Social Media Policies of Medical Colleges of Pakistan

Introduction: A total of 144 medical colleges are contributing to the country’s progress. Excessive usage of social media is a cause of not only the deterioration of physical and psychological health of medical students, but has also become a defining reason of procrastination and attaining less than ideal grades. Where most western institutes implement strict social media policies in medical schools, those in Pakistan are gravely lacking. Objective: The objective of this research implementation of social media in medical schools of Pakistan and then identify the need to develop such policies. Methods: We conducted qualitative research in which method of data collection was primarily focus group discussions (FGD) of a total of 40 participants from five different medical colleges of Pakistan. The participants included medical practitioners and medical students(n=20) who were further divided into four groups of five participants each. FGD was conducted online. Results: Content analysis revealed seven core themes as point of discussions to be highlighted. Almost all participants were grossly unaware of the importance of social media usage regulation and its implementation in medical schools. Conclusion: At the end of the FGD it was unanimously agreed upon that there must be a uniform and standard social media policy defined by the regulating bodies of medical schools. This research may further be conducted by including policymakers in the sample. KEYWORDS: Social media, policy, medical colleges.

Link to System L2s Interfacting for Advanced Receiver Strategies

The size and complexity of wireless communication networks have grown tremendously over the last few decades. Analysis of a wireless communication system requires computer simulations of the entire communication network, spanning multiple cells with a large number of base stations and mobile terminals. This normally involves complex physical layer computations in order to evaluate the receiver performance with the transmitted signals subjected to interference, multipath propagation, and shadowing. Link to system (L2S) interfacing reduces the computational complexity associated with the physical layer performance evaluation of multiple communication links by predicting the receiver behavior under different channel conditions using precalculated lookup tables (LUTs). This thesis investigates the L2S interfacing for different advanced receiver strategies using various nonlinear mapping functions. Different transmission scenarios such as single input single output, single input multiple output, and multiple input multiple output are considered. Besides using the conventional AWGN channel performance as the reference LUT, the mean of different channel frame error performance is also suggested as reference and the prediction accuracy of both have been compared. L2S framework has been implemented using the post detection signal to noise ratio (SNR) values as the received signal quality measure. The existing L2S work for SISO, linear MIMO systems has been extended to iterative and maximum likelihood receivers, where finding an accurate estimate of the received signal quality which is highly correlated to the receiver output is an open problem and needs to be fully explored. Algorithms for the post detection SNR value estimation for iterative and maximum likelihood receivers have been proposed and their prediction performance is validated for diverse communication channels. It is shown that, the post detection SNR value is an accurate measure of the quality of the received signal. However, for MIMO system with single stream encoding, the accurate estimation of the post detection SNR value for each individual link is not essential, but rather an accurate average value over multiple links is found to be sufficient.