Search results for: mobility features

Authors: Camilo Andres Agudelo-Velez, Lina María Martinez-Sanchez, Natalia Perilla-Hernandez, Maria De Los Angeles Rodriguez-Gazquez, Felipe Hernandez-Restrepo, Dayana Andrea Quintero-Moreno, Camilo Ruiz-Mejia, Isabel Cristina Ortiz-Trujillo, Monica Maria Zuluaga-Quintero

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Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is common condition, characterized by a persistent blockage of airflow, partially reversible and progressive, that represents 5% of total deaths around the world, and it is expected to become the third leading cause of death by 2030. Objective: To establish the clinical and epidemiological profile of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in a medical institution from the city of Medellin, Colombia. Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed, with a sample of 50 patients with a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in a private institution in Medellin, during 2015. The software SPSS vr. 20 was used for the statistical analysis. For the quantitative variables, averages, standard deviations, and maximun and minimun values were calculated, while for ordinal and nominal qualitative variables, proportions were estimated. Results: The average age was 73.5±9.3 years, 52% of the patients were women, 50% of them had retired, 46% ere married and 80% lived in the city of Medellín. The mean time of diagnosis was 7.8±1.3 years and 100% of the patients were treated at the internal medicine service. The most common clinical features were: 36% were classified as class D for the disease, 34% had a FEV1 <30%, 88% had a history of smoking and 52% had oxygen therapy at home. Conclusion: It was found that class D was the most common, and the majority of the patients had a history of smoking, indicating the need to strengthen promotion and prevention strategies in this regard.

Keywords: pulmonary disease, chronic obstructive, pulmonary medicine, oxygen inhalation therapy

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Authors: Andra-Iulia Ursa

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James Joyce employs several unconventional stylistic features in this landmark novel meant to experiment with language. The episode known as “Sirens” is entirely conceived around music and linguistic structures subordinated to sound. However, the aspiration to the condition of music is reflected throughout this entire literary work, as musical effects are echoed systematically. The numerous melodies scattered across the narrative play an important role in enhancing the thoughts and feelings that pass through the minds of the characters. Often the lyrics are distorted or interweaved with other words, preoccupations or memories, intensifying the stylistic effect. The Victorian song “Love’s old sweet song” is one of the most commonly referred to and meaningful musical allusions in Ulysses, becoming a leitmotif of infidelity. The lyrics of the song “M’appari”, from the opera “Martha”, are compared to an event from Molly and Bloom’s romantic history. Moreover, repeated phrases using words from “The bloom is on the rye” or “The croppy boy” serve as glances into the minds of the characters. Therefore, the central purpose of this study is to shed light on the way musical allusions flit through the episodes from the point of view of the stream of consciousness technique and to compare and analyse how these constructions are rendered into Romanian. Mircea Ivănescu, the single Romanian translator who succeeded in carrying out the translation of the entire ‘stylistic odyssey’, received both praises and disapprovals from the critics. This paper is not meant to call forth eventual flaws of the Romanian translation, but rather to elaborate the complexity of the task. Following an attentive examination and analysis of the two texts, from the point of view of form and meaning of the references to various songs, the conclusions of this study will be able to point out the intricacies of the process of translation.

Keywords: Joyce, melodious constructions, stream of consciousness, style, translation

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Authors: Renata Szewczyk, Beata Lachtara, Kinga Wieczorek, Jacek Osek

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Campylobacter is recognized as the main cause of bacterial gastrointestinal infections in Europe. A main source of the pathogen is poultry and poultry meat; however, other animals like pigs and cattle can also be reservoirs of the bacteria. Human Campylobacter infections are often self-limiting but in some cases, macrolide and fluoroquinolones have to be used. The aim of this study was to determine antimicrobial resistance patterns (AMR) of Campylobacter isolated from pig and cattle carcasses. Between July 2009 and December 2015, 735 swabs from pig (n = 457) and cattle (n = 278) carcasses were collected at Polish slaughterhouses. All samples were tested for the presence of Campylobacter by ISO 10272-1 and confirmed to species level using PCR. The antimicrobial susceptibility of Campylobacter isolates was determined by a microbroth dilution method with six antimicrobials: gentamicin (GEN), streptomycin (STR), erythromycin (ERY), nalidixic acid (NAL), ciprofloxacin (CIP) and tetracycline (TET). It was found that 167 of 735 samples (22.7%) were contaminated with Campylobacter. The vast majority of them were of pig origin (134; 80.2%), whereas for cattle carcasses Campylobacter was less prevalent (33; 19.8%). Among positive samples C. coli was predominant species (123; 73.7%) and it was isolated mainly from pig carcasses. The remaining isolates were identified as C. jejuni (44; 26.3%). Antimicrobial susceptibility indicated that 22 out of 167 Campylobacter (13.2%) were sensitive to all antimicrobials used. Fourteen of them were C. jejuni (63.6%; pig, n = 6; cattle, n = 8) and 8 was C. coli (36.4%; pig, n = 4; cattle, n = 4). Most of the Campylobacter isolates (145; 86.8%) were resistant to one or more antimicrobials (C. coli, n = 115; C. jejuni, n = 30). Comparing the AMR for Campylobacter species it was found that the most common pattern for C. jejuni was CIP-NAL-TET (9; 30.0%), whereas CIP-NAL-STR-TET was predominant among C. coli (47; 40.9%). Multiresistance, defined as resistance to three or more classes of antimicrobials, was found in 57 C. coli strains, mostly obtained from pig (52 isolates). On the other hand, only one C. jejuni strain, isolated from cattle, showed multiresistance with pattern CIP-NAL-STR-TET. Moreover, CIP-NAL-STR-TET was characteristic for most of multiresistant C. coli isolates (47; 82.5%). For the remaining C. coli the resistance patterns were CIP-ERY-NAL-TET (7 strains; 12.3%) and for one strain of each patterns: ERY-STR-TET, CIP-STR-TET, CIP-NAL-GEN-STR-TET. According to the present findings resistance to erythromycin was observed only in 11 C. coli (pig, n = 10; cattle, n = 1). In conclusion, the results of this study showed that pig carcasses may be a serious public health concern because of contamination with C. coli that might features multiresistance to antimicrobials.

