Reassessment of physico-chemical water quality in Setiu Wetland, Malaysia

Setiu Wetland is located in the southern part of South China Sea, Malaysia. This wetland has diverse ecosystems that represent a vast array of biological diversity and abundance in utilizable natural resources. However, there are large scales of aquaculture activities within and nearby the wetland which could threaten the ecosystems of this area. Thus, the main goal of the study was to assess the impact of these activities through the measurement of physico-chemical water quality parameters and then compare this to a previous study carried out in the same study area. The parameters (salinity, temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, biological oxygen demand and total suspended solids) were monitored monthly at the surface water from July to October 2008. The results showed that the impact of aquaculture activities on the water quality in the area with dissolved oxygen and total suspended solids concentrations were considerably lower than those observed previously. With respect to the Malaysian Marine Water Quality Criteria and Standard, most of the level of parameters measured remained Class 1, suggesting the physico-chemical environment were in line with sustainable conservation of the marine protected areas and marine parks of this wetland area

HIV seroconversion among factory workers in Harare: who is getting newly infected?

A clinical report on the impact of HIV/AIDS among factory workers in Zimbabwe's industrial areas of Harare.It was estimated that by the of 1996 more than 8.4 million AIDS cases had occurred worldwide.1 Because of the long and variable duration between infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the ultimate development of AIDS, a more useful indication of current trends in the epidemic is the number of new infections with HIV. Twenty eight million people from 190 countries across the world were HIV positive by mid 1996.Composed of distinct epidemics, each with its own features, degree and extent, the pandemic has had a disproportionately severe impact on the developing world. Despite wide information on HIV prevention, 3.1 million new infections occurred during 1996. Up to 93% of the HIV infections recorded in 1996 were from developing countries with 68% from sub-Saharan Africa.2 Developing countries, who have weaker economic structures, continue to bear the greatest burden of HIV infections. HIV infection appears be spreading much faster in Southern Africa than anywhere else

A preliminary study of water quality index in Terengganu River Basin, Malaysia

The Malaysian Department of Environment-Water Quality Index (DOE-WQI) was determined for the Terengganu River basin which is located at the coastal water of the southern South China Sea between July and October 2008. Monthly samplings were carried out at ten sampling stations within the basin. Six parameters listed in DOE-WQI were measured based on standard methods: pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), total suspended solids (TSS) and ammonical nitrogen (AN). The results indicated the impact of various anthropogenic activities which contribute to high values of BOD, COD, TSS and AN at middle and downstream stations, as compared with the upstream of the basin. The reverses were true for the pH and DO values. The DOE-WQI ranged from 71.5-94.6% (mean 86.9%), which corresponded to a classification status range from slightly polluted to clean. With respect to the Malaysia National Water Quality Standards (NWQS), the level of most of the parameters measured remained at Class I which is suitable for the sustainable conservation of the natural environment, for water supply without treatment and as well as for very sensitive aquatic species. It is suggested that monitoring should be carried out continuously for proper management of this river basin

Dasar Progam Perancangan Dan Perencanaan Arsitektur (DP3A) Surakarta Pet Centre (Pendekatan pada Konsep Arsitektur Moderen Tropis)

Surakarta Pet Centre merupakan fasilitas yang diperuntukkan untuk melayani kebutuhankebutuhan hewan peliharaan, dimana dalam pelayanan tersebut mencangkup tiga fasilitas utama yaitu seperti kegitan jual beli hewan, jasa, dan wisata edukasi. Dari fasilitas utama tersebut masing-masing terdapat wadah-wadah untuk menunjang aktifitas kegiatan yang ada di Surakarta Pet Centre, diantaranya untuk fasilitas jual beli terdapat pet jual beli hewan dan pet shop, untuk pelayanan jasa terdapat pet hotel, pet grooming, pet salon, dan pet clinic, serta untuk pelayanan edukasi terdapat pet education. Tujuan dari adanya urakarta Pet Centre sendiri salah satunya adalah menciptakan sebuah konsep perancangan desain arsitektur yang mampu mewadahi segala kegiatan yang meliputi kegiatan pendidikan,pemenuhan kebutuhan pokok hewan, wisata kreatif, dan bisnis. Konsep arsitektur modern tropis dijadikan sebagai upaya mewujudkan bangunan yang ramah lingkungan yang bisa dinilai dari sisi lingkungan, ekonomi serta social dimana dalam tiga aspek tersebut selalu saling berkaitan untuk berkelanjutan di masa yang akan datang. Dengan adanya penerapan tersebut diharapkan bisa bermanfaat untuk kehidupan di dalam aktifitas yang ada di Surakarta Pet Centre, khususnya untuk pengguna bangunan

Seasonal and spatial variability of selected surface water quality parameters in Setiu Wetland, Terengganu, Malaysia

This paper presents the results for surface water quality parameters measured in the Setiu Wetland, on the east coast of Malaysia, which feeds into the southern part of the South China Sea. There are no previous studies dealing with the seasonal and spatial variation of water quality in this area, despite numerous anthropogenic inputs into this ecologically and economically important wetland. The parameters measured were salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), pH, biological oxygen demand (BOD) and total suspended solids (TSS). These parameters were sampled monthly from October 2009 to September 2010, during both the wet and dry seasons, at ten sampling stations distributed throughout the area. The physical water quality parameters were measured in situ whilst TSS and BOD were determined using the standard methods. A deterioration of water quality in the Setiu Wetland was observed in areas near agriculture and aquaculture activities. This was expected to be as a result of the use of fertilisers, waste from fish farm food and the waste products of aquaculture. The parameters measured showed lower mean values of surface salinity, temperature, DO, pH and TSS during the wet season relative to the dry season. In contrast, the concentration of BOD was high during the wet season and lowest in the dry season. Results obtained from this study clearly showed the surface physical water quality for the Setiu Wetland was highly influenced by anthropogenic activities and seasonal variation. Therefore, both factors must be considered to move towards proper management of this wetland

