Hypothermia in the early neonatal period

Background: Hypothermia in neonates is a common problem and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Prevention of hypothermia is therefore an essential aspect of neonatal care especially in the immediate neonatal period. Aim: To evaluate the efficacy of thermal care of the neonate in the labour ward at St Luke's Hospital, Malta. Method: Retrospective study analysing the temperature on admission to the nursery from the labour ward. A consecutive sample of 754 neonates admitted during 2002 was studied. Results: The proportion of babies admitted with normal body temperature (36.5-37.5°C) was 25.5%. The rest were mildly (36.0-36.5°C) (42.2%) or moderately (<36.0°C) (32.2%) hypothermic. Significantly less normothermia was evident in winter births (19.6%) than in summer births (38.1%) (Chi squared=26.5, p<0.0001). Implications: The results indicate the need for an improvement in thermal support in the labour ward.peer-reviewe

Gender and local floodplain management institutions: a case study from Bangladesh

"Floodplain wetlands are the major common pool natural resource in Bangladesh. Mostly men fish, and both men and women collect aquatic plants and snails. Case studies contrast a women-only, men-only, and mixed community based organization (CBO), each of which manages a seasonal floodplain wetland. The two CBOs in which women hold key positions are in Hindu communities where more women use aquatic resources, work for an income, and belong to other local institutions. In the oldest of these CBOs, more women have gradually become office bearers as their recognition in the community has grown. In the Muslim community, only a few women collect aquatic resources and in this community most women do not perceive floodplain natural resource constraints to be very important to them. These women have no role in the CBO and feel that they have no say in decisions about the fishery, unlike many women in the other two sites. The fishery management activities in all three sites are similar and catches and biodiversity appear to have improved, demonstrating that women can play an effective role in community organizations for fishery management. Those who are represented in the CBOs reported significant increases in their participation and influence. Men and women in all three sites recognized that decisionmaking and management of their fisheries had improved, but community support and compliance were higher where both men and women had an active role in this process. Women had a more diverse set of criteria for effective CBOs than men. The men-only CBO saw itself as more of a membership based organization than as representing all of the community." Authors' AbstractGender, Poverty, Collective action, Community participation, Floodplains, Fisheries, Community-based organizations,

Morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking preschool children

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific developmental information is not available in Bangla and that properties of these verb forms render them suitable for exploring how language typology contributes to the learnability of verb morphology in emerging child language. Children's performance on these forms was assessed through form-specific language elicitation tasks and spontaneous language samples. Three stages of development of verb morphology were identified by consideration of accuracy of production and error types

Automated Identification of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discriminatory Texts from Issue Comments

In an industry dominated by straight men, many developers representing other gender identities and sexual orientations often encounter hateful or discriminatory messages. Such communications pose barriers to participation for women and LGBTQ+ persons. Due to sheer volume, manual inspection of all communications for discriminatory communication is infeasible for a large-scale Free Open-Source Software (FLOSS) community. To address this challenge, this study aims to develop an automated mechanism to identify Sexual orientation and Gender identity Discriminatory (SGID) texts from software developers' communications. On this goal, we trained and evaluated SGID4SE ( Sexual orientation and Gender Identity Discriminatory text identification for (4) Software Engineering texts) as a supervised learning-based SGID detection tool. SGID4SE incorporates six preprocessing steps and ten state-of-the-art algorithms. SGID4SE implements six different strategies to improve the performance of the minority class. We empirically evaluated each strategy and identified an optimum configuration for each algorithm. In our ten-fold cross-validation-based evaluations, a BERT-based model boosts the best performance with 85.9% precision, 80.0% recall, and 82.9% F1-Score for the SGID class. This model achieves 95.7% accuracy and 80.4% Matthews Correlation Coefficient. Our dataset and tool establish a foundation for further research in this direction

