Search results for: essential tremors

Authors: Shubham Damke, Md Imtiaz, Sanchita Dei

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To stimulate the well and to enhance the production from the shaly formations, fracturing is essential. Presently the chiefly employed technology is Hydraulic Fracturing. However Hydraulic Fracturing accompanies itself with problems like disposing large volumes of fracturing wastewater, removal of water from the pores, formation damage due to injection of large amount of chemicals into underground formations and many more. Therefore embarking on the path of innovation new techniques have been developed which uses different gases such as Nitrogen, Carbon dioxide, Frac Oil, LPG, etc. are used as a base fluid for fracturing formation. However LPG proves to be the most favorable of them which eliminates the use of water and chemicals. When using it as a fracturing fluid, within the surface equipment, it is stored, gelled, and proppant blended at a constant pressure. It is then pressurized with high pressure pumps to the required surface injection pressure With lowering the total cost and increasing the productivity, LPG is also very noteworthy for fracturing shale, where if the hydraulic fracturing is done the water ‘swells’ the formation and creates surface tension, both of which inhibit the flow of oil and gas. Also fracturing with LPG increases the effective fracture length and since propane, butane and pentane is used which are already present in the natural gas therefore there is no problem of back flow because these gases get mixed with the natural gas. LPG Fracturing technology can be a promising substitute of the Hydraulic Fracturing, which could substantially reduce the capital cost of fracturing shale and will also restrict the problems with the disposal of water and on the same hand increasing the fracture length and the productivity from the shale.

Keywords: Fracking, Shale, Surface Tension, Viscosity

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Authors: Benguerine Zohra, Merzak Siham, Bouziane Cheimaa, Si Tayeb Fatima, Jou Siham, Belkessam

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Introduction: Antibiotics, widely produced and consumed in large quantities, have proven problematic due to various types of side effects. The development of bacterial resistance to currently available antibiotics has made the search for new antibacterial agents necessary. One alternative strategy to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria is the use of natural antimicrobial substances such as plant extracts. The objective of this study is to provide an overview of the antibacterial effects of a plant native to the Middle East and Mediterranean regions, Salvia officinalis (sage). Materials and Methods: This review article was conducted by searching studies in the PubMed, Scopus, JSTOR, and SpringerLink databases. The search terms were "Salvia officinalis L." and "antibacterial effects." Only studies that met our inclusion criteria (in English, antibacterial effects of Salvia officinalis L., and primarily dating from 2012 to 2023) were accepted for further review. Results and Discussion: The initial search strategy identified approximately 78 references, with only 13 articles included in this review. The synthesis of the articles revealed that several data sources confirm the antimicrobial effects of S. officinalis. Its essential oil and alcoholic extract exhibit strong bactericidal and bacteriostatic effects against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Conclusion: The significant value of the extract, oil, and leaves of S. officinalis calls for further studies on the other useful and unknown properties of this multi-purpose plant.

Keywords: salvia officinalis, literature review, antibacterial, effects

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Authors: Osung Im, Neha Yadav, Eui Hoon Lee, Joong Hoon Kim

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Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach is commonly used in lots of fields for forecasting. In water resources engineering, forecast of water level or inflow of reservoir is useful for various kind of purposes. Due to advantages of ANN, many papers were written for inflow prediction in river networks, but in this study, ANN is used in urban sewer networks. The growth of severe rain storm in Korea has increased flood damage severely, and the precipitation distribution is getting more erratic. Therefore, effective pump operation in pump station is an essential task for the reduction in urban area. If real time inflow of pump station reservoir can be predicted, it is possible to operate pump effectively for reducing the flood damage. This study used ANN model for pump station reservoir inflow prediction using upstream sewer depth data. For this study, rainfall events, sewer depth, and inflow into Banpo pump station reservoir between years of 2013-2014 were considered. Feed – Forward Back Propagation (FFBF), Cascade – Forward Back Propagation (CFBP), Elman Back Propagation (EBP) and Nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous (NARX) were used as ANN model for prediction. A comparison of results with ANN model suggests that ANN is a powerful tool for inflow prediction using the sewer depth data.

Keywords: artificial neural network, forecasting, reservoir inflow, sewer depth

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Authors: Sareh Rajabi, Salwa Bheiry

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In general, Covid-19 created many financial and non-financial damages to the economy and community. Level and severity of covid-19 as pandemic case varies over the region and due to different types of the projects. Covid-19 virus emerged as one of the most imperative risk management factors word-wide recently. Therefore, as part of portfolio management assessment, it is essential to evaluate severity of such risk on the project and program in portfolio management level to avoid any risky portfolio. Covid-19 appeared very effectively in South America, part of Europe and Middle East. Such pandemic infection affected the whole universe, due to lock down, interruption in supply chain management, health and safety requirements, transportations and commercial impacts. Therefore, this research proposes Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to analyze and assess such pandemic case like Covid-19 and its impacts on the construction projects. The AHP technique uses four sub-criteria: Health and safety, commercial risk, completion risk and contractual risk to evaluate the project and program. The result will provide the decision makers with information which project has higher or lower risk in case of Covid-19 and pandemic scenario. Therefore, the decision makers can have most feasible solution based on effective weighted criteria for project selection within their portfolio to match with the organization’s strategies.