Keywords: antimicrobial resistance, Campylobacter, carcasses, multi resistance

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Authors: M. A. Brown, K. Hugill, D. Meredith

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Since the establishment of midwifery, as a professional identity in its own right, in the early years of the 20th century, midwifery-led models of childbirth have prevailed in many parts of the world. However, in many locations midwives’ scope of practice remains underdeveloped or absent. In Qatar, all births take place in hospital and are under the professional jurisdiction of obstetricians, predominately supported by internationally trained nurse-midwives and obstetric nurses. The strategic vision for health services in Qatar endorsed a desire to provide women with the ‘Best Care Always’ and the introduction of midwifery was seen as a way to achieve this. In 2015 the process of recruiting postgraduate educated Clinical Midwife Specialists from international sources began. The midwives were brought together to initiate an in hospital and community service transformation plan. This plan set out a series of wide-ranging actions to transform maternity and neonatal services to make care safer and give women more health choices. Change in any organization is a complex and dynamic process. This is made even more complex when multifaceted professional and cross cultural factors are involved. This presentation reports upon the motivations and challenges that exist and the progress around introducing a multicultural midwifery model of childbirth care in the state of Qatar. The paper examines and reflects upon the drivers and unique features of childbirth in the country. Despite accomplishments, progress still needs to be made in order to fully implement sustainable changes to further improve care and ensure women and neonates get the ‘Best Care Always’. The progress within the transformation plan highlights how midwifery may coexist with competing models of maternity care to create an innovative, eclectic and culturally sensitive paradigm that can best serve women and neonatal health needs.

Keywords: culture, managing change, midwifery, neonatal, service transformation plan

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Authors: Elitsa Kolentsova, Dimitar Dimitrov, Vasko Idakiev, Tatyana Tabakova, Krasimir Ivanov

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Formaldehyde production by selective oxidation of methanol is an important industrial process. The main by-products in the waste gas are CO and dimethyl ether (DME). The idea of this study is to combine the advantages of both Cu-Mn and Cu-Co catalytic systems by obtaining a new mixed Cu-Mn-Co catalyst with high activity and selectivity at the simultaneous oxidation of CO, methanol, and DME. Two basic Cu-Mn samples with high activity were selected for further investigation: (i) manganese-rich Cu-Mn/γ–Al2O3 catalyst with Cu/Mn molar ratio 1:5 and (ii) copper-rich Cu-Mn/γ-Al2O3 catalyst with Cu/Mn molar ratio 2:1. Manganese in these samples was replaced by cobalt in the whole concentration region, and catalytic properties were determined. The results show a general trend of decreasing the activity toward DME oxidation and increasing the activity toward CO and methanol oxidation with the increase of cobalt up to 60% for both groups of catalyst. This general trend, however, contains specific features, depending on the composition of the catalyst and the nature of the oxidized gas. The catalytic activity of the sample with Cu/(Mn+Co) molar ratio of 2:1 is gradually changed with increasing the cobalt content. The activity of the sample with Cu/(Mn+Co) molar ratio of 1: 5 passes through a maximum at 60% manganese replacement by cobalt, probably due to the formation of highly dispersed Co-based spinel structures (Co3O4 and/or MnCo2O4). In conclusion, the present study demonstrates that the Cu-Mn-Co/γ–alumina supported catalysts have enhanced activity toward CO, methanol and DME oxidation. Cu/(Mn+Co) molar ratio 1:5 and Co/Mn molar ratio 1.5 in the active component can ensure successful oxidation of CO, CH3OH and DME. The active component of the mixed Cu-Mn-Co/γ–alumina catalysts consists of at least six compounds - CuO, Co3O4, MnO2, Cu1.5Mn1.5O4, MnCo2O4 and CuCo2O4, depending on the Cu/Mn/Co molar ratio. Chemical composition strongly influences catalytic properties, this effect being quite variable with regards to the different processes.

Keywords: Cu-Mn-Co catalysts, oxidation, carbon oxide, VOCs

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Authors: Pengfei Meng, Shuangcheng Jia, Qian Li

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We proposed a real-time high-precision semantic segmentation network based on a multi-resolution feature fusion module, the auxiliary feature extracting module, upsampling module, and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module. We designed a feature fusion structure, which is integrated with sufficient features of different resolutions. We also studied the effect of side-branch structure on the network and made discoveries. Based on the discoveries about the side-branch of the network structure, we used a side-branch auxiliary feature extraction layer in the network to improve the effectiveness of the network. We also designed upsampling module, which has better results than the original upsampling module. In addition, we also re-considered the locations and number of atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) modules and modified the network structure according to the experimental results to further improve the effectiveness of the network. The network presented in this paper takes the backbone network of Bisenetv2 as a basic network, based on which we constructed a network structure on which we made improvements. We named this network deep multiple-resolution bilateral networks for real-time, referred to as DMBR-Net. After experimental testing, our proposed DMBR-Net network achieved 81.2% mIoU at 119FPS on the Cityscapes validation dataset, 80.7% mIoU at 109FPS on the CamVid test dataset, 29.9% mIoU at 78FPS on the COCOStuff test dataset. Compared with all lightweight real-time semantic segmentation networks, our network achieves the highest accuracy at an appropriate speed.

Keywords: multi-resolution feature fusion, atrous convolutional, bilateral networks, pyramid pooling

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Authors: Mohamed Boullouz, Mohamed Louay Metougui

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Accurate modeling of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, crop growth, soil productivity, and biochemical processes is crucial considering escalating global concerns about climate change and the urgent need to improve agricultural sustainability. The application of the denitrification-disintegration (DNDC) model in the context of Morocco's unique agro-climate is thoroughly investigated in this study. Our main research hypothesis is that the DNDC model offers an effective and powerful tool for precisely simulating a wide range of significant parameters, including greenhouse gas emissions, crop growth, yield potential, and complex soil biogeochemical processes, all consistent with the intricate features of environmental Moroccan agriculture. In order to verify these hypotheses, a vast amount of field data covering Morocco's various agricultural regions and encompassing a range of soil types, climatic factors, and crop varieties had to be gathered. These experimental data sets will serve as the foundation for careful model calibration and subsequent validation, ensuring the accuracy of simulation results. In conclusion, the prospective research findings add to the global conversation on climate-resilient agricultural practices while encouraging the promotion of sustainable agricultural models in Morocco. A policy architect's and an agricultural actor's ability to make informed decisions that not only advance food security but also environmental stability may be strengthened by the impending recognition of the DNDC model as a potent simulation tool tailored to Moroccan conditions.

