491 research outputs found

    Effective Evacuation Route Strategy during Natural Disaster

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    Nowadays, most of the countries around the world encounter affect of disasters. Disaster can occur anytime and anywhere, without giving any alarm or message. During the disaster, the rapid response and recovery activities are critical issues to save lives and properties. The effective response actions play vital role in the disaster situation because the large amount of properties and valuable lives are depending on it. But, the rescue teams and emergency organizations have many problems and delays to give the effective response to the victim areas. To reduce the risk and damage, identifying the best evacuation routes for the recuse teams is vital. The proposed system provides not only the recuse teams which locate near the victim area but also the best evacuation routes to move people from the hazard place to the safe places. This paper describes a web-based application for the best evacuation route assessment during natural disaster

    Authentications of Myanmar National Registration Card

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    The automatic identification system of Myanmar national registration card (NRC) holder is presented in this paper. The proposed system can be handled the identification by the extracted low quality face image and fingerprint image from Myanmar NRC. Both of the facial recognition and fingerprint recognition system are developed for Myanmar citizenship confirmation. Age invariant face recognition algorithm is performed based on combination of DiaPCA (Diagonal principal Component Analysis) and KNN (Kth nearest neighbor classifier) approaches. An algorithm of the fingerprint recognition is proposed for recognition of the poor quality fingerprint image with fabric background.  Several experiments have been done for confirming the effectiveness of the proposed approach

    The pale evidence for treatment of iron-deficiency anaemia in older people

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    Funding The authors have received funding to carry out a pilot RCT on management of IDA in older people from the Chief Scientist Office, Scotland.Peer reviewedPostprin

    Qualitative evaluation of adherence therapy in Parkinson’s disease: a multidirectional model

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    Background: Medication can control the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Despite this, non-adherence with medication is prevalent in PD. Treatments for improving adherence with medication have been investigated in many chronic conditions, including PD. However, few researchers have evaluated their interventions qualitatively. We investigated the acceptability and potential mechanism of action of adherence therapy (AT) in PD patients and their spouse/carers who received the intervention as part of a randomized controlled trial. Methods: Sixteen participants (ten patients and six spouses/carers) who had recently completed the trial were purposely selected in order to cover a range of ages and disease severity. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in the participants’ homes. Data were transcribed and analyzed using a thematic approach. A second researcher, naïve to PD and AT, analyzed the data independently to limit bias. Results: The trial showed that AT significantly improved both medication adherence and quality of life in people with PD. Specifically, patients who received AT reported improvements in mobility, activities of daily living, emotional wellbeing, cognition, communication, and body discomfort. General beliefs about medication also significantly improved in those who received AT compared with controls. In the current qualitative evaluation, a total of 175 codes were generated, which formed eleven subthemes. These could be grouped under three overarching themes, ie, perceptions prior to AT, positive effects of AT, and attributes of AT. Conclusion: This randomized controlled trial is the first to investigate AT in PD. The acceptability and underlying mechanism of the intervention suggest a new multidirectional model of AT in PD which future research should seek to confirm. The findings provide a deeper understanding of AT and will allow clinicians to modify the delivery of the intervention by acknowledging various pathways to improved outcomes

    Mineralogical, gemmological and petrological study of the Mogok Stone Tract in Myanmar with a special focus on gem-quality ruby and spinel

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    This thesis mainly focuses on the gemstones (marble-hosted ruby and spinel) from world famous ruby deposits in the Mogok area, Myanmar. This dissertation consists of three main sections (one published paper and two drafts for publications to be submitted): (1) Spinel from Mogok, Myanmar - a detalied inclusion study by Raman microspectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy, (2) Petrology, geothermobarometry and geochemistry of granulite facies gneisses in the vicinity of gemstone deposits from Mogok area (Myanmar) and (3) U-Pb age dating of zircon and zirconolite inclusions in marble hosted gem-quality ruby and spinel from Mogok, Myanmar. During the last few years, spinel became one of the most popular gemstones and currently is highly demanded in the international gem market. Therefore, it was my intention to carry out a detailed inclusion study on Mogok spinel which might become in the future an essential tool for gem laboratories to enable conclusive origin determination analyses of spinel. For this research, Raman microspectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analyses were carried out to identify the inclusions in Mogok spinel. Based on my research, I was able to document 16 mineral inclusions in Mogok spinel so far not known in literature. Furthermore, these studies confirmed that most solid inclusions in Mogok spinel are in fact multi-phase inclusions which may contain both, primary and secondary mineral phases (such as dolomite, apatite, anhydrite, phlogopite, and halite in calcite). Three garnet-quartz gneisses, three peculiar garnet-clinopyroxene-nepheline gneisses and one clinopyroxene-clinoamphibole gneiss were selected for geothermobarometric studies. Conventional geothermobarometry of the garnet-quartz gneisses revealed granulite facies PT-conditions of 758-798°C at 7.2-7.6 kbar. The nepheline-gneisses and the clinopyroxene-clinoamphibole gneiss were also metamorphosed at such high-grade metamorphic conditions. Equilibrium phase diagram calculations with the Theriak-Domino program reproduced these PT-estimates and pointed at water activities of 0.34-0.4. Whole rocks geochemistry, trace elements analyses and isotope studies were carried out on the garnet-clinopyroxene-nepheline gneisses and the clinopyroxene-clinoamphibole gneiss. The geochemical investigations highlighted the high-K calcalkaline and shoshonitic character of these foid-bearing rocks pointing to a strong fractionation and to a subduction-related generation of their magmatic protoliths. For the geochronology (U-Pb age dating) study, I analysed a selected number of zircon and zirconolite inclusions from ruby and spinel samples, and from ruby-and spinel-bearing marble as well as from gneisses (two garnet-quartz gneisses), all from the Mogok area. Two different setups of Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometers were used, (a) Time-Of-Flight and (b) Sector-Field mass spectrometer to detect the U-Pb isotopes in these inclusions. The calculated U-Pb ages in zircon inclusions from gemstones as well as from gneisses indicate that the Mogok area experienced several magmatic and metamorphic events. Specifically, the U-Pb ages of zircon from gem-quality corundum, spinel and marble revealed maximum ages of Late Cretaceous in their cores and minimum ages of Late Oligocene to Early Miocene in the rim of zircon grains. Garnet-quartz gneiss from the western part of the area revealed significant lead loss conditions and U-Pb ages ranging from Precambrian to Jurassic age in the core, whereas the rim again revealed Oligocene ages. The garnet-quartz gneiss from central Mogok showed Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous ages in the zircon core and Oligocene ages in the rim of zircon grains. I assume that the Precambrian age of zircon in gneiss is probably representing the so-called Mogok gneiss of Iyer (1953)

    Glycated Haemoglobin (HbA1c) and Future Physical and Mental Functional Health in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer (EPIC)-Norfolk Population-Based Study

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    Funding The EPIC-Norfolk study (DOI 10.22025/2019.10.105.00004) has received funding from the Medical Research Council (grant number MR/N003284/1 and MC-UU_12015/1) and Cancer Research UK (grant number C864/A14136). Acknowledgments We are grateful to the participants of the EPIC-Norfolk study who have been part of this project, and to the many members of the study teams at the University of Cambridge who have enabled this research. We gratefully acknowledge the EPIC management committee for their approval for data use for this study.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
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