Keywords: portfolio management, risk management, COVID-19, analytical hierarchy process technique

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Authors: Ayush Shrivastava, Arpit Chaudhary, Devang Kulshreshtha, Vibhav Prakash Singh, Rajeev Srivastava

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Early diagnosis of breast cancer can improve the survival rate by detecting cancer at an early stage. Breast region segmentation is an essential step in the analysis of digital mammograms. Accurate image segmentation leads to better detection of cancer. It aims at separating out Region of Interest (ROI) from rest of the image. The procedure begins with removal of labels, annotations and tags from the mammographic image using morphological opening method. Pectoral Muscle Sliding Window Algorithm (PMSWA) is used for removal of pectoral muscle from mammograms which is necessary as the intensity values of pectoral muscles are similar to that of ROI which makes it difficult to separate out. After removing the pectoral muscle, Dispersed Region Growing Algorithm (DRGA) is used for segmentation of mammogram which disperses seeds in different regions instead of a single bright region. To demonstrate the validity of our segmentation method, 322 mammographic images from Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database are used. The dataset contains medio-lateral oblique (MLO) view of mammograms. Experimental results on MIAS dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Keywords: CAD, dispersed region growing algorithm (DRGA), image segmentation, mammography, pectoral muscle sliding window algorithm (PMSWA)

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Authors: Revoti Prasad Bora, Nikita Katyal

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Promotion is a key element in the retail business. Thus, analysis of promotions to quantify their effectiveness in terms of Revenue and/or Margin is an essential activity in the retail industry. However, measuring the sales/revenue uplift is based on estimations, as the actual sales/revenue without the promotion is not present. Further, the presence of Halo and Cannibalization in a multiple parallel promotions’ scenario complicates the problem. Calculating Baseline by considering inter-brand/competitor items or using Halo and Cannibalization's impact on Revenue calculations by considering Baseline as an interpretation of items’ unit sales in neighboring nonpromotional weeks individually may not capture the overall Revenue uplift in the case of multiple parallel promotions. Hence, this paper proposes a Machine Learning based method for calculating the Revenue uplift by considering the Halo and Cannibalization impact on the Baseline and the Revenue. In the first section of the proposed methodology, Baseline of an item is calculated by incorporating the impact of the promotions on its related items. In the later section, the Revenue of an item is calculated by considering both Halo and Cannibalization impacts. Hence, this methodology enables correct calculation of the overall Revenue uplift due a given promotion.

Keywords: Halo, Cannibalization, promotion, Baseline, temporary price reduction, retail, elasticity, cross price elasticity, machine learning, random forest, linear regression

Procedia PDF Downloads 157

Authors: Taha Kadir Yesin, Hanyu Liu, Zhangfan Ding, Amit Singh, Qi Tian, Yuheng Zhang, Biswajyoti Borah, Junyu Chen, Anjali P. Kusumbe

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The skeletal structure and bone marrow endothelium collectively form a critical functional unit essential for bone development, health, and aging. At the core of osteogenesis and bone formation lies the dynamic process of angiogenesis. In this study, we reveal a potent endogenous anabolic NCAM1-14.3.3. ζδ-derived- Peptide interaction, which stimulates bone angiogenesis and osteogenesis during homeostasis, aging, and age-related bone diseases. Employing high-resolution imaging and inducible cell-specific mouse genetics, our results elucidate the pivotal role of the NCAM1-14.3.3.ζδ-derived-Peptide interaction in driving the expansion of Clec14a+ angiogenic endothelial cells. Notably, Clec14a+ endothelial cells express key osteogenic factors. The NCAM1-14.3.3.ζδ-derived-Peptide interaction in osteoblasts drives osteoblast differentiation, ultimately contributing to the genesis of bone. Moreover, the NCAM1-14.3.3.ζδ-derived-Peptide interaction leads to a reduction in bone resorption. In age-associated vascular and bone loss diseases, stimulating the NCAM1-14.3.3.ζδ-derived-Peptide interaction not only promotes angiogenesis but also reverses bone loss. Consequently, harnessing the endogenous anabolic potential of the NCAM1-14.3.3.ζδ-derived-Peptide interaction emerges as a promising therapeutic modality for managing age-related bone diseases.

