Case report: Typhoid fever complicated by hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis and rhabdomyolysis

Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) and rhabdomyolysis are rare complications of typhoid fever from Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi. Herein, we describe the clinical features in a 21-year-old female from India who presented to the intensive care unit with fever, severe pancytopenia, and rhabdomyolysis

The Constitution in a Hall of Mirrors: Canada at 150, by David E. Smith

Academics, media commentators, and political figures alike have each seized the opportunity presented by Canada’s sesquicentennial to reflect upon the status of our nation, and upon the ways in which its institutions, demographic makeup, and standing in the global community have evolved over the past 150 years. The modern Canadian state—which is now home to thirteen provinces and territories; the world’s tenth-largest economy; and one of the world’s most diverse set of ethnicities, languages, and religions—only faintly resembles the state that was initially envisioned by Canada’s founding fathers on the shores of Charlottetown

Multimodal image analysis of the human brain

Gedurende de laatste decennia heeft de snelle ontwikkeling van multi-modale en niet-invasieve hersenbeeldvorming technologieën een revolutie teweeg gebracht in de mogelijkheid om de structuur en functionaliteit van de hersens te bestuderen. Er is grote vooruitgang geboekt in het beoordelen van hersenschade door gebruik te maken van Magnetic Reconance Imaging (MRI), terwijl Elektroencefalografie (EEG) beschouwd wordt als de gouden standaard voor diagnose van neurologische afwijkingen. In deze thesis focussen we op de ontwikkeling van nieuwe technieken voor multi-modale beeldanalyse van het menselijke brein, waaronder MRI segmentatie en EEG bronlokalisatie. Hierdoor voegen we theorie en praktijk samen waarbij we focussen op twee medische applicaties: (1) automatische 3D MRI segmentatie van de volwassen hersens en (2) multi-modale EEG-MRI data analyse van de hersens van een pasgeborene met perinatale hersenschade. We besteden veel aandacht aan de verbetering en ontwikkeling van nieuwe methoden voor accurate en ruisrobuuste beeldsegmentatie, dewelke daarna succesvol gebruikt worden voor de segmentatie van hersens in MRI van zowel volwassen als pasgeborenen. Daarenboven ontwikkelden we een geïntegreerd multi-modaal methode voor de EEG bronlokalisatie in de hersenen van een pasgeborene. Deze lokalisatie wordt gebruikt voor de vergelijkende studie tussen een EEG aanval bij pasgeborenen en acute perinatale hersenletsels zichtbaar in MRI

Exploring the Serbian consumer attitude towards agro-food products with ethical values: organic, fair-trade and typical/traditional products

The new Millennium has seen a renewed and intensified interest in issues of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). This has been partly driven by a wave of concern about conduct and governance of business and partly reflects a growing interest amongst consumers, policy makers and businesses, in forms of production and consumption that are more sustainable and more ethically oriented. This is typified by growth in demand of products encompassing ethical values such as organic and Fair Trade products. However, research knowledge base about consumers and their behaviour and attitude from an ethical perspective is relatively weak. Consumer attitude to foods is mainly influenced by concerns (e.g. food safety, human health, environmental impact) and commodity attributes (e.g. quality, taste, freshness and packaging). The objective of this paper is to get an insight on Serbian consumer attitude towards agro-food products with ethical values (AFPEV) namely organic, Fair Trade and typical/traditional products. This paper is based on the literature and an online self-administered questionnaire, carried out from December 2010 through June 2011 with 104 Serbian adult consumers, dealing with understanding of and knowledge about AFP and relationships with ethical values; AFPEV buying frequency; main criteria and reasons for buying AFPEV; opinion about AFPEV price and consumer willingness to pay; potential impacts on animal health and welfare as well environmental, economic social and civic impacts of buying AFPEV; purchasing channels; and main sources of information about AFPEV. Serbian consumers have a good knowledge about AFPEV that are bought by 98% of the sample. Most of the respondents relate ethical values to the respect of environment (73.5%) and organic production (49.0%). The main reasons for buying AFPEV are quality (35%), organic certification (17%), and taste (15%). Price seems less important. The main sources of information about AFPEV are mass media, newspapers and magazines (summing up 46%). However, the majority of Serbian consumers prefer to get information directly from the supply chain actors mainly sellers and/or producers. AFPEV are bought mainly from the specialized shops (34%) and supermarkets (26%) to achieve personal satisfaction, for health, safety, natural resources conservation, and environment protection. Consumers do not always buy sustainable products as consequences of environmental concern or to benefit the community or due to personal beliefs but mainly to give priority to health. Ethical factors are important in some cases, but they may be overstated. Results indicated that most Serbian consumers perceived that AFPEV as healthier and portray a positive attitude towards AFPEV thus showing a high willingness to pay higher prices. Serbian consumers seem to have a positive attitude towards organic, fair trade and typical products due to the sustainable benefits that they can bring about. Therefore, institutional and domestic market conditions should be improved for insuring long-term market development and information campaigns should be organised to increase Serbian consumers’ awareness and consciousness and to strengthen their positive attitude towards AFPEV

