Design of Real Time Walsh Transform for Processing of Multiple Digital Signals

This paper presents the design and implementation of multiple digital signals processing using real-time Walsh transforms. The design of real time Walsh transform is done in such a way that it starts producing outputs instantly even before all input data have entered the system. The system consists of Walsh Transform circuit, several Digital Signal Processing (DSP) circuits, and an inverse Walsh transform circuit. The real time Walsh and inverse Walsh transforms are also designed to produce right results for any possible combinations of input data. DSP blocks are able to perform addition, subtraction, and dyadic convolution process of Walsh coefficients of more than one digital signals. Comparisons to the previous methods are briefly presented. It was found that the design of real time Walsh transform structure has better performance than many of the previously reported results in the literature.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v3i2.196

Isolation of keratinophilic fungi and aerobic actinomycetes from park soils in Gorgan, North of Iran

Background: Keratinophilic fungi are a group of fungi that colonize in various keratinous substrates and degrade them to the components with low molecular weight. This study was conducted to determine the prevalence of keratinophilic fungi and aerobic Actinomycetes in soil of city parks in Gorgan. Objectives: In this study, we surveyed the city park soils of Gorgan (a northern province of Iran) to determine the identities and diversity of soil aerobic Actinomycetes, keratinophilic and non-keratinophilic fungi. Materials and Methods: A total of 244 soil samples were collected from 22 diferent parks of Gorgan, North of Iran. The samples were collected from the superfcial layer with depth not exceeding than 0-10 cm in sterile polyethylene bags. We used hair bait technique for isolation keratinophilic fungi. The colonies identifed by macroscopic and microscopic characterization after slide culturing. Actinomycetes were isolated by antibiotic dilution methods and detected by using physiological tests such as Lysozyme, Casein, Xanthine, Hypoxanthine, Gelatin, Urea Broth, and modifed acid-fast stain. Results: Totally, 75 isolates of aerobic Actinomycetes were detected that Actinomadura madurae and Nocardia asteroides were the most prevalent strains, with 14.66 and 28% prevalence respectively. Microsporum gypseum was more frequent than other keratinophilic fungi (22.96%) and Aspergillus spp. was the most species of saprophyte fungi (15.92%). Conclusions: This study showed that the collected soil from studied areas was rich of keratinophilic fungi and Actinomycetes, therefore hygiene protocol should be taken to prevent the spread of pathogenic and saprophytes fungi in the environment of susceptible person. © 2013, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences

Client Satisfaction Towards Quality of Health Services: an Assessment at Primary Healthcare of District Gujranwala

This survey designed to evaluate the satisfaction level and the factors that affect the patient satisfaction regarding health care delivery services with the aim to improve the services in the primary health care settings of Gujranwala. A Cross Sectional Study done on randomly selected patients attending the basic health units of Gujranwala, with more than18 years of age. Pretested structured "Liker scale questionnaire" was used for data collection. Out of total respondents, 62 (41.3%) clients were satisfied with the services provided by the basic health units of Gujranwala. The factors identified to determine patient satisfaction were accessibility of services, behavior of staff, health education, level of cleanliness, drug availability and miscellaneous services. Not a single ranked area of satisfaction noticed. Client\u27s occupation and income had significant relationship with the patient satisfaction level. Gender, age, and education of clients were not contributing factors; they not affect the client satisfaction level.Less than half clients were satisfied with the services provided by the basic health units. Management of health facilities needs to improve the services

Trends of research productivity across author gender and research fields: A multidisciplinary and multi-country observational study

