Review of the algorithms used in exhaled breath analysis for the detection of diabetes

Currently, intensive work is underway on the development of truly noninvasive medical diagnostic systems, including respiratory analysers based on the detection of biomarkers of several diseases including diabetes. In terms of diabetes, acetone is considered as a one of the potential biomarker, although is not the single one. Therefore, the selective detection is crucial. Most often, the analysers of exhaled breath are based on the utilization of several commercially available gas sensors or on specially designed and manufactured gas sensors to obtain the highest selectivity and sensitivity to diabetes biomarkers present in the exhaled air. An important part of each system are the algorithms that are trained to detect diabetes based on data obtained from sensor matrices. The prepared review of the literature showed that there are many limitations in the development of the versatile breath analyser, such as high metabolic variability between patients, but the results obtained by researchers using the algorithms described in this paper are very promising and most of them achieve over 90% accuracy in the detection of diabetes in exhaled air. This paper summarizes the results using various measurement systems, feature extraction and feature selection methods as well as algorithms such as Support Vector Machines, k-Nearest Neighbours and various variations of Neural Networks for the detection of diabetes in patient samples and simulated artificial breath samples.

Health Literacy and Digital Communication

The SARS-COV-2 pandemic has placed the entire planet under a global health threat, but it has also provided a golden opportunity for us to make the digital transition. With the successive confinements and restrictions on circulation and communication to which we were subjected, we had to look for other models of relationships, work, and learning. In a few months, the Portuguese went from an essentially playful and informative use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to an intensive work, academic, and communicational use.

An Improved Text Extraction Approach with Auto Encoder for Creating Your Own Audiobook

As we all know, listening makes learning easier and interesting than reading. An audiobook is a software that converts text to speech. Though this sounds good, the audiobooks available in the market are not free and feasible for everyone. Added to this, we find that these audiobooks are only meant for fictional stories, novels or comics. A comprehensive review of the available literature shows that very little intensive work was done for image to speech conversion. In this paper, we employ various strategies for the entire process. As an initial step, deep learning techniques are constructed to denoise the images that are fed to the system. This is followed by text extraction with the help of OCR engines. Additional improvements are made to improve the quality of text extraction and post processing spell check mechanism are incorporated for this purpose. Our result analysis demonstrates that with denoising and spell checking, our model has achieved an accuracy of 98.11% when compared to 84.02% without any denoising or spell check mechanism.

ON MONITORING THE HYDROLOGICAL AND HYDROCHEMICAL REGIME OF THE BLACK SEA WATERS

The article briefly describes the main facts and milestones in the development of methods for monitoring the hydrological and hydrochemical state of the Black Sea waters from the 19th century to the present day. It is shown that the modern understanding of the hydrological and hydrochemical processes of this unique sea basin resulted from the intensive work of many oceanographers over the past centuries. Par-ticular attention is paid to the oxygen regime of the Black Sea.

Art and Architecture as Opponents against the Cultural Identity Loss in the Context of a Post-Industrial Environment - The Case of the Manufacturing Villages of Cebolais de Cima and Retaxo, Portugal

Facing the dramatic desertification extent of the territory under study, this article presents the results of an experimental methodology approach on the regeneration of landscapes in the national territory, where man, communities, architecture, art and landscape combine in a visible result, image of synthesis, itself revealing the problem. The deactivation process of the local textile industry, in the territory of Cebolais de Cima and Retaxo, Castelo Branco, Portugal, was marked by a period of stagnation, abandonment and degradation of its manufacturing sites and consequently, of deep degradation of the urban and human landscape. This landscape, which was mainly characterized by an intensive work environment and industrial production, is today essentially portrayed through a legacy of abandoned buildings, materials and machinery, scattered throughout the distorted scenery. It is therefore in a physical, social and human environment with a high rate of abandonment and degradation that matrixes will be found for a process of collaboration between an active group of local forces and the critical mass offered by the University. This was intended to incite a strong awakening of the various agents involved in the alarming conformism installed in these settlements, an environment that transcends the entire frontier territory of the interior border between Portugal and Spain. The beginning of this path with several steps and still in a preliminary stage was offered to students of architecture in Lisbon. It was the opportunity to learn realities other than those of their daily lives, in a universe of excess of information, but weak reflection. It also allowed them to challenge their points of view against the ones of those few who still live in the territory and preferred to stay rather than emigrate as most already did. For this difficult rendezvous, several actions were planned during two years, in Lisbon and Cebolais de Cima and Retaxo, culminating in the so-called Creative Assault, the "occupation" of an abandoned factory intended as a wake-up call for awareness. For three days, various activities and exhibitions took place in this space, inviting the community and local authorities to participate, as well as the students involved in the various moments of work.

