Multifactor Authentication in Automated Teller Machine

Skimming of card details is the primary problem faced by many people in today’s world. This can be done in many ways. For instance, a thief can insert a small device into the machine and steal the information. When a person swipes or inserts a card, the details will be captured and stored. This problem can be solved using biometrics. Biometrics include fingerprint, iris, face, retina scanning, etc. This paper focused on solving this issue using fingerprint and iris recognition using OpenCV and propose a suitable method for this issue. Fingerprint and iris recognition are performed by identifying the keypoints and descriptors and matching those with the test data. Keywords: Biometrics, Fingerprint recognition, Iris recognition, Scale Invariant Feature Transform, Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF, OpenCV

The Effectiveness of Integrated Agribusiness Cooperatives on The Income of Local Farmers

The primary problem is the limited capital owned by the farmers. This study determine agribusiness activities and analyze the effectiveness of the Integrated Agribusiness Cooperative on the income level of farmers in Subak Guama, Tabanan Regency, Bali Province. The research subject is the Subak Guama farmers who receive capital assistance, and the object is the income of farmers. This study used quantitative data with descriptive statistical analysis, namely paired sample t-test. The results showed that: (1) The Subak Guama carries out: integrated rice management activities, rice-livestock integration activities; and task to strengthen household business capital, namely independent business loans; (2) There is a difference in the level of farming income of Subak Guama farmers before and after receiving capital assistance for agribusiness cooperatives of 7.24% with an effective level of 86.69% with effective criteria.

Segmentation of Overlapping Grape Clusters Based on the Depth Region Growing Method

Accurately extracting the grape cluster at the front of overlapping grape clusters is the primary problem of the grape-harvesting robot. To solve the difficult problem of identifying and segmenting the overlapping grape clusters in the cultivation environment of a trellis, a simple method based on the deep learning network and the idea of region growing is proposed. Firstly, the region of grape in an RGB image was obtained by the finely trained DeepLabV3+ model. The idea of transfer learning was adopted when training the network with a limited number of training sets. Then, the corresponding region of the grape in the depth image captured by RealSense D435 was processed by the proposed depth region growing algorithm (DRG) to extract the front cluster. The depth region growing method uses the depth value instead of gray value to achieve clustering. Finally, it fils the holes in the clustered region of interest, extracts the contours, and maps the obtained contours to the RGB image. The images captured by RealSense D435 in a natural trellis environment were adopted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results showed that the recall and precision of the proposed method were 89.2% and 87.5%, respectively. The demonstrated performance indicated that the proposed method could satisfy the requirements of practical application for robotic grape harvesting.

Spirited Psychology and Civic Temperament in the Statesman

Chapter 9 argues that the Statesman characterizes the task of the politician as one that prominently requires attention to distinctively spirited aspects of the human soul. According to the dialogue’s final section, the primary problem of politics is that of producing harmony between, or “weaving” together, two main types of citizens that naturally tend toward conflict with one another: the “courageous” and the “moderate.” This chapter argues that the Statesman’s treatment of civic unity is largely a discussion of spirited political psychology: the “courageous” citizens incline toward behavior associated with the aggressive side of thumos, while the “moderate” tend toward behavior associated with its gentle side. Moreover, this treatment is set up earlier in the dialogue through the Myth of Cronus, which is designed to expose the inadequacy of conceptions of politics that ignore the social desires and emotions of human beings that are most relevant to politics.

Computer Assisted Patient Monitoring: Associated Patient, Clinical and ECG Characteristics and Strategy to Minimize False Alarms

This chapter is a review of studies that have examined false arrhythmia alarms during in-hospital electrocardiographic (ECG) monitoring in the intensive care unit. In addition, we describe an annotation effort being conducted at the UCSF School of Nursing, Center for Physiologic Research designed to improve algorithms for lethal arrhythmias (i.e., asystole, ventricular fibrillation, and ventricular tachycardia). Background: Alarm fatigue is a serious patient safety hazard among hospitalized patients. Data from the past five years, showed that alarm fatigue was responsible for over 650 deaths, which is likely lower than the actual number due to under-reporting. Arrhythmia alarms are a common source of false alarms and 90% are false. While clinical scientists have implemented a number of interventions to reduce these types of alarms (e.g., customized alarm settings; daily skin electrode changes; disposable vs. non-disposable lead wires; and education), only minor improvements have been made. This is likely as these interventions do not address the primary problem of false arrhythmia alarms, namely deficient and outdated arrhythmia algorithms. In this chapter we will describe a number of ECG features associated with false arrhythmia alarms. In addition, we briefly discuss an annotation effort our group has undertaken to improve lethal arrhythmia algorithms.

