Building climate resilience to Noapara town: a coastal urban centre of Bangladesh

"This paper attempts to identify ways of making the town of Noapara, a coastal urban centre in the Jessore district in Bangladesh, resilient to the impacts of climate change, with specific focus on the water and sanitation sectors. Climatic events can trigger migration from hazard-prone areas to large cities. But if sufficient livelihood opportunities are available, improved resilience of towns or urban centres close to major cities may play a role in diverting migrants from the large cities. The situation in Naopara was investigated to see what investments would need to be made in the town to make it an attractive option for migrants. The findings indicate that Naopara lacks access to basic services such as safe water and sanitation, with only one percent of households being covered by the municipal water supply. The rest are dependent on hand tube wells and other sources. In particular, poor communities lack access to safe water because they do not have their own land, or the economic capacity to afford a tube well. Additionally, the lack of proper drainage systems, adequate sanitation facilities and waste management facilities increases the vulnerability of those communities during hazards. Climate change-induced hazards such as intense rainfall, cyclones, flooding and salinity intrusion are expected to exacerbate this. In order to address these limitations, the appropriate institutional support from the government, and collaboration among stakeholders, including public-private partnerships and community-based organisations, can play a key role. The preparation and implementation of a city resilience plan could eventually attract displaced people to smaller towns such as Naopara.

Thrombolytic therapy in acute myocardial infarction in Pakistan.

To characterize features of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in a Pakistani population, and assess the role of thrombolysis in our country, we studied 194 consecutive admitted patients with enzyme positive AMI. Males were affected three times more frequently; women, although affected less, had a higher incidence of complications than men. Premature coronary artery disease (CAD) was present in 50% patients presenting with AMI. An unusually high incidence of anterior wall myocardial infarction (39%) was seen. Complications were frequent with a predominance of LV failure symptoms. Cardiogenic shock was associated with a very high mortality, in excess of 93%. Streptokinase (SK) was administered in 60% patients with suspected transmural AMI. A statistically significant reduction in mortality was seen in the group that received SK (15.2%) compared to those who did not receive SK (24.7%), (p = \u3c 0.05)

Building climate resilience to Noapara town: a coastal urban centre of Bangladesh

"This paper attempts to identify ways of making the town of Noapara, a coastal urban centre in the Jessore district in Bangladesh, resilient to the impacts of climate change, with specific focus on the water and sanitation sectors. Climatic events can trigger migration from hazard-prone areas to large cities. But if sufficient livelihood opportunities are available, improved resilience of towns or urban centres close to major cities may play a role in diverting migrants from the large cities. The situation in Naopara was investigated to see what investments would need to be made in the town to make it an attractive option for migrants. The findings indicate that Naopara lacks access to basic services such as safe water and sanitation, with only one percent of households being covered by the municipal water supply. The rest are dependent on hand tube wells and other sources. In particular, poor communities lack access to safe water because they do not have their own land, or the economic capacity to afford a tube well. Additionally, the lack of proper drainage systems, adequate sanitation facilities and waste management facilities increases the vulnerability of those communities during hazards. Climate change-induced hazards such as intense rainfall, cyclones, flooding and salinity intrusion are expected to exacerbate this. In order to address these limitations, the appropriate institutional support from the government, and collaboration among stakeholders, including public-private partnerships and community-based organisations, can play a key role. The preparation and implementation of a city resilience plan could eventually attract displaced people to smaller towns such as Naopara.

Sink-to-Sink Coordination Framework Using RPL: Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks

RPL (Routing Protocol for low power and Lossy networks) is recommended by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for IPv6-based LLNs (Low Power and Lossy Networks). RPL uses a proactive routing approach and each node always maintains an active path to the sink node. Sink-to-sink coordination defines syntax and semantics for the exchange of any network defined parameters among sink nodes like network size, traffic load, mobility of a sink, and so forth. The coordination allows sink to learn about the network condition of neighboring sinks. As a result, sinks can make coordinated decision to increase/decrease their network size for optimizing over all network performance in terms of load sharing, increasing network lifetime, and lowering end-to-end latency of communication. Currently, RPL does not provide any coordination framework that can define message exchange between different sink nodes for enhancing the network performance. In this paper, a sink-to-sink coordination framework is proposed which utilizes the periodic route maintenance messages issued by RPL to exchange network status observed at a sink with its neighboring sinks. The proposed framework distributes network load among sink nodes for achieving higher throughputs and longer network's life time

Chest X-ray Classification for the Detection of COVID-19 Using Deep Learning Techniques

Recent technological developments pave the path for deep learning-based techniques to be used in almost every domain of life. The precision of deep learning techniques make it possible for these to be used in the medical field for the classification and detection of various diseases. Recently, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has put a lot of pressure on the health system all around the world. The diagnosis of COVID-19 is possible by PCR testing and medical imagining. Since COVID-19 is highly contagious, diagnosis using chest X-ray is considered safe in various situations. In this study, a deep learning-based technique is proposed to classify COVID-19 infection from other non-COVID-19 infections. To classify COVID-19, three different pre-trained models named EfficientNetB1, NasNetMobile and MobileNetV2 are used. The augmented dataset is used for training deep learning models while two different training strategies have been used for classification. In this study, not only are the deep learning model fine-tuned but also the hyperparameters are fine-tuned, which significantly improves the performance of the fine-tuned deep learning models. Moreover, the classification head is regularized to improve the performance. For the evaluation of the proposed techniques, several performance parameters are used to gauge the performance. EfficientNetB1 with regularized classification head outperforms the other models. The proposed technique successfully classifies four classes that include COVID-19, viral pneumonia, lung opacity, and normal, with an accuracy of 96.13%. The proposed technique shows superiority in terms of accuracy when compared with recent techniques present in the literature

Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition Using 3D-CNN and LSTM Networks

Recognition of dynamic hand gestures in real-time is a difficult task because the system can never know when or from where the gesture starts and ends in a video stream. Many researchers have been working on vision-based gesture recognition due to its various applications. This paper proposes a deep learning architecture based on the combination of a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The proposed architecture extracts spatial-temporal information from video sequences input while avoiding extensive computation. The 3D-CNN is used for the extraction of spectral and spatial features which are then given to the LSTM network through which classification is carried out. The proposed model is a light-weight architecture with only 3.7 million training parameters. The model has been evaluated on 15 classes from the 20BN-jester dataset available publicly. The model was trained on 2000 video-clips per class which were separated into 80% training and 20% validation sets. An accuracy of 99% and 97% was achieved on training and testing data, respectively. We further show that the combination of 3D-CNN with LSTM gives superior results as compared to MobileNetv2 + LSTM

Error management climate and job stress in project-based organizations: an empirical evidence from Pakistani aircraft manufacturing industry

Drawing on the JD-R model, this study examines the influence of error management climate (EMC) on the job stress of frontline aeronautical employees. It also analyzes the moderating role of psychological capital (PsyCap) dimensions (i.e., hope, optimism, self-efficacy, and resilience) for the relationship between error management climate and job stress. The data was collected from 208 individuals through a questionnaire survey and was analyzed using a partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach. The results revealed that employees’ perceptions of error management climate have a significant negative impact on job stress. PsyCap optimism and PsyCap self-efficacy were found to have a negative moderating influence on the relationship between EMC and job stress. The other two dimensions of hope and resilience were found to have a moderating influence in the same direction as expected, but not at statistically significant levels. The findings of this study provide a unique perspective in realizing the part national and organizational cultures could play in either enhancing or attenuating the influence of an individual’s psychological resources such as psychological capital

Salt stress proteins in plants: An overview

Salinity stress is considered the most devastating abiotic stress for crop productivity. Accumulating different types of soluble proteins has evolved as a vital strategy that plays a central regulatory role in the growth and development of plants subjected to salt stress. In the last two decades, efforts have been undertaken to critically examine the genome structure and functions of the transcriptome in plants subjected to salinity stress. Although genomics and transcriptomics studies indicate physiological and biochemical alterations in plants, it do not reflect changes in the amount and type of proteins corresponding to gene expression at the transcriptome level. In addition, proteins are a more reliable determinant of salt tolerance than simple gene expression as they play major roles in shaping physiological traits in salt-tolerant phenotypes. However, little information is available on salt stress-responsive proteins and their possible modes of action in conferring salinity stress tolerance. In addition, a complete proteome profile under normal or stress conditions has not been established yet for any model plant species. Similarly, a complete set of low abundant and key stress regulatory proteins in plants has not been identified. Furthermore, insufficient information on post-translational modifications in salt stress regulatory proteins is available. Therefore, in recent past, studies focused on exploring changes in protein expression under salt stress, which will complement genomic, transcriptomic, and physiological studies in understanding mechanism of salt tolerance in plants. This review focused on recent studies on proteome profiling in plants subjected to salinity stress, and provide synthesis of updated literature about how salinity regulates various salt stress proteins involved in the plant salt tolerance mechanism. This review also highlights the recent reports on regulation of salt stress proteins using transgenic approaches with enhanced salt stress tolerance in crops

Assessment of sublethal and transgenerational effects of spirotetramat, on population growth of cabbage aphid, Brevicoryne brassicae L. (Hemiptera: Aphididae)

The cabbage aphid (Brevicoryne brassicae L.) is a devastating pest of cruciferous crops causing economic damage worldwide and notably owing to its increasing resistance to commonly used pesticides. Such resistance prompts the development of integrated pest management (IPM) programs that include novel pesticides being effective against the aphids. Spirotetramat is a novel insecticide used against sap-sucking insect pests, particularly aphids. This study evaluated the toxicity of spirotetramat to adult apterous B. brassicae after 72 h using the leaf dipping method. According to the toxicity bioassay results, the LC50 value of spirotetramat to B. brassicae was 1.304 mgL−1. However, the sublethal concentrations (LC5 and LC15) and transgenerational effects of this novel insecticide on population growth parameters were estimated using the age-stage, two-sex life table theory method. The sublethal concentrations (LC5; 0.125 mgL−1 and LC15; 0.298 mgL−1) of spirotetramat reduced the adult longevity and fecundity of the parent generation (F0). These concentrations prolonged the preadult developmental duration while decreasing preadult survival, adult longevity and reproduction of the F1 generation. The adult pre-reproductive period was also extended by spirotetramat treatment groups. Subsequently, the population growth parameters such as the intrinsic rate of increase r, finite rate of increase λ and net reproductive rate R0 of the F1 generation were decreased in spirotetramat treatment groups whereas, the mean generation time T of the F1 generation was not affected when compared to the control. These results indicated the negative effect of sublethal concentrations of spirotetramat on the performance of B. brassicae by reducing its nymphal survival, extending the duration of some immature stages and suppressing the population growth of B. brassicae. Overall, we demonstrated that spirotetramat is a pesticide showing both sublethal activities, and transgenerational effects on cabbage aphid; it may be useful for implementation in IPM programs against this aphid pest