DIAMOND: A tool for monitoring the participation of students in online lectures.

The principle of traditional education has transformed fundamentally within the last few years. The growth of new computer and communication technologies has provided learners with access to a variety of quality online education. Many educational institutions have shifted partially or completely to distance learning and online lectures as their major instruction methods. With these new models, various difficulties related to classroom management and students' monitoring during online lectures face many instructors worldwide. In addition, educational administrators, such as school principals and university deans, find it very difficult to assure that students are participating and actively engaging during online lectures. In this paper, we present a framework that can be utilized to monitor online lectures and deduce important figures, such as the degree of students' involvement, the percentage of students who are participating, and the amount of engagement of each student during each lecture. The proposed system analyzes the recorded lectures and performs voice diarization on the audio signals to produce the required outputs. The system was tested during five online courses in multiple majors. The results illustrate the importance of monitoring the online lectures of distance learning courses to ensure satisfactory students' participation.

Evidence that the mechanism of antibody-catalysed hydrolysis of arylcarbamates can be determined by the structure of the immunogen used to elicit the catalytic antibody.

A kinetically homogeneous anti-phosphate catalytic antibody preparation was shown to catalyse the hydrolysis of a series of O-aryl N-methyl carbamates containing various substituents in the 4-position of the O-phenyl group. The specific nature of the antibody catalysis was demonstrated by the adherence of these reactions to the Michaelis-Menten equation, the complete inhibition by a hapten analogue, and the failure of the antibody to catalyse the hydrolysis of the 2-nitrophenyl analogue of the 4-nitrophenylcarbamate substrate. Hammett sigma-rho analysis suggests that both the non-catalysed and antibody-catalysed reactions proceed by mechanisms in which development of the aryloxyanion of the leaving group is well advanced in the transition state of the rate-determining step. This is probably the ElcB (elimination-addition) mechanism for the non-catalysed reaction, but for the antibody-catalysed reaction might be either ElcB or B(Ac)2 (addition-elimination), in which the elimination of the aryloxy group from the tetrahedral intermediate has become rate-determining. This result provides evidence of the dominance of recognition of phenolate ion character in the phosphate hapten in the elicitation process, and is discussed in connection with data from the literature that suggest a B(Ac)2 mechanism, with rate-determining formation of the tetrahedral intermediate for the hydrolysis of carbamate substrates catalysed by an antibody elicited by a phosphonamidate hapten in which phenolate anion character is minimized. The present paper contributes to the growing awareness that small differences in the structure of haptens can produce large differences in catalytic characteristics.

Evidence for 'lock and key' character in an anti-phosphonate hydrolytic antibody catalytic site augmented by non-reaction centre recognition: variation in substrate selectivity between an anti-phosphonate antibody, an anti-phosphate antibody and two hydrolytic enzymes.

The substrate selectivities of an anti-phosphonate and an anti-phosphate kinetically homogeneous polyclonal catalytic antibody preparation and two hydrolytic enzymes were compared by using hapten-analogous and truncated carbonate and ester substrates each containing a 4-nitrophenolate leaving group. Syntheses of the truncated substrates devoid of recognition features in the non-leaving group parts of the substrates are reported. The relatively high kinetic selectivity of the more active anti-phosphonate antibody preparation is considered to depend on a relatively rigid catalytic site with substantial reaction centre specificity together with other important recognition interactions with the extended non-leaving group part of the substrate. In contrast, the less catalytically active, more flexible anti-phosphate antibody exhibits much lower kinetic selectivity for the substrate reaction centre comparable with that of the hydrolytic enzymes with activity much less dependent on recognition interactions with the non-leaving group part of the substrate. The ways in which haptenic flexibility and IgG architecture might contribute to the differential kinetic selectivities are indicated.