Large Dog Relinquishment to Two Municipal Facilities in New York City and Washington, D.C.: Identifying Targets for Intervention

While the overall trend in euthanasia has been decreasing nationally, large dogs are at a higher risk of euthanasia than other sized dogs in most animal shelters in the United States. We hypothesized one way to increase the lives saved with respect to these large dogs is to keep them home when possible. In order to develop solutions to decrease relinquishment, a survey was developed to learn more about the reasons owners relinquish large dogs. The survey was administered to owners relinquishing their dogs at two large municipal facilities, one in New York City and one in Washington, D.C. There were 157 responses between the two facilities. We found both significant similarities and differences between respondents and their dogs from the two cities. We identified opportunities to potentially support future relinquishers and found that targets for interventions are likely different in each community

PENGARUH PEMBERIAN TERAPI MINYAK Nigella sativa DAN KOMBINASINYA DENGAN SEFTRIAKSON TERHADAP JUMLAH KUMAN Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) PADA KULTUR LIMPA MENCIT BALB/c

Background Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a strain of Staphylococcus aureus which is resistant to metichilin and another antibiotics. Researchs are being developed to find new therapies for MRSA infection. Nigella sativa has an antibacterial effect. Effect of Nigella sativa on the number of MRSA bacteria in vivo have not been investigated. Aims To prove the effect of Nigella sativa oil and its combination with ceftriaxone toward MRSA count in BALB/c mice’s spleen culture. Methods This was true laboratory experimental study with post test only control group design. The samples were 20 males BALB/c mice, randomized into 4 groups. Control was given 0,03 ml aquabidest injected intraperitoneally, P1 was given 0,03 ml ceftriaxone injected intraperitoneally, P2 was given 0,3 ml Nigella sativa oil orally and P3 was given the combination of 0,03 ml ceftriaxone and 0,3 ml Nigella sativa oil. 0,2 ml (107 cfu/ml) MRSA was injected intraperitoneally at the hour 0. The treatment was given at the hour 16 and mice were terminated at the hour 24. Kruskall-Wallis Test and Mann-Whitney Test is used to analyze the data. Results Results of the mean number of MRSA bacteria in spleen culture were K=124x103 160,70x103; P1=24,08x103 26,53x103; P2=0,78x103 1,52x103; P3=6,05x103 13,38x103. The number of MRSA bacteria decreased significantly between control group compared to P2 (p=0,016) and P3 (p=0,046) and P1 compared to P2 (p=0,016) and P3 (p=0,047). There were no significance between control compared to P1 (p=0,674) and P2 toward P3 (p=0,596). Conclusion Administration of Nigella sativa oil and its combination with ceftriaxone can decrease the number of MRSA bacteria in BALB/c mice’s spleen cultures. Key words : MRSA, Nigella sativa, ceftriaxone, in viv

Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data

Internet and the proliferation of smart mobile devices have changed the way information is created, shared, and spreads, e.g., microblogs such as Twitter, weblogs such as LiveJournal, social networks such as Facebook, and instant messengers such as Skype and WhatsApp are now commonly used to share thoughts and opinions about anything in the surrounding world. This has resulted in the proliferation of social media content, thus creating new opportunities to study public opinion at a scale that was never possible before. Naturally, this abundance of data has quickly attracted business and research interest from various fields including marketing, political science, and social studies, among many others, which are interested in questions like these: Do people like the new Apple Watch? Do Americans support ObamaCare? How do Scottish feel about the Brexit? Answering these questions requires studying the sentiment of opinions people express in social media, which has given rise to the fast growth of the field of sentiment analysis in social media, with Twitter being especially popular for research due to its scale, representativeness, variety of topics discussed, as well as ease of public access to its messages. Here we present an overview of work on sentiment analysis on Twitter.Comment: Microblog sentiment analysis; Twitter opinion mining; In the Encyclopedia on Social Network Analysis and Mining (ESNAM), Second edition. 201

A Multiple-Expert Binarization Framework for Multispectral Images

In this work, a multiple-expert binarization framework for multispectral images is proposed. The framework is based on a constrained subspace selection limited to the spectral bands combined with state-of-the-art gray-level binarization methods. The framework uses a binarization wrapper to enhance the performance of the gray-level binarization. Nonlinear preprocessing of the individual spectral bands is used to enhance the textual information. An evolutionary optimizer is considered to obtain the optimal and some suboptimal 3-band subspaces from which an ensemble of experts is then formed. The framework is applied to a ground truth multispectral dataset with promising results. In addition, a generalization to the cross-validation approach is developed that not only evaluates generalizability of the framework, it also provides a practical instance of the selected experts that could be then applied to unseen inputs despite the small size of the given ground truth dataset.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables. Presented at ICDAR'1

Performance analysis of joint precoding and MUD techniques in multibeam satellite systems

This paper considers interference mitigation techniques in the forward link of multibeam satellite systems. In contrast to previous works, either devoted to receiver interference mitigation (e.g. multiuser detection) or transmitter interference mitigation (precoding), this work evaluates the achievable rates of the joint combination of both techniques. On the one hand, precoding cannot properly mitigate all the inter- beam interference while maintaining a sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio. On the other hand, the receiver cost and complexity exponentially increases with the number of signals to be simultaneously detected. This highlights that the receiver cannot deal with all the interferences so that in general only 2 signals are jointly detected. As a result, the use of precoding within a coverage area jointly with multiuser detection can both benefit from each other and extremely increase the achievable rates of the system. This is numerically evaluated in a close-to-real coverage area considering simultaneous non-unique decoding strategies. The results show the benefits of this joint scheme that eventually can increase the current precoding performance a 23%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft