Implementation of Grade 8 Science Curriculum2012 in Bangladesh: Teachers Preparedness

A mixed method research design was employed to examine the measures undertaken by the Ministry of Education in Bangladesh to enhance the competencies of Science teachers to cope with the requirements  of Science  Curriculum  2012  at Grade 8. The population of this study was the Grade 8 Science teachers. Sample of the study included 320 survey teachers, 24 interview teachers and 48 teachers whose class activities were observed. Random sampling, stratified sampling and purposive sampling techniques were used. Survey questionnaire, semi-structured interview schedule and observation checklist were used to collect both qualitative and qualitative data. Survey data was analyzed by using SPSS 21.0 versions. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used. Thematic categories for commonalities were used and coding was used. Triangulation was used to interpret both data. Measures undertaken by Ministry of Education were not successful. Teachers used lecture method in place of activity-based and student-centered approach. Teachers did not have sufficient understanding on Grade 8 Science curriculum objectives. Teachers were not aware about their responsibilities in curriculum implementation. Education Minstry of Bangladesh introduced National Curriculum 2012 at Grade 8 before teachers’ preparedness. In-service training should  be designed  and  conducted  on  the basis  of teacher’s need

Less is More: Facial Landmarks can Recognize a Spontaneous Smile

Smile veracity classification is a task of interpreting social interactions. Broadly, it distinguishes between spontaneous and posed smiles. Previous approaches used hand-engineered features from facial landmarks or considered raw smile videos in an end-to-end manner to perform smile classification tasks. Feature-based methods require intervention from human experts on feature engineering and heavy pre-processing steps. On the contrary, raw smile video inputs fed into end-to-end models bring more automation to the process with the cost of considering many redundant facial features (beyond landmark locations) that are mainly irrelevant to smile veracity classification. It remains unclear to establish discriminative features from landmarks in an end-to-end manner. We present a MeshSmileNet framework, a transformer architecture, to address the above limitations. To eliminate redundant facial features, our landmarks input is extracted from Attention Mesh, a pre-trained landmark detector. Again, to discover discriminative features, we consider the relativity and trajectory of the landmarks. For the relativity, we aggregate facial landmark that conceptually formats a curve at each frame to establish local spatial features. For the trajectory, we estimate the movements of landmark composed features across time by self-attention mechanism, which captures pairwise dependency on the trajectory of the same landmark. This idea allows us to achieve state-of-the-art performances on UVA-NEMO, BBC, MMI Facial Expression, and SPOS datasets

Electrocardiographic Abnormalities Among Arsenic-exposed Persons Through Groundwater in Bangladesh

This study was carried out among arsenic-exposed and non-exposed people of Bangladesh to assess and compare their cardiac status based on electrocardiographic (ECG) findings. For the purpose of the study, participants were included in three groups: arsenic-exposed persons with arsenicosis (arsenicosis group), arsenic-exposed persons without arsenicosis (non-arsenicosis group), and persons not exposed to arsenic (non-exposed group). Each group included 50 respondents. In this study, no significant difference in heart rate, rhythm, axis, and pulse rate interval was detected among the arsenicosis, non-arsenicosis and non-exposed groups. A significant difference in corrected QT interval between the arsenicosis and the non-exposed group (p<0.05) was observed. On the contrary, no statistically significant difference in corr-ected QT interval between the non-arsenicosis and the non-exposed group was found. Abnormal QRS complex was found among 14%, 8%, and 2% of the arsenicosis, non-arsenicosis, and non-exposed groups respectively. ECG findings, indicative of left ventricular hypertrophy, ischaemic heart disease, andright bundle branch block, were high among the arsenicosis group. Overall, abnormal ECG findings were high (58%) among the respondents of the arsenicosis group and were highly significant (p<0.001). The findings revealed that there was a significant association between ECG abnormalities and arsenic exposure

Real-time Mobile Enabled Scheme for Virtual Spectacle Frame Selection

Selection of physical appearance related personal item in online shopping is extremely difficult. This research presents a mobile enabled scheme that provides an advanced online shopping experience of spectacle frames selection. The application is developed to automatically detect the face shape of the user from an image, give suggestions of frames based on the shape, and provide a virtual try-on for the user. Active Shape Model has been used to identify the facial landmark points. Mathematical equations have been designed to analyze and map the landmark points to a face shape. Expert knowledge has been used to recommend frames for each face shape. Haar feature based face and eye detector provided by OpenCV has been used to detect the face and identify the position of eyes for virtual try-on. So far this is the best mobile enabled application for real-time frame selection

Electrocardiographic Abnormalities Among Arsenic-exposed Persons Through Groundwater in Bangladesh

This study was carried out among arsenic-exposed and non-exposed people of Bangladesh to assess and compare their cardiac status based on electrocardiographic (ECG) findings. For the purpose of the study, participants were included in three groups: arsenic-exposed persons with arsenicosis (arsenicosis group), arsenic-exposed persons without arsenicosis (non-arsenicosis group), and persons not exposed to arsenic (non-exposed group). Each group included 50 respondents. In this study, no significant difference in heart rate, rhythm, axis, and pulse rate interval was detected among the arsenicosis, non-arsenicosis and non-exposed groups. A significant difference in corrected QT interval between the arsenicosis and the non-exposed group (p<0.05) was observed. On the contrary, no statistically significant difference in corr-ected QT interval between the non-arsenicosis and the non-exposed group was found. Abnormal QRS complex was found among 14%, 8%, and 2% of the arsenicosis, non-arsenicosis, and non-exposed groups respectively. ECG findings, indicative of left ventricular hypertrophy, ischaemic heart disease, andright bundle branch block, were high among the arsenicosis group. Overall, abnormal ECG findings were high (58%) among the respondents of the arsenicosis group and were highly significant (p<0.001). The findings revealed that there was a significant association between ECG abnormalities and arsenic exposure