Intestinal obstruction in adults at the Aga Khan University Hospital

During the period January, 1987 to June, 1991, 208 adults with mechanical bowel obstruction were managed at The Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH). Post-operative adhesions accounted for 34% of the cases and were the most frequent cause of intestinal obstruction. External hemia (16%), malignancy (13.5%) and tuberculous stricture (10%) were the next most frequent causes. The predominance of adhesive intestinal obstruction at AKUH shows a trend towards a Western disease pattern. Socioeconomic status was a significant determinant of the cause of obstruction. The proportion of self paying to welfare patients was significantly lower in tuberculous obstruction as compared with adhesive or malignant obstruction and in obstruction caused by hernia as compared with that due to malignant disease (P \u3c 0.05). The present study demonstrates the synchronal occurrence of old and new diseases in a population and points towards the epidemiological transition which is affecting urban areas in the developing world

Germination and Seedlings Heterotrophic Growth of Cocksfoot (\u3cem\u3eDactylis glomerata\u3c/em\u3e L.) in Response to Temperature

In the context of climate change, grasslands are considered, similar to forest, as an important sink for atmospheric CO2. However, environmental change seems to go faster than species adaptation to survive on site. Germination and heterotrophic growth are key phases for plant, and consequently, communities’ establishment and structure. They are under genetic control and affected by temperature. The objective of this study was to analyze the intra-specific variability of six accessions of Dactylis glomerata in their responses to eight constant temperatures (5 to 40˚C) during germination and initial heterotrophic growth. The novelty of this work comes from the non-linear modeling of germination and growth velocities and the estimation of cardinal temperatures. High variability within temperatures and significant differences between accessions were observed for germination speed. No germination was observed at 40˚C for any accession. Further, seed germinated at 25˚C died soon after they were transferred to 40˚C for heterotrophic growth. The growth of the axes, whenever it existed, was negligible at 40˚C. The speed of heterotrophic growth of the roots and shoots showed asymmetric bell-shaped response curves to temperature. Base temperature for germination was fixed to 0˚C. After curve-fitting, optimum temperatures for germination were estimated to be between 21.5 and 26.3˚C. Those for heterotrophic growth were, up to 5˚C, higher. Contrariwise, the upper limits, for both processes, appeared between 34 and 40˚C. Overall, this study demonstrates that genetic variability does exist between accessions. For each accession, the response of the germination rate was different from the response of heterotrophic growth rate

Context-Aware Personalized Activity Modeling in Concurrent Environment

Activity recognition, having endemic impact on smart homes, faces one of the biggest challenges in learning a personalized activity model completely by using a generic model especially for parallel and interleaved activities. Furthermore, inhabitant’s mistaken object interaction may entail in another spurious activity at smart homes. Identifying and removing such spurious activities is another challenging task. Knowledge driven techniques used for recognizing activity models are static in nature, lack contextual representation and may not comprehend spurious actions for parallel/interleaved activities. In this paper, a novel approach for completing the personalized model specific to each inhabitant at smart homes using generic model (incomplete) is presented that can recognize the sequential, parallel, and interleaved activities dynamically while removing the spurious activities semantically. A comprehensive set of experiments and results based upon number of correct (true positivity) or incorrect (false negativity) recognition of activities assert effectiveness of presented approach within a smart hom