Stretching the life of Twitter classifiers with time-stamped semantic graphs

Social media has become an effective channel for communicating both trends and public opinion on current events. However the automatic topic classification of social media content pose various challenges. Topic classification is a common technique used for automatically capturing themes that emerge from social media streams. However, such techniques are sensitive to the evolution of topics when new event-dependent vocabularies start to emerge (e.g., Crimea becoming relevant to War Conflict during the Ukraine crisis in 2014). Therefore, traditional supervised classification methods which rely on labelled data could rapidly become outdated. In this paper we propose a novel transfer learning approach to address the classification task of new data when the only available labelled data belong to a previous epoch. This approach relies on the incorporation of knowledge from DBpedia graphs. Our findings show promising results in understanding how features age, and how semantic features can support the evolution of topic classifiers

Spatial water surface variations in open channel flows downstream of side disturbances

River hydrodynamicsInteraction with structure

The Relative Odds of Progressing by Structural and Functional Tests in Glaucoma.

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of disease severity and number of tests acquired during follow-up on the relative odds of identifying progression by structural or functional tests in glaucoma.MethodsThis was an observational cohort study involving 462 eyes of 305 patients with glaucoma and 62 eyes of 49 healthy subjects. Glaucoma patients and healthy subjects were followed for an average of 3.6 ± 0.9 and 3.8 ± 0.9 years, with a median (interquantile range) of 8 (6-9) and 7 (6-8) visits, respectively. At each visit, subjects underwent visual field assessment with standard automated perimetry (SAP) and retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) evaluation by spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). Slopes of change in SAP mean sensitivity and OCT RNFL thickness over time were estimated by linear regression using progressively cumulative visits over time. Cutoff values for age-related expected rates of change for each test were obtained from the healthy group. Progression by SD-OCT and/or SAP was determined if the slope of change was statistically significant and also lower (faster) than the fifth percentile cutoff calculated from the healthy group. A generalized estimating equation logistic regression model was used to evaluate the relative odds of progressing by OCT versus SAP in glaucoma eyes.ResultsEyes with less severe disease at baseline had a higher chance of being detected as progressing by SD-OCT but not by SAP, whereas an increase in disease severity at baseline increased the chance that the eye would be detected as progressing by SAP but not SD-OCT. Each 1 dB higher MD was associated with a 5% increase in the odds of detecting progression by SD-OCT versus SAP (odds ratio = 1.05 per 1 dB; 95% confidence interval: 1.01-1.09; P = 0.005).ConclusionsThe ability to detect glaucoma progression by SAP versus SD-OCT is significantly influenced by the stage of disease. Our results may provide useful information for guiding clinicians on the relative utility of these tests for detecting change throughout the disease continuum

Prevalence and Health Adverse Effects of Khat Chewing Among College Students in Jazan Region, Saudi Arabia

Khat chewing is a social habit which has stimulatory action due to its cathinone content, but its adverse effects on health are a source of growing concern. The aim of our study is to evaluate the prevalence and health adverse effects of khat chewing among students in Jazan region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The study sample included 195 students from Applied Medical Science College, who were randomly selected and were asked through questionnaire and with a signed consent. About 5 ml of venous blood was collected in plain vacutainer tubes from 38 khat chewers and 20 non khat chewers as normal control. Serum was used to determine alanine aminotransferase (ALT), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), total and direct bilirubin, total protein, urea, creatinine, uric acid, and albumin. The sample consisted of 134 males and 61 females, with age range 19-27 years, and their mean age was 21.1 year. 40% of students were from urban area, and 81.5% of them from Jazan region. Out of 195 students, only 38 (19.5%) were found to chew khat. Biochemical results revealed highly significant differences among chewers in ALT, ALP, uric acid, and urea (p<0.005) compared to nonchewers group. There is also a significant difference in the total protein level (<0.05), while no significant differences were noticed in other biochemical traits analyzed. We concluded that the prevalence of khat chewing among students is fairly high (19.5 %), and that adverse effects of khat chewing on health are very clear, so all efforts should be contributed to solve this problem by increasing awareness of all members of the society to khat chewing risk

