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In the Netherlands, more than 80% of the highways are surfaced by porous asphalt (PA) mixes. The benefits of using PA mixes include, among others, the reduction of noise and the improvement of skid resistance. However, pavements with PA mixes are known to have a shorter lifetime and higher maintenance costs as compared with traditional dense asphalt mixes. Raveling is one of the most prominent distresses that occur on PA mix pavements. To analyze the raveling distress of a PA mix pavement, the stress and strain fields at the component level are required. Computational models based on finite element methods (FEM), discrete element methods (DEM), or both, can be used to compute local stress and strain fields. However, they require the development of large FEM meshes and large-scale computational facilities. As an alternative, the homogenization technique provides a way to calculate the stress and strain fields at the component level without the need for much computation power. This study aims to propose a new approach to analyze the raveling distress of a PA mix pavement by using the homogenization technique. To demonstrate the application of the proposed approach, a real field-like example was presented. In the real field-like example, the Mori–Tanaka model was used as a homogenization technique. The commonly available pavement analysis tool 3D-MOVE was used to compute the response of the analyzed pavement. In general, it was concluded that the homogenization technique could be a reliable and effective way to analyze the raveling distress of a PA mix pavement.

Thousands of lives are lost every year in developing countries for failing to detect epidemics early because of the lack of real-time disease surveillance data. We present results from a large-scale deployment of a telephone triage service as a basis for dengue forecasting in Pakistan. Our system uses statistical analysis of dengue-related phone calls to accurately forecast suspected dengue cases 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time at a subcity level (correlation of up to 0.93). Our system has been operational at scale in Pakistan for the past 3 years and has received more than 300,000 phone calls. The predictions from our system are widely disseminated to public health officials and form a critical part of active government strategies for dengue containment. Our work is the first to demonstrate, with significant empirical evidence, that an accurate, location-specific disease forecasting system can be built using analysis of call volume data from a public health hotline. Calling patterns on a health hotline can accurately forecast dengue cases, 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time, at a subcity level.

Abstract Whilst researchers and professionals recognise that mobile health (M-health) systems offer unprecedented opportunities, most existing work has comprised individual project-based developments in specialised areas. Existing review articles generally utilise medical literature and categories: none investigates M-health from an information systems (IS) design point of view. Identifying application areas, design issues and IS research techniques will demonstrate models, issues, approaches and gaps to inform future research. A comprehensive analysis of the literature from this viewpoint is thus valuable, both for theoretical progression and for guiding real-world innovative system developments. Drawing from key IS and healthcare multidisciplinary journals we analyse recent (2010–2016) articles concerning M-health application developments and their associated design or development issues, with particular focus on the use of contemporary research methods. Our analysis suggests that M-health is an emerging field to which, although underused, contemporary approaches such as design science research are particularly appropriate. We identify eight application categories, eleven design issues (security, privacy, literacy, accessibility, acceptability, reliability, usability, confidentiality, integrity, knowledge sharing and flexibility) as well as the stakeholders and development techniques involved. This goes beyond previous frameworks, and theoretically integrates the central role of IS design within the sub-field.

Different accessions of Sporobolus spicatus were tested for the possible use in the landscaping sector of United Arab Emirates. In this regards, fifty accessions of S. spicatus were screened against five salinity levels of 15, 30, 45, 60 and 75dSm-1 at 3cm mowing height. Significant variations were found among the treatment for various characters of leaf colour, fresh and dry weight. Most of the accessions of the grass tolerated up to 45 dSm-1, without compromising on quality. Further increase in salinity, most of the accessions ceased to grow, except a few accessions which survived even at salinity levels of 75dSm-1. Many of the grasses exhibit better performance than Paspalam vaginatum, the prevailing commercial turf grass in UAE (used as control in this instance). As a whole accessions 45S, 18S, 35S and 37S showed salinity tolerance at 3cm mowing height and maintaining quality up to the acceptable level. Based on their tolerance to salinity and better performance, these accessions are recommended for turf use in public landscaping.

Abstract This work examines the effect on the weights of vital body organs, on blood biochemical variables, on neuromuscular coordination and on cerebral microcirculation of aqueous extracts of Teucrium stocksianum, given to mice in drinking water at concentrations of 2 and 4% for 56 days. The treatment caused progressive impairment of neuromuscular coordination, as evidenced by the time spent on the rota-rod. After photochemical challenge, the time for first observable platelet aggregation in arterioles was shorter than for the control group by 22 and 45% in the 2 and 4% T. stocksianum-treated groups, respectively. Platelet aggregation on the venular side was not affected by the treatment nor were microvascular diameters. Treatment with the plant extract produced no statistically significant effect on the plasma biochemical variables that are considered indices of liver and kidney function. Histologically, brains obtained from mice treated with T. stocksianum showed loss of cerebellar Purkinje cells. Although it is likely that the accelerated platelet aggregation might have contributed to an ischaemic effect which could, at least in part, have caused the cytotoxicological changes, this does not exclude the possibility of a direct cytotoxicological effect of the plant extract. Further pharmacological and toxicological investigations on Teucrium species seem warranted.

