The Threat of Intolerance. Religious Extremism

Taslima Nasrin, the writer from Bangladesh, shot into international fame and limelight with the publication of her novel 'Lajja' (Shame) which criticized Muslims for attacking minority Hindus in Bangladesh following the 1992 destruction of a mosque by Hindu zealots in neighbouring India. Nasrin's writing so angered Muslim sentiments in Bangladesh that Khaleda Zia's government ordered her arrest in 1994 on charges of blasphemy. After a year in hiding, Nasrin fled Bangladesh for four years of exile in Europe. Several Muslim religious leaders demanded her immediate arrest and trial. They warned the government of serious consequences if she is not put on trial for suggesting that the Qur'an should be rewritten. Nasrin has denied making the comments. However, it was finally confirmed that the 36-year old author should indeed stand trial. Nasrin has appealed to the international community for help

Optimizing seed rate for summer mungbean varieties

An experiment was conducted at the Agronomy Field Laboratory, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh from March to June, 2007 to investigate the effect of cultivar and seed rate on morphological characters, yield attributes and yield of summer mungbean. The experiment comprised four varieties viz., BINA moog2, BINA moog5, BINA moog6 and BINA moog7 and four seed rates viz. 30, 40, 50 and 60 kg ha-1. The experiment was laid out in a randomized complete block design with four replications. Results revealed that variety and seed rate had significant effect on the studied crop characters and yield. The variety BINA moog7 showed superiority in relation to plant height, number of branches and effective pods per plant, number of seeds pod-1 compared to other varieties, which resulted in the highest seed yield both per plant and per hectare. The plant height, stover yield and number of non-effective pods per plant increased with the increase in seed rate, while branch number, number of effective pods per plant, seeds per pod, 100-seed weight, as well as seed weight per plant decreased with increasing seed rate. The higher number of branches and effective pods per plant, number of seeds pod, 100-seed weight and seed yield per plant were recorded at the rate of 30 and 40 kg seeds ha-1 and the lowest values for the above parameters were observed at the rate of 60 kg seeds ha-1. But per unit area basis, the highest seed yield was recorded in 40 kg seeds ha-1 followed by 50 kg seeds ha-1 due to accommodation of higher number of plants. BINA moog7 interacted favorably with the seed rate of 30 kg ha-1 to produce the highest seed yield

Using Skeleton Correction to Improve Flash Lidar-Based Gait Recognition

This paper presents GlidarPoly, an efficacious pipeline of 3D gait recognition for flash lidar data based on pose estimation and robust correction of erroneous and missing joint measurements. A flash lidar can provide new opportunities for gait recognition through a fast acquisition of depth and intensity data over an extended range of distance. However, the flash lidar data are plagued by artifacts, outliers, noise, and sometimes missing measurements, which negatively affects the performance of existing analytics solutions. We present a filtering mechanism that corrects noisy and missing skeleton joint measurements to improve gait recognition. Furthermore, robust statistics are integrated with conventional feature moments to encode the dynamics of the motion. As a comparison, length-based and vector-based features extracted from the noisy skeletons are investigated for outlier removal. Experimental results illustrate the superiority of the proposed methodology in improving gait recognition given noisy, low-resolution flash lidar data

3D-conformal-intensity modulated radiotherapy with compensators for head and neck cancer: clinical results of normal tissue sparing

BACKGROUND: To investigate the potential of parotic gland sparing of intensity modulated radiotherapy (3D-c-IMRT) performed with metallic compensators for head and neck cancer in a clinical series by analysis of dose distributions and clinical measures. MATERIALS AND METHODS: 39 patients with squamous cell cancer of the head and neck irradiated using 3D-c-IMRT were evaluable for dose distribution within PTVs and at one parotid gland and 38 patients for toxicity analysis. 10 patients were treated primarily, 29 postoperatively, 19 received concomittant cis-platin based chemotherapy, 20 3D-c-IMRT alone. Initially the dose distribution was calculated with Helax (® )and photon fluence was modulated using metallic compensators made of tin-granulate (n = 22). Later the dose distribution was calculated with KonRad (® )and fluence was modified by MCP 96 alloy compensators (n = 17). Gross tumor/tumor bed (PTV 1) was irradiated up to 60–70 Gy, [5 fractions/week, single fraction dose: 2.0–2.2 (simultaneously integrated boost)], adjuvantly irradiated bilateral cervical lymph nodes (PTV 2) with 48–54 Gy [single dose: 1.5–1.8]). Toxicity was scored according the RTOG scale and patient-reported xerostomia questionnaire (XQ). RESULTS: Mean of the median doses at the parotid glands to be spared was 25.9 (16.3–46.8) Gy, for tin graulate 26 Gy, for MCP alloy 24.2 Gy. Tin-granulate compensators resulted in a median parotid dose above 26 Gy in 10/22, MCP 96 alloy in 0/17 patients. Following acute toxicities were seen (°0–2/3): xerostomia: 87%/13%, dysphagia: 84%/16%, mucositis: 89%/11%, dermatitis: 100%/0%. No grade 4 reaction was encountered. During therapy the XQ forms showed °0–2/3): 88%/12%. 6 months postRT chronic xerostomia °0–2/3 was observed in 85%/15% of patients, none with °4 xerostomia. CONCLUSION: 3D-c-IMRT using metallic compensators along with inverse calculation algorithm achieves sufficient parotid gland sparing in virtually all advanced head and neck cancers. Since the concept of lower single (and total) doses in the adjuvantly treated volumes reduces acute morbidity 3D-c-IMRT nicely meets demands of concurrent chemotherapy protocols