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.

Stabilization of Perturbed Nonholonomic Systems in Chained Foam

Many real-world systems exhibit velocity-dependent and/or acceleration-dependent constraints in their mathematical models. If these constraints are non-integrable then these systems are known as nonholonomic systems. Examples of such nonholonomic systems include hopping robots, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), car-like robots, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), surface vessels, vertical take-oand landing systems and many more. These systems are special as, in general, the stabilization problem of these systems cannot be solved by smooth (or continuous) static state-feedback and, thus, requires time-varying or discontinuous state-feedback control. In this research, we are consideringrst-, secondand higher-order nonholonomic systems that can be transformed into chained or power form which are canonical representations of these mechanical systems. The importance of stabilization problem of perturbed nonholonomic systems is further magni ed by the variety of real-world day-to-day applications. This research presents the solution to the stabilization problems for a selected class of perturbedrst-, second- and higher-order nonholonomic mechanical systems. The methodologies are based on adaptive integral sliding mode control (AISMC). For the perturbed nonholonomic system, the original system is transformed into perturbed chained form. Then this perturbed chained form system is further transformed into a special structure containing nominal part and some unknown terms through input transformation. The unknown terms are computed adaptively. Later the transformed system is stabilized using integral sliding mode control (ISMC). The stabilizing controller for the transformed system is constructed which consists of the nominal control plus some compensator control. The compensator controller and the adaptive laws are derived in such a way that derivative of a Lyapunov function becomes strictly negative. A similar approach is applied to the third-order nonholonomic system with a jerk constraint. The validity of the proposed controllers is ascertained by simulating the perturbedrst-, secondand higher-order nonholonomic systems in MATLAB / SIMULINK. The proposed control algorithms globally steer the whole system to the origin.