Analysing volatility spillovers between grain and freight markets

The International Grain Council (IGC) circulates two price indices which are the Grain and Oilseeds Index (GOI) and the Grain and Oilseeds Freight Market Index (GOFI). These two indices indicate the respective market prices. The GOI markets are affected by various factors like supply and demand, weather, freight markets, etc. This research article attempts to explore and analyse volatility in GOI and GOFI markets using various GARCH family models, that is Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) analysis. The multivariate Dynamic Conditional Correlation Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity model (DCC GARCH) is used to find the spillovers between the two markets and thereby explore the effect of GOFI on GOI markets from the year 2013. The research article consists of four sections after introducing the subject namely a literature review, research methodology and models, analysis and conclusions of the study

Towards Optimizing Storage Costs on the Cloud

We study the problem of optimizing data storage and access costs on the cloud while ensuring that the desired performance or latency is unaffected. We first propose an optimizer that optimizes the data placement tier (on the cloud) and the choice of compression schemes to apply, for given data partitions with temporal access predictions. Secondly, we propose a model to learn the compression performance of multiple algorithms across data partitions in different formats to generate compression performance predictions on the fly, as inputs to the optimizer. Thirdly, we propose to approach the data partitioning problem fundamentally differently than the current default in most data lakes where partitioning is in the form of ingestion batches. We propose access pattern aware data partitioning and formulate an optimization problem that optimizes the size and reading costs of partitions subject to access patterns. We study the various optimization problems theoretically as well as empirically, and provide theoretical bounds as well as hardness results. We propose a unified pipeline of cost minimization, called SCOPe that combines the different modules. We extensively compare the performance of our methods with related baselines from the literature on TPC-H data as well as enterprise datasets (ranging from GB to PB in volume) and show that SCOPe substantially improves over the baselines. We show significant cost savings compared to platform baselines, of the order of 50% to 83% on enterprise Data Lake datasets that range from terabytes to petabytes in volume.Comment: The first two authors contributed equally. 12 pages, Accepted to the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 202

CANCER AND NEW PROSPECTIVE TO TREAT CANCER

Cancer is a condition when a few of the body's cells grow out of control and spread across other bodily regions. In the millions of cells that make up the human body, cancer may develop practically anywhere. Human cells often divide (via a process known as cell growth and multiplication) to create new cells when the body requires them. New cells replace old ones when they die as a result of ageing or injury. Aside from recent significant advancements in stem cell treatment, targeted therapy, ablation therapy, nanoparticles, natural antioxidants, radionics, chemodynamic therapy, sonodynamic therapy, and ferroptosis-based therapy, traditional treatment modalities like surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy are still in use. Oncology practices today concentrate on creating effective and secure cancer nanomedicines. Targeting both primary and metastatic cancer foci, stem cell treatment has demonstrated remarkable success in regenerating and repairing sick or damaged tissues, and nanoparticles have introduced novel diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities. The development and spread of particular cancer cells can be prevented by targeted treatment, which also protects good cells from harm. Ablation treatment has become a less invasive method for freezing or burning tumours without performing open surgery. Natural antioxidants have shown promise in locating free radicals and counteracting their damaging effects, perhaps treating or preventing cancer. Clinical trials are being conducted on a number of innovative technologies, some of which have already received approval. A summary on current developments and discoveries in cancer therapy was provided in this review

Fully Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Context-Aware Word Translation and Denoising Autoencoder

Learning machine translation by using only monolingual data sets is a complex task as there are many possible ways to connect or associate target sentences with source sentences. The monolingual word embeddings are linearly mapped on a common shared space through robust learning or adversarial training in an unsupervised way, but these learning techniques have fundamental limitations in translating sentences. In this paper, a simple yet effective method has been proposed for fully unsupervised machine translation that is based on cross-lingual sense to word embedding instead of cross-lingual word embedding and language model. We have utilized word sense disambiguation to incorporate the source language context in order to select the sense of a word more appropriately. A language model for considering target language context in lexical choices and denoising autoencoder for language insertion, deletion, and reordering are integrated. The proposed approach eliminates the problem of noisy target language context due to erroneous word translations. This work takes into account the challenge of homonyms and polysemous words in the case of morphologically rich languages. The experiments performed on English-Hindi and Hindi-English using different evaluation metrics show an improvement of +3 points in BLEU and METEOR-Hindi over the baseline system

Haematological toxicity in cancer cervix patients treated with concurrent chemoradiation by conventional technique- correlation with bone marrow radiation dose

