. Masticatory and parafunctional forces determine flexure on these prostheses. This study investigates the influence of the printing angle and loading direction of the applied force on the flexure strength of two commercially available printable resins—Detax Freeprint Temp and Nextdent MFH Vertex dental. Ten rectangular beam specimens printed at the angle of 0, 45 and 90 degrees were fabricated of each of these materials, with an addition of 10 at 0 degrees for the investigation of the load direction. Three-point bending tests were performed in a universal testing machine. Flexure strength, strain at break and Young’s modulus were determined and a statistical analysis was performed on the obtained data. According to the statistical analysis, the flexural strength has a significance dependence with respect to degrees of orientation, for both investigated materials.

The exigencies of the permanently evolving markets require continuous adaptation of company offers. The development and continuous improvement of the quality and environment management systems would be to anticipate these developments and therefore fully satisfy the needs and expectations of each partner (customers, staff and other stakeholders) and also maintain competitive advantage. One of the possibilities of gaining operational excellence is implementing different quality improvement initiatives like Total Quality Management, ISO certification, Agile & Lean manufacturing etc. Real life demonstrated that these initiatives are neither time efficient nor profitable in terms of quality. Therefore introducing and implementing the Six Sigma methodology was proven to provide breakthrough quality improvements in a reasonable short time. This paper presents a creative solution for improving an assembly process in an automotive company in Romania by using Statistical Thinking and DMAIC Six Sigma methodology.

Given the increased prevalence of thyroid nodules in the general population (~50%), the real challenge resides in correctly recognizing the suspicious ones. This study proposes to compare four important Thyroid Imaging and Reporting Data Systems (TI-RADS) and evaluate the contribution of elastography and 4D Color Doppler assessment of vascularity in estimating the risk of malignancy. In the study, 133 nodules with histopathological examination were included. Of these, 35 (26.31%) proved to be malignant. All nodules were classified using the four selected systems and our proposed improved score. The American College of Radiology (ACR) and EU TI-RADS had good sensitivity (94.28%, 97.14%) and NPV (93.33%, 95.83%), but fairly poor specificity (31.81%, 23.46%) and PPV (35.48%, 31.19%), with an accuracy of 42.8% and 45.8%, respectively. Horvath TI-RADS had better accuracy of 66.9% and somewhat improved specificity (62.24%), but poorer sensitivity (80%). Russ’ French TI-RADS includes elastography in the risk assessment strategy. This classification proved superior in all aspects (Se: 91.42%, Sp:82.65%, NPV:96.42%, PPV:65.30%, and Acc of 84.96%). The mean strain ratio (SR) value for malignant lesions was 5.56, while the mean SR value for benign ones was significantly lower, 2.54 (p < 0.05). It also correlated well with the response variable: histopathological result (p < 0.001). Although, adding 4D vascularity to the French score generated a similar calculated accuracy and from a statistical point of view, the parameter itself proved beneficial for predicting the malignancy risk (p < 0.001) and may add important knowledge in uncertain situations. Advanced ultrasound techniques definitely improved the risk estimation and should be used more extensively.

In the present paper, we consider an incompressible magnetohydrodynamic flow of two-dimensional upper-convected Maxwell fluid over a porous stretching plate with suction and injection. The nonlinear partial differential equations are reduced to an ordinary differential equation by the similarity transformations and taking into account the boundary layer approximations. This equation is solved approximately by means of the optimal homotopy asymptotic method (OHAM). This approach is highly efficient and it controls the convergence of the approximate solutions. Different approximations to the solution are given, showing the exceptionally good agreement between the analytical and numerical solutions of the nonlinear problem. OHAM is very efficient in practice, ensuring a very rapid convergence of the solutions after only one iteration even though it does not need small or large parameters in the governing equation.