Keywords: greenhouse gas emissions, DNDC model, sustainable agriculture, Moroccan cropping systems

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Authors: Tooran Tavangar, Masoud Hosseinpoor, Jeffrey S. Marshall, Ammar Yahia, Kamal Henri Khayat

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In this study, a four-way coupled CFD-DEM methodology was used to simulate the behavior of concrete pipe flow. Fresh concrete, characterized as a biphasic suspension, features aggregates comprising the solid-suspended phase with diverse particle-size distributions (PSD) within a non-Newtonian cement paste/mortar matrix forming the liquid phase. The fluid phase was simulated using CFD, while the aggregates were modeled using DEM. Interaction forces between the fluid and solid particles were considered through CFD-DEM computations. To capture the viscoelastic characteristics of the suspending fluid, a bi-viscous approach was adopted, incorporating a critical shear rate proportional to the yield stress of the mortar. In total, three diphasic suspensions were simulated, each featuring distinct particle size distributions and a concentration of 10% for five subclasses of spherical particles ranging from 1 to 17 mm in a suspending fluid. The adopted bi-viscous approach successfully simulated both un-sheared (plug flow) and sheared zones. Furthermore, shear-induced particle migration (SIPM) was assessed by examining coefficients of variation in particle concentration across the pipe. These SIPM values were then compared with results obtained using CFD-DEM under the Newtonian assumption. The study highlighted the crucial role of yield stress in the mortar phase, revealing that lower yield stress values can lead to increased flow rates and higher SIPM across the pipe.

Keywords: computational fluid dynamics, concrete pumping, coupled CFD-DEM, discrete element method, plug flow, shear-induced particle migration.

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Authors: Venkat S. Somayajula

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Ground surface temperature history prediction model plays a vital role in determining standards for international nuclear waste management. International standards for borehole based nuclear waste disposal require paleoclimate cycle predictions on scale of a million forward years for the place of waste disposal. This research focuses on developing a paleoclimate cycle prediction model using Bayesian long-short term memory (LSTM) neural architecture operated on accumulated borehole temperature history data. Bayesian models have been previously used for paleoclimate cycle prediction based on Monte-Carlo weight method, but due to limitations pertaining model coupling with certain other prediction networks, Bayesian models in past couldn’t accommodate prediction cycle’s over 1000 years. LSTM has provided frontier to couple developed models with other prediction networks with ease. Paleoclimate cycle developed using this process will be trained on existing borehole data and then will be coupled to surface temperature history prediction networks which give endpoints for backpropagation of LSTM network and optimize the cycle of prediction for larger prediction time scales. Trained LSTM will be tested on past data for validation and then propagated for forward prediction of temperatures at borehole locations. This research will be beneficial for study pertaining to nuclear waste management, anthropological cycle predictions and geophysical features

Keywords: Bayesian long-short term memory neural network, borehole temperature, ground surface temperature history, paleoclimate cycle

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Authors: Tayyaba Azim, Bibi Amina

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The increase in the popularity of opinion mining with the rapid growth in the availability of social networks has attracted a lot of opportunities for research in the various domains of Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) using Artificial Intelligence approaches. The latest trend allows the public to actively use the internet for analyzing an individual’s opinion and explore the effectiveness of published facts. The main theme of this research is to account the public opinion on the most crucial and extensively discussed development projects, China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), considered as a game changer due to its promise of bringing economic prosperity to the region. So far, to the best of our knowledge, the theme of CPEC has not been analyzed for sentiment determination through the ML approach. This research aims to demonstrate the use of ML approaches to spontaneously analyze the public sentiment on Twitter tweets particularly about CPEC. Support Vector Machine SVM is used for classification task classifying tweets into positive, negative and neutral classes. Word2vec and TF-IDF features are used with the SVM model, a comparison of the trained model on manually labelled tweets and automatically generated lexicon is performed. The contributions of this work are: Development of a sentiment analysis system for public tweets on CPEC subject, construction of an automatic generation of the lexicon of public tweets on CPEC, different themes are identified among tweets and sentiments are assigned to each theme. It is worth noting that the applications of web mining that empower e-democracy by improving political transparency and public participation in decision making via social media have not been explored and practised in Pakistan region on CPEC yet.

Keywords: machine learning, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, support vector machine, Word2vec

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Authors: Oleg Redkin, Olga Bernikova

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Globalization and migrations have made cross-cultural contacts more frequent and intensive. Sometimes, these contacts may lead to misunderstanding between partners of communication and misinterpretations of the verbal messages that some researchers tend to consider as the 'clash of civilizations'. In most cases, reasons for that may be found in cultural and linguistic differences and hence misinterpretations of intentions and behavior. The current research examines factors of verbal and non-verbal communication that should be taken into consideration in verbal and non-verbal contacts. Language is one of the most important manifestations of the cultural code, and it is often considered as one of the special features of a civilization. The Arabic language, in particular, is commonly associated with Islam and the language and the Arab-Muslim civilization. It is one of the most important markers of self-identification for more than 200 million of native speakers. Arabic is the language of the Quran and hence the symbol of religious affiliation for more than one billion Muslims around the globe. Adequate interpretation of Arabic texts requires profound knowledge of its grammar, semantics of its vocabulary. Communicating sides who belong to different cultural groups are guided by different models of behavior and hierarchy of values, besides that the vocabulary each of them uses in the dialogue may convey different semantic realities and vary in connotations. In this context direct, literal translation in most cases cannot adequately convey the original meaning of the original message. Besides that peculiarities and diversities of the extralinguistic information, such as the body language, communicative etiquette, cultural background and religious affiliations may make the dialogue even more difficult. It is very likely that the so called 'clash of civilizations' in most cases is due to misinterpretation of counterpart's means of discourse such as language, cultural codes, and models of behavior rather than lies in basic contradictions between partners of communication. In the process of communication, one has to rely on universal values rather than focus on cultural or religious peculiarities, to take into account current linguistic and extralinguistic context.

Keywords: Arabic, civilization, discourse, language, linguistic

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Authors: Mudassir Ghafoor, Irsalan Arif, Shuaib Salamat

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This paper presents modeling and analysis of different intake bump (compression surface) configurations and comparison with an existing supersonic aircraft having bump intake configuration. Many successful aircraft models have shown that Diverter less Supersonic Inlet (DSI) as compared to conventional intake can reduce weight, complexity and also maintenance cost. The research is divided into two parts. In the first part, four different intake bumps are modeled for comparative analysis keeping in view the consistency of outer perimeter dimensions of fighter aircraft and various characteristics such as flow behavior, boundary layer diversion and pressure recovery are analyzed. In the second part, modeled bumps are integrated with intake duct for performance analysis and comparison with existing supersonic aircraft data is carried out. The bumps are named as uniform large (Config 1), uniform small (Config 2), uniform sharp (Config 3), non-uniform (Config 4) based on their geometric features. Analysis is carried out at different Mach Numbers to analyze flow behavior in subsonic and supersonic regime. Flow behavior, boundary layer diversion and Pressure recovery are examined for each bump characteristics, and comparative study is carried out. The analysis reveals that at subsonic speed, Config 1 and Config 2 give similar pressure recoveries as diverterless supersonic intake, but difference in pressure recoveries becomes significant at supersonic speed. It was concluded from research that Config 1 gives better results as compared to Config 3. Also, higher amplitude (Config 1) is preferred over lower (Config 2 and 4). It was observed that maximum height of bump is preferred to be placed near cowl lip of intake duct.

