Non-Gaussianity and direction dependent systematics in HST key project data

Two new statistics, namely $\Delta_\chi^2$ and $\Delta_\chi$, based on extreme value theory, were derived in \cite{gupta08,gupta10}. We use these statistics to study direction dependence in the HST key project data which provides the most precise measurement of the Hubble constant. We also study the non-Gaussianity in this data set using these statistics. Our results for $\Delta_\chi^2$ show that the significance of direction dependent systematics is restricted to well below one $\sigma$ confidence limit, however, presence of non-Gaussian features is subtle. On the other hand $\Delta_\chi$ statistic, which is more sensitive to direction dependence, shows direction dependence systematics to be at slightly higher confidence level, and the presence of non-Gaussian features at a level similar to the $\Delta_\chi^2$ statistic.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in MNRA

Effect of Stacking Sequence on Flexural and Dynamic Mechanical Properties of Hybrid Sisal/Glass Polyester Composite

In present study, flexural properties in terms of break load, percentage elongation, flexural strength and flexural modulus, and dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) in terms of storage modulus (), loss modulus (), damping , glass transition temperature  and effectiveness constant of reinforcement  of hybrid sisal/glass fibre reinforced polyester composite are investigated. Polyester based hybrid composites are prepared by Hand lay-up technique followed by static compression having constant 25 wt.% of fibre content  with various stacking sequences.  A significant improvement in flexural properties of sisal fibre reinforced polyester composite is observed by incorporation of glass fibre.  In addition, the stacking sequence has great influences on flexural and dynamic mechanical properties of hybrid composites

ContextCLIP: Contextual Alignment of Image-Text pairs on CLIP visual representations

State-of-the-art empirical work has shown that visual representations learned by deep neural networks are robust in nature and capable of performing classification tasks on diverse datasets. For example, CLIP demonstrated zero-shot transfer performance on multiple datasets for classification tasks in a joint embedding space of image and text pairs. However, it showed negative transfer performance on standard datasets, e.g., BirdsNAP, RESISC45, and MNIST. In this paper, we propose ContextCLIP, a contextual and contrastive learning framework for the contextual alignment of image-text pairs by learning robust visual representations on Conceptual Captions dataset. Our framework was observed to improve the image-text alignment by aligning text and image representations contextually in the joint embedding space. ContextCLIP showed good qualitative performance for text-to-image retrieval tasks and enhanced classification accuracy. We evaluated our model quantitatively with zero-shot transfer and fine-tuning experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Birdsnap, RESISC45, and MNIST datasets for classification task.Comment: 11 Pages, 7 Figures, 2 Tables, ICVGI

Are We Causing Antibiotic Resistance with Antibiotic Abuse? A Study among Dentists

INTRODUCTION: With the invention of any new technology their comes the boon and curse both. The invention and use of antibiotics comes a problem of antibiotic resistance which is much more in extent than treating the infectious disease. Keeping this in mind the WHO in 2011 gave the theme “combat drug resistance- No action today, No cure tomorrow” which was very significant. The present study was done with the aim to know the prescription pattern of antibiotics for various dental procedures by dental practitioners.MATERIALS AND METHODS: A specially prepared questionnaire exclusively designed for the study recording all the required relevant general information and information related to antibiotic prescribing patterns was used for data collection. The questionnaire consisted of three sections. The first part of the questionnaire collected the demographic details of the study population like age, gender, Graduate or postgraduate degree, area of specialization and years of practice. In the second section the Questions related to antibiotics use in certain dental clinical procedures and conditions in apparently healthy people were asked from the participants. In the last section of the questionnaire the participants were asked about the questions related to antibiotics use for certain dental clinical procedures in medically compromised cases.RESULTS: Questionnaire response rate of 73% was recorded. The study showed Augmentin to be the first choice of antibiotic by most of the respondents.  The study showed that 64% of the endodontists and 74% of the general dentists prescribed  antibiotics during root canal therapy where ideally operative intervention would have sufficed. Overuse of antibiotics for routine scaling and extraction was observed.CONCLUSION: The dental profession as a whole needs to acquire a deeper understanding of the global effects of unnecessary antibiotic prescription. Antibiotics when judiciously used are precise life-saving drugs