Keywords: endothelial cell, NCAM1, Clec14a, 14.3.3.ζδ

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Authors: Orathai Srithongtham, Ubonsri Thabuddha

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The youth with HIV positive is not difference from the general youth in term of sexual needs. Sexual health is crucial the most to support the youth with HIV positive to be sexual well-being. This study aims to elucidate the sexual health on protection from STDs (Sexual Transmitted Diseases) and HIV transmission and to explain sexual risk behavior of the youth with HIV positive. The target group was the youth with HIV positive about 23 cases from two provinces in northeastern part of Thailand. Qualitative method was applied for collecting data by in-depth interview. Content analysis was use for data analysis. The youth with HIV positive was protection from STDs and HIV transmission by using the condom during sexual activity. The reason to deny the condom use were ashamed, condom is not a part of life, no have fit size, and the youth fear to stigmatized as a mental disorder and fear to stigmatized as going to fuck someone. The youth who trust with nurse in clinic was dare to request the condom by face. Sexual activity without condom use is sexual risk behavior. The major causes were couple trust and the sexual enjoyment first and sexual active competition with friend without condom use. The concern on HIV was the boyfriend or girlfriend not accepts the HIV positive people, worry about the HIV transmutation, and finally not compliance to ARV drug. The youth with HIV positive was lacking of the knowledge on sexual health on the issues of access to condom and the concern to keep on relationship with the boyfriend or girlfriend. This concern issues was led to the non-adherence of ARV drug and HIV distribution. To provide the sexual health service is more essential to the youth with HIV positive.

Keywords: sexual health, sexual risk behavior, youth, HIV

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Authors: Akram Khelaifia, Nesreddine Djafar Henni

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Reinforced concrete shear walls are essential components in protecting buildings from seismic forces by providing both strength and stiffness. This study focuses on optimizing the placement of shear walls in a high seismic zone. Through nonlinear analyses conducted on an eight-story building, various scenarios of shear wall positions are investigated to evaluate their impact on seismic performance. Employing a performance-based seismic design (PBSD) approach, the study aims to meet acceptance criteria related to inter-story drift ratio and damage levels. The findings emphasize the importance of concentrating shear walls in the central area of the building during the design phase. This strategic placement proves more effective compared to peripheral distributions, resulting in reduced inter-story drift and mitigated potential damage during seismic events. Additionally, the research explores the use of shear walls that completely infill the frame, forming compound shapes like Box configurations. It is discovered that incorporating such complete shear walls significantly enhances the structure's reliability concerning inter-story drift. Conversely, the absence of complete shear walls within the frame leads to reduced stiffness and the potential deterioration of short beams.

Keywords: performance level, pushover analysis, shear wall, plastic hinge, nonlinear analyses

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Authors: Itamir de Morais Barroca Filho, Cephas A. S. Barreto, Ramon Malaquias, Cezar Miranda Paula de Souza, Arthur Costa Gorgônio, João C. Xavier-Júnior, Mateus Firmino, Fellipe Matheus Costa Barbosa

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Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in healthcare are crucial for efficiently delivering medical healthcare services to patients. These ICTs are also known as e-health and comprise technologies such as electronic record systems, telemedicine systems, and personalized devices for diagnosis. The focus of e-health is to improve the quality of health information, strengthen national health systems, and ensure accessible, high-quality health care for all. All the data gathered by these technologies make it possible to help clinical staff with automated decisions using machine learning. In this context, we collected patient data, such as heart rate, oxygen saturation (SpO2), blood pressure, respiration, and others. With this data, we were able to develop machine learning models for patients’ risk of death and estimate the length of stay in ICU beds. Thus, this paper presents the methodology for applying machine learning techniques to develop these models. As a result, although we implemented these models on an IoT healthcare platform, helping clinical staff in healthcare in an ICU, it is essential to create a robust clinical validation process and monitoring of the proposed models.

Keywords: ICT, e-health, machine learning, ICU, healthcare

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Authors: Raheleh Saifiabolhassan

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After the post-industrial era, when a wide variety of foods and drinks are readily available everywhere, the motive has shifted from meeting basic nutritional needs to enjoy the eating experience. Today, behavioral environmental studies are an essential branch of science when it comes to understanding, analyzing, and evaluating how humans react to the environment. Similarly, these studies explore customer-influencing factors and the effectiveness of restaurant designs. To facilitate a pleasant dining experience, the authors focused on acoustics, flexibility, and lighting. In this study, 2700 square feet of surface area was used to plan a restaurant (called Mesineh) based on behavioral science, considering many factors related to the interaction between the building and the users, such as flexibility and privacy, acoustics, and light. Environment psychology considerations in architectural design have been lacking for several decades. To fill this gap, the author evaluated environmental psychology standards and applied them to Mesineh's design. A sense of nostalgia will be felt by customers of the Mesineh restaurant thanks to its interior design, which combines historical elements with contemporary elements. Additionally, vernacular Persian architectural elements were incorporated into a modern context to fulfill the behavioral science component of interior design.

Keywords: Mesineh restaurant, interior design, behavioral sciences, environment psychology, traditional persian architecture

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Authors: A. Asgharzadeh, M. Maroufi

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5G mobile communication system has drawn more and more attention. The 5G system needs to provide three different types of services, including enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB), massive machine-type communication (mMTC), and ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC). Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC), Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC), and Filtered Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (f-OFDM) are suggested as a well-known candidate waveform for the coming 5G system. Themachine-to-machine (M2M) communications are one of the essential applications in 5G, and it involves exchanging of concise messages with a very short latency. However, in UFMC systems, the subcarriers are grouped into subbands but f-OFDM only one subband covers the entire band. Furthermore, in FBMC, a subband includes only one subcarrier, and the number of subbands is the same as the number of subcarriers. This paper mainly discusses the performance of UFMC with different parameters for the UFMC system. Also, paper shows that UFMC is the best choice outperforming OFDM in any case and FBMC in case of very short packets while performing similarly for long sequences with channel estimation techniques for Interleave Division Multiple Access (IDMA) systems.