Bibliographic properties of more than 75 million scholarly articles, are examined and trends in overall research productivity are analysed as a function of research field (over the period of 1970-2020) and author gender (over the period of 2006-2020). Potential disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are also investigated. Over the last decade (2010-2020), the annual number of publications have invariably increased every year with the largest relative increase in a single year happening in 2019 (more than 6% relative growth). But this momentum was interrupted in 2020. Trends show that Environmental Sciences and Engineering Environmental have been the fastest growing research fields. The disruption in patterns of scholarly publication due to the Covid-19 pandemic was unevenly distributed across fields, with Computer Science, Engineering and Social Science enduring the most notable declines. The overall trends of male and female productivity indicate that, in terms of absolute number of publications, the gender gap does not seem to be closing in any country. The trends in absolute gap between male and female authors is either parallel (e.g., Canada, Australia, England, USA) or widening (e.g., majority of countries, particularly Middle Eastern countries). In terms of the ratio of female to male productivity, however, the gap is narrowing almost invariably, though at markedly different rates across countries. While some countries are nearing a ratio of .7 and are well on track for a 0.9 female to male productivity ratio, our estimates show that certain countries (particularly across the Middle East) will not reach such targets within the next 100 years. Without interventional policies, a significant gap will continue to exist in such countries. The decrease or increase in research productivity during the first year of the pandemic, in contrast to trends established before 2020, was generally parallel for male and female authors. There has been no substantial gender difference in the disruption due to the pandemic. However, opposite trends were found in a few cases. It was observed that, in some countries (e.g., The Netherlands, The United States and Germany), male productivity has been more negatively affected by the pandemic. Overall, female research productivity seems to have been more resilient to the disruptive effect of Covid-19 pandemic, although the momentum of female researchers has been negatively affected in a comparable manner to that of males

Text stream to temporal network - A dynamic heartbeat graph to detect emerging events on twitter

© 2018, Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. Huge mounds of data are generated every second on the Internet. People around the globe publish and share information related to real-world events they experience every day. This provides a valuable opportunity to analyze the content of this information to detect real-world happenings, however, it is quite challenging task. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based approach named the Dynamic Heartbeat Graph (DHG) that not only detects the events at an early stage, but also suppresses them in the upcoming adjacent data stream in order to highlight new emerging events. This characteristic makes the proposed method interesting and efficient in finding emerging events and related topics. The experiment results on real-world datasets (i.e. FA Cup Final and Super Tuesday 2012) show a considerable improvement in most cases, while time complexity remains very attractive

Enhanced Heartbeat Graph for emerging event detection on Twitter using time series networks

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd With increasing popularity of social media, Twitter has become one of the leading platforms to report events in real-time. Detecting events from Twitter stream requires complex techniques. Event-related trending topics consist of a group of words which successfully detect and identify events. Event detection techniques must be scalable and robust, so that they can deal with the huge volume and noise associated with social media. Existing event detection methods mostly rely on burstiness, mainly the frequency of words and their co-occurrences. However, burstiness sometimes dominates other relevant details in the data which could be equally significant. Besides, the topological and temporal relationships in the data are often ignored. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based approach, called the Enhanced Heartbeat Graph (EHG), which detects events efficiently. EHG suppresses dominating topics in the subsequent data stream, after their first detection. Experimental results on three real-world datasets (i.e., Football Association Challenge Cup Final, Super Tuesday, and the US Election 2012) show superior performance of the proposed approach in comparison to the state-of-the-art techniques

What’s Happening Around the World? A Survey and Framework on Event Detection Techniques on Twitter

© 2019, Springer Nature B.V. In the last few years, Twitter has become a popular platform for sharing opinions, experiences, news, and views in real-time. Twitter presents an interesting opportunity for detecting events happening around the world. The content (tweets) published on Twitter are short and pose diverse challenges for detecting and interpreting event-related information. This article provides insights into ongoing research and helps in understanding recent research trends and techniques used for event detection using Twitter data. We classify techniques and methodologies according to event types, orientation of content, event detection tasks, their evaluation, and common practices. We highlight the limitations of existing techniques and accordingly propose solutions to address the shortcomings. We propose a framework called EDoT based on the research trends, common practices, and techniques used for detecting events on Twitter. EDoT can serve as a guideline for developing event detection methods, especially for researchers who are new in this area. We also describe and compare data collection techniques, the effectiveness and shortcomings of various Twitter and non-Twitter-based features, and discuss various evaluation measures and benchmarking methodologies. Finally, we discuss the trends, limitations, and future directions for detecting events on Twitter