Surgical and audiological outcome of canal wall down mastoidectomy in Sub Himalayan region: our experience

Background: Pre-operative and post-operative hearing status and status of mastoid cavity were compared in patients undergoing canal wall down mastoidectomy (CWDM) with tympanoplasty.Methods: Forty-three patients who underwent surgery and completed their follow up post-surgery were included in the study. Nineteen patients underwent CWDM with type III tympanoplasty with PORP, 7 patients underwent CWDM with type III tympanoplasty without PORP and 17 patients underwent CWDM with type IV tympanoplasty with TORP.Results: Among enrolled patients, 21 patients were females and 22 patients were male. Right ear (29) was commonly involved than left ear (14). Hearing loss was predominant symptom followed by recurrent ear discharge and other symptoms. Patients underwent three types of surgeries, type III tympanoplasty with PORP (19/43), type III tympanoplasty without PORP (7/43) and type IV tympanoplasty with TORP (17/43) by using Teflon prosthesis.Conclusions: Thirty seven percent (16/43) of patients had hearing threshold 60dB hearing threshold, all belonging to group C. Anatomical results were assessed by examining the mastoid cavity showing 95%, 72%, 70% patients in group A, B and C had well epithelialized cavity

SEM-CS: Semantic CLIPStyler for Text-Based Image Style Transfer

CLIPStyler demonstrated image style transfer with realistic textures using only the style text description (instead of requiring a reference style image). However, the ground semantics of objects in style transfer output is lost due to style spillover on salient and background objects (content mismatch) or over-stylization. To solve this, we propose Semantic CLIPStyler (Sem-CS) that performs semantic style transfer. Sem-CS first segments the content image into salient and non-salient objects and then transfers artistic style based on a given style text description. The semantic style transfer is achieved using global foreground loss (for salient objects) and global background loss (for non-salient objects). Our empirical results, including DISTS, NIMA and user study scores, show that our proposed framework yields superior qualitative and quantitative performance.Comment: 11 Pages, 4 Figures, 2 Table

Periodic Nanophotonic Structures-Based Light Management for Solar Energy Harvesting

Solar energy has always been an obvious choice for solving the energy issues for the humans for centuries. The two most popular choices, out of many, to harness this infinite source of energy are: solar cells and photoelectrochemical cells. Although both these techniques are quite attractive, they have inherent limitations for tapping all of the incident photons. Maximizing the absorption of incident photons to produce maximum possible electrical output is always the main impetus for the researchers working to streamline these two techniques and making them compatible with existing sources of electrical energy. It has been well established that the light trapping in the solar cells and photoelectrochemical cells can play a vital role in improving their performance. To design light harvesting structures for both these applications, periodic nanophotonic structures have demonstrated stupendous results and shown that they have the real potential to enhance their performance. The chapter, in this regard, presents and reviews the current and historical aspects of the light harvesting structures for these two interesting applications and also discusses about the future of the research to further the performance of these large-area solar-to-electrical conversion transducers

Multi-modal Medical Neurological Image Fusion using Wavelet Pooled Edge Preserving Autoencoder

Medical image fusion integrates the complementary diagnostic information of the source image modalities for improved visualization and analysis of underlying anomalies. Recently, deep learning-based models have excelled the conventional fusion methods by executing feature extraction, feature selection, and feature fusion tasks, simultaneously. However, most of the existing convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures use conventional pooling or strided convolutional strategies to downsample the feature maps. It causes the blurring or loss of important diagnostic information and edge details available in the source images and dilutes the efficacy of the feature extraction process. Therefore, this paper presents an end-to-end unsupervised fusion model for multimodal medical images based on an edge-preserving dense autoencoder network. In the proposed model, feature extraction is improved by using wavelet decomposition-based attention pooling of feature maps. This helps in preserving the fine edge detail information present in both the source images and enhances the visual perception of fused images. Further, the proposed model is trained on a variety of medical image pairs which helps in capturing the intensity distributions of the source images and preserves the diagnostic information effectively. Substantial experiments are conducted which demonstrate that the proposed method provides improved visual and quantitative results as compared to the other state-of-the-art fusion methods.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 6 table