Variables influencing parental perception of inherited metabolic diseases before and after genetic counselling

BACKGROUND: Sixty percent of adults has typical symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux in Chile. AIM: To report the clinical and laboratory features of patients with gastroesophageal reflux. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Five hundred thirty-four patients (255 male) with gastroesophageal reflux were included in a prospective protocol that included clinical analysis, manometry and endoscopy in all patients, barium swallow in 427, scintigraphy in 195, acid reflux test in 359, 24 h pH in 175, and differential potential of gastroesophageal mucosa in 73 patients. RESULTS: There was no correlation between the severity of symptoms and the endoscopical severity. Patients with Barret esophagus were 12 years older, were male in a greater proportion and had a higher proportion of manometrically incompetent sphincters than patients with esophageal reflux but without esophagitis or with erosive esophagitis. Severity of acid reflux, measured with 24 h pH monitoring was proportional to the endoscopical damage of the mucosa. There was a close relationship between the mucosal change limit determined with differential potentials and with endoscopy. No short esophagi were found. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux must be assessed using several objective measures to determine the severity of their pathological alterations.     

A Computational Study on the Reduction Behavior of Iron Ore/Carbon Composite Pellets in Both Single and Multi-layer Bed Rotary Hearth Furnace

Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B - A phenomenological model for the reduction of iron ore/carbon composite pellets in a multi-layer bed rotary hearth furnace has been developed. A single...     

Performance analysis of M‐APSK generalised spatial modulation with constellation reassignment

Generalised spatial modulation (GSM) is a recently developed multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) technique aimed at improving data rates over conventional spatial modulation (SM) systems. However, for identical antenna array size and configurations (AASC), the bit error rate (BER) of GSM systems in comparison with SM systems is degraded. Recently, a GSM system with constellation reassignment (GSM‐CR) was proposed in order to improve the BER of traditional GSM systems. However, this study focused on M‐ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M‐QAM) schemes. The focus of this paper is the application of a circular constellations scheme, in particular, amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) modulation, to GSM and GSM‐CR systems. An analytical bound for the average BER of the proposed M‐APSK GSM and M‐APSK GSM‐CR systems over fading channels is derived. The accuracy of this bound is verified using Monte Carlo simulation results. A 4 × 4 16‐APSK GSM‐CR system achieves a gain of 2.5 dB at BER of 10^?5 over the traditional 16‐APSK GSM system with similar AASC. Similarly, a 6 × 4 32‐APSK GSM‐CR system achieves a gain of 2 dB at BER of 10^?5 over equivalent 32‐APSK GSM system.     

New multicriteria group decision support systems for small hydropower plant locations selection based on intuitionistic cubic fuzzy aggregation information

There has been a quick development in construction activities during the last couple of decades attributable to a general improvement in all features of humankind. Because of innovative progressions and regularly expanding human progress, there is a diligent requirement of power. Close by the ordinary energy sources, renewable energy sources have likewise lead significantly to the rising power requirement. All over the world in the past, a number of small hydropower plants (SHPPs) have been developed, as a renewable energy source. Generally, these SHPPs are being manufactured and worked by the private designers consenting to the administration rules. So as to help a designer in choosing the most productive and doable SHPP for development and consequent activity, the concept of the intuitionistic cubic fuzzy set (ICFS) theory is established and a few important operations for ICFSs are characterized, and also a strategy dependent on intuitionistic cubic fuzzy Hamacher hybrid averaging (ICFHHA) operator, intuitionistic cubic fuzzy Hamacher order weighted averaging (ICFHOWA) operator, and intuitionistic cubic fuzzy Hamacher weighted averaging (ICFHWA) operators is utilized in the present paper. The financial criteria and technobusiness, as assumed for examining the practicality of the candidate SHPPs, are presented qualitatively utilizing intuitionistic cubic fuzzy numbers (ICFNs). Further study their fundamental properties and the relationship among these aggregation operators. Developed group decision-making (DM) algorithm under intuitionistic cubic fuzzy (ICF) environment. An interpretative case for the analysis of SHPP for construction is given to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of the mentioned new techniques. Further validate its effectiveness and benefits via a comparative analysis with pre-existing aggregation operators, and the outcomes demonstrate that the proposed SHPP determination model has some special favorable circumstances, which is progressively practical and adaptable for SHPP choice under a complex and uncertain environment.     