Keywords: universal filtered multi-carrier technique, UFMC, interleave division multiple access, IDMA, fifth-generation, subband

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Authors: Abdessalam Hijab, Eric Henry, Hafida Boulekbache

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The complexity of the city makes sustainable management of the urban environment more difficult. Managers are required to make significant human and technical investments, particularly in household waste collection (focus of our research). The aim of this communication is to propose a collaborative geographic multi-actor device (MGCD) based on the link between information and communication technologies (ICT) and geo-web tools in order to involve urban residents in household waste collection processes. Our method is based on a collaborative/motivational concept between the city and its residents. It is a geographic collaboration dedicated to the general public (citizens, residents, and any other participant), based on real-time allocation and geographic location of topological, geographic, and multimedia data in the form of local geo-alerts (location-specific problems) related to household waste in an urban environment. This contribution allows us to understand the extent to which residents can assist and contribute to the development of household waste collection processes for a better protected urban environment. This suggestion provides a good idea of how residents can contribute to the data bank for future uses. Moreover, it will contribute to the transformation of the population into a smart inhabitant as an essential component of a smart city. The proposed model will be tested in the Lamkansa sampling district in Casablanca, Morocco.

Keywords: information and communication technologies, ICTs, GeoWeb, geo-collaboration, city, inhabitant, waste, collection, environment

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Authors: Frimpong Kyeremeh, Albert Y. Appiah, Ben B. K. Ayawli

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Energy storage system (ESS) is an essential part of a microgrid (MG) because of its immense benefits to the economics and the stability of MG. For a direct current (DC) MG (DCMG) in which the generating units are mostly variable renewable energy generators, DC bus voltage fluctuation is inevitable; hence ESS is vital in managing the mismatch between load demand and generation. Besides, to accrue the maximum benefits of ESS in the microgrid, there is the need for proper sizing and location of the ESSs. In this paper, a performance comparison is made between two configurations of ESS; distributed battery energy storage system (D-BESS) and an aggregated (centralized) battery energy storage system (A-BESS), on the basis of stability and operational cost for a DCMG. The configuration consists of four households with rooftop PV panels and a wind turbine. The objective is to evaluate and analyze the technical efficiencies, cost effectiveness as well as controllability of each configuration. The MG is first modelled with MATLAB Simulink then, a mathematical model is used to determine the optimal size of the BESS that minimizes the total operational cost of the MG. The performance of the two configurations would be tested with simulations. The two configurations are expected to reduce DC bus voltage fluctuations, but in the cases of voltage stability and optimal cost, the best configuration performance will be determined at the end of the research. The work is in progress, and the result would help MG designers and operators to make the best decision on the use of BESS for DCMG configurations.

Keywords: aggregated energy storage system, DC bus voltage, DC microgrid, distributed battery energy storage, stability

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Authors: Almutasim Billa A. Alanazi, Hal S. Tharp

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Safe performance and efficient energy consumption are essential factors for designing a control system. This paper presents a reinforcement learning (RL) model that can be applied to control applications to improve safety and reduce energy consumption. As hardware constraints and environmental disturbances are imprecise and unpredictable, conventional control methods may not always be effective in optimizing control designs. However, RL has demonstrated its value in several artificial intelligence (AI) applications, especially in the field of control systems. The proposed model intelligently monitors a system's success by observing the rewards from the environment, with positive rewards counting as a success when the controlled reference is within the desired operating zone. Thus, the model can determine whether the system is safe to continue operating based on the designer/user specifications, which can be adjusted as needed. Additionally, the controller keeps track of energy consumption to improve energy efficiency by enabling the idle mode when the controlled reference is within the desired operating zone, thus reducing the system energy consumption during the controlling operation. Water temperature control for a hydroponic system is taken as a case study for the RL model, adjusting the variance of disturbances to show the model’s robustness and efficiency. On average, the model showed safety improvement by up to 15% and energy efficiency improvements by 35%- 40% compared to a traditional RL model.