Introduction: The standard of care for treatment of cancer cervix is concurrent chemoradiation followed by brachytherapy in the majority of cases. Conventional radiotherapy with chemotherapy causes haematological toxicities which may be related to radiation to pelvic bone marrow. The present study aims to study the haematological toxicities and correlate with the mean dose to the bone marrow. Material and Methods: Retrospective data of cancer patients treated in the institute in the year 2019 was retrieved. Haematological toxicities were analyzed in terms of CTCAE criteria. Mean dose to bone marrow was calculated after the delineation in the CT scan. The correlation between haematological toxicity and mean bone marrow was done using a paired t-test for statistical significance. Results: The data of 20 patients were retrieved. Anaemia Grade, I and Grade II-IV was seen in 65% and 35% respectively. Leukopenia Grade I and Grade II-IV were seen in 85% and 15% respectively and Lymphopenia Grade I and Grade II-Iv were seen in 55% and 45% respectively. The mean dose to bone marrow did not show any statistical significance with the severity of haematological toxicity. There was no Grade II-IV toxicity of neutropenia and thrombocytopenia. Conclusion: Conventional radiotherapy can safely be practice for patients with cancer cervix with acceptable haematological toxicities

Phase Stability of AlCoTiZn High-Entropy Alloy Prepared by Mechanical Alloying

In this work, synthesis and phase stability of a novel dual-phase (HCP-BCC) AlCoTiZn high-entropy alloy are presented. Microstructural evolution and thermal stability of the alloy powder were studied up to their melting point. X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, atomic emission spectrophotometry analysis and hardness measurements were used for the characterization of the HEA. As-milled and the bulk samples consist of an HCP and Co-rich BCC dual phases. The samples heat-treated at intermediate temperatures show HCP and Co-rich two FCC phases. Thermal stability studies reveal that vaporization of Zn occurs at around 800 degrees C. An extraordinary hardness of 1005 +/- 50 HV was observed in the bulk sample. This is mainly attributed to the presence of dual-phase HCP-BCC structures

Reducing planning target volume margins decreases dose to parotid glands in head and neck cancers - a dosimetric analysis

Introduction: Radiotherapy in head and neck cancers is treated for several weeks and daily setup and reproducibility is a challenge. This daily variability causes setup errors which accounts planning target volume margins. Reduced PTV margins have to be taken to decrease the dose to the parotid glands, without compromising on loco regional control rates. The present study is done to identify setup errors and see the feasibility to decrease the PTV margins by creating dummy radiotherapy plans in order to decrease dose to parotid glands. Material and Methods: 420 portal images were evaluated for setup errors in three dimensions (Antero Posterior, Left to Right and Superior to Inferior) which were performed in ten patients of oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma. All patients were treated in supine position using immobilization cast. After target volume delineation a PTV margin of 7mm was given. Dosimetric parameters of PTV and organs at risk were assessed. PTV margins were calculated according to three methods proposed by Stroom, Van Herk and ICRU 62. Dummy radiotherapy plans were generated using new PTV margins and compared with 7mm PTV margins. The data was analyzed using 3-way ANNOVA test for statistical significance. Results: The optimum PTV margins were 4mm in LR and SI direction and 7mm in AP direction. The PTV parameters (V95, D95, Dmax, Dmean, HI and CI) had no significant difference among different radiotherapy plans with different PTV margins. There was a significant decrease in the dose to right parotid (39.12 Gy to 32.88Gy; p-0.04), left parotid (37.90 to 31.21Gy; p-0.03) and parotid combined (38.65 to 31.45 Gy; p-0.01) when 7mm PTV margins were reduced to 4mm PTV margins. The results of dummy radiotherapy plans using asymmetric PTV margins (LR-4mm, SI-4mm and AP-7mm) and symmetrical PTV margins (4mm in all directions) are compared with PTV margins (7mm in all directions), in terms of PTV and OAR dosimetric parameters. Conclusion: The decreased PTV margins of 4mm decreases the dose to the parotid significantly. The implementation of radiotherapy plans needs to be supplemented by daily IGRT

Comparative study of pattern of infections in adult patients presenting as Acute Japanese Encephalitis and Acute Non Japanese Viral Encephalitis in tertiary care centre in Eastern Uttar Pradesh

Introduction : Acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) caused by Japanese encephalitis (JE) virus is a major health problem in Eastern Uttar Pradesh in India since 1978. In last 10 years a change in pattern of AES has been noticed, with two distinct patterns. One group has AES with extrapyramidal involvement and higher JE virus positivity, while the other has concomitant systemic involvement, mimicking enterovirus infection with low JE virus positivity. Aim& objectives :To compare the pattern of infections in adult patients presenting as Acute JE and Acute Non JE in a tertiary care centre in Eastern Uttar Pradesh.Methods : Fifty eight patients of JE were compared with the 115 patients with Non JE viral encephalitis for demography, clinical features, investigations, complications and outcome. It was a prospective study with one month follow up. Results & Conclusion : Cases of JE came mostly from August to October, while cases of Non JE came throughout the year. Abdominal pain, loose stools, swelling of body and breathlessness were more common in Non JE patients. Hepatomegaly, icterus, ascitis and raised JVP were more common in Non JE patients. Non JE cases have multisystem involvement like renal, hepatic and cardiac. Cerebellar signs, extrapyramidal signs, brisk DTR, hypertonia and hemiparesis were predominant in JE.Full recovery was achieved in 68.96% in JE and 74.78% in Non JE. Partial recovery with sequelae was seen in 13.79% in JE and 11.30% in Non JE. The case fatality rate was 13.79% in JE and 10.43% in Non JE