Related Files Research Articles

Accuracy of complete-arch digital implant impression with or without scanbody splinting: An in vitro study

ObjectivesTo assess accuracy of implant complete-arch digital impression with intraoral scanner (IOS) and implant scanbody splinting (ISS). MethodsAn edentulous mandibular model with 4 analogues was fabricated. Four polyetheretherketone (PEEK) implant scanbodies (ISBs) were scanned, according to a randomized sequence, by investigated IOS with (ISS+) and without implant scanbody splinting (ISS-), resulting in 30 test and 30 control files. The model was digitized by industrial optical scanner and the related file superimposed to the test and control files by a best fit algorithm. Linear (ΔX, ΔY and ΔZ-axis) and angular deviations (ΔANGLE) were evaluated for each analogue. A global measure of linear absolute error (ΔASS) was calculated considering the sum of absolute linear discrepancies. Influence of ISS and implant position on IOS accuracy was assessed using General Linear Model and possible interaction between ISS and implant position evaluated. ResultsImplant position showed a significant main effect (p<0.0001) and interaction with ISS (p=0.0454) when ΔASS was considered as response variable. Posterior implants resulted as less accurate. ISS was able to reduce ΔASS for both distal analogues (4.7, p=0.0188). When ΔANGLE was considered as a response variable, implant position and ISS showed significant main and interactive effects (p=0.0039, p<0.0001, p<0.0001). Analogue 3.6 was associated with highest angular discrepancy. This error was significantly reduced by ISS (p<0.0001). ConclusionsComplete-arch implant digital impression with scanbody splinting showed a significant improvement of the overall accuracy, particularly reducing linear and angular deviations at the most critical posterior implant positions. Clinical significance: Intraoral scanner accuracy for implant complete-arch digital impression could be improved by a low cost, easy to assemble and use implant scanbodies splinting 3D printed modular chain.

Ligand Based Virtual Screening Using Self-organizing Maps.

Conventional drug discovery methods rely primarily on in-vitro experiments with a target molecule and an extensive set of small molecules to choose the suitable ligand. The exploration space for the selected ligand being huge; this approach is highly time-consuming and requires high capital for facilitation. Virtual screening, a computational technique used to reduce this search space and identify lead molecules, can speed up the drug discovery process. This paper proposes a ligand-based virtual screening method using an artificial neural network called self-organizing map (SOM). The proposed work uses two SOMs to predict the active and inactive molecules separately. This SOM based technique can uniquely label a small molecule as active, inactive, and undefined as well. This can reduce the number of false positives in the screening process and improve recall; compared to support vector machine and random forest based models. Additionally, by exploiting the parallelism present in the learning and classification phases of a SOM, a graphics processing unit (GPU) based model yields much better execution time. The proposed GPU-based SOM tool can successfully evaluate a large number of molecules in training and screening phases. The source code of the implementation and related files are available at https://github.com/jayarajpbalakrishnan/2_SOM_SCREEN.

Long-term observations on the mortality of mentally ill patients admitted to a short-stay psychiatric hospital: 23 years retrospective Egyptian study

BackgroundInformation about mortality patterns in different psychiatric populations is scanty, yet it is vital for designing successful preventive mental health strategies. In this study, we aimed to assess mortality rates and patterns for the patients admitted to Ain Shams University Institute of Psychiatry (ASUIP) with different psychiatric diagnoses from1990 to 2013. All medical records and related registration files were reviewed and investigated for death cases and their possible causes in a retrospective record linkage study. Data were recorded, tabulated, and coded to be used in the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 17.ResultsThe study identified 57 death cases in 23-years duration with a mortality rate of 3/1000. Mortality rates were more in younger patients and females. Medical comorbidity was reported in 34.8% of them. The most common known causes for death in the current sample were cardiac causes 15.2%, followed by cerebrovascular causes that were 10.9%. However, sudden or unknown causes were the most frequent diagnosis in the sample.ConclusionsThe institute mortality rates were lower than those of the general population during this period. The most common known death causes were cardiovascular problems, which mandates close monitoring of high-risk psychiatric patients with co-morbid cardiac problems. Unknown morality causes represented an unresolved challenge for the current registration system and the quality of care given to patients with serious mental illness.

