160,731 research outputs found
Python for teaching introductory programming: A quantitative evaluation
This paper compares two different approaches of teaching introductory programming by quantitatively analysing the student assessments in a real classroom. The first approach is to emphasise the principles of object-oriented programming and design using Java from the very beginning. The second approach is to first teach the basic programming concepts (loops, branch, and use of libraries) using Python and then move on to oriented programming using Java. Each approach was adopted for one academic year (2008-09 and 2009-10) with first year undergraduate students. Quantitative analysis of the student assessments from the first semester of each year was then carried out. The results of this analysis are presented in this paper. These results suggest that the later approach leads to enhanced learning of introductory programming concepts by students
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Differential Disease Susceptibilities in Experimentally Reptarenavirus-Infected Boa Constrictors and Ball Pythons.
Inclusion body disease (IBD) is an infectious disease originally described in captive snakes. It has traditionally been diagnosed by the presence of large eosinophilic cytoplasmic inclusions and is associated with neurological, gastrointestinal, and lymphoproliferative disorders. Previously, we identified and established a culture system for a novel lineage of arenaviruses isolated from boa constrictors diagnosed with IBD. Although ample circumstantial evidence suggested that these viruses, now known as reptarenaviruses, cause IBD, there has been no formal demonstration of disease causality since their discovery. We therefore conducted a long-term challenge experiment to test the hypothesis that reptarenaviruses cause IBD. We infected boa constrictors and ball pythons by cardiac injection of purified virus. We monitored the progression of viral growth in tissues, blood, and environmental samples. Infection produced dramatically different disease outcomes in snakes of the two species. Ball pythons infected with Golden Gate virus (GoGV) and with another reptarenavirus displayed severe neurological signs within 2 months, and viral replication was detected only in central nervous system tissues. In contrast, GoGV-infected boa constrictors remained free of clinical signs for 2 years, despite high viral loads and the accumulation of large intracellular inclusions in multiple tissues, including the brain. Inflammation was associated with infection in ball pythons but not in boa constrictors. Thus, reptarenavirus infection produces inclusions and inclusion body disease, although inclusions per se are neither necessarily associated with nor required for disease. Although the natural distribution of reptarenaviruses has yet to be described, the different outcomes of infection may reflect differences in geographical origin.IMPORTANCE New DNA sequencing technologies have made it easier than ever to identify the sequences of microorganisms in diseased tissues, i.e., to identify organisms that appear to cause disease, but to be certain that a candidate pathogen actually causes disease, it is necessary to provide additional evidence of causality. We have done this to demonstrate that reptarenaviruses cause inclusion body disease (IBD), a serious transmissible disease of snakes. We infected boa constrictors and ball pythons with purified reptarenavirus. Ball pythons fell ill within 2 months of infection and displayed signs of neurological disease typical of IBD. In contrast, boa constrictors remained healthy over 2 years, despite high levels of virus throughout their bodies. This difference matches previous reports that pythons are more susceptible to IBD than boas and could reflect the possibility that boas are natural hosts of these viruses in the wild
MatriVasha: A Multipurpose Comprehensive Database for Bangla Handwritten Compound Characters
At present, recognition of the Bangla handwriting compound character has been
an essential issue for many years. In recent years there have been
application-based researches in machine learning, and deep learning, which is
gained interest, and most notably is handwriting recognition because it has a
tremendous application such as Bangla OCR. MatrriVasha, the project which can
recognize Bangla, handwritten several compound characters. Currently, compound
character recognition is an important topic due to its variant application, and
helps to create old forms, and information digitization with reliability. But
unfortunately, there is a lack of a comprehensive dataset that can categorize
all types of Bangla compound characters. MatrriVasha is an attempt to align
compound character, and it's challenging because each person has a unique style
of writing shapes. After all, MatrriVasha has proposed a dataset that intends
to recognize Bangla 120(one hundred twenty) compound characters that consist of
2552(two thousand five hundred fifty-two) isolated handwritten characters
written unique writers which were collected from within Bangladesh. This
dataset faced problems in terms of the district, age, and gender-based written
related research because the samples were collected that includes a verity of
the district, age group, and the equal number of males, and females. As of now,
our proposed dataset is so far the most extensive dataset for Bangla compound
characters. It is intended to frame the acknowledgment technique for
handwritten Bangla compound character. In the future, this dataset will be made
publicly available to help to widen the research.Comment: 19 fig, 2 tabl
Parallel Astronomical Data Processing with Python: Recipes for multicore machines
High performance computing has been used in various fields of astrophysical
research. But most of it is implemented on massively parallel systems
(supercomputers) or graphical processing unit clusters. With the advent of
multicore processors in the last decade, many serial software codes have been
re-implemented in parallel mode to utilize the full potential of these
processors. In this paper, we propose parallel processing recipes for multicore
machines for astronomical data processing. The target audience are astronomers
who are using Python as their preferred scripting language and who may be using
PyRAF/IRAF for data processing. Three problems of varied complexity were
benchmarked on three different types of multicore processors to demonstrate the
benefits, in terms of execution time, of parallelizing data processing tasks.
The native multiprocessing module available in Python makes it a relatively
trivial task to implement the parallel code. We have also compared the three
multiprocessing approaches - Pool/Map, Process/Queue, and Parallel Python. Our
test codes are freely available and can be downloaded from our website.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, "for associated test code, see
http://astro.nuigalway.ie/staff/navtejs", Accepted for publication in
Astronomy and Computin
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