Pain Level Detection From Facial Image Captured by Smartphone

Accurate symptom of cancer patient in regular basis is highly concern to the medical service provider for clinical decision making such as adjustment of medication. Since patients have limitations to provide self-reported symptoms, we have investigated how mobile phone application can play the vital role to help the patients in this case. We have used facial images captured by smart phone to detect pain level accurately. In this pain detection process, existing algorithms and infrastructure are used for cancer patients to make cost low and user-friendly. The pain management solution is the first mobile-based study as far as we found today. The proposed algorithm has been used to classify faces, which is represented as a weighted combination of Eigenfaces. Here, angular distance, and support vector machines (SVMs) are used for the classification system. In this study, longitudinal data was collected for six months in Bangladesh. Again, cross-sectional pain images were collected from three different countries: Bangladesh, Nepal and the United States. In this study, we found that personalized model for pain assessment performs better for automatic pain assessment. We also got that the training set should contain varying levels of pain in each group: low, medium and high

SmartHeLP: Smartphone-based Hemoglobin Level Prediction Using an Artificial Neural Network

Blood hemoglobin level (Hgb) measurement has a vital role in the diagnosis, evaluation, and management of numerous diseases. We describe the use of smartphone video imaging and an artificial neural network (ANN) system to estimate Hgb levels non-invasively. We recorded 10 second-300 frame fingertip videos using a smartphone in 75 adults. Red, green, and blue pixel intensities were estimated for each of 100 area blocks in each frame and the patterns across the 300 frames were described. ANN was then used to develop a model using the extracted video features to predict hemoglobin levels. In our study sample, with patients 20-56 years of age, and gold standard hemoglobin levels of 7.6 to 13.5 g/dL., we observed a 0.93 rank order of correlation between model and gold standard hemoglobin levels. Moreover, we identified specific regions of interest in the video images which reduced the required feature space

Racial Ideology and Black Students’ Leadership Experiences at a Historically White Institution

The purpose of the present study is to understand the relationship between racial ideology and leadership experiences of Black student leaders at a historically White institution (HWI). Using a phenomenological approach, the study seeks to delineate the experiences of Black students as it relates to their leadership and racial identity. Using the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI); (Sellers et al., 1997) and one-on-one semi-structured interviews, data was collected from Black undergraduate students at a midsized HWI who were classified as juniors or above and who participated in one or more student organizations or campus activities in a leadership capacity. Among the data collected was information about students’ racial ideology, racial centrality, and their experiences and perceptions about leadership at a midsized public HWI. Findings suggest that most students at the research site hold the Oppressed Minority racial ideology. Also, racial ideology plays a clear role in Black students’ perceptions of their leadership experiences, beliefs, and decisions. Black students whose ideology emphasized assimilation or humanism were more likely to deemphasize the impact of racial oppression, and choose leadership opportunities which enhance their professional development, respectively. Ideologies associated with a higher emphasis on Black identity and the Black experience were more likely to feel racially isolated as a student leader and to choose organizations which provided them with a stronger sense of community and belonging

Stirring Africa towards India: APA Pant and the Making of Post-Colonial Diplomacy, 1948–54

This article investigates the making of independent India as an international actor through Apa Pant, a diplomat posted to East Africa in 1948—a time when India’s interests there were fuzzy and potentially contradictory. Appointed while adrift professionally and desperate financially, Pant struggled to make sense of his role as a diplomat, to elaborate an “African policy” for India in the absence of firm guidance, and to juggle between professional, private and public life. He poured out these feelings in hundreds of frequent, unguarded, and often movingletters to his wife and family. Unusually for diplomats, who tend to leave behind carefully scripted and redacted writings, these letters form an emotional and experiential archive of diplomacy. Pant’s experiences reveal what it meant to be a diplomat serving a newly independent nation trying to assert itself in the international order. Beyond the recent focus on ideas and institutions in India’s international history, this article reveals Indian diplomacy as an embodied practice and effort of imagination, whose contours were negotiated not just in Delhi but in fledging missions by diplomats whose individual efforts to learn andadjust “the rules of the game” mirrored, and sometimes clashed, with those of the nation they represented

Essays on Monetary Policy and Bitcoin Financial Economics

This dissertation includes three chapters. The first chapter investigates the impact of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet normalization using a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) framework. I use counterfactual conditional forecasts to find that a reduction in asset holdings down to a level where the federal funds market is active again will reducereal GDP growth by an average of 0.18 percent per year and core inflation by a non-significant average of 0.07 percent per year under Quantitative Tightening, relative to a scenario where the Federal Reserve maintains a constant dollar amount of assets until 2024. The second chapter models monetary policy using Taylor’s rule for the nominal interest-rate target and examines the difference between the actual Federal Funds Rate and the Taylor Rule model of behavior for distinct structural changes. Both a simple factor ANOVA and regime switching methods find that there were “tight” or “loose” regimes in U.S. monetary policy over the period 1965 to 2008. However, after accounting for the change in inflation measurement from CPI to PCE and then core PCE after 2004, Alan Greenspan’s tenure from 2003 to 2006 is consistent with his earlier symmetric deviations from the Taylor Rule. The final chapter examines the volatility of Bitcoin exchange rates which have gained a great deal of attention since the creation of the currency. Standard measures of volatility reflect the dramatic change in the Bitcoin/US dollar exchange rate, from about $0.05 USD in 2010 to the neighborhood of$20,000 USD at the end of 2017, and down to around $5,000 USD in mid-2019. Characterizing the short-term and long-term volatility gives an impression of the volatility of Bitcoin compared to other assets, as well as implying the viability of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange and alternative asset

Opinion Editorial: Challenging Minds and Changing Lives: How Historically Black Colleges and Universities are Intentional about Educating the Whole Student

Challenging Minds and Changing Lives: How Historically Black Colleges and Universities are Intentional about Educating the Whole Studen

An introduction to the mechanics of performance assessment using examples of calculations done for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant between 1990 and 1992. Revision

This document provides an overview of the processes used to access the performance of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The quantitative metrics used in the performance-assessment (PA) process are those put forward in the Environmental Protection Agency`s Environmental Standards for the Management and Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, HIgh-LEvel and transuranic radioactive Wastes (40 CFR 191)