Pengendalian Proyektor LCD dari Jarak Jauh dengan Wifi dan Raspberry pi

LCD Projector is always used in any learning process of FKI UMS’s classes. Observation that has been done, thee tools always keep in the ‘ON’ mode even the class ends. On the other hand, FKI UMS provides Wi-Fi connection that can reach out every classroom in FKI UMS. This fact gives an idea about using Wi-Fi Connection to make LCD Projector remote controller. To bring that idea into reality, remote controller system that use Raspberry Pi as embedded controller and Wi-Fi UMS as communication infrastructure is created. The step starts with making the hardware and software programming, and the implementation follows after, after that, the program needs to be tested. Output of this research is a LCD Projector remote controller with responsive web page interfaces which can be accessed by the users by web-browser in the smartphone with a 100% success rate in 20 trials

Penataaan Kawasan Permukiman Kumuh Di Kelurahan Semanggi Dengan Konsep Urban Sustainable Settlement

The problem of slum areas is also a priority agenda of President Joko Widodo listed in Nawacita. The National Slum Settlement Management Program has been socialized with a target to reach 2019 slum-free Indonesia, through the 100-0-100 programm. The program is a continuation of 100% access to clean water, 0% slums and 100% access to sanitation. But in practice until now there are still many slum areas that have not been resolved. According to the Directorate General of Human Settlements of the Ministry of PUPR in the Surakarta City National Slum Upgrading Program (NUSP), it is included in 30 priority locations for handling slum settlements determined from the Ministry of PUPR indicators, there are 28 distribution points of slum settlements with a total slum area of 359.53 hectares and 18,625 non-habitable houses. The handling priority of Surakarta City is in the Semanggi area with a slum area of 76.03 Ha, which includes five Kelurahan: Kelurahan Sewu, Gandekan, Kedunglumbu, Sangkrah, and Semanggi Kelurahan. The first phase of structuring the Semanggi area was carried out in RW 23 through a renovation and rejuvenation project. RW 23 is a legal and illegal slum area, establishing permanent and non-permanent dwellings in the river border location which is the Bengawan Solo River Basin (BBWS) working area. The dynamics of urban settlements is a sustainable future, therefore making sustainable urban settlements urgent to be applied. The framework for the formulation of criteria and indicators for sustainable settlements includes three things that are synergized, namely, social includes human capital and social capital, the economy includes access to MSME financing and development and the physical environment includes housing, accessibility, public space, basic services and the environment (DG Cipta Ministry of Public Works and Public Works 2013). The objectives of planning and design include: 1) Developing the potential of settlements in order to improve the economic level of the community; 2) Designing residential area planning in the form of housing and supporting facilities; 3) Organizing slum areas in order to improve the quality of the environment. Keywords: Slum Settlement, Semanggi Village, Sustainabl

Caps captioning: a modern image captioning approach based on improved capsule network

In image captioning models, the main challenge in describing an image is identifying all the objects by precisely considering the relationships between the objects and producing various captions. Over the past few years, many methods have been proposed, from an attribute-to-attribute comparison approach to handling issues related to semantics and their relationships. Despite the improvements, the existing techniques suffer from inadequate positional and geometrical attributes concepts. The reason is that most of the abovementioned approaches depend on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for object detection. CNN is notorious for failing to detect equivariance and rotational invariance in objects. Moreover, the pooling layers in CNNs cause valuable information to be lost. Inspired by the recent successful approaches, this paper introduces a novel framework for extracting meaningful descriptions based on a parallelized capsule network that describes the content of images through a high level of understanding of the semantic contents of an image. The main contribution of this paper is proposing a new method that not only overrides the limitations of CNNs but also generates descriptions with a wide variety of words by using Wikipedia. In our framework, capsules focus on the generation of meaningful descriptions with more detailed spatial and geometrical attributes for a given set of images by considering the position of the entities as well as their relationships. Qualitative experiments on the benchmark dataset MS-COCO show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art image captioning models when describing the semantic content of the images.Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

Burden of diarrhea in the eastern mediterranean region, 1990-2013: Findings from the global burden of disease study 2013

Diarrheal diseases (DD) are leading causes of disease burden, death, and disability, especially in children in low-income settings. DD can also impact a child's potential livelihood through stunted physical growth, cognitive impairment, and other sequelae. As part of the Global Burden of Disease Study, we estimated DD burden, and the burden attributable to specific risk factors and particular etiologies, in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) between 1990 and 2013. For both sexes and all ages, we calculated disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), which are the sum of years of life lost and years lived with disability. We estimate that over 125,000 deaths (3.6 of total deaths) were due to DD in the EMR in 2013, with a greater burden of DD in low-and middle-income countries. Diarrhea deaths per 100,000 children under 5 years of age ranged from one (95 uncertainty interval UI = 0-1) in Bahrain and Oman to 471 (95% UI = 245-763) in Somalia. The pattern for diarrhea DALYs among those under 5 years of age closely followed that for diarrheal deaths. DALYs per 100,000 ranged from 739 (95% UI = 520-989) in Syria to 40,869 (95% UI = 21,540-65,823) in Somalia. Our results highlighted a highly inequitable burden of DD in EMR, mainly driven by the lack of access to proper resources such as water and sanitation. Our findings will guide preventive and treatment interventions which are based on evidence and which follow the ultimate goal of reducing the DD burden. Copyright © 2016 by The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene