Model to assess the factors of 10-year future risk of coronary heart disease among people of Framingham, Massachusetts

In earlier decade, heart disease was the most common cause of death in the US. Among the many important risk factors such as age, number of cigarettes smoke could help in determining the odds of having corona heart disease (CHD) when modeling with other important factors. We analyzed ongoing cardiovascular study on residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, US to predict the 10-year risk of future CHD. We applied the Binary logistic regression model to assess the strength of the association of factors (such as gender, age, number of cigarettes smoke, total cholesterol level) in predicting the odds of having CHD in study population. Results showed that gender, age, number of cigarette smoke, systolic blood pressure were statistically significant and the increased age and cigarettes per day increase the odds of having 10-year risk of CHD. However, the noticeable finding was that patients with Diabetes at higher glucose level have the higher odds of having 10-year risk of CHD than with low level of glucose concentration among the residents of Framingham study

An Evaluation of the Quality of Work Life: A Study of the Faculty Members of Private Universities in Bangladesh

 In Bangladesh, Quality of Work Life (QWL) is still a new concept to emerge although four decades have passed since its inception. Very few initiatives have been taken to identify employee QWL in different sectors of Bangladesh (i.e. banking, hospitals, tobacco, schools, etc.) and the private higher education sector is still unexplored. Thus the current study aims to explore the perception of the faculty members of private universities in Bangladesh about their QWL. The study looks in detail at the prospects and problems of QWL and its related dimensions.A quantitative survey of 72 full-time faculty members from 11 private universities is conducted based on a structured questionnaire designed with a 5-point Likert-scale. First, avalidity and reliability test is conducted. According to the factor mean values, three most positively perceived QWL dimensions are social relevance of work life, safe and healthy working condition, and social integration in the work organization. Correlational analysis reveals a significant relationship between QWL and its dimensions. Several nonparametric t-tests are conducted to explore whether the QWL of the faculty members vary due to the differences in gender, faculty/department, education, job position, experience, and marital status. The results reveal significant differences about the perception of QWL exist in terms of gender and faculty/department of the university. At the end step-wise regression analysis reveals, social relevance of work life, adequate and fair compensation, and constitutionalism, are three dimensions of QWL which work as predictor variables to determine the QWL of the faculty members in private universities

Identifying the Reliability and Validity of Hard and Soft HRM Measures: A Study on the Banking Sector of Bangladesh

The effectiveness of Human Resource Management (HRM) is based on the realization of two models of HRM – the ‘Hard’ model and the ‘Soft’ model, which are now widely practiced. No study was conducted in the context of Bangladesh. Thus, a valid and reliable measurement of Hard and Soft HRM is vital for managing human resources in changing competitive businessenvironments. This study explores HRM practices in the banking sector of Bangladesh in terms of these two categories. The results indicate that the scale used in the study is valid and reliable to conduct further studies. Descriptive statistics reveals that the banking sector of Bangladesh practices a combination of both Hard and Soft HRM. It is found that most employees of the banks of Bangladesh think that HRM practices and policies can increase employee motivation, satisfaction, commitment, and welfare. Many of the employees in fact consider the HRM practices and policies as fair and facilitating towards employee development

Fake News Detection: Covid-19 Perspective

The development of social media has con- tributed to a remarkable rise in the spread of fake news. Today people rely more on online news outlets. The chance of receiving fake news on an online platform is high. As we went through a pandemic and the Covid-19 was the most absorbing topic of 2020, much news on Covid-19 was published every day in traditional media and social media. Among that news, some are fake. In this work, we have collected a new dataset for detecting fake news from traditional media on Covid-19. We have gathered more than 3000 pieces of news from traditional media out of the 170 are fake ones that were collected from fact-checking sites. Then we have tested the existing four classification algorithms with our dataset using Count Vectorizer and TF-IDF. We have merged 170 fake news with four scales of true news and analyzed the outcome

Treatment of Molluscum Contagiosum with 10% Potassium Hydroxide Solution

Background: To determine the efficacy and safety of topical 10% potassium hydroxide solution in the treatment of molluscum contagiosum (MC) .Methods: An open, prospective, non-randomized study of one year duration was conducted using 10% KOH solution to treat MC. Twenty eight patients completed the study. A total of seven appointments were planned; one baseline and six follow-up visits. 10% KOH was applied to molluscum lesions daily till the lesions resolved or till 3 months had elapsed.Results: Twenty eight patients, among which 22 were children, completed the study. The mean age of patients was 10.6 years. The total lesion count in the patients varied from 5 – 94, with the mean lesion count of 22.14 SD +_ 18.32. There was complete resolution of lesions in 20 (71.4%) of patients , 4 (14.3) had a near complete, 2 (7.1%) had partial and 2 (7.1%) patients had no improvement. 82% patients tolerated the treatment well with no side effects.Conclusion:10% KOH solution is an effective and well tolerated treatment for MC. It is less painful and cost-effective as compared to many well-established therapeutic modalities. It has the advantage of ease of application at home making it an acceptable and feasible option for the treatment of MC

