Social Change: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Panel: What Matters Now: Social Change in the Worl

Shear wall of multi story wall beam system for tall buildings

Precast construction with wall beam system has gain many advantages in multi storey building construction. In addition, high rise building plays an important role not only in accommodation issue but also in safety issue of the lives during construction and living in that building. Therefore, most of the engineers explore the safer construction methods and economical solution for the construction of multi storeyed building. Moreover, wall beam system has a high resistance in the earthquake (lateral) load since the shear wall has been used as one of the main structural elements. Many research and testing has been done in shear wall analysis using various methods to determine the strength, the behaviour and failure mechanism of the shear wall. In this research work the dynamic properties and failure mechanism of scale-down shear wall with regular openings subjected to real seismic loads on shake table test are discussed. For this purpose, the experimental works are carried out in accordance with PGA (peak ground acceleration), natural frequency, mode of shapes, pushover testing and failure mechanism of the shear wall are evaluated and compared with the results from FEM software (ETABS). To sum up, wall beam system has many advantages in construction and it can be said that it is the most time effective construction method among the other construction methods especially if IBS is introduced. In addition, this type of structural system can withstand the lateral loads (earthquake) than any other types of the structure. Therefore, nowadays, this method has been accepted as one of the most appropriate methods in tall building construction system

Influencing Factors on Buying Behavior of Consumers Towards Organic Eggs in Yangon

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of consumers personal and situational factors on their buying intention and actual buying behavior of organic eggs in Yangon. Data are collected from 300 respondents of organic eggs consumers with a structured questionnaire. The findings shows that consumers interest in health, environment, product quality, and their trust on organic eggs significantly influence on their intention to buy organic eggs. Moreover, their buying intention positively affect the buying behavior of consumers towards organic eggs. The results of this study describe various essential conclusions for retailers, policy makers, and social and environmental organizations who are working to establish effective strategies to increase organic egg consumption in Yangon. The results provide valuable information to organic egg producers to help them develop marketing strategies for buying organic eggs

Stock enhancement activities in the Union of Myanmar

Presented in the paper are the stock enhancement programs of the Union of Myanmar which is being implemented by the Department of Fisheries. The State’s vision is to assist the national economy by promoting livelihood programs for rural people through the development of the fisheries sector. To achieve such goal, one of the major activities is to undertake a stock enhancement program which has been implemented since 1983. The DOF subsidizes the annual seeding of freshwater fish and prawns into natural waters. Species used in seeding include common carp (Cyprinus carpio), tilapia (Oreochromis), rohu (Labeo rohita), catla (Catla catla), and featherbacks fish (Notopteridae), freshwater prawn Macrobrachium and tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon. Activities include annual stocking of seeds in the Ayeyarwaddy River and its tributaries, lakes, reservoirs, dams and other bodies of water

Resolution of Dialyzer Membrane-Associated Thrombocytopenia with Use of Cellulose Triacetate Membrane: A Case Report

Blood and dialyzer membrane interaction can cause significant thrombocytopenia through the activation of complement system. The extent of this interaction determines the biocompatibility of the membrane. Although the newer synthetic membranes have been shown to have better biocompatibility profile than the cellulose-based membranes, little is known about the difference in biocompatibility between synthetic membrane and modified cellulose membrane. Herein, we report a case of a patient on hemodialysis who developed dialyzer-membrane-related thrombocytopenia with use of synthetic membrane (F200NR polysulfone). The diagnosis of dialyzer membrane-associated thrombocytopenia was suspected by the trend of platelet count before and after dialysis, and the absence of other possible causes of thrombocytopenia. We observed significant improvement in platelet count when the membrane was changed to modified cellulose membrane (cellulose triacetate). In patients at high risk for thrombocytopenia, the modified cellulose membrane could be a better alternative to the standard synthetic membranes during hemodialysis

Effect of dietary garlic and thyme seed supplementation on the production performance, carcass yield and gut microbial population of broiler chickens

A total of 200 Cobb 500 male broilers were randomly allocated to 4 treatments consisting of 5 replications with 10 chicks each in order to evaluate the effect of dietary garlic and thyme seed supplementation on the production performance, carcass yield and gut microbial population. Treatments were control diet (T1), control diet with 1% thyme seed powder (T2), control diet with 1% garlic powder (T3) and control diet with 0.5% thyme seed and 0.5% garlic powder (T4). Feed intake, body weight, weight gain, feed conversion ratio (FCR), carcass yield was not significantly (p>0.05) improved by dietary treatments compared to control. Escherichia coli (E. coli) count in the gut of broilers did not show significant difference among dietary treatments. However, Lactobacilli count in the gut of broilers significantly (p<0.05) increased in T2 compared to that of T1. Lactobacilli count in the gut of broilers received T1, T3 and T4 did not differ significantly (p>0.05) with each other. It was concluded that thyme seed was reliable as feed additive in the broiler diet and could provide positive advantages to the colonization and proliferation of Lactobacilli

Health literacy - is it useful in prevention of behavioral risk factors of NCDs?

Background: Health literacy means cognitive and social skills of a person that determine his or her ability to access, understand and use health information to maintain and promote health. People need to understand and use health information in order to choose a healthy lifestyle or to take advantage of preventive measures. The occurrence and consequences of NCDs are related to unhealthy life styles. Insight into the relationship between health literacy and modifiable behavioral risk factors of NCDs may support the prevention and control of these diseases.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 1367 adults. Multi-stage random sampling was used. Data entry and analysis was done using Stata 11.0 statistical package. Multiple logistic regression analysis was applied to assess the association between health literacy and behavioral risk factors.Results: The proportion of participants who reported ever smoking, ever alcohol drinking and not-practicing daily-exercise was 19.8%, 16.2% and 85.2%, respectively. The prevalence of satisfactory level of health literacy was 31.5%. Health literacy was significantly related to behavioral risk factors even if age, sex, education status and monthly household’s expenditure were adjusted. By improving the health literacy status of adults up to satisfactory level, the prevalence of ever smoking, ever drinking and not-practicing daily exercise among them would be reduced by 34%, 32.1% and 38.9%, respectively.Conclusions: Health literacy status of community should be assessed, monitored and improved. Health literacy may be an effective tool in prevention and control of NCDs because of its preventive effect on modifiable behavioral risk factors.

UCSY-SC1: A Myanmar speech corpus for automatic speech recognition

This paper introduces a speech corpus which is developed for Myanmar Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) research. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) research has been conducted by the researchers around the world to improve their language technologies. Speech corpora are important in developing the ASR and the creation of the corpora is necessary especially for low-resourced languages. Myanmar language can be regarded as a low-resourced language because of lack of pre-created resources for speech processing research. In this work, a speech corpus named UCSY-SC1 (University of Computer Studies Yangon - Speech Corpus1) is created for Myanmar ASR research. The corpus consists of two types of domain: news and daily conversations. The total size of the speech corpus is over 42 hrs. There are 25 hrs of web news and 17 hrs of conversational recorded data.The corpus was collected from 177 females and 84 males for the news data and 42 females and 4 males for conversational domain. This corpus was used as training data for developing Myanmar ASR. Three different types of acoustic models  such as Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) - Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Deep Neural Network (DNN), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models were built and compared their results. Experiments were conducted on different data  sizes and evaluation is done by two test sets: TestSet1, web news and TestSet2, recorded conversational data. It showed that the performance of Myanmar ASRs using this corpus gave satisfiable results on both test sets. The Myanmar ASR  using this corpus leading to word error rates of 15.61% on TestSet1 and 24.43% on TestSet2