Keywords: control system, hydroponics, machine learning, reinforcement learning

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Authors: Raymond Xu, Cindy Jingru Wang

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Social media has become a globally connected and influencing platform. Social media data, such as tweets, can help predict the spread of pandemics and provide individuals and healthcare providers early warnings. Public psychological reactions and opinions can be efficiently monitored by AI models on the progression of dominant topics on Twitter. However, statistics show that as the coronavirus spreads, so does an infodemic of misinformation due to pandemic-related factors such as unemployment and lockdowns. Social media algorithms are often biased toward outrage by promoting content that people have an emotional reaction to and are likely to engage with. This can influence users’ attitudes and cause confusion. Therefore, social media is a double-edged sword. Combating fake news and biased content has become one of the essential tasks. This research analyzes the variety of methods used for fake news detection covering random forest, logistic regression, support vector machines, decision tree, naive Bayes, BoW, TF-IDF, LDA, CNN, RNN, LSTM, DeepFake, and hierarchical attention network. The performance of each method is analyzed. Based on these models’ achievements and limitations, a multi-dimensional AI framework is proposed to achieve higher accuracy in infodemic detection, especially pandemic-related news. The model is trained on contextual content, images, and news metadata.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, fake news detection, infodemic detection, image recognition, sentiment analysis

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Authors: Marwa Al-Subhi, Eiman Al-Ajmi, Mallak Al-Maamari, Humood Al-Dhuhli, Srinivasa Rao

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The orbit and its contents are affected by various pathologies and craniofacial anomalies. Sound knowledge of the normal orbital dimensions is clinically essential for successful surgical outcomes and also in the field of forensic anthropology. Racial, ethnic, and regional variations in the orbital dimensions have been reported. This study sought to determine the orbital dimensions of Omani subjects who had been referred for computed tomography (CT) images at a tertiary care hospital. A total of 273 patients’ CT images were evaluated retrospectively by using an electronic medical records database. The orbital dimensions were recorded using both axial and sagittal planes of CT images. The mean orbital index (OI) was found to be 83.25±4.83 and the prevalent orbital type was categorized as mesoseme. The mean orbital index was 83.34±5.05 and 83.16±4.57 in males and females, respectively, with their difference being statistically not significant (p=0.76). A statistically significant association was observed between the right and left orbits with regard to horizontal distance (p<0.05) and vertical distance (p<0.01) of orbit and OI (p<0.05). No significant difference between the OI and age groups was observed in both males and females. The mean interorbital distance and interzygomatic distance were found to be 19.45±1.52 mm and 95.59±4.08 mm, respectively. Both of these parameters were significantly higher in males (p<0.05). Results of the present study provide reference values of orbital dimensions in Omani subjects. The prevalent orbital type of Omani subjects is mesoseme, which is a hallmark of the white race.

Keywords: orbit, orbital index, mesoseme, ethnicity, variation

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Authors: Matthew Olanrewaju Ibiyomi

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The study examined the abundance of free-range natural inhabitants of the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB) Zoo Park. A baseline data of free-ranging inhabitants of the Park is essential to monitor trends and institute conservation plans through unsustainable natural resources exploitation and habitat destruction. Four transects were selected across the study area. Each transect was traversed for a period of four months and observations was carried out twice a day. The Four existing tracks explored during the study were the aviary, reptile, carnivore and primate tracks. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The findings from this study revealed that 8 species of natural inhabitants were identified, which were the Vervet monkey (Chlorocebuspygerythrus), Maxwell duiker(Philantombamaxwellii), Mongoose (Herpestidaespp), Bushbuck(Tragelaphusscriptus), Cobra (Najanaja), Ground squirrel (Marmotinispp), Senegal coucal(Centropus senegalensis), Black kite (Milvus migrans). The result further showed that a total of 115 animals were encountered in the primate transect, 77 animals in the carnivores transect, 46 animals in the aviary transect and 34 animals in the ungulates transect by the representative of 43.3%, 28.3%, 15.8% and 12.5% respectively. Human activities and level of disturbance were observed to have affected the abundance and distribution of animals at Funaab Zoo Park. Continuous field inventory is recommended to ascertain the dynamics of animals observed as free-range inhabitants in this study.

Keywords: abundance, ecosystem, extinction, free-range

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Authors: Parker Townes, Prabdeep Panesar, Chunlin Liu, Soo Youn Lee, Dan Devoe, Paul D. Arnold, Jennifer Crosbie, Russell Schachar

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Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are impairing childhood neurodevelopmental disorders with problems in executive functions. Executive functions are higher-level mental processes essential for daily functioning and goal attainment. There is genetic and neural overlap between ADHD and ASD. The aim of this meta-analysis was to evaluate if pediatric ASD and ADHD have distinct executive function profiles. This review was completed following Cochrane guidelines. Fifty-eight articles were identified through database searching, followed by a blinded screening in duplicate. A meta-analysis was performed for all task performance metrics evaluated by at least two articles. Forty-five metrics from 24 individual tasks underwent analysis. No differences were found between youth with ASD and ADHD in any domain under direct comparison. However, individuals with ASD and ADHD exhibited deficient attention, flexibility, visuospatial abilities, working memory, processing speed, and response inhibition compared to controls. No deficits in planning were noted in either disorder. Only 11 studies included a group with comorbid ASD+ADHD, making it difficult to determine whether common executive function deficits are a function of comorbidity. Further research is needed to determine if comorbidity accounts for the apparent commonality in executive function between ASD and ADHD.

