4,412 research outputs found

    Electronic structure of Pr0.67_{0.67}Ca0.33_{0.33}MnO3_3 near the Fermi level studied by ultraviolet photoelectron and x-ray absorption spectroscopy

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    We have investigated the temperature-dependent changes in the near-EEF_F occupied and unoccupied states of Pr0.67_{0.67}Ca0.33_{0.33}MnO3_3 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 3dd - O 2pp hybridization result in varied O 2pp contributions to the valence band. A quantitative estimate of the charge transfer energy (EECT_{CT}) shows a larger value compared to the earlier reported estimates. The charge localization causing the large EECT_{CT} 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

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    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

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    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 – Experiences of Next Generation resource centre

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    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 β€œACADO” is being field-tested as central information server for Indian Institute of Information Technology – 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

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    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

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    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

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    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
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