Panchromatic imaging and spectroscopic observations of the mass ejections of RY Scuti

We describe recent panchromatic imaging and spectroscopic studies of the supergiant, mass-transferring, binary star RY Scuti, which is in a brief transitional phase to become a Wolf-Rayet star and a stripped-envelope supernova.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of "Physics of Evolved Stars 2015 - A conference dedicated to the memory of Olivier Chesneau

Regression and Classification for Direction-of-Arrival Estimation with Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks

We present a novel learning-based approach to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of a sound source using a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) trained via regression on synthetic data and Cartesian labels. We also describe an improved method to generate synthetic data to train the neural network using state-of-the-art sound propagation algorithms that model specular as well as diffuse reflections of sound. We compare our model against three other CRNNs trained using different formulations of the same problem: classification on categorical labels, and regression on spherical coordinate labels. In practice, our model achieves up to 43% decrease in angular error over prior methods. The use of diffuse reflection results in 34% and 41% reduction in angular prediction errors on LOCATA and SOFA datasets, respectively, over prior methods based on image-source methods. Our method results in an additional 3% error reduction over prior schemes that use classification based networks, and we use 36% fewer network parameters

Mariamman Worship Traditions and Beliefs

In today's world, from the countries where science has developed to the villages where laymen live, everyone is afraid of God. It is a well-known fact that we are driven from within or outside by an invisible, formless force that we cannot understand or see. The early man gave it many forms and gave it many names, and he followed the methods of worship and rituals out of fear. Man has subjected himself and his dependents to a kind of ritual for all the things he feared and organized himself and his dependents through the instrument of faith. It was this unshakable faith that later led to the emergence of countless theological doctrines. Accordingly, the methods of worship of Mariamman, one of the most widely worshipped Goddesses in Tamil Nadu, and the beliefs found in them are discussed in this paper with relevant data

Reforming History: Turkey’s Legal Regime and Its Potential Accession to the European Union

For the past decade, Turkey and the European Union (EU) have had serious discussions about Turkey\u27s possible entrance into the EU. The intensity of these talks, however, has always been tempered by Turkey\u27s extremely questionable human rights practices. The most marked aspects of this record are the country\u27s treatment of the Kurdish minority and its quashing of political dissent through the heavyhanded use of its legal system. In this note, I will argue that, despite Turkey\u27s increasing political and economic stature in the world, it will not be able to gain entry into the EU until it is able to sufficiently address these human rights problems to the satisfaction of the EU and the international community in general

Performance measurements of Bluetooth 5 technique under interference

Abstract. This thesis focuses on experimental performance of the Bluetooth 5 technology and compares results with the previous version. Bluetooth technology, institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE) Std. 802.15.4, and other techniques share the same unlicensed 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) spectrum. Various technologies are operating in the same frequency band, and if the channel utilized by these technologies overlap, end in cross-technology interference (CTI). Measurements have been performed in indoor scenario and ZigBee nodes were used as an interference. Performance output of the Bluetooth 5 is compared to a previous release Bluetooth low energy (BLE) 4 which is currently one of the popular technologies in commercial wireless devices and expected to be even more widespread in the future. This new Bluetooth technology has featured increased data rate, low power consumption, longer range, higher broadcasting capacity, and improved coexistence with other wireless technologies operating in the same frequency band. The main goal of this work was to evaluate the experimental communication range and throughput of the BLE 5 coded version under interference. Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 chipset has been used for measurements and result shows the practical communication range and throughput of BLE 5 coded version under interference. In this work, with error correction coding, one-third BLE link gain was achieved when considering packet error rate (PER) less than 10%. In addition, ZigBee interference was found to be very harmful for the Bluetooth communication when operating in the same frequency band

Flow of Conducting Fluid on solid Core Surrounded by Porous Cylindrical Region in Presence of Transverse Magnetic Field

The steady flow of an electrically conducting, viscous and incompressible fluid flow through / past a solid core surrounded by cylindrical porous medium is considered in the presence of the transverse magnetic field. The modified Brinkman and Stokes equations are used to describe the fluid flow in porous and non-porous regions respectively. The exact solution is obtained in terms of modified Bessel’s function.    The matching boundary conditions are used at the interface of the two regions along with the no-slip condition on the surface of the solid core. Further, uniform velocity away from the fluid surface is considered. The effect of magnetic field and porous parameter on the fluid flow is presented for both porous and     non-porous regions. From the obtained result it is noticed that increase in magnetic field strength, the flow is suppressed and fluid flow through porous region is observed.     Further, increase in porou

A Deep Learning based Model for Fruit Grading using DenseNet

Detecting the rotten fruits become significant in the agricultural industry. Usually, the classification of fresh and rotten fruits is carried by humans is not effectual for the fruit farmers. Human beings will become tired after doing the same task multiple times, but machines do not. Thus, this paper proposes an approach to reduce human efforts, reduce the cost and time for production by identifying the defects in the fruits in the agricultural industry. If we do not detect those defects, those defected fruits may contaminate good fruits. Hence, we proposed a model to avoid the spread of rottenness. The proposed model classifies the fresh fruits and rotten fruits from the input fruit images. For this work, we have used three types of fruits, such as apple, banana, and oranges. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used for extracting the features from input fruit images, and Softmax is used to classify the images into fresh and rotten fruits. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated on a dataset that is downloaded from Kaggle and produces an accuracy of 97.82%. The results showed that the proposed CNN model can effectively classify the fresh fruits and rotten fruits

Systemic inflammation predicts all-cause mortality: a Glasgow Inflammation Outcome Study

Introduction: Markers of the systemic inflammatory response, including C-reactive protein and albumin (combined to form the modified Glasgow Prognostic Score), as well as neutrophil, lymphocyte and platelet counts have been shown to be prognostic of survival in patients with cancer. The aim of the present study was to examine the prognostic relationship between these markers of the systemic inflammatory response and all-cause, cancer, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular mortality in a large incidentally sampled cohort.<p></p> Methods: Patients (n = 160 481) who had an incidental blood sample taken between 2000 and 2008 were studied for the prognostic value of C-reactive protein (>10mg/l, albumin (>35mg/l), neutrophil (>7.5×109/l) lymphocyte and platelet counts. Also, patients (n = 52 091) sampled following the introduction of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (>3mg/l) measurements were studied. A combination of these markers, to make cumulative inflammation-based scores, were investigated.<p></p> Results: In all patients (n = 160 481) C-reactive protein (>10mg/l) (HR 2.71, p<0.001), albumin (>35mg/l) (HR 3.68, p<0.001) and neutrophil counts (HR 2.18, p<0.001) were independently predictive of all-cause mortality. These associations were also observed in cancer, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular mortality before and after the introduction of high sensitivity C-reactive protein measurements (>3mg/l) (n = 52 091). A combination of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (>3mg/l), albumin and neutrophil count predicted all-cause (HR 7.37, p<0.001, AUC 0.723), cancer (HR 9.32, p<0.001, AUC 0.731), cardiovascular (HR 4.03, p<0.001, AUC 0.650) and cerebrovascular (HR 3.10, p<0.001, AUC 0.623) mortality. Conclusion The results of the present study showed that an inflammation-based prognostic score, combining high sensitivity C-reactive protein, albumin and neutrophil count is prognostic of all-cause mortality