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, neurocognition, executive function, youth

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Authors: Kassaye Bewketu Zellelew

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The Main Ethiopian Rift Valley lakes suffer from water level fluctuations due to several natural and anthropocentric factors. Lakes located at terminal positions are highly affected by the fluctuations. These fluctuations are disturbing the stability of ecosystems, putting very serious impacts on the lives of many animals and plants around the lakes. Hence, studying the hydrodynamics of the lakes was found to be very essential. The main purpose of this study is to find the most significant factors that contribute to the water level fluctuations and also to quantify the fluctuations so as to identify lakes that need special attention. The research method included correlations, least squares regressions, multi-temporal satellite image analysis and land use change assessment. The results of the study revealed that much of the fluctuations, specially, in Central Ethiopian Rift are caused by human activities. Lakes Abiyata, Chamo, Ziway and Langano are declining while Abaya and Hawassa are rising. Among the studied lakes, Abiyata is drastically reduced in size (about 28% of its area in 1986) due to both human activities (most dominant ones) and natural factors. The other seriously affected lake is Chamo with about 11% reduction in its area between 1986 and 2010. Lake Abaya was found to be relatively stable during this period (showed only a 0.8% increase in its area). Concerned bodies should pay special attention to and take appropriate measures on lakes Abiyata, Chamo and Hawassa.

Keywords: correlations, hydrodynamics, lake level fluctuation, landsat satellite images

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Authors: Daisy Saikia

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Long-term maternal health issues with Caesarean section deliveries are significant. Thus, this study aims to investigate the prevalence of caesarean section deliveries in India and to comprehend its associated predictors in light of the high caesarean section delivery rate. The study uses data from the fifth National Family Health Surveys (NFHS-5) round. Specifically, live births to women aged 15-49 in the 5 years preceding the survey. Binary logistic regression was used to check the adjusted effects of the predictor variables on caesarean section delivery. STATA/SE v16.0 was used for the data analysis with a 5% significance level. Twenty-two per cent of the live births to women were delivered by caesarean section. There was socio-economic, demographic and geographical variation in the prevalence of caesarean section delivery in India. Increasing age, body mass index, marital status, mother’s occupation and education, birth order, place of delivery, full ANC, non-tribal status, wealth quintile and region are significantly associated with caesarean section deliveries in India. Caesarean section deliveries should only be performed when essential from a medical perspective, and regions, where the rate is too high, should follow the guidelines. Additionally, it needs to be investigated whether private hospitals compel patients to have caesarean section deliveries to increase their revenue. Thus, these unnecessary deliveries must be examined immediately for safe childbirth and the wellness of both mother and child.

Keywords: caesarean section, delivery, maternal health, India

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Authors: Taoufik Bettaieb, Sihem Soufi

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As a bioactive metalloid, silicon (Si) is an essential element for plant growth and development. It also plays a crucial role in enhancing plants’ resilience to different abiotic and biotic stresses. The morpho-physiological, biochemical, and molecular background of Si-mediated stress tolerance in plants were unraveled. Cold stress is a severe abiotic stress response to the decrease of plant growth and yield by affecting various physiological activities in plants. Several approaches have been used to alleviate the adverse effects generated from cold stress exposure, but the cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and defensible approach is the supply of silicon. Silicon has the ability to neutralize the harmful impacts of cold stress. Therefore, based on these hypotheses, this study was designed in order to investigate the morphological and physiological background of silicon effects applied at different concentrations on cold stress mitigation during early growth of a turfgrass, namely Paspalum vaginatum Sw. Results show that silicon applied at different concentrations improved the morphological development of Paspalum subjected to cold stress. It is also effective on the photosynthetic apparatus by maintaining stability the photochemical efficiency. As the primary component of cellular membranes, lipids play a critical function in maintaining the structural integrity of plant cells. Silicon application decreased membrane lipid peroxidation and kept on membrane frontline barrier relatively stable under cold stress.

Keywords: crops, cold stress, silicon, abiotic stress

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Authors: Kyriaki Kalaitzidou, Athanasia Tolkou, Christina Raptopoulou, Manassis Mitrakas, Anastasios Zouboulis

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Phosphate rock is the main source of phosphorous (P) in fertilizers and is essential for high crop yield in agriculture; currently, it is considered as a critical element, phasing scarcity. Chemical precipitation, which is a commonly used method of phosphorous removal from wastewaters, finds its significance in that phosphates may be precipitated in appropriate chemical forms that can be reused-recovered. Most often phosphorous is removed from wastewaters in the form of insoluble phosphate salts, by using salts (coagulants) of multivalent metal ions, most frequently iron, aluminum, calcium, or magnesium. The removal degree is affected by various factors, such as pH, chemical agent dose, temperature, etc. In this study, phosphate precipitation from the secondary (biologically treated) effluent of a municipal wastewater treatment plant is examined. Using chlorosulfate (FeClSO4) it was attempted to either remove and/or recover PO43-. Results showed that the use of Fe3+ can achieve residual concentrations lower than the commonly applied legislation limit of PO43- (i.e. 3 mg PO43-/L) by adding 7.5 mg/L Fe3+ in the secondary effluent with an initial concentration of about 10 mg PO43-/L and at pH range between 6 to 9. In addition, the formed sediment has a percentage of almost 24% PO43- content. Therefore, simultaneous removal and recovery of PO43- as ferric phosphate can be achieved, making it possible for the ferric phosphate to be re-used as a possible (secondary) fertilizer source.

