Diabetes Lipidus - A persistent problem. Frequency and patterns of dyslipidemia among the diabetic adults of Pakistan.

Objective: To determine the frequency of dyslipidemia and its types in adult diabetics of Karachi. Study Design: Cross Sectional, Observational study. Setting: Diabetic Outpatient Clinic in JPMC, Karachi. Period: January 2019 to June 2019. Material & Methods: 248 adult diabetics presenting in diabetic outpatient clinic in JPMC, Karachi selected by non-purposive convenient sample technique. Diagnosed diabetics who were not on any lipid lowering therapy were included in the study. Non diabetics and those diabetics who are already on lipid lowering drugs were excluded. After relevant information is taken the lipid profile of the participants was done with a 12 hours fasting and the data was secured on a pre-designed performa. The results were analyzed on SPSS. Results: Among the 248 diabetics that presented 88(35.4%) were males and 160(64.5%) were females. The prevalence of dyslipidemia is 85.9% (213 diabetics had dyslipidemia). High triglycerides were present in 52.4% (130), high LDL in 28.2% (70) and low HDL in 175(70.6%). [P=0.000]. At least one dyslipidemic factor was deranged in 81(32.7%), two in 102(41.1%) and 3 in 30(12.1%) persons. In males, 53 out of 88(60.2%) were dyslipidemic, and in females all had dyslipidemia (100%). [P = 0.000]. Hypertriglyceridemia was present in 38(43.1%) males and 92(57.5%) females [P=.021], High LDL in 21(23.8%) males and 49(44%) females [P=.163], while low HDL was present in 16(22%) males and 159(99%) females [P=.000]. Conclusion: Dyslipidemia is highly prevalent in our population. Female diabetic patients had relatively higher triglycerides than men.

Decision-making Skills among Managers Employed in Public and Private Organizations of Udaipur City, India

Decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and preferences of the decision-maker. This research examines the decision-making skills of managers employed in public and private organizations. The methodology entails a survey of 60 randomly selected managers (i.e. 30 from public organizations and 30 from private organizations) in Udaipur city, India. An online questionnaire technique was used for data collection. Secondary data was also used to get a better insight into the research problem. Frequency, percentage and means weighted scores were used for the analysis of data. The major limitation of this study is that it was conducted in Udaipur city alone, while the work culture of organizations other than in Udaipur city may be different. Results showed that decision-making skills were at a good level among most of the managers in public organizations (63.3%) but in private organizations the majority of managers (60%) were at an excellent level. Maintenance Window Scheme (MWS) were higher in decision making statements of private organizations in comparison to public organizations. There is difference among managers’ managerial skills of public and private organizations.

Tekstkenmerken en tekstkwaliteit van leerlingteksten

Text features and quality of learner text: an annotation studyManually annotated corpora of writing products may greatly contribute to writing research: they offer detailed insights in the quality of these texts, in the text features actually attended to by human text raters, in possibilities and difficulties for the use of automatic writing analytics and writing tools, and in the relations between different text quality dimensions. This paper presents the Utrecht System for Annotation of Learner text (USALT), that covers both general features (orthography, punctuation, wording, coherence) and genre-specific elements (such as openings, endings, structuring devices and politeness). The annotations contain up to three items (annotation unit; problem type; part-of-speech tag). USALT reflects various text quality dimensions, notably correctness, comprehensibility and appropriateness (both stylistically and in terms of genre conventions).We present an USALT analysis of 371 texts produced by Dutch students from grades 7-9 (aged 12-15 years), taken from the so-called Schrijfmeters-corpus. The assignment concerned a letter about ‘typically Dutch things’ to a Swedish girl about to emigrate to The Netherlands. USALT reliabilities were adequate. In terms of problem frequency, we were struck by the pervasiveness of punctuation problems. Furthermore, the orthography and punctuation problems together present considerable difficulties for automatic analysis of original learner texts at this level. A remarkable result regarding relations between various text quality dimensions is that the frequency of orthography problems correlates higher with genre convention problems than with lexico-grammatical problems. We also used the annotations as predictors of the holistic scores assigned to the texts by human raters. Standardized annotation frequencies by themselves may account for 45% of the score variance, with a prominent role for annotations regarding genre elements; text length by itself explains 52%. The best model includes both text length and annotations (65% explained variance). In ongoing work, USALT is being extended to handle argumentative writing assignments.