An explicit investigation of occupational stress and safety behavior on the relationships between supportive leadership and safety compliance in sewerage industry

This study aims to examine the influence of supportive leadership on occupational stress, safety behaviour and safety compliance of workers working in Indah Water Konsortium Sdn. Bhd. (IWK) Malaysia. Moreover, the study intends to investigate the mediational role of occupational stress and safety behaviour. Supportive leadership negatively influence occupational stress while positively influences safety behaviour. Occupational stress put a negative effect on safety behaviour and safety compliance, while safety behaviour has a positive effect on safety compliance. Supportive leadership positively influence safety compliance. Occupational stress and safety behaviour partially mediate the relationship between supportive leadership and safety compliance. The outcomes of this study offer significant insights into the management of Indah Water Konsortium Sdn. Bhd. (IWK) to reduce occupational stress, encourage safety behaviour, and improve safety compliance by providing supportive leadership to the workers. Unlike other industries, the sewerage operation industry (in Malaysia) is under an intensive work burden and work pressure that eventually causes occupational stress, lack of safety compliance and ignorance of safety behaviours among workers. The link of supportive leadership with safety compliance is scare with the mediating role of occupational stress and safety behaviour, especially in the sewerage industry particularly in developing countries such as Malaysia.

Direct Dating of Chinese Immovable Cultural Heritage

The most extensive corpus of ancient immovable cultural heritage is that of global rock art. Estimating its age has traditionally been challenging, rendering it difficult to integrate archaeological evidence of early cultural traditions. The dating of Chinese rock art by ‘direct methods’ began in the late 1990s in Qinghai Province. Since then, China has acquired the largest body of direct dating information about the rock art of any country. The establishment of the International Centre for Rock Art Dating at Hebei Normal University has been the driving force in this development, with its researchers accounting for most of the results. This centre has set the highest standards in rock art age estimation. Its principal method, microerosion analysis, secured the largest number of determinations, but it has also applied other methods. Its work with uranium-thorium analysis of carbonate precipitates in caves is of particular significance because it tested this widely used method. The implications of this work are wide-ranging. Most direct-dating of rock art has now become available from Henan, but results have also been reported from Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Jiangsu, Hubei, Guangxi, Yunnan, Qinghai, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Intensive work by several teams is continuing and is expected to result in a significantly better understanding of China’s early immovable cultural heritage.

Storytelling as a Tool for Vicarious Learning among Air Medical Transport Crews

Learning vicariously from the experiences of others at work, such as those working on different teams or projects, has long been recognized as a driver of collective performance in organizations. Yet as work becomes more ambiguous and less observable in knowledge-intensive organizations, previously identified vicarious learning strategies, including direct observation and formal knowledge transfer, become less feasible. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with flight nurse crews in an air medical transport program, I inductively build a model of how storytelling can serve as a valuable tool for vicarious learning. I explore a multistage process of triggering, telling, and transforming stories as a means by which flight nurses convert the raw experience of other crews’ patient transports into prospective knowledge and expanded repertoires of responses for potential future challenges. Further, I highlight how this storytelling process is situated within the transport program’s broader structures and practices, which serve to enable flight nurses’ storytelling and to scale the lessons of their stories throughout the entire program. I discuss the implications of these insights for the study of storytelling as a learning tool in organizations, as well as for revamping the field’s understanding of vicarious learning in knowledge-intensive work settings.

Mechanical response and strength characteristics of aluminum honeycomb sandwich panels for infrastructure engineering

The use of aluminium sandwich panels has been increased in a certain number of engineering applications from infrastructure systems and transportation to aircraft and naval engineering. Due to their structural efficiency these materials are ideal for applications where ratio of strength to weight is of crucial importance. In the current study the investigation of the strength characteristics of aluminium sandwich panels with aluminium honeycomb core and different types of skins is performed using both analytical models and experimental procedures. A series of strength tests such as tension, shear, three point bending and double cantilever beam were conducted on aluminium honeycomb-cored sandwich panel specimens with five different skins in order to examine the mode of failure and the mechanical behaviour of the structural elements. The experimental findings are compared to theoretical values while an attempt for the explanation of the mechanisms leading to failure such as buckling, delamination or debonding between core and skins is performed. The results occurring from the study are very useful for the enhancement of the mechanical behaviour of sandwich constructions, thus more intensive work must be carried out in order to understand the physical mechanisms leading to strength characteristics of sandwich panels.