UTILIZATION OF WASTE EGGSHELLS FOR PRODUCTION OF RENEWABLE CATALYST FOR TRANSESTERIFICATION

Objective: This paper deals with the production of a nonconventional heterogeneous base catalyst from waste egg shells and comparison with conventional homogeneous and heterogeneous base catalysts like potassium hydroxide, sodium hydroxide, magnesium oxide and calcium oxide.Methods: Three types of virgin oil were used to study the biodiesel yield. Trasesterification reaction was performed for the conversion to biodiesel. The biodiesel yield produced from palm oil, coconut oil and sunflower oil catalyzed with commercially available base catalysts was compared with prepared eggshell catalyst. Waste eggshells were calcined at 700 °C to 1000 °C for various time periods ranging from 2-4 h for the preparation of renewable catalyst after washing with deionizing water. The calcined waste eggshell catalyst was characterized using scanning electron microscope. The prepared catalyst was used for transesterification reaction.Results: The yield of biodiesel using waste eggshell catalyst is comparable to conventional catalyst like sodium hydroxide with a yield of 95%. Eggshell catalyst has the advantage of reusability and does not require water washing steps. The eggshell catalyst was reused for four times before a decline in its activity. It exhibited lower reusability for coconut and palm oil because of leaching problems.Conclusion: The prepared biodiesel was subjected to ASTM D6751 standard test to assess the fuel properties. The fuel properties was comparable to commercial diesel and hence it can be used in compression-ignition engines.Keywords: Waste egg shell, Heterogeneous, Base catalyst, Virgin cooking oil, Biodiese

A Phenomenological Study of the Language Ideology, Language Management, and Language Practice in English-Medium Universities in Bangladesh: Lecturers’ and Students’ Voices

English Medium Instruction (EMI) is a commonly observed phenomenon in higher education (HE) in the countries where English is mandated as a second or foreign language. The globally conducted studies reported the prospect, practice, problems, and eventualities of EMI in HE. Numbering around 105, private universities in Bangladesh also adopted EMI. Being guided by Cooper (1989) and Spolsky (2009), this phenomenological study explored the language ideology of lecturers and students regarding the benefits of EMI, their remarks about the language management to achieve compatibility for adopting EMI, and their opinion concerning the implementation (language practice) of EMI in the classrooms of private universities in Bangladesh. We collected from eight participants (four students and four lecturers) who responded to the semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. The findings of the study suggested EMI does not observe full-fledged practice in the classrooms, as lecturers and students struggle to impart and receive knowledge due to their limited proficiency in the English language, although they did not deny the benefit of EMI to produce globally efficient workforces empowered with English language proficiency. This paper suggested the implementation of a bilingual curriculum in which instruction is delivered in English and Bangla to imparting a great deal of knowledge to the students. In the national language-in-education policy, Cognitive Communicative Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) should be prioritized over Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) to enrich knowledge acquisition

A mathematical model for understanding and controlling monkeypox transmission dynamics in the United States and its implications for future epidemic management

Although the outbreak of human monkeypox (Mpox) caused by the monkeypox virus (MPXV) has slowed down around the world, little is known about this epidemic-like disease. To identify and re-examine the underlying pattern of the disease through a modified logistic growth model, Mpox data set of the United States from 10 May 2022 to 31 December 2022 was used in this study. The main focus is on the two non-pharmaceutical interventions (policies for reducing human-to-human, and animal-to-human transmissions) which were applied to understand their significance on the epidemic. The interventions are used as control parameters in the model with a view to analyzing the strengths of such controls in minimizing the infected cases. The model reveals a complying acceptance to the United States data. The findings disclose that preventive measures could play important roles in controlling the deadly spread of the transmission in the year of 2022. During the transmission period, better outcomes could have been possible to achieve in the US if both controls were brought to action simultaneously. Our model reflects that to prevent the outbreak of Mpox and/or any similar diseases from a community in future, the continuous application of the preventive strategies displayed through the model might be an effective tool. Moreover, such strategies could play supporting roles during pre-and/or post-vaccination periods.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Community Fishery Management: Implications for Food Security and Livelihoods

A partnership project of the Bangladesh Department of Fisheries, five NGOs and ICLARM has introduced community management of inland fisheries in Bangladesh. Management arrangements and outcomes are compared in four waterbodies with different property rights. In the closed lake fishers jointly stock, guard and harvest fish, non-members are excluded. Production and incomes have fluctuated since the power of past fisher leaders has been challenged by more transparent decision making. After government made rivers open access, fishers no-longer had any recognized right to limit fishing there and have failed to develop institutions to limit fishing, effort has increased and increasingly small fish are caught using smaller nets. In two open beels, similar fishery outcomes have emerged from different contexts. One is managed by many diverse fisher groups who have agreed to protect fish and have seen catches and consumption increase. A similar pattern has emerged in a seasonal floodplain on private land managed by a multi-stakeholder committee led by women. Here the existing seasonal common fishing rights for very homogenous villages are maintained and overwintering fish have been protected by consensus. Local decisions and rules that conserve fish in the dry season and early monsoon are feasible for communities but require external facilitation and recognition of longer-term fisher or community use rights if they are to be sustainable.Keywords: community-based management, co-management, access, equity, food security