Waist-to-height ratio as index of cardiometabolic risk among the doctors

The aim of this study was to see the cardiometabolic risk among doctors using waist-to-height ratio index as tool. Cardiometabolic risk is an umbrella term that includes all the risk factors of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The study was conducted among 195 doctors. According to waist-to-height ratio index 167 (85.6%) doctors had cardiometabolic risk. Waist-to-height ratio index was found good (area under the curve >0.5, sensitivity 88.1%, specificity 23.2%, positive predictive value 53.9%, and negative predictive value 66.7%) for their predictive value of cardiometabolic risk. Age grouping was done and found that no age group was free from cardiometabolic risk

Impact of acne on quality of life in young Pakistani adults and its relationship with severity: A multicenter study

Objectives: The current study aimed to determine the effect of acne vulgaris on quality of life of young adults and to assess the correlation between acne severity and impairment of quality of life (QOLI).Methods: In this multi-center cross-sectional study, 163 young adults with acne vulgaris were assessed for severity and quality of life impairment between December 2016 and May 2017 at three tertiary care hospitals. Cardiff Acne Disability Index (CADI) was used to assess the quality of life while the severity of acne measured by Global Acne Grading System (GAGS). Data were collected on standardized forms, with CADI, GAGS scores, and sociodemographic data and analyzed using SPSS version 9. The quantitative variables were presented as means, median and qualitative variables expressed as frequency and percentages. P-value ≤0.05 was considered as statistically significant.Results: Out of 163 patients enrolled in this study, the mean age was 21.6 ± 4.9 years and 124 were females and 39 males. In mild QOLI, 56 (87.5%) cases were affected with mild, 11 (13.4%) with moderate and 1 (1.5%) case had severe acne. While, in moderate QOLI, 8(12.5%) cases were of mild, 60 (73.2%) were moderate and 6 (35.3%) cases affected with severe acne. The severe impairment of QOL noted in 11 (13.4%) moderate and 10 (58.8%) severe acne cases. The relationship between sex was statistically significant, (P\u3c0.001). The result showed significant correlation between severity of acne vulgaris and the quality of life impairment of these patients (P\u3c0.001).Conclusion: This study showed significant correlation between acne vulgaris and quality of life impairment. Cardiff acne disability index has proven to be a reliable tool to assess the quality of life. It is recommended to be used routinely in dermatology clinics to provide tailored treatment to individuals because mild disease may be disproportionately distressing for patients

BN-DRISHTI: Bangla Document Recognition through Instance-level Segmentation of Handwritten Text Images

Handwriting recognition remains challenging for some of the most spoken languages, like Bangla, due to the complexity of line and word segmentation brought by the curvilinear nature of writing and lack of quality datasets. This paper solves the segmentation problem by introducing a state-of-the-art method (BN-DRISHTI) that combines a deep learning-based object detection framework (YOLO) with Hough and Affine transformation for skew correction. However, training deep learning models requires a massive amount of data. Thus, we also present an extended version of the BN-HTRd dataset comprising 786 full-page handwritten Bangla document images, line and word-level annotation for segmentation, and corresponding ground truths for word recognition. Evaluation on the test portion of our dataset resulted in an F-score of 99.97% for line and 98% for word segmentation. For comparative analysis, we used three external Bangla handwritten datasets, namely BanglaWriting, WBSUBNdb_text, and ICDAR 2013, where our system outperformed by a significant margin, further justifying the performance of our approach on completely unseen samples.Comment: Will be published under the Springer Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series, as part of ICDAR WML 202

Food waste and food processing waste for biohydrogen production: a review

Food waste and food processing wastes which are abundant in nature and rich in carbon content can be attractive renewable substrates for sustainable biohydrogen production due to wide economic prospects in industries. Many studies utilizing common food wastes such as dining hall or restaurant waste and wastes generated from food processing industries have shown good percentages of hydrogen in gas composition, production yield and rate. The carbon composition in food waste also plays a crucial role in determining high biohydrogen yield. Physicochemical factors such as pre-treatment to seed culture, pH, temperature (mesophilic/thermophilic) and etc. are also important to ensure the dominance of hydrogen-producing bacteria in dark fermentation. This review demonstrates the potential of food waste and food processing waste for biohydrogen production and provides a brief overview of several physicochemical factors that affect biohydrogen production in dark fermentation. The economic viability of biohydrogen production from food waste is also discussed

Theological Determinism & Free Will: A Philosophical Approach

Theological determinism challenges Free Will, an important part of the theistic view. Determinants claim that free will is incompatible with God's omniscience and that God is responsible for everything that happens. I argue in this paper that so-called theological determinism never denies free will and that free will is compatible with God's omniscience