The method of polarized traces for the 3D Helmholtz equation

We have developed a fast solver for the 3D Helmholtz equation, in heterogeneous, constant density, acoustic media, in the high-frequency regime. The solver is based on the method of polarized traces, a layered domain-decomposition method, where the subdomains are connected via transmission conditions prescribed by the discrete Green’s representation formula and artificial reflections are avoided by enforcing nonreflecting boundary conditions between layers. The method of polarized traces allows us to consider only unknowns at the layer interfaces, reducing the overall cost and memory footprint of the solver. We determine that polarizing the wavefields in this manner yields an efficient preconditioner for the reduced system, whose rate of convergence is independent of the problem frequency. The resulting preconditioned system is solved iteratively using generalized minimum residual, where we never assemble the reduced system or preconditioner; rather, we implement them via solving the Helmholtz equation locally within the subdomains. The method is parallelized using Message Passing Interface and coupled with a distributed linear algebra library and pipelining to obtain an empirical on-line runtime [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the total number of degrees of freedom, [Formula: see text] is the number of subdomains, and [Formula: see text] is the number of right-hand sides (RHS). This scaling is favorable for regimes in which the number of sources (distinct RHS) is large, for example, enabling large-scale implementations of frequency-domain full-waveform inversion.

Approximate Floquet Analysis of Parametrically Excited Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Systems With Application to Wind Turbines

General responses of multi-degrees-of-freedom (MDOF) systems with parametric stiffness are studied. A Floquet-type solution, which is a product between an exponential part and a periodic part, is assumed, and applying harmonic balance, an eigenvalue problem is found. Solving the eigenvalue problem, frequency content of the solution and response to arbitrary initial conditions are determined. Using the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors, the system response is written in terms of “Floquet modes,” which are nonsynchronous, contrary to linear modes. Studying the eigenvalues (i.e., characteristic exponents), stability of the solution is investigated. The approach is applied to MDOF systems, including an example of a three-blade wind turbine, where the equations of motion have parametric stiffness terms due to gravity. The analytical solutions are also compared to numerical simulations for verification.

The Relationship Between Antecedent And Consequence Factors With Safety Behaviour In PT.X

Background : Safety behaviour is an act worker to minimize the possibility of accidents in workplace. Based on the Antecedents-Behaviour-Consequence (ABC) theory, safety behaviour of worker related with the antecedent and consequence factors. Purpose : The purpose of this research was to study the association between antecedent and consequence factors with safety behaviour of workers in Ring Frame Unit Spinning II PT. X. Methods : This was an observational descriptive research with cross sectional approach. Sample size was the total population 24 workers. The variables studied were level of knowledge, motivation, perception, private problem, OSH regulation, availability of safety facilities, frequency of OSH training, controlling, positive reinforcement (reward), and negative reinforcement (punishment). The strength of relationship between variables dependent and independent were analyzed by using Contingency Coefficient (C). Results : The results showed that there were strong association between motivation, private problem, frequency of OSH training, positive reinforcement (reward), and negative reinforcement (punishment) with safety behaviour (C = 0.622, C = 0.508, C = 0.702, C = 0.669, dan C = 0.707, respectively). There were very strong association between knowledge, perception, OSH regulation, and controlling with safety behaviour (C = 0.763, C = 0.797, C = 0.768, dan C = 0.797, respectively). Conclusion : the higher the knowledge and motivation to work safely the higher the safety behaviour of the workers would be. Workers who have not personal problem, have already participated in OSH training, feeling supervised and given reward and punishment applied higher safety behaviour.

Frequency-domain finite-element simulations of 2D sonic wireline borehole measurements acquired in fractured and thinly bedded formations

We simulated wireline borehole sonic waveforms to appraise modal frequency dispersions across fractured and thinly bedded formations. Simulations included monopole and dipole sources of excitation and explicitly took into account the borehole, the mandrel tool, and casing whenever present. Calculations were performed in the frequency domain with a highly accurate finite-element method that automatically generates optimal grids for each problem/frequency combination. The method guarantees solutions at significantly reduced computational time with relative energy errors below 0.5% (even in the presence of singularities in the solution that can originate from complex geometries, high material contrasts, and simultaneous presence of large and fine structures). Such a high accuracy in the simulation of sonic waveforms is necessary to accurately quantify the effects of fractures and thin beds on acoustic logs. Simulations indicate that fractures mainly influence propagation modes related to the formation shear velocity. In slow thinly bedded formations, effective properties are similar to those of average layer properties, as predicted by the Reuss lower bound. However, presence of intralayer interfaces gives rise to multiple reflections that can deleteriously affect the estimation of elastic properties with dispersion processing. Casing effectively functions as a low-pass frequency filter of sonic waveforms, significantly distorting the original borehole modes, hence the estimation of elastic properties.

The Study of Sound Quality for Car Compressor

As cars become more and more quiet the sound quality of rotary components such as car compressor becomes more important in the customer’s subjective perception of passenger car quality. This needs a new evaluation method which is not only the traditional method like sound pressure level but also Psychoacoustic Metrics to focus the specification of component sounds. This paper on one hand analyzed one car’s abnormal noise reason through the tests, found the main problem frequency band of the compressor, and on the other hand studied the compressor’s psychoacoustic metrics. In this paper the countermeasure of solving this problem was also given, and then noise level and psychoacoustic parameters are compared. Both objective evaluation and subjective evaluation showed that the compressor with the solution not only reduced the sound pressure level, but also improved the car sound quality greatly.