Post-traumatic stress disorder in children and adolescents one year after a super-cyclone in Orissa, India: exploring cross-cultural validity and vulnerability factors

BACKGROUND: It has been asserted that psychological responses to disasters in children and adolescents vary widely across cultures, but this has rarely been investigated. The objectives of the study were to clinically evaluate the construct of traumatic stress symptoms and disorder in children and adolescents after a super-cyclone in Orissa, India; to find out the prevalence at one year; compare the effect in high and low exposure areas and study the factors associated with it. METHODS: Clinical examination of children and adolescents (n = 447) was done, supplemented by a symptoms checklist based on International Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders, Diagnostic Criteria for Research and a semi-structured questionnaire for disaster related experiences. RESULTS: A majority of children had post-traumatic symptoms. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was present in 30.6% (95% confidence interval: 26.4 to 34.9), and an additional 13.6% had sub-syndromal PTSD. Parents or teachers reported mental health concerns in 7.2% subjects, who were a minor proportion (12.8%) of subjects with any syndromal diagnosis (n = 196). Significantly more (43.7%) children in high exposure areas had PTSD than that (11.2%) in low exposure areas (p < 0.001). Depression was significantly associated with PTSD. Binary logistic regression analysis indicated that high exposure, lower educational level and middle socioeconomic status significantly predicted the outcome of PTSD. Extreme fear and perceived threat to life during the disaster, death in family, damage to home, or staying in shelters were not significantly associated with PTSD. CONCLUSION: Following natural disaster PTSD is a valid clinical construct in children and adolescents in Indian set up; and though highly prevalent it may be missed without clinical screening. Its manifestation and associated factors resembled those in other cultures

Efficient online handwritten Chinese character recognition system using a two-dimensional functional relationship model

This paper presents novel feature extraction and classification methods for online handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR). The X-graph and Y -graph transformation is proposed for deriving a feature, which shows useful properties such as invariance to different writing styles. Central to the proposed method is the idea of capturing the geometrical and topological information from the trajectory of the handwritten character using the X-graph and the Y-graph. For feature size reduction, the Haar wavelet transformation was applied on the graphs. For classification, the coefficient of determination (R2p) from the two-dimensional unreplicated linear functional relationship model is proposed as a similarity measure. The proposed methods show strong discrimination power when handling problems related to size, position and slant variation, stroke shape deformation, close resemblance of characters, and non-normalization. The proposed recognition system is applied to a database with 3000 frequently used Chinese characters, yielding a high recognition rate of 97.4% with reduced processing time of 75.31%, 73.05%, 58.27% and 40.69% when compared with recognition systems using the city block distance with deviation (CBDD), the minimum distance (MD), the compound Mahalanobis function (CMF) and the modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF), respectively. High precision rates were also achieved

Effect of Fecl4- Intercalation On the Transport-properties of a Graphitized Polyimide Film

The temperature variation of the thermal conductivity, the electrical resistivity, and the thermoelectric power of a graphitized polyimide film have been measured in the temperature range 2 < T < 300 K. The effect of the electrochemical intercalation with FeCl4- ions has also been studied. The thermal conductivity measurements confirm the high degree of graphitization that may be obtained with polyimide films. They show how intercalation increases the structural disorder and how the intercalate substantially contributes to the thermal conductivity at low temperatures. The electrical-resistivity and thermoelectric-power measurements reveal that the density of free carriers is about three times lower in stage-2 FeCl4- solvated intercalation compounds obtained by an electrochemical way than in stage-2 FeCl3 compounds obtained by a classical synthesis method

Transport-properties of a Graphitized Polyimide Film and its Stage-2 Fecl4- Intercalation Compound

The temperature variation of the thermal conductivity, the electrical resistivity and the thermoelectric power of a graphitized polyimide film has been measured in the temperature range 2 < T < 300 K. The effect of electrochemical intercalation with FeCl4- ions has also been studied. The thermal conductivity results confirm the high degree of graphitization that may be obtained with polyimide films. It shows how intercalation increases the structural disorder and how the intercalate substantially contributes to the thermal conductivity at low temperatures. The electrical-resistivity and thermoelectric-power measurements reveal that the density of free carriers is about three times lower in stage-2 FeCl4- solvated intercalation compounds obtained by an electrochemical way than in stage-2 FeCl3 compounds synthetized by a classical method

Macroscopic graphene membranes and their extraordinary stiffness

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