Kaempferol (KMP), a dietary flavonoid, has antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antiapoptotic effects. Hence, we investigated the effect of KMP in ischemia-reperfusion (IR) model of myocardial injury in rats. We studied male albino Wistar rats that were divided into sham, IR-control, KMP-20 + IR, and KMP 20 per se groups. KMP (20 mg/kg; i.p.) was administered daily to rats for the period of 15 days, and, on the 15th day, ischemia was produced by one-stage ligation of left anterior descending coronary artery for 45 min followed by reperfusion for 60 min. After completion of surgery, rats were sacrificed; heart was removed and processed for biochemical, morphological, and molecular studies. KMP pretreatment significantly ameliorated IR injury by maintaining cardiac function, normalizing oxidative stress, and preserving morphological alterations. Furthermore, there was a decrease in the level of inflammatory markers (TNF-α, IL-6, and NFκB), inhibition of active JNK and p38 proteins, and activation of ERK1/ERK2, a prosurvival kinase. Additionally, it also attenuated apoptosis by reducing the expression of proapoptotic proteins (Bax and Caspase-3), TUNEL positive cells, and increased level of antiapoptotic proteins (Bcl-2). In conclusion, KMP protected against IR injury by attenuating inflammation and apoptosis through the modulation of MAPK pathway.

Success of a search engine is measured by the satisfaction of its users. Finding user expectation can be a better step for improved user satisfaction. In this paper we have proposed a neural network based approach for predicting user satisfaction with search engine. Our work is divided in two parts. Part I investigates user expectations towards search engine for their information need. In Part II we proposed an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model for predicting User Satisfaction. In our work we have analyzed the major factors affecting user satisfaction with search engine and find out the importance /priority value of these factors based on a survey conducted on 100 search engine users of different profiles with 5-10 years of experience using search engines for their information needs like study material, entertainment, research, day to day problem solution etc. In the present work we have identified four major factors namely up-to-date information, search result relevancy, response time and reliability, contributing to the user satisfaction and developed an ANN model which predicts satisfaction results with a reasonable degree of accuracy. General Terms Search Engine, User Satisfaction, Artificial Neural Network

This paper aims to highlight contrasts between the writing of young people in the UAE and Japan. For comparison, anthologies of 50-word short stories written in English, resulting from the Extremely Short Story Competition (ESSC) in each country are examined. These two ESSC anthologies were created under similar conditions in 2006. Analysis of the most frequently-appearing topics in each ESSC anthology provides insights into the daily life, general mindsets, behavior, preferences, values and culture of these two groups. These data help us to understand the everyday life and social context of young people in the UAE and Japan. Thematic analysis shows that youth in both countries are often preoccupied with seeking identity, and regard friends to be important. Both groups of young people also appear to appreciate the beauty of nature and feel affection towards living creatures. An identifying characteristic of Emirati youth is that they talk about death more often than do the Japanese writers; in addition, the ESSC anthologies indicate UAE society is remarkably family-oriented, with life being firmly connected to Islam and God. In contrast, Japanese youth show they are keen to engage in various hobbies and also like to express their romantic feelings and thankfulness for their environment. The ESSC was originally designed to develop students’ creative writing in English. This study explains that corpora generated by the ESSC may be used to illuminate the lives and societies of students living in disparate countries, with implications for planning and delivering locally appropriate education.

Person re-identification has achieved great progress with deep convolutional neural networks. However, most previous methods focus on learning individual appearance feature embedding, and it is hard for the models to handle difficult situations with different illumination, large pose variance and occlusion. In this work, we take a step further and consider employing context information for person search. For a probe-gallery pair, we first propose a contextual instance expansion module, which employs a relative attention module to search and filter useful context information in the scene. We also build a graph learning framework to effectively employ context pairs to update target similarity. These two modules are built on top of a joint detection and instance feature learning framework, which improves the discriminativeness of the learned features. The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used person search datasets. Comment: To appear in CVPR 2019

Abstract A rice starch edible coating blended with sucrose esters was developed for controlling the postharvest physiological activity of Cavendish banana to extend postharvest quality during ripening at 20 ± 2 °C. Coating effectiveness was assessed against changes in fruit physiochemical parameters such as weight loss, titratable acidity, total soluble solids, flesh fruit firmness, ion leakage, colour change, respiration, ethylene production, chlorophyll degradation and starch conversion were determined. The topography of coating material on the fruit surface was evaluated by scanning electron microscope (SEM). Surface morphology studies highlighted the binding compatibility of the coating matrix with the fruit peel character and formed a continuous uniform layer over the fruit surface. The results showed that the coating was effective in delaying ethylene biosynthesis and reducing respiration rate. Other factors impacting included delayed chlorophyll degradation, reduced weight loss and retention of fruit firmness for the first six days, all of which improved the commercial value of the fruit. The shelf life of coated fruit was prolonged for 12 days in comparison with the untreated control which ripened within seven days and lost marketability after Day 6. The pilot study demonstrates the effectiveness of a starch-based edible coating formulation for improving the ambient storage capacity of banana fruit.