Effect of Governance, Piracy, and Investment on OTT Subscription Numbers

This paper evaluates the incentives for consumers to pirate video content on OTT streaming services. With rising exclusive content provided by each service, consumers have the incentive to subscribe to multiple services. The hypothesis is that as investment increases and a country’s laws are perceived to be better enforced, the number of subscriptions increases. Survey data on piracy from Herz, Kiljanski’s (2018) paper gives us a propensity to pirate variable, and data from the WGI report by the World Bank gives us indicators of consumer perception of governance. This is analysed against data on original content investment and subscription numbers to draw conclusions about confounding factors that affect consumers’ incentives to pirate.No embargoAcademic Major: Economic

EpilNet: A Novel Approach to IoT based Epileptic Seizure Prediction and Diagnosis System using Artificial Intelligence

Epilepsy is one of the most occurring neurological diseases. The main characteristic of this disease is a frequent seizure, which is an electrical imbalance in the brain. It is generally accompanied by shaking of body parts and even leads (fainting). In the past few years, many treatments have come up. These mainly involve the use of anti-seizure drugs for controlling seizures. But in 70% of cases, these drugs are not effective, and surgery is the only solution when the condition worsens. So patients need to take care of themselves while having a seizure and be safe. Wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) devices have come up with the development in medical science and technology. These devices help in the analysis of brain electrical activities. EEG helps in locating the affected cortical region. The most important is that it can predict any seizure in advance on-site. This has resulted in a sudden increase in demand for effective and efficient seizure prediction and diagnosis systems. A novel approach to epileptic seizure prediction and diagnosis system "EpilNet" is proposed in the present paper. It is a one-dimensional (1D) convolution neural network. EpilNet gives the testing accuracy of 79.13% for five classes, leading to a significant increase of about 6-7% compared to related works. The developed Web API helps in bringing EpilNet into practical use. Thus, it is an integrated system for both patients and doctors. The system will help patients prevent injury or accidents and increase the efficiency of the treatment process by doctors in the hospitals

Public Health concern for a Nipah Virus disease

Nipah virus (NiV) is a pathogenic paramyxovirus that has been responsible for sporadic outbreaks of respiratory and encephalitic disease in tropical countries. Elevated case mortality rate has also been connected with recent outbreaks in India (Kerala), Malaysia and Bangladesh. The virus generally infects animals like pigs and bats, but they do not show any symptoms of NiV.  The mortality rate in NiV infected humans is more as compared to other mammals. The patient usually shows no symptoms to headache fever, cough, dyspnea, confusion and more consequences lead to a coma. Although there are no drugs or vaccines available against this severe disease, precaution and awareness reduce the risk of NiV-infection. This review will be helpful to save the life of people and decrease death by the NiV-infection outbreak. Keywords:   Diagnosis, Henipavirus, Nipah virus, Prevention and treatmen

NucPosDB: a database of nucleosome positioning in vivo and nucleosomics of cell-free DNA

Nucleosome positioning is involved in many gene regulatory processes happening in the cell, and it may change as cells differentiate or respond to the changing microenvironment in a healthy or diseased organism. One important implication of nucleosome positioning in clinical epigenetics is its use in the “nucleosomics” analysis of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) for the purpose of patient diagnostics in liquid biopsies. The rationale for this is that the apoptotic nucleases that digest chromatin of the dying cells mostly cut DNA between nucleosomes. Thus, the short pieces of DNA in body fluids reflect the positions of nucleosomes in the cells of origin. Here, we report a systematic nucleosomics database — NucPosDB — curating published nucleosome positioning datasets in vivo as well as datasets of sequenced cell-free DNA (cfDNA) that reflect nucleosome positioning in situ in the cells of origin. Users can select subsets of the database by a number of criteria and then obtain raw or processed data. NucPosDB also reports the originally determined regions with stable nucleosome occupancy across several individuals with a given condition. An additional section provides a catalogue of computational tools for the analysis of nucleosome positioning or cfDNA experiments and theoretical algorithms for the prediction of nucleosome positioning preferences from DNA sequence. We provide an overview of the field, describe the structure of the database in this context, and demonstrate data variability using examples of different medical conditions. NucPosDB is useful both for the analysis of fundamental gene regulation processes and the training of computational models for patient diagnostics based on cfDNA. The database currently curates ~ 400 publications on nucleosome positioning in cell lines and in situ as well as cfDNA from > 10,000 patients and healthy volunteers. For open-access cfDNA datasets as well as key MNase-seq datasets in human cells, NucPosDB allows downloading processed mapped data in addition to the regions with stable nucleosome occupancy. NucPosDB is available at https://generegulation.org/nucposdb/

Death from mantle cell lymphoma limits sequential therapy, particularly after first relapse: Patterns of care and outcomes in a series from Australia and the United Kingdom

Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is a B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma characterised by a heterogeneous clinical course. Patients can often receive sequential treatments, yet these typically yield diminishing periods of disease control, raising questions about optimal therapy sequencing. Novel agents, such as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies and bispecific antibodies, show promise in relapsed MCL, but are often reserved for later treatment lines, which may underserve patients with aggressive disease phenotypes who die early in the treatment journey. To assess the problem of patient attrition from lymphoma-related death limiting sequential treatment, we performed a multicentre retrospective cohort analysis of 389 patients treated at Australian and UK centres over a 10-year period. Deaths from MCL increased after each treatment line, with 7%, 23% and 26% of patients dying from uncontrolled MCL after first, second and third lines respectively. Patients with older age at diagnosis and early relapse after induction therapy were at particular risk of death after second-line treatment. This limitation of sequential treatment by lymphoma-related death provides support for the trial of novel therapies in earlier treatment lines, particularly in high-risk patient populations

Nucleosome reorganisation in breast cancer tissues.