A Fuzzy Social Network Analysis Method and a Case Study on Tianya

Social networking service (SNS) has become online service platforms that focus on facilitating the building of social networks among people who share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections and has had a rapid development in China in the past few years. This paper aims to develop a fuzzy social network service analysis method, which combines graph theory with related fuzzy approach, to analyze the social network structural features and the distribution characteristics of interpersonal nodes in SNS community. A case study on a very famous Chinese tourism BBS-Tianya-is conducted to illustrate and validate the proposed approach. The research findings are as follows: (1) The attraction degrees of various areas in the forum are significantly different; (2) interpersonal nodes in the forum are concentrated relatively; (3) the fuzzy out-degrees and the fuzzy in-degrees of interpersonal nodes in the forum conflict each other; and (4) the distribution of interpersonal nodes is influenced by geographical relations. These findings can directly support social network service management and particularly tourism online service developments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

The effect of aminoguanidine on sperm motility and mitochondrial membrane potential in varicocelized rats

Objective(s): Increased levels of nitric oxide (NO) in the testicular veins of people suffering from varicocele have already been reported. However, the role of NO-synthase (NOS) isozymes and their inhibitors have not been extensively studied. We aimed to evaluate the inhibitory effects of aminoguanidine (AG), on sperm motility, vitality, and mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) in varicocelized rats. Materials and Methods: Twenty fore male Wister rats were divided into control, sham, varicocele, and treatment groups. Varicocele and treatment groups underwent partial ligation of left renal vein. Rats in the sham group underwent the same procedures as the varicocele group with the exception of vein ligation. 10 weeks after varicocele induction, sperm parameters were evaluated in all groups. The treatment group received 50 mg/kg AG injection daily for 10 weeks after which they were sacrificed prior to assessment of the parameters. Sperm viability and MMP were assessed by flow cytometry using propidium iodide (PI) and rhodamine 123 (Rh123), respectively. Results: The results of this study show a decrease in sperm viability, motility and MMP in the varicocele group compared with the other groups. After AG injection, we observed that all the parameters were significantly enhanced in the treatment group compared with the other groups. Rh123 staining revealed a positive relation between MMP and sperm motility, whereas PI staining showed a positive relation between sperm motility and viability. Conclusion: The findings of our study show that AG improves sperm motility and MMP, and thus, might be useful in the management of varicocele-related infertility. © 2016, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved

Synthesis of 2-{[5-(aralkyl/aryl)-1,3,4-oxadiazol-2- yl]sulfanyl}-N-(4-methyl-1,3-thiazol-2-yl)acetamides: Novel bi-heterocycles as potential therapeutic agents

Purpose: To evaluate the therapeutic potential of new bi-heterocycles  containing a 1,3-thiazole and 1,3,4-oxadiazole in the skeleton against Alzheimer's disease and diabetes, supported by in-silico study. Methods: The synthesis was initiated by the reaction of 4-methyl- 1,3-thiazol-2-amine (1) with bromoacetyl bromide (2) in aqueous basic medium to obtain an electrophile,2-bromo-N-(4-methyl-1,3- thiazol- 2-yl)acetamide (3). In parallel reactions, a series of carboxylic acids, 4a-r, were converted through a sequence of three steps, into respective 1,3,4-oxadiazole heterocyclic cores, 7a-r, to utilize as nucleophiles. Finally, the designed molecules, 8a-r, were synthesized by coupling 7a-r individually with 3 in an aprotic polar solvent. The structures of these bi-heterocycles were elucidated by infrared (IR), electron ionization-mass spectrometry (EI-MS), proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR) and carbon nuclear magnetic resonance (13C-NMR). To evaluate their enzyme inhibitory potential, 8a-r were screened against acetylcholinesterase (AChE), but brine shrimp lethality bioassay.Results: The most active compound against AChE was 8l with half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of 17.25 ± 0.07 μM. Against BChE, the highest inhibitory effect was shown by 8k (56.23 ± 0.09 μM). Compound 8f (161.26 ± 0.23μM) was recognized as a fairly good inhibitor of urease. In view of its inhibition of α-glucosidase, 8o (57.35 ± 0.17μM) was considered a potential therapeutic agent.Conclusion: The results indicate that some of the synthesized products with low toxicity exhibit notable enzyme inhibitory activity against selected enzymes compared with the reference drug, and therefore, are of potential therapeutic interestKeywords: 4-Methyl-1,3-thiazol-2-amine,1,3,4-Oxadiazole,  Cholinesterases, α-Glucosidase, Urease, Brine shrim