Pump It Up: Predict Water Pump Status using Attentive Tabular Learning

Water crisis is a crucial concern around the globe. Appropriate and timely maintenance of water pumps in drought-hit countries is vital for communities relying on the well. In this paper, we analyze and apply a sequential attentive deep neural architecture, TabNet, for predicting water pump repair status in Tanzania. The model combines the valuable benefits of tree-based algorithms and neural networks, enabling end-to-end training, model interpretability, sparse feature selection, and efficient learning on tabular data. Finally, we compare the performance of TabNet with popular gradient tree-boosting algorithms like XGBoost, LightGBM,CatBoost, and demonstrate how we can further uplift the performance by choosing focal loss as the objective function while training on imbalanced data.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Fate of indeterminate microbial keratitis

Background: Previous published literature has shown that there is no significant difference between outcomes of culture positive and culture negative infective keratitis. This study was done to find the outcome in cases of indeterminate keratitis in our institute. Purpose was to highlight the fate of indeterminate microbial keratitis.Methods: Patients presenting to cornea services of ABVIMS and Dr. RML hospital from February 2017 to April 2021 were evaluated for demographic and microbiological assessment, clinical presentation and management.Results: The 188 out of 310 cases were microbiologically positive. No organism could be detected in 122 cases. Clinical prognosis is worse in cases of indeterminate keratitis.Conclusions: Cases with indeterminate microbial keratitis do not show timely and appropriate response which leads to spread of infection resulting in more complications and less CDVA

A Influência da Cultura no Comportamento de Compra por Impulso: uma Revisão Sistemática da Literatura

Culture plays a significant buying role in shaping different aspects of consumer behavior such as rational, impulse, and compulsive buying behavior. Impulse buying is one of the prevalent phenomena that significantly affect the sales revenue of companies. This study focuses on unveiling the interaction between cultural factors and impulse buying behavior. For this systematic literature review, 112 significant articles were examined to understand the relationship between various aspects of culture and impulse buying behavior in both online and offline contexts. Further investigation of impulse buying in cross-cultural context helps to understand and classify different theoretical perspectives to study impulse buying behavior and cultural factors. This study offers practical implications for retail professionals and e-commerce strategists to design and implement viable cross-cultural marketing campaigns. Academic researchers may also understand research gaps and contribute further to understanding cross-cultural impulse buying.A cultura desempenha um papel de compra significativo na formação de diferentes aspectos do comportamento do consumidor, como comportamento de compra racional, por impulso e compulsivo. A compra por impulso é um dos fenômenos predominantes que afetam significativamente a receita de vendas das empresas. Este estudo tem como objetivo desvendar a interação entre fatores culturais e o comportamento de compra por impulso. Para esta revisão sistemática da literatura, 112 artigos significativos foram examinados para entender a relação entre vários aspectos da cultura e o comportamento de compra por impulso em contextos online e offline. Uma investigação mais aprofundada da compra por impulso no contexto intercultural ajuda a entender e classificar diferentes perspectivas teóricas para estudar o comportamento de compra por impulso e os fatores culturais. Este estudo oferece implicações práticas para profissionais de varejo e estrategistas de comércio eletrônico para projetar e implementar campanhas de marketing interculturais viáveis. Pesquisadores acadêmicos também podem entender as lacunas de pesquisa e contribuir ainda mais para a compreensão da compra por impulso intercultural