Keywords: bump intake, boundary layer, computational fluid dynamics, diverter-less supersonic inlet

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Authors: Alexandre Faure, Yoko Mizokami, éRic Dinet

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These recent years, the potential of light in assisting visually impaired people in their indoor mobility has been demonstrated by different studies. Implementing smart lighting systems for selective visual enhancement, especially designed for low-vision people, is an approach that breaks with the existing visual aids. The appearance of the surface of an object is significantly influenced by the lighting conditions and the constituent materials of the objects. Appearance of objects may appear to be different from expectation. Therefore, lighting conditions lead to an important part of accurate material recognition. The main objective of this work was to investigate the effect of the spatial distribution of light on object identification in the context of low vision. The purpose was to determine whether and what specific lighting approaches should be preferred for visually impaired people. A psychophysical experiment was designed to study the ability of individuals to identify the smallest cube of a pair under different lighting diffusion conditions. Participants were divided into two distinct groups: a reference group of observers with normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity and a test group, in which observers were required to wear visual impairment simulation glasses. All participants were presented with pairs of cubes in a "miniature room" and were instructed to estimate the relative size of the two cubes. The miniature room replicates real-life settings, adorned with decorations and separated from external light sources by black curtains. The correlated color temperature was set to 6000 K, and the horizontal illuminance at the object level at approximately 240 lux. The objects presented for comparison consisted of 11 white cubes and 11 black cubes of different sizes manufactured with a 3D printer. Participants were seated 60 cm away from the objects. Two different levels of light diffuseness were implemented. After receiving instructions, participants were asked to judge whether the two presented cubes were the same size or if one was smaller. They provided one of five possible answers: "Left one is smaller," "Left one is smaller but unsure," "Same size," "Right one is smaller," or "Right one is smaller but unsure.". The method of constant stimuli was used, presenting stimulus pairs in a random order to prevent learning and expectation biases. Each pair consisted of a comparison stimulus and a reference cube. A psychometric function was constructed to link stimulus value with the frequency of correct detection, aiming to determine the 50% correct detection threshold. Collected data were analyzed through graphs illustrating participants' responses to stimuli, with accuracy increasing as the size difference between cubes grew. Statistical analyses, including 2-way ANOVA tests, showed that light diffuseness had no significant impact on the difference threshold, whereas object color had a significant influence in low vision scenarios. The first results and trends derived from this pilot experiment clearly and strongly suggest that future investigations could explore extreme diffusion conditions to comprehensively assess the impact of diffusion on object identification. For example, the first findings related to light diffuseness may be attributed to the range of manipulation, emphasizing the need to explore how other lighting-related factors interact with diffuseness.

Keywords: Lighting, Low Vision, Visual Aid, Object Identification, Psychophysical Experiment

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Authors: Ronahlee Asuncion

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The nature of their work and employment relationship make domestic workers easy prey to abuse, maltreatment, and exploitation. Considering their plight, this research was conceptualized and examined the: a) level of awareness of Filipino domestic workers on occupational safety and health (OSH); b) their issues/problems/concerns on OSH; c) their intervention strategies at work to address OSH related issues/problems/concerns; d) issues/problems/concerns of government, employers, and non-government organizations with regard to implementation of OSH to Filipino domestic workers; e) the role of government, employers and non-government organizations to help Filipino domestic workers address OSH related issues/problems/concerns; and f) the necessary policy amendments/initiatives/programs to address OSH related issues/problems/concerns of Filipino domestic workers. The study conducted a survey using non-probability sampling, two focus group discussions, two group interviews, and fourteen face-to-face interviews. These were further supplemented with an email correspondence to a key informant based in another country. Books, journals, magazines, and relevant websites further substantiated and enriched data of the research. Findings of the study point to the fact that domestic workers have low level of awareness on OSH because of poor information drive, fragmented implementation of the Domestic Workers Act, inactive campaign at the barangay level, weakened advocacy for domestic workers, absence of law on OSH for domestic workers, and generally low safety culture in the country among others. Filipino domestic workers suffer from insufficient rest, long hours of work, heavy workload, occupational stress, poor accommodation, insufficient hours of sleep, deprivation of day off, accidents and injuries such as cuts, burns, slipping, stumbling, electrical grounding, and fire, verbal, physical and sexual abuses, lack of medical assistance, none provision of personal protective equipment (PPE), absence of knowledge on the proper way of lifting, working at heights, and insufficient food provision. They also suffer from psychological problems because of separation from one’s family, limited mobility in the household where they work, injuries and accidents from using advanced home appliances and taking care of pets, low self-esteem, ergonomic problems, the need to adjust to all household members who have various needs and demands, inability to voice their complaints, drudgery of work, and emotional stress. With regard to illness or health problems, they commonly experience leg pains, back pains, and headaches. In the absence of intervention programs like those offered in the formal employment set up, domestic workers resort to praying, turn to family, relatives and friends for social and emotional support, connect with them through social media like Facebook which also serve as a means of entertainment to them, talk to their employer, and just try to be optimistic about their situation. Promoting OSH for domestic workers is very challenging and complicated because of interrelated factors such as cultural, knowledge, attitudinal, relational, social, resource, economic, political, institutional and legal problems. This complexity necessitates using a holistic and integrated approach as this is not a problem requiring simple solutions. With this recognition comes the full understanding that its success involves the action and cooperation of all duty bearers in attaining decent work for domestic workers.

Keywords: decent work, Filipino domestic workers, occupational safety and health, working conditions

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Authors: Bülent Kantar, Numan Ünaldı

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This paper presents a new method which includes robust and invisible digital watermarking on images that is colored. Colored images are used as watermark. Frequency region is used for digital watermarking. Discrete wavelet transform and discrete stationary wavelet transform are used for frequency region transformation. Low, medium and high frequency coefficients are obtained by applying the two-level discrete wavelet transform to the original image. Low frequency coefficients are obtained by applying one level discrete stationary wavelet transform separately to all frequency coefficient of the two-level discrete wavelet transformation of the original image. For every low frequency coefficient obtained from one level discrete stationary wavelet transformation, watermarks are added. Watermarks are added to all frequency coefficients of two-level discrete wavelet transform. Totally, four watermarks are added to original image. In order to get back the watermark, the original and watermarked images are applied with two-level discrete wavelet transform and one level discrete stationary wavelet transform. The watermark is obtained from difference of the discrete stationary wavelet transform of the low frequency coefficients. A total of four watermarks are obtained from all frequency of two-level discrete wavelet transform. Obtained watermark results are compared with real watermark results, and a similarity result is obtained. A watermark is obtained from the highest similarity values. Proposed methods of watermarking are tested against attacks of the geometric and image processing. The results show that proposed watermarking method is robust and invisible. All features of frequencies of two level discrete wavelet transform watermarking are combined to get back the watermark from the watermarked image. Watermarks have been added to the image by converting the binary image. These operations provide us with better results in getting back the watermark from watermarked image by attacking of the geometric and image processing.