Review: The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956, by Aaron J. Leonard, and Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life, by Gustavus Stadler

Review: <i>The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956</i>, by Aaron J. Leonard, and <i>Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life</i>, by Gustavus Stadler

Information support for forecasting the flooding of Left bank territories of the Saratov region

The article presents the results of research on the creation of information support for predicting flooding of the territories of the Saratov Left Bank region, which includes a database of data necessary for calculations, consisting of 14 relational files, including reference books, normative files and files of source data; algorithms and computer programs forecasting. Flooding boundaries vectorization is carried out in the QGIS environment based on the exported forecast results and digital elevation model. Development and implementation of the proposed information support will provide a improvement in the quality of forecasts and will pay off in 4 years of operation.

In Search of Socio-Technical Congruence: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study

We report on a large-scale empirical study investigating the relevance of socio-technical congruence over key basic software quality metrics, namely, bugs and churn. In particular, we explore whether alignment or misalignment of social communication structures and technical dependencies in large software projects influences software quality. To this end, we have defined a quantitative and operational notion of socio-technical congruence, which we call <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">socio-technical motif congruence</i> (STMC). STMC is a measure of the degree to which developers working on the same file or on two related files, need to communicate. As socio-technical congruence is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, the interpretability of the results is one of our main concerns, so we have employed a careful mixed-methods statistical analysis. In particular, we provide analyses with similar techniques as employed by seminal work in the field to ensure comparability of our results with the existing body of work. The major result of our study, based on an analysis of 25 large open-source projects, is that STMC is <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">not</i> related to project quality measures—software bugs and churn—in any temporal scenario. That is, we find no statistical relationship between the alignment of developer tasks and developer communications on the one hand, and project outcomes on the other hand. We conclude that, wherefore congruence does matter as literature shows, then its measurable effect lies elsewhere.

Data bank of irrigation ponds of the Saratov region

The article is devoted to the issue of improving the quality of operation of small reservoirs of the left-bank districts of the Saratov region through the development and implementation of an automated data bank of their safety parameters. It provides a generalized scheme for the functioning of an automated databank, as well as the structure of the database, which should include 27 relational files containing all the necessary information for declaring the safety of hydraulic structures of reservoirs and calculating the harm to the population and subjects of economic and economic activity, various natural and man-made objects in case of accidents. The creation of such an automated data bank will improve the quality of monitoring the condition and management of hydraulic structures of the reclamation systems of the Saratov Trans-Volga region and will pay off in 5 years.

Getting Along with Relational Databases

Both relational databases (RDBs) and XML have strengths and weaknesses as data storage and modeling systems. Most researchers working with historical and literary data in the humanities would argue for the superiority of XML, since it allows unlimited nesting, linking, and complexity. Relational database proponents claim superior querying and processing speed, although recent advances in XML languages and tools have eroded that advantage. Nevertheless, RDBs remain popular and are widely used, particularly in the early stages of projects where resources and metadata are being collected, and projects may end up with both an RDB and an XML document collection. Programmers must then integrate these distinct forms of data when building project outputs. This article discusses the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (DVPP) project, where metadata on about 15,000 poems from nineteenth-century periodicals is captured in a MySQL database, and periodically exported to create a TEI file for each poem. Many of the poems are then transcribed and encoded. The canonical source of metadata is the RDB, while the canonical source of textual data is the TEI file. Metadata in the TEI files must be periodically updated from the RDB, without disturbing the textual encoding. Changes to the RDB data may result in changes to the id and filename of the related TEI file, so any existing TEI data is migrated to a new file, and the Subversion repository must be appropriately updated. All of this is done with XSLT and Ant.

Application of BOLD-MRI-based radiomics in differentiating malignant from benign renal tumors.