Keywords: ferric phosphate, phosphorus recovery, phosphorus removal, wastewater treatment

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Authors: Batsukh Chultem, Oyunbileg Natsagdorj, Namsrai Steyrmunkh

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Many industries, tourist camps and houses, discharge aqueous effluents containing relatively high levels of heavy metals, harmful organic compounds water. Untreated effluent from these manufacturing processes has an adverse impact on the environment. A specific problem associated with waste water in the environment is accumulation in the food chain and persistence in the environment. The screening of microorganisms resistant to pollution and able to detoxification them is essential for the development of clean-up technologies. The purpose of this study is to use advanced microbiological technology products for oxidizing organic and heavy metals pollutants as a biological treatment, to reduce water pollution, which arise as a result of waste water due to day-to-day operations of industries and houses of Ulaanbaatar city and tourist camps located around the lake Hovsgol, in Hovsgol province of Mongolia. By comparing the results from tests of effective microorganism’s bio-preparation treated sewage samples and not treated sewage samples shows that the treated sewage samples pollution decreased defending on treatment period and ratio. Treated water analyses show that: the suspended solids 352 mg/l, pH 5.85-7.95, ammonium nitrate 81.25-221.2 mg NH₄/l, nitrite 0.088-0.227 mg NO₂/l, nitrate 8.5-11.5 mg NO₃/l, and orthophosphate 1.06-15.46 mg PO₄/l. Also, heavy metals were decreased and microbiological test results defined parameters, respectively show the waste water pollution was reduced.

Keywords: effective microorganims, environment, pollution, treatment

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Authors: Versha Sharma

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Juvenile hormone analogue, fenoxycarb and ecdysterone, when applied at varying concentrations in the adult females of Dysdercus similis, in situ histochemical observations of treated ovarian and adipose tissues during the first gonotrophic cycle elicited drastic histomorphological changes in both tissues. The action and effect of both JHa and ecdysterone on ovarian development, vitellogenesis, the activity of follicular epithelium, chorion formation all were monitored in detail. SDS-PAGE electrophoretic analysis showed drastic downregulation on the protein profile of differently treated tissue samples. After exogenous JHa supply, resorption of the developing oocytes was also often noticed. Gradational decline and disappearance of different protein bands in treated both ovarian and adipose tissues noticed could be due to the depletion of specific metabolites essential for oocyte development and maturation. Natural products support both crop production and the environment that being effective in pest control, less toxic to non-target organisms and at the same time biodegradable. Hence, these could be utilized as an attractive alternative to the synthetic chemical insecticides for at least cotton bug pest management. Increasing IGR dosages is found to elicit both qualitative and quantitative depletion of protein metabolites and drastic histochemical changes in the gonads of the treated forms brought forth the production of a large number of immature mal-formed oocytes. Findings in greater detail could be discussed.

Keywords: juvenile hormone, ecdysone, P. picta, Dysdercus similis

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Authors: Mennani Maha, Attak El Houssain

Abstract:

Under the massive effect of the Covid-19 health crisis, marked by a loss of competitiveness, a slowdown in growth and an accumulation of the repercussions of socio-economic inequalities, a considerable effort must be combined, in Morocco, to put into perspective macro-political, macro-economic and social opportunities. The development of a new economic and social approach is essential in order to respond to the authenticity of the new development model that will be used by the country. The appropriation of strategies of solidarity and social cohesion constitutes a participatory, competitive and inclusive approach to support the functionalities of the economic, social and political system. Therefore, the search for alternative financial resources has become a necessity to achieve the objectives of sustainable socio-economic growth on the one hand; and to promote, on the other hands, the dynamics, of large scale, social investments. The zakat remains a site of the Islamic economy dedicated to stimulating the bases of a collective adhesion of the population on the economic, as well as on the social level, thanks to a fair and equitable distribution of the zakat funds. However, Morocco is one of the few Muslim countries that has not yet had an institution for collecting and distributing this Islamic duty, which makes it difficult to measure the socio-economic impact of zakat. This theoretical document essentially ensures the development of the crucial utility of institutionalizing zakat in order to reinforce the objectives of social solidarity in Morocco in line with the process of conceptualizing a new development model.