Keywords: watermarking, DWT, DSWT, copy right protection, RGB

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Authors: Guilherme Giacomini, Ana Luiza Menegatti Pavan, Allan Felipe Fattori Alves, Marcela de Oliveira, Fernando Antonio Bacchim Neto, José Ricardo de Arruda Miranda, Seizo Yamashita, Diana Rodrigues de Pina

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The maxillary sinus (MS), part of the paranasal sinus complex, is one of the most enigmatic structures in modern humans. The literature has suggested that MSs function as olfaction accessories, to heat or humidify inspired air, for thermoregulation, to impart resonance to the voice and others. Thus, the real function of the MS is still uncertain. Furthermore, the MS anatomy is complex and varies from person to person. Many diseases may affect the development process of sinuses. The incidence of rhinosinusitis and other pathoses in the MS is comparatively high, so, volume analysis has clinical value. Providing volume values for MS could be helpful in evaluating the presence of any abnormality and could be used for treatment planning and evaluation of the outcome. The computed tomography (CT) has allowed a more exact assessment of this structure, which enables a quantitative analysis. However, this is not always possible in the clinical routine, and if possible, it involves much effort and/or time. Therefore, it is necessary to have a convenient, robust, and practical tool correlated with the MS volume, allowing clinical applicability. Nowadays, the available methods for MS segmentation are manual or semi-automatic. Additionally, manual methods present inter and intraindividual variability. Thus, the aim of this study was to develop an automatic tool to quantity the MS volume in CT scans of paranasal sinuses. This study was developed with ethical approval from the authors’ institutions and national review panels. The research involved 30 retrospective exams of University Hospital, Botucatu Medical School, São Paulo State University, Brazil. The tool for automatic MS quantification, developed in Matlab®, uses a hybrid method, combining different image processing techniques. For MS detection, the algorithm uses a Support Vector Machine (SVM), by features such as pixel value, spatial distribution, shape and others. The detected pixels are used as seed point for a region growing (RG) segmentation. Then, morphological operators are applied to reduce false-positive pixels, improving the segmentation accuracy. These steps are applied in all slices of CT exam, obtaining the MS volume. To evaluate the accuracy of the developed tool, the automatic method was compared with manual segmentation realized by an experienced radiologist. For comparison, we used Bland-Altman statistics, linear regression, and Jaccard similarity coefficient. From the statistical analyses for the comparison between both methods, the linear regression showed a strong association and low dispersion between variables. The Bland–Altman analyses showed no significant differences between the analyzed methods. The Jaccard similarity coefficient was > 0.90 in all exams. In conclusion, the developed tool to quantify MS volume proved to be robust, fast, and efficient, when compared with manual segmentation. Furthermore, it avoids the intra and inter-observer variations caused by manual and semi-automatic methods. As future work, the tool will be applied in clinical practice. Thus, it may be useful in the diagnosis and treatment determination of MS diseases. Providing volume values for MS could be helpful in evaluating the presence of any abnormality and could be used for treatment planning and evaluation of the outcome. The computed tomography (CT) has allowed a more exact assessment of this structure which enables a quantitative analysis. However, this is not always possible in the clinical routine, and if possible, it involves much effort and/or time. Therefore, it is necessary to have a convenient, robust and practical tool correlated with the MS volume, allowing clinical applicability. Nowadays, the available methods for MS segmentation are manual or semi-automatic. Additionally, manual methods present inter and intraindividual variability. Thus, the aim of this study was to develop an automatic tool to quantity the MS volume in CT scans of paranasal sinuses. This study was developed with ethical approval from the authors’ institutions and national review panels. The research involved 30 retrospective exams of University Hospital, Botucatu Medical School, São Paulo State University, Brazil. The tool for automatic MS quantification, developed in Matlab®, uses a hybrid method, combining different image processing techniques. For MS detection, the algorithm uses a Support Vector Machine (SVM), by features such as pixel value, spatial distribution, shape and others. The detected pixels are used as seed point for a region growing (RG) segmentation. Then, morphological operators are applied to reduce false-positive pixels, improving the segmentation accuracy. These steps are applied in all slices of CT exam, obtaining the MS volume. To evaluate the accuracy of the developed tool, the automatic method was compared with manual segmentation realized by an experienced radiologist. For comparison, we used Bland-Altman statistics, linear regression and Jaccard similarity coefficient. From the statistical analyses for the comparison between both methods, the linear regression showed a strong association and low dispersion between variables. The Bland–Altman analyses showed no significant differences between the analyzed methods. The Jaccard similarity coefficient was > 0.90 in all exams. In conclusion, the developed tool to automatically quantify MS volume proved to be robust, fast and efficient, when compared with manual segmentation. Furthermore, it avoids the intra and inter-observer variations caused by manual and semi-automatic methods. As future work, the tool will be applied in clinical practice. Thus, it may be useful in the diagnosis and treatment determination of MS diseases.

Keywords: maxillary sinus, support vector machine, region growing, volume quantification

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Authors: Xianping Du, Runlu Miao, Guanjun Zhang, Libo Cao, Feng Zhu

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Current vehicle safety standards and human body injury criteria were established based on the biomechanical response of Euro-American human body, without considering the difference in the body anthropometry and injury characteristics among different races, particularly the East Asian people with smaller body size. Absence of such race specific design considerations will negatively influence the protective performance of safety products for these populations, and weaken the accuracy of injury thresholds derived. To resolve these issues, in this study, we aim to develop a race specific finite element model to simulate the impact response of the lower extremity of a 50th percentile East Asian (Chinese) male. The model was built based on medical images for the leg of an average size Chinese male and slightly adjusted based on the statistical data. The model includes detailed anatomic features and is able to simulate the muscle active force. Thirteen biomechanical tests available in the literature were used to validate its biofidelity. Using the validated model, a pedestrian-car impact accident taking place in China was re-constructed computationally. The results show that the newly developed lower leg model has a good performance in predicting dynamic response and tibia fracture pattern. An additional comparison on the fracture tolerance of the East Asian and Euro-American lower limb suggests that the current injury criterion underestimates the degree of injury of East Asian human body.

