Screening for Depression and Anxiety Among Medical and Dental Students Who Are Forced into Their Field of Study

ABSTRACT Background and Objective: The study hypothesized that the students who are forced to enter the medical field by their parents may have a higher incidence of depression and anxiety. Methods: A total of 210 medical and dental students were asked to fill out a form indicating their desire to enter medical college versus their parents’ wishes on an analogue scale. They were also asked to fill out screening forms for depression and anxiety. Results: The students who selected the medical field by their parent’s wishes were found to have 1.2 times more anxiety & 1.96 times more depression. Conclusions: Parents should consider children\u27s willingness to enter the medical field before forcing them into medical school

CLIPping the Deception: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Universal Deepfake Detection

The recent advancements in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and the emergence of Diffusion models have significantly streamlined the production of highly realistic and widely accessible synthetic content. As a result, there is a pressing need for effective general purpose detection mechanisms to mitigate the potential risks posed by deepfakes. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) when paired with recent adaptation methods for universal deepfake detection. Following previous studies in this domain, we employ only a single dataset (ProGAN) in order to adapt CLIP for deepfake detection. However, in contrast to prior research, which rely solely on the visual part of CLIP while ignoring its textual component, our analysis reveals that retaining the text part is crucial. Consequently, the simple and lightweight Prompt Tuning based adaptation strategy that we employ outperforms the previous SOTA approach by 5.01% mAP and 6.61% accuracy while utilizing less than one third of the training data (200k images as compared to 720k). To assess the real-world applicability of our proposed models, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation across various scenarios. This involves rigorous testing on images sourced from 21 distinct datasets, including those generated by GANs-based, Diffusion-based and Commercial tools

Child's play and recreation in Dhaka City, Bangladesh

This paper is an attempt to take into account children's views and perceptions about their playing spaces, as a result of a study of playgrounds, parks and amusement parks in Dhaka City. It is quite evident that the so-called ?play and recreation facilities? provided by the authorities cater for only a fraction of the children in Dhaka City. Girls are almost totally excluded from using these facilities, while boys from high-income families and street children seldom use them. The main reasons for their inaccessibility to most children in Dhaka City are lack of security, poor maintenance and inadequate play facilities and accessories. It is recommended that further studies are undertaken on the existing provision of play spaces for children in order to understand better the impact of such spaces on their well being

Stakeholders' response to the private sector participation of water supply utility in Karachi, Pakistan

Changes are proposed to improve urban water supply systems around the globe. Improvement in service delivery mechanisms, institutional efficiency, financial viability and acceptance by users are the key criteria for initiating and sustaining a change. To improve the situation of water supply in Karachi, Pakistan, advised by the World Bank, a private sector participation (PSP) strategy was formed during the 1990s. The strategy aimed to promote a gradual increase of PSP in water and sanitation services. The proposed project faced strong resistance from stakeholders, mainly civil society, leading to its suspension. Efforts are being made to revive the PSP and to make it acceptable to the stakeholders concerned. The paper documents and analyses the stakeholders’ response to the anticipated PSP process and the possible social and economic impacts. The study makes a contribution in the areas of participation and consensus building in the context of PSP. Willingness to negotiate continuously and even consideration of possible alternatives based on the changing situations are the key to any way forward for sustainable improvements

Hybrid Transformer Network for Deepfake Detection

Deepfake media is becoming widespread nowadays because of the easily available tools and mobile apps which can generate realistic looking deepfake videos/images without requiring any technical knowledge. With further advances in this field of technology in the near future, the quantity and quality of deepfake media is also expected to flourish, while making deepfake media a likely new practical tool to spread mis/disinformation. Because of these concerns, the deepfake media detection tools are becoming a necessity. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid transformer network utilizing early feature fusion strategy for deepfake video detection. Our model employs two different CNN networks, i.e., (1) XceptionNet and (2) EfficientNet-B4 as feature extractors. We train both feature extractors along with the transformer in an end-to-end manner on FaceForensics++, DFDC benchmarks. Our model, while having relatively straightforward architecture, achieves comparable results to other more advanced state-of-the-art approaches when evaluated on FaceForensics++ and DFDC benchmarks. Besides this, we also propose novel face cut-out augmentations, as well as random cut-out augmentations. We show that the proposed augmentations improve the detection performance of our model and reduce overfitting. In addition to that, we show that our model is capable of learning from considerably small amount of data.publishedVersio

Public private partnerships and the poor - case report 1: Karachi, Pakistan

The purpose of the project Public Private Partnerships and the Poor in Water and Sanitation is to determine workable processes whereby the needs of the poor are promoted in strategies which encourage public-private partnerships (PPP) in the provision of water supply and sanitation services. One of the key objectives is to fill some of the gaps which exist in evidence-based reporting of the facts and issues around the impacts of PPP on poor consumers. This report presents the case report from Karachi, Pakistan

MRI features of spinal fluorosis: Results of an endemic community screening

Objectives: Fluorosis is endemic in many parts of the world. However community studies on MRI features of fluorosis are lacking. The aim of this study was to determine MRI features of spinal changes in a community with endemic fluorosis in the Thar Desert Pakistan.Methodology: Randomly selected adults from the Village Samorindh, district Tharparker, Sindh, Pakistan, with spinal fluorosis diagnosed on plain x-rays and raised serum fluoride levels were studied from June 2008 to January 2009. MRI was carried out on 0.5 T open magnet MRI system. Features of vertebral body, spinal ligaments, intervertebral disc, facet joints, iliac wings and other incidental findings were noted. Sclerosis was defined as low signal intensity on both T1 and T2 weighted images. RESULTS were described as mean and percentage values.Results: All the studied 27 subjects complained of back ache without neurological signs. The average age was 43.33 ± 10.45 years; 21 being male (77.8%). The most frequent findings included generalized vertebral sclerosis (24, 88.8%), ligamentum flavum hypertrophy (23, 85%), anterior (20, 74%) and lateral (17, 62.9%) disc herniation, thickened longitudinal ligaments, and narrowing of spinal foramina. Hemangioma was seen in 04(14.8%). The most commonly involved level was L1-2, L4-5 and lower dorsal spine.Conclusion: Vertebral sclerosis, a combination of premature degeneration with anterior disc herniation and an unusually high frequency of vertebral hemangioma formed the spectrum of MRI findings in subjects with spinal fluorosis having back ache but no neurological findings