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The Praescriptionary
No full textThe Praescriptionary is a project that explores the power of stories to guide, to
empower and to heal the soul.
In the main framing tale, we find Bhavin, a grieving widower and Astrid, a patient
in a comatose state, both unable to move on with their lives. Bhavin discovers the
Praescriptionary, a magical book capable of dispensing just the right tale for the reader
(or the listener’s) soul, in a mysterious bookshop. It is when he begins reading and
sharing it with Astrid that they both began their journey towards healing.
The seven tales which the book reveals to our protagonists are nestled within the
larger frame tale so that readers may experience immersion along with the protagonists
and be startled when they surface back in the main tale, realizing that they are still within
a layer of story.
The sub-stories are original creations though there are a few re-imaginings of
existing myth or fairytales. Each tale carries within it the kernel of an impetus towards
healing for one or both of the main characters to help them on their paths to wholeness.
There is also a key psychological step towards grief recovery enmeshed deep within each
story, though each retains a unique flavor, with the exception of the linked Lost Princess
tales. This individuality is reflected in the frontispiece illustration, a composite of seven
panels of original artwork, each based on one of the seven tales and made by the author
for this work
Author's personal copy How emotional arousal and valence influence access to awareness
No full texta b s t r a c t The effect of emotion on visual awareness is largely unknown. Pairs of natural images were presented side by side on a screen in a binocular rivalry setup. The amount of time that each image of a pair dominated perception was computed. Our results showed: (A) A main effect of arousal: Dominance durations of the more arousing picture of iso-valence pairs were longer. (B) No effect of valence: Dominance durations of pleasant and unpleasant pictures of isoarousal pairs were similar. (C) An interaction between arousal and valence: The more pleasant picture of iso-arousal pairs of low arousal level dominated conscious perception. The less pleasant picture of iso-arousal pairs of high arousal level dominated conscious perception. Our findings suggest that the emotional content of a stimulus affects the extent to which it dominates awareness. While arousal and valence interactively affect access to awareness, only arousal exerts an independent control of such access
Impact of Outpatient Prescribing of Antibiotics for Acute Exacerbation of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease on 30-Day Re-exacerbation Rates
No full text
Long-COVID versus adverse event following COVID vaccination among students and staff of tertiary care teaching hospital
No full textBackground: Long COVID is an important public health concern requiring proper defining, quantifying and describing following SARS-CoV infection with differentiation from adverse events due to COVID vaccination. So, this study was planned to analyze adverse effect of COVID19 vaccination or drug for COVID treatment versus consequences of COVID19 infection.
Methods: Self-reported data was collected through questionnaire-based survey by voluntary participation of healthcare staff. Percentage of participant developing various events was analyzed by enlisting sign, symptom, co-morbidity and medication history. Association between COVID-19 infection with number of doses of COVID-19 vaccine taken was analyzed by Chi Square Test with p value <0.05. Association between presence of specific sign, symptom after COVID infection or side effect after COVID vaccination was analyzed by Chi-Square Test with p value <0.05.
Results: Overall total 985 (59.58%) participants were analyzed and among them maximum number of participants (60.30%) reported as COVID-19 positive during the third wave with history of diagnosed COVID positive twice (57.87%). Participants with presence of co-morbidity were more likely to develop symptoms (p<0.001). On analysis, fever, body ache, headache, sore throat and fatigue were significantly more likely to develop after COVID infection as compared to after COVID vaccination (p<0.001).
Conclusions: This study by exploratory survey highlights heterogeneity of Long COVID sign or symptom that’s seen predominantly in person with co-morbidity and a few of them were mimicking adverse events after COVID vaccinations
Galaxy Evolution in the Local and the High-z Universe Through Optical+near-IR Spectroscopy
No full textabstract: A key open problem within galaxy evolution is to understand the evolution of galaxies towards quiescence. This work investigates the suppression of star-formation through shocks and turbulence at low-redshift, and at higher-redshifts, this work investigates the use of features within quiescent galaxy spectra to redshift estimation, and passive evolution of aging stellar populations to understand their star-formation histories.
At low-, this work focuses on the analysis of optical integral field spectroscopy data of a nearby () unusual merging system, called the Taffy system because of radio emission that stretches between the two galaxies. This system, although a recent major-merger of gas-rich spirals, exhibits an atypically low star-formation rate and infrared luminosity. Strong evidence of shock heating as a mechanism for these atypical properties is presented. This result (in conjunction with many others) from the nearby Universe provides evidence for shocks and turbulence, perhaps due to mergers, as an effective feedback mechanism for the suppression of star-formation.