Keywords: lower limb, East Asian body characteristics, traffic accident reconstruction, finite element analysis, injury tolerance

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Authors: Getaneh Berie Tarekegn

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A precise localization system is crucial for many artificial intelligence Internet of Things (AI-IoT) applications in the era of smart cities. Their applications include traffic monitoring, emergency alarming, environmental monitoring, location-based advertising, intelligent transportation, and smart health care. The most common method for providing continuous positioning services in outdoor environments is by using a global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Due to nonline-of-sight, multipath, and weather conditions, GNSS systems do not perform well in dense urban, urban, and suburban areas.This paper proposes a generative AI-based positioning scheme for large-scale wireless settings using fingerprinting techniques. In this article, we presented a semi-supervised deep convolutional generative adversarial network (S-DCGAN)-based radio map construction method for real-time device localization. It also employed a reliable signal fingerprint feature extraction method with t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), which extracts dominant features while eliminating noise from hybrid WLAN and long-term evolution (LTE) fingerprints. The proposed scheme reduced the workload of site surveying required to build the fingerprint database by up to 78.5% and significantly improved positioning accuracy. The results show that the average positioning error of GAILoc is less than 0.39 m, and more than 90% of the errors are less than 0.82 m. According to numerical results, SRCLoc improves positioning performance and reduces radio map construction costs significantly compared to traditional methods.

Keywords: location-aware services, feature extraction technique, generative adversarial network, long short-term memory, support vector machine

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Authors: Mansoor Soomro

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The evolution of power electronic equipment has been pivotal in making industrial processes productive, efficient and safe. Despite its attractive features, it has been due to nonlinear loads which make it vulnerable to power quality conditions. Harmonics is one of the power quality problem in which the harmonic frequency is integral multiple of supply frequency. Therefore, the supply voltage and supply frequency do not last within their tolerable limits. As a result, distorted current and voltage waveform may appear. Attributes of low power quality confirm that an electrical device or equipment is likely to malfunction, fail promptly or unable to operate under all applied conditions. The electrical power system is designed for delivering power reliably, namely maximizing power availability to customers. However, power quality events are largely untracked, and as a result, can take out a process as many as 20 to 30 times a year, costing utilities, customers and suppliers of load equipment, a loss of millions of dollars. The ill effects of current harmonics reduce system efficiency, cause overheating of connected equipment, result increase in electrical power and air conditioning costs. With the passage of time and the rapid growth of power electronic converters has highlighted the damages of current harmonics in the electrical power system. Therefore, it has become essential to address the bad influence of current harmonics while planning any suitable changes in the electrical installations. In this paper, an effort has been made to mitigate the effects of dominant 3rd order current harmonics. Passive filtering technique with six pulse multiplication converter has been employed to mitigate them. Since, the standards of power quality are to maintain the supply voltage and supply current within certain prescribed standard limits. For this purpose, the obtained results are validated as per specifications of IEEE 519-1992 and IEEE 519-2014 performance standards.

Keywords: current harmonics, power quality, passive filters, power electronic converters

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Authors: Justin Nwabanne, Sam Omenyi, Jeremiah Chukwuneke

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This work presents structural nonlinear static analysis of a horizontal taut cable using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) method. The FEA was performed analytically to determine the tensions at each nodal point and subsequently, performed based on finite element displacement method computationally using the FEA software, ANSYS 14.0 to determine their behaviour under the influence of aerodynamic forces imposed on the cable. The convergence procedure is adapted into the method to prevent excessive displacements through the computations. The work compared the two FEA cases by examining the effectiveness of the analytical model in describing the response with few degrees of freedom and the ability of the nonlinear finite element procedure adopted to capture the complex features of cable dynamics with reference to the aerodynamic external influence. Results obtained from this work explain that the analytic FEM results without aerodynamic influence show a parabolic response with an optimum deflection at nodal points 12 and 13 with the cable weight at nodes 12 and 13 having the value -1.002936N while for the cable tension shows an optimum deflection value for nodes 12 and 13 at -189396.97kg/km. The maximum displacement for the cable system was obtained from ANSYS 14.0 as 4483.83 mm for X, Y and Z components of displacements at node number 2 while the maximum displacement obtained is 4218.75mm for all the directional components. The dynamic behaviour of a taut cable investigated has application in a typical power transmission line. Aerodynamic influences on the cables were considered using FEA approach by employing ANSYS 14.0 showed a complex modal behaviour as expected.

Keywords: aerodynamics, cable tension and weight, finite element analysis, nodal, non-linear model, optimum deflection, suspended cable, transmission line

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Authors: Saeeda Batool, Ather Maqsood Ahmed

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This study investigates the impact of public healthcare facilities and socio-economic circumstances on the status of child health in Pakistan. The complete analysis is carried out in correspondence with fourth and sixth millennium development goals. Further, the health variables chosen are also inherited from targeted indicators of the mentioned goals (MDGs). Trends in the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) for both health inequalities and coverage are analyzed using the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PLSM) data set for 2001-02 to 2012-13 at the national and provincial level. To reveal the relative importance of each circumstance in achieving the targeted values for child health, Shorrocks decomposition is applied on HOI. The annual point average growth rate of HOI is used to simulate the time period for the achievement of target set by MDGs and universal access also. The results indicate an improvement in HOI for a reduction in child mortality rates from 52.1% in 2001-02 to 67.3% in 2012-13, which confirms the availability of healthcare opportunities to a larger segment of society. Similarly, immunization against measles and other diseases such as Diphtheria, Polio, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG), and Hepatitis has also registered an improvement from 51.6% to 69.9% during the period of study at the national level. On a positive note, no gender disparity has been found for child health indicators and that health outcome is mostly affected by the parental and geographical features and availability of health infrastructure. However, the study finds that this achievement has been uneven across provinces. Pakistan is not only lagging behind in achieving its health goals, disappointingly with the current rate of health care provision, but it will take many additional years to achieve its targets.

Keywords: socio-economic circumstances, unmet MDGs, public healthcare services, child and infant mortality

Procedia PDF Downloads 229

Authors: Aymen Laadhari

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During the last decade, an increasing number of contributions have been made in the fields of scientific computing and numerical methodologies applied to the study of the hemodynamics in the heart. In contrast, the numerical aspects concerning the interaction of pulsatile blood flow with highly deformable thin leaflets have been much less explored. This coupled problem remains extremely challenging and numerical difficulties include e.g. the resolution of full Fluid-Structure Interaction problem with large deformations of extremely thin leaflets, substantial mesh deformations, high transvalvular pressure discontinuities, contact between leaflets. Although the Lagrangian description of the structural motion and strain measures is naturally used, many numerical complexities can arise when studying large deformations of thin structures. Eulerian approaches represent a promising alternative to readily model large deformations and handle contact issues. We present a fully Eulerian finite element methodology tailored for the simulation of pulsatile blood flow in the aorta and sinus of Valsalva interacting with highly deformable thin leaflets. Our method enables to use a fluid solver on a fixed mesh, whilst being able to easily model the mechanical properties of the valve. We introduce a semi-implicit time integration scheme based on a consistent NewtonRaphson linearization. A variant of the classical Newton method is introduced and guarantees a third-order convergence. High-fidelity computational geometries are built and simulations are performed under physiological conditions. We address in detail the main features of the proposed method, and we report several experiments with the aim of illustrating its accuracy and efficiency.

