4,412 research outputs found
Electronic structure of PrCaMnO near the Fermi level studied by ultraviolet photoelectron and x-ray absorption spectroscopy
We have investigated the temperature-dependent changes in the near-
occupied and unoccupied states of PrCaMnO which shows the
presence of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases. The
temperature-dependent changes in the charge and orbital degrees of freedom and
associated changes in the Mn 3 - O 2 hybridization result in varied O
2 contributions to the valence band. A quantitative estimate of the charge
transfer energy () shows a larger value compared to the earlier
reported estimates. The charge localization causing the large is
discussed in terms of different models including the electronic phase
separation.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, To be published in Phy. Rev.
Design of Safe Slopes After Failure During an Earthquake
Four slope slides took place, during a major earthquake, on the slopes of hill that has a paper mill complex on its top. The subsoil condition and engineering parameters for the site were evaluated at the time of construction of this complex and again after the earthquake for the purpose of designing safe slopes. However, both times the variation in the numerical values of shear parameters obtained by different tests was very wide and it was difficult to arrive at some conclusion. Therefore, on the basis of failure surface geometries, these was assessed by back analysis and design of safe slope carried out
Prevalence of gastro-intestinal symptoms during pregnancy: a questionnaire based study in a tertiary care center of South Asia
Background: Gastrointestinal symptoms lead to morbidity in pregnancy, yet remain a surprisingly under-researched topic. The objective was to find out the prevalence of various gastro-intestinal symptoms in pregnant women, the status before pregnancy, and their perceived impact.Methods: A questionnaire incorporating various gastro-intestinal problems was prepared and used over 184 pregnant women to know their prevalence in different trimesters of pregnancy and compare them with prevalence before pregnancy. 184 matched non-pregnant women were also interrogated as additional control group.Results: Constipation was seen significantly more often during pregnancy (24.5%) and was maximum in the first trimester (31.8%) followed by third trimester (26.3%) and second trimester (19.0%) as compared to only 9.8% of women in non-pregnant state. Diarrhea was also more rampant in pregnancy (9.2%), especially in third trimester (13.1%) than before pregnancy (1.6%). Constipation, diarrhea and fecal incontinence were much commoner in pregnant as compared to non-pregnant controls.Conclusions: There is a very high prevalence of gastro-intestinal symptoms during pregnancy as compared to non-pregnant state. More studies are needed to highlight the Quality-Of-Life issues with these symptoms
Digital Library of IIITM-K β Experiences of Next Generation resource centre
Digital Library has many features that make it distinct from traditional libraries. These features make it an excellent medium to address information and interaction services related to quality of education, and management of learning environments. While the paper libraries have become very expensive and are the prerogative of only a few well endowed institutions, Digital Libraries make these services and more at affordable costs. This will remove the digital divide between developed and developing nations in long run. Transversal E-Networks [TEN] a company under incubation at IIITM-K has developed an academic aggregation server concept in which several academic functions such as Course Management, Authoring, and collaborative group-work are built around their unique metadata standards compliant Digital Library implementation. This server called βACADOβ is being field-tested as central information server for Indian Institute of Information Technology β Kerala. The server has more than proven its effectiveness in increasing the productivity and quality of academic collaboration, management of learning environment and research in the institution. The same server can network itself with similar servers in other institutions and form as Information, Knowledge or Educational Grids across the different Digital Library spaces
Early childhood obesity: a survey of knowledge and practices of physicians from the Middle East and North Africa
BACKGROUND: Childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health issues of the twenty-first century affecting
even low- and middle-income countries. Overweight and obese children are more likely to stay obese into
adulthood. Due to the paucity of data on local practices, our study aimed to assess the knowledge and practices of
physicians from the Middle East and North Africa region with respect to early-onset obesity.
METHODS: A specific questionnaire investigating the perception and knowledge on early-onset obesity was
circulated to healthcare providers (general physicians, pediatricians, pediatric gastroenterologist, neonatologists)
practicing in 17 Middle East and North African countries.