Keywords: zakat, socio-economic development, solidarity, social investment

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Authors: Rashmi Gupta

Abstract:

Rewarding stimuli capture attention involuntarily as a result of an association process that develops quickly during value learning, referred to as the reward or value-driven attentional capture. It is essential to compare reward with punishment processing to get a full picture of value-based modulation in visual attention processing. Hence, the present study manipulated both valence/value (reward as well as punishment) and motivational salience (probability of an outcome: high vs. low) together. Series of experiments were conducted, and there were two phases in each experiment. In phase 1, participants were required to learn to associate specific face stimuli with a high or low probability of winning or losing points. In the second phase, these conditioned stimuli then served as a distractor or prime in a speeded letter search task. Faces with high versus low outcome probability, regardless of valence, slowed the search for targets (specifically the left visual field target) and suggesting that the costs to performance on non-emotional cognitive tasks were only driven by motivational salience (high vs. loss) associated with the stimuli rather than the valence (gain vs. loss). It also suggests that the processing of motivationally salient stimuli is right-hemisphere biased. Together, results of these studies strengthen the notion that our visual attention system is more sensitive to affected by motivational saliency rather than valence, which termed here as motivational-driven attentional capture.

Keywords: attention, distractors, motivational salience, valence

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Authors: Zhou Yang, Heli Sun, Jianbin Huang, Jizhong Zhao, Shaojie Qiao

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Traffic prediction is essential in a multitude of ways in modern urban life. The researchers of earlier work in this domain carry out the investigation chiefly with two major focuses: (1) the accurate forecast of future values in multiple time series and (2) knowledge extraction from spatial-temporal correlations. However, two key considerations for traffic prediction are often missed: the completeness of raw data and the full context of the prediction timestamp. Concentrating on the two drawbacks of earlier work, we devise an approach that can address these issues in a two-phase framework. First, we utilize the raw trajectories to a greater extent through building a VLA table and data compression. We obtain the intra-trajectory features with graph-based encoding and the intertrajectory ones with a grid-based model and the technique of back projection that restore their surrounding high-resolution spatial-temporal environment. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study direct feature extraction from raw trajectories for traffic prediction and attempt the use of raw data with the least degree of reduction. In the prediction phase, we provide a broader context for the prediction timestamp by taking into account the information that are around it in the training dataset. Extensive experiments on several well-known datasets have verified the effectiveness of our solution that combines the strength of raw trajectory data and prediction context. In terms of performance, our approach surpasses several state-of-the-art methods for traffic prediction.

Keywords: traffic prediction, raw data utilization, context building, data reduction

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Authors: Spandan Sahu, Amiya Kumar Pati, Kishanjit Kumar Khatua

Abstract:

River is the main source of water. It is a form of natural open channel which gives rise to many complex phenomenon of sciences that needs to be tackled such as the critical flow conditions, boundary shear stress and depth averaged velocity. The development of society more or less solely depends upon the flow of rivers. The rivers are major sources of many sediments and specific ingredients which are much essential for human beings. During floods, part of a river is carried by the simple main channel and rest is carried by flood plains. For such compound asymmetric channels, the flow structure becomes complicated due to momentum exchange between main channel and adjoining flood plains. Distribution of boundary shear in subsections provides us with the concept of momentum transfer between the interface of main channel and the flood plains. Experimentally, to get better data with accurate results are very complex because of the complexity of the problem. Hence, Conveyance Estimation System (CES) software has been used to tackle the complex processes to determine the shear stresses at different sections of an open channel having asymmetric flood plains on both sides of the main channel and the results are compared with the symmetric flood plains for various geometrical shapes and flow conditions. Error analysis is also performed to know the degree of accuracy of the model implemented.

Keywords: depth average velocity, non prismatic compound channel, relative flow depth , velocity distribution

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Authors: Adewole Tomiwa Adetunji, Francis Bayo Lewu, Richard Mundembe

Abstract:

Plants require nitrogen (N) to support desired production levels. There is a need for better understanding of N transport mechanism in order to improve N assimilation by plant root. Nitrogen is available to plants in the form of nitrate or ammonium, which are transported into the cell with the aid of various transport proteins. Ammonium transporters (AMTs) play a role in the uptake of ammonium, the form in which N is preferentially absorbed by plants. Solanum tuberosum AMT1 (StAMT1) was amplified, sequenced and characterized using molecular biology and bioinformatics methods. Nucleotide database sequences were used to design 976 base pairs AMT1-specific primers which include forward primer 5’- GCCATCGCCGCCGCCGG-3’ and reverse primer 5’-GGGTCAGATCCATACCCGC-3’. These primers were used to amplify the Solanum tuberosum AMT1 internal regions. Nucleotide sequencing, alignment and phylogenetic analysis assigned StAMT1 to the AMT1 family due to the clade and high similarity it shared with other plant AMT1 genes. The deduced amino acid sequences showed that StAMT1 is 92%, 83% and 76% similar to Solanum lycopersicum LeAMT1.1, Lotus japonicus LjAMT1.1, and Solanum lycopersicum LeAMT1.2 respectively. StAMT1 fragments were shown to correspond to the 5th-10th trans-membrane domains. Residue StAMT1 D15 is predicted to be essential for ammonium transport, while mutations of StAMT1 S76A may further enhance ammonium transport.

Keywords: ammonium transporter, bioinformatics, nitrogen, primers, Solanum tuberosum

Procedia PDF Downloads 211