Keywords: eulerian, level set, newton, valve

Procedia PDF Downloads 278

Authors: Zainab Mutlaq Ibrahim, Mohamed Bader-El-Den, Mihaela Cocea

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Students' textual feedback can hold unique patterns and useful information about learning process, it can hold information about advantages and disadvantages of teaching methods, assessment components, facilities, and other aspects of teaching. The results of analysing such a feedback can form a key point for institutions’ decision makers to advance and update their systems accordingly. This paper proposes a data mining framework for analysing end of unit general textual feedback using part of speech feature (PoS) with four machine learning algorithms: support vector machines, decision tree, random forest, and naive bays. The proposed framework has two tasks: first, to use the above algorithms to build an optimal model that automatically classifies the whole data set into two subsets, one subset is tailored to assessment practices (assessment related), and the other one is the non-assessment related data. Second task to use the same algorithms to build an optimal model for whole data set, and the new data subsets to automatically detect their sentiment. The significance of this paper is to compare the performance of the above four algorithms using part of speech feature to the performance of the same algorithms using n-grams feature. The paper follows Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDDM) framework to construct the classification and sentiment analysis models, which is understanding the assessment domain, cleaning and pre-processing the data set, selecting and running the data mining algorithm, interpreting mined patterns, and consolidating the discovered knowledge. The results of this paper experiments show that both models which used both features performed very well regarding first task. But regarding the second task, models that used part of speech feature has underperformed in comparison with models that used unigrams and bigrams.

Keywords: assessment, part of speech, sentiment analysis, student feedback

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Authors: Safieh Javadinejad

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In order to make well-informed decisions respecting long-term system planning, resource managers and policy creators necessitate to comprehend the interconnections among energy and water utilization and manufacture—and also the energy-water nexus. Planning and assessment issues contain the enhancement of strategies for declining the water and energy system’s vulnerabilities to climate alteration with also emissions of decreasing greenhouse gas. In order to deliver beneficial decision support for climate adjustment policy and planning, understanding the regionally-specific features of the energy-water nexus, and the history-future of the water and energy source systems serving is essential. It will be helpful for decision makers understand the nature of current water-energy system conditions and capacity for adaptation plans for future. This research shows an integrated hydrology/energy modeling platform which is able to extend water-energy examines based on a detailed illustration of local circumstances. The modeling links the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) and the Long Range Energy Alternatives Planning (LEAP) system to create full picture of water-energy processes. This will allow water managers and policy-decision makers to simply understand links between energy system improvements and hydrological processing and realize how future climate change will effect on water-energy systems. The Zayandeh Rud river basin in Iran is selected as a case study to show the results and application of the analysis. This region is known as an area with large integration of both the electric power and water sectors. The linkages between water, energy and climate change and possible adaptation strategies are described along with early insights from applications of the integration modeling system.

Keywords: climate impacts, hydrology, water systems, adaptation planning, electricity, integrated modeling

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Authors: Ruby Jean Hornsby

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In our rapidly advancing techno-moral world, human-robot relationships are increasingly becoming a part of intimate human life. Indeed, social robots - that is, autonomous or semi-autonomous embodied artificial agents that generally possess human or animal-like qualities (such as responding to environmental stimuli, communicating, learning, performing human tasks, and making autonomous decisions) - have been designed to function as human friends. In light of such advances, immediate philosophical scrutiny is imperative in order to examine the extent to which human-robot interactions constitute genuine friendship and therefore contribute towards the good human life. Aristotle's conception of friendship is philosophically illuminating and sufficiently broad in scope to guide such analysis. On his account, it is necessary (though not sufficient) that for a friendship to exist between two agents - A and B - both agents must have a mutual love for one another. Aristotle claims that A loves B if: Condition 1: A desires those apparent good (qua pleasant, useful, or virtuous) properties attributable to B, and Condition 2: A has goodwill (wishes what is best) for B. This paper argues that human-robot interaction can (and does) successfully meet both conditions; as such, it demonstrates that robots and humans can reciprocally love one another. It will argue for this position by first justifying the claim that a human can desire apparent good features attributable to a robot (i.e., by taking them to be pleasant and/or useful) and outlining how it is that a human can wish a robot well in light of that robot's (quasi-) interests. Next, the paper will argue that a robot can (quasi-)desire certain properties that are attributable to a human before elucidating how it is possible for a robot to act in the interests of a human. Accordingly, this paper will conclude that it is already the case that humans can formulate relationships with robots that involve reciprocated love. This is significant because it suggests that social robots are candidates for human friendship and can therefore contribute toward flourishing human futures.

Keywords: ancient philosophy, friendship, inter-disciplinary applied ethics, love, social robotics

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Authors: Camilo Andrés Agudelo Vélez, Lina María Martínez Sánchez, Isabel Cristina Ortiz Trujillo, Evert Armando Jiménez Cotes, Natalia Perilla Hernández, María de los Ángeles Rodríguez Gázquez, Daniel Duque Restrepo, Felipe Hernández Restrepo, Dayana Andrea Quintero Moreno, Juan José Builes Gómez, Camilo Ruiz Mejía, Ana Lucia Arango Gómez

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Preeclampsia is a clinical complication during pregnancy with high incidence in Colombia; therefore, it is important to evaluate the influence of external conditions and medical interventions, in order to promote measures that encourage improvements in the quality of life. Objective: Determine clinical and sociodemographic variables in women with preeclampsia. Methods: This cross-sectional study enrolled 50 patients with the diagnosis of preeclampsia, from a private institution in Medellin, during 2015. We used the software SPSS ver.20 for statistical analysis. For the qualitative variables, we calculated the mean and standard deviation, while, for ordinal and nominal levels of quantitative variables, ratios were estimated. Results: The average age was 26.8±5.9 years. The predominant characteristics were socioeconomic stratum 2 (48%), students (55%), mixed race (46%) and middle school as level of education (38%). As for clinical features, 72% of the cases were mild preeclampsia, and 22% were severe forms. The most common clinical manifestations were edema (46%), headache (62%), and proteinuria (55%). As for the Gyneco-obstetric history, 8% reported previous episodes of this disease and it was the first pregnancy for 60% of the patients. Conclusions: Preeclampsia is a frequent condition in young women; on the other hand, headache and edema were the most common reasons for consultation, therefore, doctors need to be aware of these symptoms in pregnant women.