Unsteady nonlinear convection on Eyring–Powell radiated flow with suspended graphene and dust particles

This research contemplates the flow and heat transport of MHD rheological Eyring–Powell fluid embedded with dust and graphene nanoparticles (GP) in an ethylene–glycol (EG) mixture in the presence of nonlinear convection, Cattaneo–Christov heat flux, and thermal radiation. Primarily existing PDEs (fluid and dust phase) are transferred to non-dimensional form by invoking similarity transformations then solved numerically through RKF-45 method. The graphene particles are significantly used in energy transmission in aerospace, power and propulsion generation etc. Through graphical illustrations, velocity and temperature profiles (fluid and dust phases) converse for various prominent parameters. The results of friction factor and heat transfer rate are presented and analyzed. Validation of the present result is made with the existing data. Results demonstrate that increasing nonlinear convection parameter has an inverse relationship with the Nusselt number and the velocity in the dust and fluid phases. This may happen due to the domination of unsteadiness in the flow.

     

Role of Ni<Superscript>2+</Superscript> Ions in Magnetite Nano-particles Synthesized by Co-precipitation Method

In the present work, nickel-doped iron oxide (Ni_xFe_3?x O ₄) nanoparticles with different concentration of nickel (x = 0, 0.05, 0.1, and 0.15) have been prepared by co-precipitation method. These prepared nanoparticles have been characterized by using x-ray diffractometer, thermo gravimetric analysis and differential scanning calorimetry, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, vibrating sample magnetometer, and UV-Visible spectroscopy to study their structural, thermal, morphological, magnetic, and optical properties, respectively. The x-ray diffraction confirms the formation of single-phase inverse spinel cubic structure of NiFe₃ O ₄ nanoparticles. Crystallite size has been estimated by the full width at half maximum of the most intense x-ray diffraction peak where vibrational and stretching modes of metal-oxygen bonds in 872 cm are shown in Fourier transform infrared spectra which confirms the formation of nanoparticles. The thermal analysis revealed that the transition temperature and stability increases with increasing Ni concentration. The surface morphology indicated that the particles are spherical in shape with some agglomeration. The magnetic measurement revealed that the coercivity and anisotropy increases with nickel doping in magnetite nanoparticles. The optical analysis revealed that direct and indirect both types of band gap increases when the particle size decreases because the absorption spectra shift toward smaller wavelength. The blue shift confirms the formation of nanoparticles.     

Cubic fuzzy Einstein aggregation operators and its application to decision-making

In this paper, we define some Einstein operations on cubic fuzzy set (CFS) and develop three arithmetic averaging operators, which are cubic fuzzy Einstein weighted averaging (CFEWA) operator, cubic fuzzy Einstein ordered weighted averaging (CFEOWA) operator and cubic fuzzy Einstein hybrid weighted averaging (CFEHWA) operator, for aggregating cubic fuzzy data. The CFEHWA operator generalises both the CFEWA and CFEOWA operators. Furthermore, we develop various properties of these operators and derive the relationship between the proposed operators and the exiting aggregation operators. We apply CFEHWA operator to multiple attribute decision-making with cubic fuzzy data. Finally, a numerical example is constructed to demonstrate the established approach.     

Abnormal event detection and localization in crowded scenes based on PCANet

Detecting and localizing abnormal events in crowded scenes still remains a challenging task among computer vision community. An unsupervised framework is proposed in this paper to address the problem. Low-level features and optical flows (OF) of video sequences are extracted to represent motion information in the temporal domain. Moreover, abnormal events usually occur in local regions and are closely linked to their surrounding areas in the spatial domain. To extract high-level information from local regions and model the relationship in spatial domain, the first step is to calculate optical flow maps and divide them into a set of non-overlapping sub-maps. Next, corresponding PCANet models are trained using the sub-maps at same spatial location in the optical flow maps. Based on the block-wise histograms extracted by PCANet models, a set of one-class classifiers are trained to predict the anomaly scores of test frames. The framework is completely unsupervised because it utilizes only normal videos. Experiments were carried out on UCSD Ped2 and UMN datasets, and the results show competitive performance of this framework when compared with other state-of-the-art methods.     

Determinants of online safety behaviour: towards an intervention strategy for college students

How can young adults be motivated to enact security precautions? Communication about the risks of Internet use or online safety communication is a context in which personal responsibility is especially salient. The present research builds on Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) to examine the role of a previously unexplored variable, personal responsibility, in the protective behaviour of college students. Two studies are reported here. In the first (N?=?565), the relationship of personal responsibility to safe (i.e. protective) online behaviour is tested in relationship to standard PMT variables. A multiple regression analysis of survey data shows that personal responsibility explained additional variance in protective behaviour after accounting for the effects of traditional threat and coping appraisal variables. Building on this, the second study (N?=?206) examines the possibility of influencing personal responsibility through an intervention and experimental manipulation among college students. The experimental manipulation of personal responsibility found evidence of a causal relationship between personal responsibility and protective behaviour in the college student sample. Interactions with pre-existing levels of safety involvement and self-efficacy were uncovered. Based on the results, strategies for targeted online safety interventions are suggested.