Background Nucleosome repositioning in cancer is believed to cause many changes in genome organisation and gene expression. Understanding these changes is important to elucidate fundamental aspects of cancer. It is also important for medical diagnostics based on cell-free DNA (cfDNA), which originates from genomic DNA regions protected from digestion by nucleosomes. Results We have generated high-resolution nucleosome maps in paired tumour and normal tissues from the same breast cancer patients using MNase-assisted histone H3 ChIP-seq and compared them with the corresponding cfDNA from blood plasma. This analysis has detected single-nucleosome repositioning at key regulatory regions in a patient-specific manner and common cancer-specific patterns across patients. The nucleosomes gained in tumour versus normal tissue were particularly informative of cancer pathways, with ~ 20-fold enrichment at CpG islands, a large fraction of which marked promoters of genes encoding DNA-binding proteins. The tumour tissues were characterised by a 5-10 bp decrease in the average distance between nucleosomes (nucleosome repeat length, NRL), which is qualitatively similar to the differences between pluripotent and differentiated cells. This effect was correlated with gene activity, differential DNA methylation and changes in local occupancy of linker histone variants H1.4 and H1X. Conclusions Our study offers a novel resource of high-resolution nucleosome maps in breast cancer patients and reports for the first time the effect of systematic decrease of NRL in paired tumour versus normal breast tissues from the same patient. Our findings provide a new mechanistic understanding of nucleosome repositioning in tumour tissues that can be valuable for patient diagnostics, stratification and monitoring

An integrated peridynamics-finite volume based multi-phase flow, geomechanics and hydraulic fracture model

Hydraulic fracturing in unconventional reservoirs exhibits several interesting phenomena including the interaction of hydraulic fractures with multi-scale heterogeneities such as natural fractures, stress/barrier layers, bedding planes, shale laminations, and mineralogy. Moreover, hydraulic fractures originating from different clusters or stages in a multi-stage, multi-cluster treatment interact among themselves. Mathematical models, with various degrees of numerical complexity, are developed for gaining better insights into the physics governing these phenomena. Peridynamics-based hydraulic fracturing model developed by Ouchi (2016) has been demonstrated to capture all of these phenomena. However, its major drawback is that it is computationally expensive. In this dissertation, we have extended the capabilities of the model to multi-phase flow and made it significantly faster by coupling it with the less expensive Finite Volume Method. The single-phase peridynamics flow model for slightly compressible, Newtonian fluids has been generalized for multiphase, multicomponent flow of compressible, non-Newtonian fluids. The generalized flow model has been coupled with the fracturing model and compared with laboratory experiments performed under low confining stresses. The extended model is also applied to simulate the growth of fractures from a new (child) well in the presence of depleted regions created by production from the fractures of an old (parent) well under high confining stresses. The interaction of a hydraulic fracture (HF) with a natural fracture (NF) is investigated. Remote shear failure of the NF due to the pororelastic stress changes caused by the propagating HF are considered. Consistent with the experiments, the remote shear failure is shown to result in the bending of the HF towards the NF before intersecting with it. Accounting for the effects of remote shear failure and poroelasticity, numerical crossing criteria for the HF-NF interaction are developed. The hydraulic fracturing model based on peridynamics (PD) theory is coupled with the less expensive Finite Volume Method (FVM), following the PD-FEM coupling method proposed by Galvanetto et al. (2016). Significant improvements in computational performance are achieved by the coupled model relative to the pure PD-based model, without compromising the unique original capabilities. By monitoring material damage in remote heterogeneous regions, a workflow for estimating the extent of the Stimulated Reservoir Volume (SRV) around a primary hydraulic fracture is developed. A sensitivity study for the effects of elastic properties of the formation, injection rate, and the reservoir fluid type on SRV extent is presentedPetroleum and Geosystems Engineerin

PRIOR ONTOLOGY SELECTION AND QUERY TRANSLATION FOR INFORMATION SEARCH

Objective: Most of the current search engines follow informal keyword based search. Finding the user intention and improving the relevancy of results are the major issues faced by the current traditional keyword based search. Targeting to solve the problems of traditional search and to boost the retrieval process, a framework for semantic based information retrieval is planned. Methods: Social and wine ontologies are used to find the user intention and retrieving it. User's natural language queries are translated into SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and Resource Description Framework query language) query for finding related items from those ontologies.Results: The proposed method makes a significant improvement over traditional search in terms of some searches required for searching a particular number of pages using performance graph.Conclusion: Semantic based search can understand the user intention and gives better results than traditional search

An analytical cross-sectional study on the determinants of nutritional anemia among children aged 1 to 5 years from Muzaffarnagar, India

Background: Nutritional anemia, one of the common causes of anemia, may result from the deficiency of a number of micronutrients. The present study was conducted to assess the prevalence of nutritional anemia and the clinico-haematological profile of anemia among the hospitalized children aged 1 to 5 years. Materials and Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted among 250 anemic children between age one and five years attending the tertiary care hospital at Northern India. An interviewer administered questionnaire was used to obtain the data. Peripheral blood samples were used to assess the hematological parameters. Results: The prevalence of nutritional anemia among the anemic 1-5 years old children was 27.6%, in which Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) prevalence was 21.2%. Vitamin B12 deficiency was found among 8% of the anemic children and folic acid deficiency was prevalent among the 1.6% of the cases. The mean hemoglobin levels were significantly lower in among the nutritional anemia children (8.75 g/dl). Conclusion: Overall, the proportion of nutritional anemia among children aged one to five years is significant in Northern India, with IDA being the most common nutritional deficiency anemia