The Internal Affairs in Egypt During the Third Reign of Sultan al-Nasir Muhammed ibn Qalawun, A.D. 1309-41.

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Monetary policy and the gender pay gap: Evidence from UK households

This paper studies how monetary policy decisions affect the gender pay gap across UK households through a survey database. The results signify the impact of monetary policy shocks on the gap; monetary authorities’ decisions carry welfare effects for households through their pay income.N/

Efficient dominant point detection based on discrete curve structure

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate the problem of dominant point detection on digital curves which consists in finding points with local maximum curvature. Thanks to previous studies of the decomposition of curves into sequence of discrete structures [5–7], namely maximal blurred segments of width [13], an initial algorithm has been proposed in [14] to detect dominant points. However, an heuristic strategy is used to identify the dominant points. We now propose a modified algorithm without heuristics but a simple measure of angle. In addition, an application of polygonal simplification is as well proposed to reduce the number of detected dominant points by associating a weight to each of them. The experimental results demonstrate the e and robustness of the proposed method

A discrete approach for decomposing noisy digital contours into arcs and segments

International audienceIn the paper, we present a method for decomposing a discrete noisy curve into arcs and segments which are the frequent primitives in digital images. This method is based on two tools: dominant point detection using adaptive tangential cover and tangent space representation of the polygon issued from detected dominant points. The experiments demonstrate the robustness of the method w.r.t. noise

Psychological Morbidity in patients with Idiopathic Hirsutism presenting for Laser Treatment at a Tertiary Care Hospital

Objective: The objective of our study was to determine the frequency of depression, anxiety, and stress in females presenting for laser treatment of hirsutism at a dermatology clinic. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional descriptive study. 152 female participants of all ages presenting for laser treatment of hirsutism to the dermatology department –removed for blind review--from June 2019 to Dec 2019, were included using a consecutive convenient sampling technique. Patients having an FG (Ferriman and Gallwey) score of 8 or more, were included whereas those having any underlying cause (as assessed by history and examination and laboratory investigations where required) for both hirsutism and psychological disorder were excluded. The participants were given an Urdu version of the DASS 21 (depression, anxiety, and stress scale) to complete. Results: The participants had a mean age of 30.22 (SD = 9.17). The prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress in the sample was found to be 13.2%, 23.7%, and 17.8%, respectively. Mean depression, anxiety, and stress scores on DASS 21 were 4.43(SD=4.87, Cut-off= 10), 4.34(SD=5.12, Cut-off= 8), and 8.21(SD=6.26, Cut-off=15), respectively, indicating that the scores were within the normal range. Anxiety was the most common illness in the sample and both depression and stress showed a decline with advancing age up till 45years of age. No statistically significant association was found between the severity of hirsutism and depression, stress, and anxiety scores. Conclusion: Psychological morbidity was found to be lower in patients of idiopathic hirsutism presenting for laser treatment. The long-term efficacy of laser treatment needs further evaluation in future research

Analysis of Noisy Digital Contours with Adaptive Tangential Cover

International audienceThe notion of tangential cover, based on maximal segments, is a well-known tool to study the geometrical characteristics of a discrete curve. However, it is not robust to noise, while extracted contours from digital images typically contain noise and this makes the geometric analysis tasks on such contours difficult. To tackle this issue, we investigate in this paper a discrete structure, named Adaptive Tangential Cover (ATC), which is based on the notion of tangential cover and on a local noise estimator. More specifically, the ATC is composed of maximal segments with different widths deduced from the local noise values estimated at each point of the contour. Furthermore, a parameter-free algorithm is also presented to compute ATC. This study leads to the proposal of several applications of ATC on noisy digital contours: dominant point detection, contour length estimator, tangent/normal estimator, detection of convex and concave parts. An extension of ATC to 3D curves is also proposed in this paper. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of this new notion

Adaptive Tangential Cover for Noisy Digital Contours

International audienceThe notion of tangential cover, based on maximal segments, is a well-known tool to study the geometrical characteristics of a discrete curve. However, it is not adapted to noisy digital contours. In this paper, we propose a new notion, named Adaptive Tangential Cover, to study noisy digital contours. It relies on the meaningful thickness, calculated at each point of the contour, which permits to locally estimate the noise level. The Adaptive Tangential Cover is then composed of maximal blurred segments with appropriate widths, deduced from the noise level estimation. We present a parameter-free algorithm for computing the Adaptive Tangential Cover. Moreover an application to dominant point detection is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of this new notion

An algorithm to decompose noisy digital contours

International audienceFrom the previous digital contour decomposition algorithm, this paper focuses on the implementation and on the reproduction of the method linking to an online demonstration. This paper also gives improvement of the previous method with details on the intern parameter choice and shows how to use the C++ source code in other context

A Statistical-Topological Feature Combination for Recognition of Isolated Hand Gestures from Kinect Based Depth Images

International audienceReliable hand gesture recognition is an important problem for automatic sign language recognition for the people with hearing and speech disabilities. In this paper, we create a new benchmark database of multi-oriented, isolated ASL numeric images using recently launched Kinect V2. Further, we design an effective statistical-topological feature combinations for recognition of the hand gestures using the available V1 sensor dataset and also over the new V2 dataset. For V1, our best accuracy is 98.4% which is comparable with the best one reported so far and for V2 we achieve an accuracy of 92.2% which is first of its kind