Exploratory Study on the Current Limitations of Personal Protective Equipment and the Potential for Innovation

Personal protective equipment (PPE) in mine action typically consists of a polycarbonate visor that fully covers the face and front neck, and body armor consisting of an apron made of aramid fabric (i.e., Kevlar) that fully covers the front torso, groin, and neck. PPE used in mine action is generally considered as “the last line of defense” since the primary method through which accidental deaths and injuries are prevented is through the application of and adherence to appropriate standard operating procedures (SOPs). However, with any operations, there is always an element of “acceptable risk,” and universal adherence to all SOPs at all times by all mine action personnel is not realistic. Thus, the primary purpose of PPE is to minimize harm rather than prevent it. This must be balanced with factors such as weight, mobility, visibility, and to a lesser extent, cost

Loss to Follow-Up (LTFU) during Tuberculosis Treatment

Loss to follow-up (LTFU) is a serious issue in the field of tuberculosis (TB) since it can lead to TB outbreaks and drug resistance. The proportion of LTFU patients differs among different countries, regions, year, and institutions. In some countries, the number of patients that were LTFU nearly reaches half of the total patients. Underlying factors such as age, gender, education, residence, financial factors, migration, and social stigma are discussed in this chapter. These factors should always be taken into consideration whenever a treatment program is designed. Suggestions have been made regarding some interventions that could potentially solve the problem of LTFU. With these points in mind, an ambitious approach should be taken to reduce the number of LTFU patients up to zero

Institutional Quality and Illicit Financial Flows in Developing and Developed Countries: An Empirical Assessment

This paper investigates the direct linkage between institutional quality and illicit financial flows (IFFs) of 47 developing and developed countries from the period of 2005 to 2014. Corruption and political stability are found to be correlated to the IFFs

Analysis and design of base-isolated suspension bridge under seismic loads

Suspension bridges have been firmly established as the most efficient and cost effective structural form in the 500-ft to 1500-ft span range. Today, the suspension bridge is most suitable type for very long-span bridge and actually represents 20 or more of all the longest span bridges in the world. Behavior of suspension bridge is great importance as the influence of moving loads, seismic and wind forces on these structures. Seismic isolation introduces to avoid resonance with the typical predominant frequencies of earthquakes, in order to reduce the shear forces, deflections, and floor accelerations of a building, and, consequently, prevent damage of its structural and non-structural elements. In this study damper is used as isolation and energy dissipation devices for bridge subjected to earthquake loads. The simplified model is three-span continuous and main span has 260-ft and each side span has 120-ft with a steel bridge deck. Main cables are parallel-wire strands and pylons are Portal type. The bridge is designed for equivalent traffic loads of HS 20-44 trucks specified by American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). A realistic analytical suspension bridge model is developed by using STAAD.Pro finite element program. The response spectrum analysis method is used from UBC 1997 code. This paper discusses the effect of base-isolator on design of suspension bridge. Then, compared the analysis results in different between normal support condition and spring support condition. From the comparison results, the axial force in main cable is reduced by 22.6 %. Axial forces in girder are reduced about 40 % in all members of girder under spring support condition

Experimental Study on Sampling Theorem in Signal Processing

This practicum is to define the study properties of the sampling theorem. Understand the effect of selecting the sample size and its effect on the signal recovery process. The experiment utilizes a computer or portable workstation to run an examination of the hypothesis reenactment program. From the test information gotten, it can be concluded that the more noteworthy the frequency of the signal to be inspected, the closer the signal will be to the initial signal. The time and frequency of the examining signal are conversely relative. The higher the frequency, the lower the time will be. The magnitude of the amplitude of the output signal is indeterminate

Learning a Disentangled Embedding for Monocular 3D Shape Retrieval and Pose Estimation

We propose a novel approach to jointly perform 3D shape retrieval and pose estimation from monocular images.In order to make the method robust to real-world image variations, e.g. complex textures and backgrounds, we learn an embedding space from 3D data that only includes the relevant information, namely the shape and pose. Our approach explicitly disentangles a shape vector and a pose vector, which alleviates both pose bias for 3D shape retrieval and categorical bias for pose estimation. We then train a CNN to map the images to this embedding space, and then retrieve the closest 3D shape from the database and estimate the 6D pose of the object. Our method achieves 10.3 median error for pose estimation and 0.592 top-1-accuracy for category agnostic 3D object retrieval on the Pascal3D+ dataset, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art methods on both tasks