RESULTS: A total of 999/1051 completed forms (95% response) were evaluated. Of all respondents, 28.9% did not
consistently use growth charts to monitor growth during every visit and only 25.2% and 46.6% of respondents
were aware of the correct cut-off criterion for overweight and obesity, respectively. Of those surveyed, 22.3, 14.0,
36.1, 48.2, and 49.1% of respondents did not consider hypertension, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, fatty
liver disease, and decreased life span, respectively, to be a long-term complication of early childhood obesity.
Furthermore, only 0.7% of respondents correctly answered all survey questions pertaining to knowledge of early
childhood overweight and obesity.
CONCLUSION: The survey highlights the low use of growth charts in the evaluation of early childhood growth in
Middle East and North Africa region, and demonstrated poor knowledge of healthcare providers on the short- and
long-term complications of early-onset obesity. This suggests a need for both continued professional education and
development, and implementation of guidelines for the prevention and management of early childhood
overweight and obesity
Non-Compositional Term Dependence for Information Retrieval
Modelling term dependence in IR aims to identify co-occurring terms that are
too heavily dependent on each other to be treated as a bag of words, and to
adapt the indexing and ranking accordingly. Dependent terms are predominantly
identified using lexical frequency statistics, assuming that (a) if terms
co-occur often enough in some corpus, they are semantically dependent; (b) the
more often they co-occur, the more semantically dependent they are. This
assumption is not always correct: the frequency of co-occurring terms can be
separate from the strength of their semantic dependence. E.g. "red tape" might
be overall less frequent than "tape measure" in some corpus, but this does not
mean that "red"+"tape" are less dependent than "tape"+"measure". This is
especially the case for non-compositional phrases, i.e. phrases whose meaning
cannot be composed from the individual meanings of their terms (such as the
phrase "red tape" meaning bureaucracy). Motivated by this lack of distinction
between the frequency and strength of term dependence in IR, we present a
principled approach for handling term dependence in queries, using both lexical
frequency and semantic evidence. We focus on non-compositional phrases,
extending a recent unsupervised model for their detection [21] to IR. Our
approach, integrated into ranking using Markov Random Fields [31], yields
effectiveness gains over competitive TREC baselines, showing that there is
still room for improvement in the very well-studied area of term dependence in
IR
Efficient CSL Model Checking Using Stratification
For continuous-time Markov chains, the model-checking problem with respect to
continuous-time stochastic logic (CSL) has been introduced and shown to be
decidable by Aziz, Sanwal, Singhal and Brayton in 1996. Their proof can be
turned into an approximation algorithm with worse than exponential complexity.
In 2000, Baier, Haverkort, Hermanns and Katoen presented an efficient
polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the sublogic in which only binary
until is allowed. In this paper, we propose such an efficient polynomial-time
approximation algorithm for full CSL. The key to our method is the notion of
stratified CTMCs with respect to the CSL property to be checked. On a
stratified CTMC, the probability to satisfy a CSL path formula can be
approximated by a transient analysis in polynomial time (using uniformization).
We present a measure-preserving, linear-time and -space transformation of any
CTMC into an equivalent, stratified one. This makes the present work the
centerpiece of a broadly applicable full CSL model checker. Recently, the
decision algorithm by Aziz et al. was shown to work only for stratified CTMCs.
As an additional contribution, our measure-preserving transformation can be
used to ensure the decidability for general CTMCs.Comment: 18 pages, preprint for LMCS. An extended abstract appeared in ICALP
201
The SOS Pilot Study: a RCT of routine oxygen supplementation early after acute strokeβeffect on recovery of neurological function at one week
Mild hypoxia is common after stroke and associated with poor long-term outcome. Oxygen supplementation could prevent hypoxia and improve recovery. A previous study of routine oxygen supplementation showed no significant benefit at 7 and 12 months. This pilot study reports the effects of routine oxygen supplementation for 72 hours on oxygen saturation and neurological outcomes at 1 week after a stroke
- β¦