Supply Chain Tracing and Anti-Counterfeiting with Distributed Ledger Technology

In recent times, there has been a rampant proliferation of counterfeit products that has left a trail of devastation in the manufacturing sectors. The repercussions of this extend to companies, impacting their brand reputation, revenue streams and overall profitability. Industries like agriculture, banking, electronics, and high-value deliveries uses the emergence of blockchain technology as a powerful tool to discern between authentic and counterfeit items. Its potential as a means to curtail the influx of fake products in the market is substantial. Blockchain technology, at its core, operates as a decentralized and distributed digital ledger system, meticulously recording transactions within interconnected blocks across multiple databases. The inherent security of this technology ensures the immutability of these blocks, rendering them invulnerable to alteration or hacking. By leveraging blockchain technology, consumers can independently verify the authenticity of a product, eliminating the need for reliance on third-party intermediaries. Incorporating recent technological advancements, the utilization of Quick Response (QR) codes offers a robust approach to combat the proliferation of counterfeit goods. The integration of blockchain technology with QR codes serves as a means to uphold the integrity of products. This innovative system securely stores product details and unique codes in the form of blocks,  where QR codes play a pivotal role in collecting and matching these unique codes with entries in the blockchain database. If the QR code matches with entries in the database, the user receives a confirmation of the product's authenticity; otherwise, an alert is triggered, signaling the presence of a counterfeit product

Concomitant deletion of Ptpn6 and Ptpn11 in T cells fails to improve anticancer responses

Anticancer T cells acquire a dysfunctional state characterized by poor effector function and expression of inhibitory receptors, such as PD-1. Blockade of PD-1 leads to T cell reinvigoration and is increasingly applied as an effective anticancer treatment. Recent work challenged the commonly held view that the phosphatase PTPN11 (known as SHP-2) is essential for PD-1 signaling in T cells, suggesting functional redundancy with the homologous phosphatase PTPN6 (SHP-1). Therefore, we investigated the effect of concomitant Ptpn6 and Ptpn11 deletion in T cells on their ability to mount antitumour responses. In vivo data show that neither sustained nor acute Ptpn6/11 deletion improves T cell-mediated tumor control. Sustained loss of Ptpn6/11 also impairs the therapeutic effects of anti-PD1 treatment. In vitro results show that Ptpn6/11-deleted CD8(+) T cells exhibit impaired expansion due to a survival defect and proteomics analyses reveal substantial alterations, including in apoptosis-related pathways. These data indicate that concomitant ablation of Ptpn6/11 in polyclonal T cells fails to improve their anticancer properties, implying that caution shall be taken when considering their inhibition for immunotherapeutic approaches

International Review and Advisory Committee

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Glucose and glutamine fuel protein O-GlcNAcylation to control T cell self-renewal and malignancy

Sustained glucose and glutamine transport are essential for activated T lymphocytes to support ATP and macromolecule biosynthesis. We now show that glutamine and glucose also fuel an indispensible dynamic regulation of intracellular protein O-GlcNAcylation at key stages of T cell development, transformation and differentiation. Glucose and glutamine are precursors of UDP-GlcNAc, a substrate for cellular glycosyltransferases. Immune activated T cells contained higher concentrations of UDP-GlcNAc and increased intracellular protein O-GlcNAcylation controlled by the enzyme O-GlcNAc glycosyltransferase as compared to naïve cells. We identified Notch, the T cell antigen receptor and c-Myc as key controllers of T cell protein O-GlcNAcylation, via regulation of glucose and glutamine transport. Loss of O-GlcNAc transferase blocked T cell progenitor renewal, malignant transformation, and peripheral T cell clonal expansion. Nutrient-dependent signaling pathways regulated by O-GlcNAc glycosyltransferase are thus fundamental for T cell biology

Intergenerational reforms in women’s right to inheritance in India

The evolution after the Hindu Code Bill, women's property ownership in India has improved. Women's position in old custom and their evolution in modern law from the colonial period to the Hindu Code Bill are the study's main focus areas. In ancient legal codes, such as Dharmashastras, Manusmriti, and Arthashastra, women were denied property rights and she always is dependent on their father, husband, or son. As per our constitution, every human being has the right to equitable treatment. Equal property rights for men and women are important for reducing the gender gap, to empower women in order to promote social and economic development and to ensure gender and social justice within the framework of Personal Laws and inform women about the areas of legislation that are most likely to affect and enhance their lives. So the focus of the article is on women's inheritance rights in old Indian laws and their development in modern laws with help of international conventions. As the status of women in India improves economically and socially, there is a need for more development and a single or uniform property rights for every sect of Indian females