At intermediate and higher-, this work focuses on the analysis of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) G800L grism spectroscopy and photometry of galaxies with a discernible 4000\AA\ break. The usefulness of 4000\AA/Balmer breaks as redshift indicators by comparing photometric, grism, and spectrophotometric redshifts (SPZs) to ground-based spectroscopic redshifts, is quantified. A spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting pipeline that is optimized for combined HST grism and photometric data, developed for this project, is presented. This pipeline is a template-fitting based routine which accounts for correlated data between neighboring points within grism spectra via the covariance matrix formalism, and also accounts for galaxy morphology along the dispersion direction. Evidence is provided showing that SPZs typically improve the accuracy of photometric redshifts by 17--60\%. For future space-based observatories like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope, i.e., WFIRST) and Euclid, this work predicts 700--4400 galaxies\,degree, within , for galaxies with 4000\AA\ breaks and continuum-based redshifts accurate to 2\%.
This work also investigates the star-formation histories of massive galaxies (). This is done through the analysis of the strength of the Magnesium absorption feature, Mgb, at 5175\AA. This analysis is carried out on stacks of HST ACS G800L grism data, stacked for galaxies binned on a color vs stellar mass plane.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Astrophysics and Astronomy 202
Supplementary data for a study of microtearing modes at low plasma β
No full textSupplementary data for the Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion Publication `New linear stability parameter to describe low-β electromagnetic microinstabilities driven by passing electrons in axisymmetric toroidal geometry, M. R. Hardman, F. I. Parra, B. S. Patel, C. M. Roach, J. Ruiz Ruiz, M. Barnes, D. Dickinson, W. Dorland, J. F. Parisi, D. St-Onge, and H. Wilson'. The publication appears as an arXiv preprint with identifier arXiv:2208.10615.
The dataset consists of GS2 input files for the study, and a python (3) script for generating a selection of the figures from raw GS2 output data. Details are given in the Readme.This work has received funding from EPSRC [Grant Number EP/R034737/1]. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-09CH11466. The United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The author acknowledges the use of the EUROfusion High Performance Computer (Marconi-Fusion) under projects OXGK and MULTISCA. This work made use of computational support by CoSeC, the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities, through CCP Plasma (EP/M022463/1) and HEC Plasma (EP/R029148/1)
Liveness Detection Competition - Noncontact-based Fingerprint Algorithms and Systems (LivDet-2023 Noncontact Fingerprint)
No full textLiveness Detection (LivDet) is an international competition series open to academia and industry with the objective to assess and report state-of-the-art in Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). LivDet-2023 Noncontact Fingerprint is the first edition of the noncontact fingerprint-based PAD competition for algorithms and systems. The competition serves as an important benchmark in noncontact-based fingerprint PAD, offering (a) independent assessment of the state-of-the-art in noncontact-based fingerprint PAD for algorithms and systems, and (b) common evaluation protocol, which includes finger photos of a variety of Presentation Attack Instruments (PAIs) and live fingers to the biometric research community (c) provides standard algorithm and system evaluation protocols, along with the comparative analysis of state-of-the-art algorithms from academia and industry with both old and new android smartphones. The winning algorithm achieved an APCER of 11.35% averaged over all PAIs and a BPCER of 0.62%. The winning system achieved an APCER of 13.0.4%, averaged over all PAIs tested over all the smartphones, and a BPCER of 1.68% over all smartphones tested. Four-finger systems that make individual finger-based PAD decisions were also tested. The dataset used for competition will be available, to all researchers as per data share protocol. https://noncontactfingerprint2023.1ivdet.org/index.ph
Outcomes of elective liver surgery worldwide: a global, prospective, multicenter, cross-sectional study
No full textBackground: The outcomes of liver surgery worldwide remain unknown. The true population-based outcomes are likely different to those vastly reported that reflect the activity of highly specialized academic centers. The aim of this study was to measure the true worldwide practice of liver surgery and associated outcomes by recruiting from centers across the globe. The geographic distribution of liver surgery activity and complexity was also evaluated to further understand variations in outcomes. Methods: LiverGroup.org was an international, prospective, multicenter, cross-sectional study following the Global Surgery Collaborative Snapshot Research approach with a 3-month prospective, consecutive patient enrollment within January?December 2019. Each patient was followed up for 90 days postoperatively. All patients undergoing liver surgery at their respective centers were eligible for study inclusion. Basic demographics, patient and operation characteristics were collected. Morbidity was recorded according to the Clavien?Dindo Classification of Surgical Complications. Country-based and hospital-based data were collected, including the Human Development Index (HDI). (NCT03768141). Results: A total of 2159 patients were included from six continents. Surgery was performed for cancer in 1785 (83%) patients. Of all patients, 912 (42%) experienced a postoperative complication of any severity, while the major complication rate was 16% (341/ 2159). The overall 90-day mortality rate after liver surgery was 3.8% (82/2,159). The overall failure to rescue rate was 11% (82/ 722) ranging from 5 to 35% among the higher and lower HDI groups, respectively. Conclusions: This is the first to our knowledge global surgery study specifically designed and conducted for specialized liver surgery. The authors identified failure to rescue as a significant potentially modifiable factor for mortality after liver surgery, mostly related to lower Human Development Index countries. Members of the LiverGroup.org network could now work together to develop quality improvement collaboratives. © Copyright 2023 The Author(s)