GROUND MOTION IN YOGYAKARTA CITY, YOGYAKARTA SPECIAL PROVINCE, INDONESIA ON DENSELY MICROTREMOR OBSERVATIONS AND SHEAR WAVE VELOCITY

Microtremor is currently considered the foremost tool in site effect studies. The ground motion is estimated with microtremor observations, meaning that subsoil mechanical properties and geometry are evaluated and from them an estimate of local amplification is computed. Here, the ground motion is studied by the site effects of seismic hazard zonation of urban areas in Yogyakarta City. The main purpose of this paper is zoning the geological engineering features and assessing seismic of the research urban area. In this regard, the microtremors are measured at 274 sites by single station sampling method and Nakamura technique. The microtremors of all over the city are processed by a model of Mitutoyo-GPL-6A3P. The amplification factor generally ranges between 0.70 and 5.56 and the natural frequency normally varies between 0.40 and 3.30 Hz. The information layers are prepared in GMT used for detecting the zonation of potential seismic hazard. The shear wave velocity is calculated in 12 existing drilling sites based on the geotechnical approach of SPT for soil condition. To study the ground motion, geological engineering condition is investigated using amplification factor, natural frequency, shear wave velocity maps which are analyzed using densely single microtremor observation and SPT from existing drilling sites. Keywords: Ground motion, amplification factors, natural frequency; H/V spectral ratio, microtremor observations, Yogyakarta Urba

Neural Sparse Voxel Fields

Photo-realistic free-viewpoint rendering of real-world scenes using classical computer graphics techniques is challenging, because it requires the difficult step of capturing detailed appearance and geometry models. Recent studies have demonstrated promising results by learning scene representations that implicitly encode both geometry and appearance without 3D supervision. However, existing approaches in practice often show blurry renderings caused by the limited network capacity or the difficulty in finding accurate intersections of camera rays with the scene geometry. Synthesizing high-resolution imagery from these representations often requires time-consuming optical ray marching. In this work, we introduce Neural Sparse Voxel Fields (NSVF), a new neural scene representation for fast and high-quality free-viewpoint rendering. NSVF defines a set of voxel-bounded implicit fields organized in a sparse voxel octree to model local properties in each cell. We progressively learn the underlying voxel structures with a differentiable ray-marching operation from only a set of posed RGB images. With the sparse voxel octree structure, rendering novel views can be accelerated by skipping the voxels containing no relevant scene content. Our method is typically over 10 times faster than the state-of-the-art (namely, NeRF(Mildenhall et al., 2020)) at inference time while achieving higher quality results. Furthermore, by utilizing an explicit sparse voxel representation, our method can easily be applied to scene editing and scene composition. We also demonstrate several challenging tasks, including multi-scene learning, free-viewpoint rendering of a moving human, and large-scale scene rendering. Code and data are available at our website: https://github.com/facebookresearch/NSVF.Comment: 20 pages, in progres

Real-world experience of metformin 1000 mg/day in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and comorbidities from Myanmar

Background: The study was conducted to assess the efficacy and safety of 1000 (mg/day) metformin in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) with comorbidities and special reference to elderly people in Myanmar.Methods: This was a retrospective, post surveillance study conducted in patients diagnosed with T2DM receiving treatment of metformin (1000 mg/day). Baseline characteristics, comorbidities, random blood sugar level (RBS) and RBS changes pre- and post-therapy were retrieved from patient’s medical records. A paired sample t-test was used for comparing the pre- and post-treatment RBS levels.Results: A total of 303 patients with T2DM were included. A total of 88, 115 and 100 patients belonged to age groups ≤50, >50-≤60 and >61 years, respectively. Duration of T2DM was significantly higher in elderly patients (>61 years) compared to ≤50 and >50-≤60 age group. Hypertension was the most common comorbid condition observed in all age groups followed by cardiovascular disease. However, both hypertension and cardiovascular disease were significantly higher among elderly patients (>61 years) compared to ≤50 and >50-≤60 age group (p50-≤60 years, 86.2 mg/dL and >61 years, 97.2 mg/dL). Metformin was well tolerated with minimal gastrointestinal adverse events (n=27).Conclusions: In this post marketing surveillance study, metformin (1000 mg/day) was found to be effective in reducing RBS in T2DM patients with comorbidities especially older adults and well tolerated with no risk of hypoglycemia