A research study into beginning German students\u27 individual and group processing of written texts

This work examines the effect of rereading a text as a group effort and individually on beginning German students. The study included eleven participants, all in their second semester of learning German. All participants read a text written in German. The text selected is from the textbook (Kontakte-4th edition) used at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After reading the text once and writing an individual recall, the participants were divided into two main groups: One group individually reread the text while the other group was divided into two subgroups where the text was discussed instead of rereading it individually. All participants then had to write a second recallBoth recalls were scored. The scores were then normalized, since the study focused on determining the percentages of improvement in the students\u27 performance. The scores were then analyzed by running a t-test on the normalized scores of the two main groups. The t-test indicated that statistically there was no significant difference between the individual rereading group and the discussion group. The results showed however that rereading, both in groups and individually improved the students\u27 reading comprehension

New pests for old as GMOs bring on substitute pests

In agroecological systems, one thing leads to another, often in unexpected ways. In the 1950s a single pesticide application per season was sufficient to control the jassid bug Empoasca lybica, the only major cotton pest in the Gezira of Sudan at the time (1). However, the spraying killed the natural enemies that had previously held populations of the cotton bollworm Helicoverpa armigera in check. Intensive spraying against the bollworm’s larvae during the 1970s and 1980s led to the emergence from obscurity of whiteflies, Bemisia tabaci. They became primary pests in need of further control, and then there were also outbreaks of aphids, Aphis gossypii. Faced with crippling control costs and the development by the pests of resistance to the pesticides used against them (2, 3), the Sudanese eventually resorted to the integrated pest management approach. A similar but more complicated series of events is described for the cotton fields of China in PNAS by Zhang et al. (4), but in China it is not only trophic cascades leading to new pest upsurges but also effects of land-use alterations and climate change

NOISE EXPOSURE AMONG TRAFFIC POLICE OFFICERS IN KHARTOUM LOCALITY, SUDAN

Background: This study reports noise exposure among traffic police officers in Khartoum locality, Sudan. In this study, noise exposure was measured among Traffic Police Officer in Khartoum Locality, Sudan, in May 2010. Objectives: This paper addresses the noise levels, and their negative effects on traffic police officers resulting from its exposure to road traffic noise. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study in twenty two streets points along the Khartoum locality roads. The Khartoum locality roads have heavy traffic during the day, and the noise exposure level among traffic policemen was measured during the time period from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm on working day using a noise dosimeter which reads the noise exposure of a person. Also, 46 traffic police officers working in these points were selected as the study population. Results: The level of noise was ranged from 74.5 to 86.7 dBA. 52.2% have mood characteristic as annoyance, while 26.1% have tinnitus. Conclusion: It was observed that at all points, the level of noise was higher. Major effects of noise among traffic police officer include annoyance and tinnitus. All Traffic Police officers did not used hearing protection devices

NOISE EXPOSURE AMONG TRAFFIC POLICE OFFICERS IN KHARTOUM LOCALITY, SUDAN

Background: This study reports noise exposure among traffic police officers in Khartoum locality, Sudan. In this study, noise exposure was measured among Traffic Police Officer in Khartoum Locality, Sudan, in May 2010. Objectives: This paper addresses the noise levels, and their negative effects on traffic police officers resulting from its exposure to road traffic noise. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study in twenty two streets points along the Khartoum locality roads. The Khartoum locality roads have heavy traffic during the day, and the noise exposure level among traffic policemen was measured during the time period from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm on working day using a noise dosimeter which reads the noise exposure of a person. Also, 46 traffic police officers working in these points were selected as the study population. Results: The level of noise was ranged from 74.5 to 86.7 dBA. 52.2% have mood characteristic as annoyance, while 26.1% have tinnitus. Conclusion: It was observed that at all points, the level of noise was higher. Major effects of noise among traffic police officer include annoyance and tinnitus. All Traffic Police officers did not used hearing protection devices

Towards Robust and Unconstrained Full Range of Rotation Head Pose Estimation

Estimating the head pose of a person is a crucial problem for numerous applications that is yet mainly addressed as a subtask of frontal pose prediction. We present a novel method for unconstrained end-to-end head pose estimation to tackle the challenging task of full range of orientation head pose prediction. We address the issue of ambiguous rotation labels by introducing the rotation matrix formalism for our ground truth data and propose a continuous 6D rotation matrix representation for efficient and robust direct regression. This allows to efficiently learn full rotation appearance and to overcome the limitations of the current state-of-the-art. Together with new accumulated training data that provides full head pose rotation data and a geodesic loss approach for stable learning, we design an advanced model that is able to predict an extended range of head orientations. An extensive evaluation on public datasets demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in an efficient and robust manner, while its advanced prediction range allows the expansion of the application area. We open-source our training and testing code along with our trained models: https://github.com/thohemp/6DRepNet360

Prevalence of asymptomatic bacteriuria among low risk pregnant women attending antenatal care clinic in tertiary hospital: a cross sectional study

Background: The current study aims to identify the prevalence of asymptomatic bacteriuria among low-risk pregnant women attending the antenatal care clinic of tertiary University Hospital and to detect the most common causative organisms.Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study conducted at a tertiary University Hospital in the period between 1st November 2017 and 31st June 2018. All eligible women attending the outpatient clinic for antenatal care were approached to participate in the study. The recruited women were assessed through detailed history and clinical examination. Urine samples were taken for culture and sensitivity within two hours, in order to avoid bacterial multiplication. Urine culture and antibiotic sensitivity test were done.Results: The study included 250 women. The mean age of included women was 25.89±5.49 (18-42 years). The urine analysis results showed that 32% of cases had pus cells >5 per high power field and 10.4% of cases have protein (+). Casts were present in 0.8% of cases. RBCs >5 per high power field were present in 4.8% of cases. ASB is defined as urine culture with more than 100,000 colony forming unit; this was present in 30 cases. This indicates that the prevalence of ASB among studied cases was 12%. Enterococcus was the most prevalent organism as it was present in 36.7% among positive cases. Antibiotic sensitivity test was performed to the growing organisms indicated that teicoplanin, imipenem, cefoxitin, cefotaxime + clavulanic acid, Entrapenem, and trimethoprim + sulfamethoxazole are the most effective antibiotics against the most common organisms causing asymptomatic bacteriuria.Conclusions: The prevalence of asymptomatic bacteriuria among low-risk pregnant women is about 12%. Urine culture for asymptomatic bacteriuria should be the standard of care for evaluation of pregnant patient during antenatal care as regard presence or absence of UTI