90 research outputs found
Effect of Changing in Air Intake Temperature on Engine Performance Using Thermocouple
This study will present the experimental result on the performance of spark ignition engine at various cooled air intake temperatures on four-stroke four-cylinder spark ignition engine. This study also investigated the level of emission released to the environment due to decrease in air intake temperature. In this study, the exhaust emissions percentage values of CO2 and HC are recorded by using Chassis Dynamometer (MD-2WD-500). The data was taken under three different gears (gear 2,3 and 4) at varying speed ( 1000,1500,2000,2500 and 3000 rpm) and intake temperature range (15℃~25℃). Based on the data and result recorded, decrease in temperature do increase the engine performance and also decrease the emission percentage as wel
Analysing Turnaround Time in Laboratory - A Key Performance Indicator
Background: Turnaround time (TAT) is one of the key indicators of performance of a laboratory. Laboratories define it as the time from the receipt of sample/ specimen to the reporting. A fast TAT helps clinicians in making early diagnosis.Aim: To determine the turnaround time (TAT) of the biochemistry laboratory with evaluation of the contribution of pre-analytical and analytical phase to the total TAT.Results: A total of 399 samples were analysed from three outpatient departments. Average pre-analytical turnaround time contribution was found to be higher as compared to the analytical time. Excess workload and delay in pneumatic shoot were the main causes of delay in pre-analytical phase.Conclusion: Improved turnaround time is the key to clinicians’ and patients’ better satisfaction with the laboratory. It can be attained by minimising the bottlenecks within the process
Muscle cell membrane damage by very low serum sodium
A 63-year-old male was admitted with complaints of upper gastrointestinal symptoms with fatigue and myalgia. Investigations revealed severe hyponatremia with elevated creatine phosphokinase levels. Following further workup, it was diagnosed as a case of hyponatremia induced rhabdomyolysis. Because of prompt correction of hyponatremia, his renal function was preserved and myoglobinuria induced renal failure was avoided. The importance of early recognition of this potentially dangerous condition is emphasized
Towards Fairness in Visual Recognition: Effective Strategies for Bias Mitigation
Computer vision models learn to perform a task by capturing relevant
statistics from training data. It has been shown that models learn spurious
age, gender, and race correlations when trained for seemingly unrelated tasks
like activity recognition or image captioning. Various mitigation techniques
have been presented to prevent models from utilizing or learning such biases.
However, there has been little systematic comparison between these techniques.
We design a simple but surprisingly effective visual recognition benchmark for
studying bias mitigation. Using this benchmark, we provide a thorough analysis
of a wide range of techniques. We highlight the shortcomings of popular
adversarial training approaches for bias mitigation, propose a simple but
similarly effective alternative to the inference-time Reducing Bias
Amplification method of Zhao et al., and design a domain-independent training
technique that outperforms all other methods. Finally, we validate our findings
on the attribute classification task in the CelebA dataset, where attribute
presence is known to be correlated with the gender of people in the image, and
demonstrate that the proposed technique is effective at mitigating real-world
gender bias.Comment: To appear in CVPR 202
Quantum Noise Randomized Ciphers
We review the notion of a classical random cipher and its advantages. We
sharpen the usual description of random ciphers to a particular mathematical
characterization suggested by the salient feature responsible for their
increased security. We describe a concrete system known as AlphaEta and show
that it is equivalent to a random cipher in which the required randomization is
effected by coherent-state quantum noise. We describe the currently known
security features of AlphaEta and similar systems, including lower bounds on
the unicity distances against ciphertext-only and known-plaintext attacks. We
show how AlphaEta used in conjunction with any standard stream cipher such as
AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) provides an additional, qualitatively
different layer of security from physical encryption against known-plaintext
attacks on the key. We refute some claims in the literature that AlphaEta is
equivalent to a non-random stream cipher.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. A; Discussion augmented and
re-organized; Section 5 contains a detailed response to 'T. Nishioka, T.
Hasegawa, H. Ishizuka, K. Imafuku, H. Imai: Phys. Lett. A 327 (2004) 28-32
/quant-ph/0310168' & 'T. Nishioka, T. Hasegawa, H. Ishizuka, K. Imafuku, H.
Imai: Phys. Lett. A 346 (2005) 7
Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matching
This paper presents a robotic pick-and-place system that is capable of
grasping and recognizing both known and novel objects in cluttered
environments. The key new feature of the system is that it handles a wide range
of object categories without needing any task-specific training data for novel
objects. To achieve this, it first uses a category-agnostic affordance
prediction algorithm to select and execute among four different grasping
primitive behaviors. It then recognizes picked objects with a cross-domain
image classification framework that matches observed images to product images.
Since product images are readily available for a wide range of objects (e.g.,
from the web), the system works out-of-the-box for novel objects without
requiring any additional training data. Exhaustive experimental results
demonstrate that our multi-affordance grasping achieves high success rates for
a wide variety of objects in clutter, and our recognition algorithm achieves
high accuracy for both known and novel grasped objects. The approach was part
of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 1st place in the stowing task at the
2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. All code, datasets, and pre-trained models are
available online at http://arc.cs.princeton.eduComment: Project webpage: http://arc.cs.princeton.edu Summary video:
https://youtu.be/6fG7zwGfIk
Effects of bidi smoking on all-cause mortality and cardiorespiratory outcomes in men from south Asia: an observational community-based substudy of the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology Study (PURE)
Background: Bidis are minimally regulated, inexpensive, hand-rolled tobacco products smoked in south Asia. We examined the effects of bidi smoking on baseline respiratory impairment, and prospectively collected data for all-cause mortality and cardiorespiratory events in men from this region.Methods: This substudy of the international, community-based Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study was done in seven centres in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Men aged 35–70 years completed spirometry testing and standardised questionnaires at baseline and were followed up yearly. We used multilevel regression to compare cross-sectional baseline cardiorespiratory symptoms, spirometry measurements, and follow-up events (all-cause mortality, cardiovascular events, respiratory events) adjusted for socioeconomic status and baseline risk factors between non-smokers, light smokers of bidis or cigarettes (≤10 pack-years), heavy smokers of cigarettes only (\u3e10 pack-years), and heavy smokers of bidis (\u3e10 pack-years).Findings: 14 919 men from 158 communities were included in this substudy (8438 non-smokers, 3321 light smokers, 959 heavy cigarette smokers, and 2201 heavy bidi smokers). Mean duration of follow-up was 5·6 years (range 1–13). The adjusted prevalence of self-reported chronic wheeze, cough or sputum, dyspnoea, and chest pain at baseline increased across the categories of non-smokers, light smokers, heavy cigarette smokers, and heavy bidi smokers (p\u3c0·0001 for association). Adjusted cross-sectional age-related changes in forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) and FEV1/forced vital capacity (FVC) ratio were larger for heavy bidi smokers than for the other smoking categories. Hazard ratios (relative to non-smokers) showed increasing hazards for all-cause mortality (light smokers 1·28 [95% CI 1·02–1·62], heavy cigarette smokers 1·59 [1·13–2·24], heavy bidi smokers 1·56 [1·22–1·98]), cardiovascular events (1·45 [1·13–1·84], 1·47 [1·05–2·06], 1·55 [1·17–2·06], respectively) and respiratory events (1·30 [0·91–1·85], 1·21 [0·70–2·07], 1·73 [1·23–2·45], respectively) across the smoking categories.Interpretation: Bidi smoking is associated with severe baseline respiratory impairment, all-cause mortality, and cardiorespiratory outcomes. Stricter controls and regulation of bidis are needed to reduce the tobacco-related disease burden in south Asia
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