Keywords: pre-eclampsia, hypertension, pregnancy complications, pregnancy, abdominal, edema

Procedia PDF Downloads 364

Authors: Gianni Blasi, Daniele Perrone, Maria Antonietta Aiello

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The seismic vulnerability of non-structural components is nowadays recognized to be a key issue in performance-based earthquake engineering. Recent loss estimation studies, as well as the damage observed during past earthquakes, evidenced how non-structural damage represents the highest rate of economic loss in a building and can be in many cases crucial in a life-safety view during the post-earthquake emergency. The procedures developed to evaluate the seismic demand on non-structural components have been constantly improved and recent studies demonstrated how the existing formulations provided by main Standards generally ignore features which have a sensible influence on the definition of the seismic acceleration/displacements subjecting non-structural components. Since the influence of the infills on the dynamic behaviour of RC structures has already been evidenced by many authors, it is worth to be noted that the evaluation of the seismic demand on non-structural components should consider the presence of the infills as well as their mechanical properties. This study focuses on the evaluation of time-history floor acceleration in RC buildings; which is a useful mean to perform seismic vulnerability analyses of non-structural components through the well-known cascade method. Dynamic analyses are performed on an 8-storey RC frame, taking into account the presence of the infills; the influence of the elastic modulus of the panel on the results is investigated as well as the presence of openings. Floor accelerations obtained from the analyses are used to evaluate the floor response spectra, in order to define the demand on non-structural components depending on the properties of the infills. Finally, the results are compared with formulations provided by main International Standards, in order to assess the accuracy and eventually define the improvements required according to the results of the present research work.

Keywords: floor spectra, infilled RC frames, non-structural components, seismic demand

Procedia PDF Downloads 326

Authors: Aleksandra Dragojlov

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Since the election of Aleksandar Vučić and the Progressives, Serbia has witnessed a slow decline in media freedom, which has been worse than in the 1990s. Although the government adopted a package of three laws in August 2014 to bring the media landscape up to European standards, the implementation of the laws has been limited and marginal, with the progressives engaging in fake compliance. The adoption of the new media strategy for 2020-2025 in 2020 has not led to genuine domestic reform and compliance with EU conditionality. In fact, the EU Commission and journalists’ associations in Serbia have criticised the decline in Serbia’s media freedom citing continued attacks on journalists and indirect political and economic control through advertising and project co-financing, which continue to be features of the Serbian media landscape. In the absence of clear and credible EU conditionality, the decline of media freedom is in the eye of the beholder, where the gap between public engagements with Serbian politicians and the critical stance of progress reports regarding the degradation of the media have enabled Serbian elites to exploit this ambiguity to continue their strategy of fake compliance vis-a-vis rule of law. This study used a mixed methods approach combining both primary and secondary sources with those semi-structured interviews via Zoom, email, and in person with EU and Serbian officials and journalists. Our findings add to the studies where the lack of clear and credible conditionality has allowed Serbia politicians to exploit them in a manner that would suit their own interests, finding new means to retain their control over the media. We argued and concluded that it is this discrepancy between public engagements with Serbia and the progress reports in the area of freedom of expression that has not led to genuine domestic media reforms in Serbia and instead allowed Serbian elites to engage in a strategy of fake and even non-compliance towards media freedom conditionality.

Keywords: media freedom, EU conditionality, Serbia, fake compliance, EU integration, Chapter 23, justice and fundamental rights

Procedia PDF Downloads 94

Authors: Jeff Chak-Fu Wong, Tony Chun Yin Yip

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The transition from secondary school to university seems exciting for many first-year students but can be more challenging than expected. Enabling instructors to know students’ learning habits and styles enhances their understanding of the students’ learning backgrounds, allows teachers to provide better support for their students, and has therefore high potential to improve teaching quality and learning, especially in any mathematics-related courses. The aim of this research is to collect students’ data using online surveys, to analyze students’ factors using learning analytics and educational data mining and to discover the characteristics of the students at risk of falling behind in their studies based on students’ previous academic backgrounds and collected data. In this paper, we use correlation-based distance methods and mutual information for measuring student factor relationships. We then develop a factor network using the Minimum Spanning Tree method and consider further study for analyzing the topological properties of these networks using social network analysis tools. Under the framework of mutual information, two graph-based feature filtering methods, i.e., unsupervised and supervised infinite feature selection algorithms, are used to analyze the results for students’ data to rank and select the appropriate subsets of features and yield effective results in identifying the factors affecting students at risk of failing. This discovered knowledge may help students as well as instructors enhance educational quality by finding out possible under-performers at the beginning of the first semester and applying more special attention to them in order to help in their learning process and improve their learning outcomes.

Keywords: students' academic performance, correlation-based distance method, social network analysis, feature selection, graph-based feature filtering method

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Authors: Ghada Esheba, Ebtisam Aljerayan, Afnan Al-Ghamdi, Atheer Alsharif, Hanan alzahrani

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Background: Primary ovarian neoplasms comprise a heterogeneous group of tumors of three main subtypes: surface epithelial, germ cell, and sex cord-stromal. The wide morphological variation within and between these groups can result in diagnostic difficulties. Gonadal sex cord-stromal tumors (SCST) represent one of the most heterogeneous categories of human neoplasms, because they may contain various combinations of different gonadal sex cord and stromal element. Aim: The aim of this work is to highlight the clinicopathological characteristics of SCST and to assess the value of alpha-inhibin and calretinin in the distinction between SCST and their mimics. Material and methods: This study was carried out on 100 cases using full tissue sections; 70 cases were SCST and 30 cases were histological mimics of SCST. The cases were studied using immunohistochemically using alpha-inhibin. In addition, an ovarian tissue microarray containing 170 benign and malignant ovarian neoplasms was also studied immunohistochemically for calretinin expression. The ovarian microarray included 14 SCST, 59 ovarian serous borderline tumors, 17 mucinous borderline tumors, 10 mucinous adenocarcinomas, 32 endometrioid adenocarcinomas, 34 clear cell carcinomas, and 4 germ cell tumors. Results: 99% of SCST examined using full tissue sections exhibited positive cytoplasmic staining for inhibin. On the contrary, only 7% of the histological mimics (P value < 0.0001). 86% of SCST in the tissue microarray were positive for calretinin with nuclear and/or cytoplasmic staining compared to only 7% of the other tumor types (P value < 0.0001). Conclusions: SCST have characteristic clinicopathological and immunohistochemical features and their recognition is crucial for proper diagnosis and treatment. Alpha-inhibin and calretinin are of great help in the diagnosis of sex cord-stromal tumors.

Keywords: calretinin, granulosa cell tumor, inhibin, sex cord-stromal tumors

Procedia PDF Downloads 209