Asymptotic stress field of a mode III crack growing along an elastic/elastic power-law creeping bimaterial interface

The asymptotic stress field near the tip of a crack subjected to antiplane shear loading is analysed. The crack is growing quasi-statically along an elastic/elastic power-law creeping bimaterial interface. We find there is a separable solution with the following characteristics: for n &lt; 3, where n is the power-law creeping exponent, the asymptotic stress field is dominated by the elastic strain rates and has an inverse square root singularity, r~&quot; 2 , where r is the distance from the current crack tip. For n &gt; 3, the near-tip stress and strain fields has a singularity of the form r ~ ;/&lt;n~;&gt; . The strength of this field is completely specified by the current crack growth rate, besides material properties, and is otherwise independent of the applied load and of the prior crack growth history

Mitigation of Fiber Nonlinearity Effects in Ultra High-Dense WDM System by Using Fractional Fourier Transform for 32 Channel System

The optical signal is severely degraded when transmitted in the fiber due to both the linear and nonlinear distortions. It is well known that, the linear distortions in single mode fiber include chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) while self-phase modulation (SPM), cross phase modulation (XPM) and four-wave mixing (FWM) are considered the most among nonlinear distortions. A method called Fractional Fourier Transform (FRFT) has been applied to mitigate fiber nonlinearity impairments. In this work, 10 Gb/s optical fiber system with five spans, each of length 60 km, for three types of modulation formats (Return-to-Zero Differential Phase Shift Keying (RZ-DPSK), Return-to-Zero Differential Quaternary Phase Shift Keying (RZ-DQPSK) and Carrier-Suppressed Return-to-Zero (CSRZ)), single and multi-channel transmission systems are designed and simulated using “OptiSystem (2011) version 10.0” software package. The BER of thirty two channel systems (channel No.16) at bit rate 10 Gb/s per channel, 300 km link length of CSRZ modulation format with channel spacing of 50 GHz at SNR 10 dB without FRFT is 10-4.6 and 10-6.4 with FRFT. The BER of thirty two channel system (channel No.16) at bit rate 10 Gb/s per channel, 300 km link length of CSRZ modulation format with channel spacing of 25 GHz at SNR 10 dB without FRFT is 10- 2.56 and 10-3.24 with FRFT

Ciprofloxacin Intercalated with ZnO to Produce a Nanohybrid Used as a Delivery Machine

Ciprofloxacin (Cip) with zinc layered hydroxide (ZLH) as the precursors nanohybrid (CipN) was synthesized under an aqueous environment. The synthesis, bioactivity and the anti-bacterial activity of CipN nanoparticles has been evaluated against a wide variety of bacterial strains such as staphylococcus, streptococci, E. coli and hellcobacter. The anti-bacterial activity of CipN has a highly safe compound and may be considered for combination therapy against many bacterial strains, due to its potential synergistic effect with important antibiotics. Powder X-ray diffraction showed that the basal spacing of the nanohybrid was 2.5nm, resulting in the spatial orientation of Cip molecules between the interlayers of ZnO oriented with the direction of the z-axis. SEM images indicate the confirmations of the success of the intercalations. The AFE (Atomic Forcing Electrons) shows the average size of particles found was 86nm. The FTIR study showed that the intercalated CipN spectral feature is generally similar to that of the Cip free molecule, but with bands slightly shifted. This indicates that some chemical bonding of Cip presence between the nanohybrid interlayers was slightly changed due to the formation of host–guest interaction. The nanohybrid is of mesopores type with 54.5% drug loading and enhanced thermal stability. The drug CipN nanohybrid was found to be sustained and therefore has good potential to be used as a nanohybrid drug which is more effective than the free one. The vitro bioassay study showed that the CipN has a mild effect on the hepatocyte cells, more than its counterpart, free Cip. Keywords: ZnO; nano materials; antimicrobial activity; intercalations