Sentiment Analysis of Microblogs Using Multilayer Feed-Forward Artificial Neural Networks

Sentiment analysis aims to extract public opinion on a particular topic and microblogs, especially Twitter as the most influential platform, represent a significant source of information. The application to microblogs has to cope with difficulties, such as informal language with abbreviations, internet jargons, emoticons, hashtags that do not appear in conventional text documents. Sentiment analysis technique for microblogs based on a feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) with sigmoid activation function is proposed in this paper and compared to machine learning approaches, i.e. Multinomial Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines and Maximum Entropy. Experiments were performed on Stanford Twitter Sentiment corpus, a balanced dataset which contains noisy training labels weakly annotated using emoticons as sentiment indicators; and SemEval-2014 Task 9 corpus, an unbalanced dataset which contains manually annotated training examples. The obtained results show that ANN produces superior or at least comparable results to state-of-the-art machine learning techniques

Modeling and control of bulk material flow on the electromagnetic vibratory feeder

© 2016 Taylor and Francis Group LLC. This paper presents the results of modeling, simulation and experimental research of the bulk material flow on the electromagnetic vibratory feeder (EVF). The model of the EVF was implemented in Simulink/Matlab and verified in the experimental research. It has been experimentally confirmed that the bulk material flow rate has its maximal value as far as excitation frequency is equal to the EVF mechanical resonant frequency. For certain bulk material flow rate, average value of excitation coil current of EVF has minimal value when named frequencies are equal. In addition to modeling of the EVF, the main contribution of this paper is implementation of flow control algorithm of bulk material on EVF, experimental verification of the adopted model and defines parameters that enable the selection of energy-efficient operating point of the EVF

KIRA: Distributed Scalable ID-based Routing with Fast Forwarding

Emerging network infrastructures are increasingly softwarized, virtualized and, thus, flexible. They may even be viewed as a large, dynamic, and distributed elastic resource pool of network devices that can be flexibly configured and employed according to the needs of network services. Full control of such a resource pool requires resilient control plane connectivity. In this paper, we present KIRA, a two-tier routing architecture that provides self-organized, zero-touch, and extremely robust control plane connectivity. KIRA consists of the distributed, highly scalable, ID-based routing protocol R²/Kad that can run on top of any link layer. It is complemented by a forwarding tier with PathID-based fast forwarding for (control) data packets. KIRA shows excellent performance even in very large networks (evaluated with up to 200000 nodes). R²/Kad allows for flexible memory/stretch tradeoff per node and finds shortest paths to certain destinations in most cases. R²/Kad converges loop-free and fast, even in very large networks with drastic failure scenarios

Clinical-parasitological screening for respiratory capillariosis in cats in urban environments

Respiratory capillariosis is a widely distributed zoonotic parasitic disease caused by the nematode Capillaria aerophila (Trichocephalida, Trichuridae) that commonly infects wild carnivores butalso cats and dogs. This retrospective study aims to describe cases of respiratory capillariosis incats from the city of Belgrade, Serbia. Between 2015 and 2019, a total of 155 pet cats with or without respiratory symptoms were submitted to physical examination and parasitological examination of the feces. All cats lived indoor but had free access to outdoor. In suburban settlements, wild carnivores commonly share their living environments with owned cats and dogs. It can be assumed that more intense urbanization spreading into the natural habitats of will carnivores creates the opportunity for closer and more frequent contacts between the population of cats and feral carnivores whichmight increase the risk of feline contamination. The findings confirm the existence of capillaries in cats in urban areas of the city of Belgrade, contribute to a better understanding of the epidemiology of this nematode and warn that, because of close contacts between cats of pets and humans, capillaries can cause human infection