Valproic Acid Regulates HR and Cell Cycle Through MUS81-pRPA2 Pathway in Response to Hydroxyurea

Breast cancer is the primary problem threatening women’s health. The combined application of valproic acid (VPA) and hydroxyurea (HU) has a synergistic effect on killing breast cancer cells, but the molecular mechanism remains elusive. Replication protein A2 phosphorylation (pRPA2), is essential for homologous recombination (HR) repair and cell cycle. Here we showed that in response to HU, the VPA significantly decreased the tumor cells survival, and promoted S-phase slippage, which was associated with the decrease of pCHK1 and WEE1/pCDK1-mediated checkpoint kinases phosphorylation pathway and inhibited pRPA2/Rad51-mediated HR repair pathway; the mutation of pRPA2 significantly diminished the above effect, indicating that VPA-caused HU sensitization was pRPA2 dependent. It was further found that VPA and HU combination treatment also resulted in the decrease of endonuclease MUS81. After MUS81 elimination, not only the level of pRPA2 was abolished in response to HU treatment, but also VPA-caused HU sensitization was significantly down-regulated through pRPA2-mediated checkpoint kinases phosphorylation and HR repair pathways. In addition, the VPA altered the tumor microenvironment and reduced tumor burden by recruiting macrophages to tumor sites; the Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that patients with high pRPA2 expression had significantly worse survival. Overall, our findings demonstrated that VPA influences HR repair and cell cycle through down-regulating MUS81-pRPA2 pathway in response to HU treatment.

Inequality and Corruption

Corruption is a primary problem for the quality of government. Since most corrupt exchanges favor the wealthy and the powerful rather than the poor and the powerless, corruption tends to reinforce and widen existing inequalities of wealth and power. Higher inequalities in income and wealth may lead to higher levels of corruption by undermining democratic accountability mechanisms. The wealthy elite may capture policymaking and implementation processes and corrupt electoral process through sponsoring clientelistic politics. Also, high inequality is likely to affect norms and perceptions about corruption, eroding social trust and encouraging corruption. The reciprocal causality may create a vicious cycle of high corruption and high inequality as well as a virtuous cycle of low corruption and low inequality, especially in democracies.

Challenges and Progress in Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Co-Crystal Development

Co-crystal innovation is an opportunity in drug development for both scientists and industry. In line with the “green pharmacy” concept for obtaining safer methods and advanced pharmaceutical products, co-crystallization is one of the most promising approaches to find novel patent drugs, including non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID). This kind of multi-component system improves previously poor physicochemical and mechanical properties through non-covalent interactions. Practically, there are many challenges to find commercially viable co-crystal drugs. The difficulty in selecting co-formers becomes the primary problem, followed by unexpected results, such as decreased solubility and dissolution, spring and parachute effect, microenvironment pH effects, changes in instability, and polymorphisms, which can occur during the co-crystal development. However, over time, NSAID co-crystals have been continuously updated regarding co-formers selection and methods development.

Motion Planning for a Mobile Humanoid Manipulator Working in an Industrial Environment

This paper presents the usage of holonomic mobile humanoid manipulators to carry out autonomous tasks in industrial environments, according to the smart factory concept and the Industry 4.0 philosophy. The problem of transporting lengthy objects, taking into account mechanical limitations, the conditions for avoiding collisions, as well as the dexterity of the manipulator arms was considered. The primary problem was divided into three phases, leading to three different types of robotic tasks. In the proposed approach, the pseudoinverse Jacobian method at the acceleration level to solve each of the tasks was used. The redundant degrees of freedom were used to satisfy secondary objectives such as robot kinetic energy, the maximization of the manipulability measure, and the fulfillment mechanical and collision-avoidance limitations. A computer example involving a mobile humanoid manipulator, operating in an industrial environment, illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.