Blood oxygen level dependent magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD-MRI) is a kind of non-invasive MRI technology which reflects the tissue blood oxyen levels. This stuy aims to explore the value of radiomics based on BOLD-MRI in differentiating malignant from benign renal tumors. A total of 141 patients with renal tumors confirmed by pathology were retrospectively analyzed. Seventy-four men and sixty-seven women, aged 26-78 years, with a median age of 56, were included. In all patients, 118 with malignant tumors and 23 with benign tumors were confirmed. All the patients underwent renal T1 weighted imaging (T1WI), T2 weighted imaging (T2WI), and BOLD-MRI scan within 2 weeks before surgery. The patients were randomly assigned into a training group (benign, n=17; malignant, n=83) and a test group (benign, n=6; malignant, n=35). Two radiologists (A and B), who were blind to the pathological results, delineated the regions of interest (ROI) on the maximum axial slices of the tumors. Radiologist B delineated the ROI again at an interval of one month. The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to evaluate inter-observer and intra-observer repeatability and ICC>0.75 represented as a good consistency. All the T2* Mapping images and the related ROI files were loaded into the Artificial Intelligence Kit software. A total of 396 texture features, which were calculated based on morphology, histogram, gray level co-occurrence matrix, gray-scale run length matrix, gray-scale area size matrix and gray-scale dependent matrix, were extracted from each ROI. The lowest redundancy and the highest correlation were filtered using minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) algorithm. Then least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithm was used to screened out the most predictive features. Multivariate logistic regression was performed to develop the prediction model after feature selection. The radiomics signature score (Radscore) of each case was calculated. The Wilcoxon test was used to compare the difference in the Radscore between benign and malignant renal tumors in the training and test groups. The diagnostic performance of the model in differentiating malignant from benign renal tumors was evaluated with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and leave group out cross validation. The clinical application value of the model was evaluated by decision curve analysis (DCA). There was significant difference in the age between the patients with benign and those with malignant tumors (t=4.383, P<0.001). There were no significant differences in gender composition and in the largest tumor diameter between the 2 groups (χ2=3.452, P=0.063; t=1.432, P=0.154). The ICC values of all the texture features for the inter-observer repeatability were ranged from 0.71 to 0.87, and the ICC values for the intra-observer repeatability were ranged from 0.76 to 0.91. Thirty features with the lowest redundancy and the highest correlation were screened out. The most predictive 12 features were filtered out. The Radscores of malignant tumors in the training and test groups were higher than those of benign tumors (P<0.001 and P=0.006, respectively). The areas under the ROC curve of the model developed by multivariable logistic regression for differentiating malignant from benign renal tumors in the training and test groups were 0.881 and 0.706, with the accuracy at 82.93% and 79.00%, the sensitivity at 82.86% and 77.11%, and the specificities at 83.33% and 88.24%, respectively. The results of decision curve analysis showed that the net benefit of the radiomics model was higher than that of "all malignant" or "all benign" when the threshold was higher than 0.3. BOLD-MRI-based radiomics can be a reliable non-invasive approach for differentiating renal malignant tumors from benign tumors.

A Study on Behavioural Analysis of Specific Ransomware and its Comparison with DBSCAN-MP

Ransomware attack is known to as WCRY or WannaCry. This ransomware is intriguing advantage of a recently disclosed Microsoft vulnerability (“MS17-010 – “Eternalblue” ) coupled with the Shadow Brokers tools release. After a computer is fouled, WannaCry ransomware targets and encrypts 176 file types. Some of the file types WannaCry targets are database related files, multimedia and archive related files, as well as Microsoft Office documents. In its ransom note, which supports 27 languages, it initially demands US$300 worth of Bitcoins from its fatalities—an amount that increases incrementally after a definite time limit. The victim is also given seven days before the pretentious files are deleted. The WannaCry Ransomware consists of multiple components. It arrives on the ruined computer in the form of a dropper, a self-reliant program that extracts the other application mechanism embedded within it. Those components include: An application that encrypts and decrypts data Files containing encryption keys A copy of Tor The program secret code is not obfuscated and was relatively easy for security pros to analyze. Once it is launched, WannaCry tries to access a hard-coded URL (the so-called kill switch); if it can't, it proceeds to investigate for and encrypt files in a slew of important formats, ranging from Microsoft Office files to MP3s and MKVs, leaving them completely inaccessible to the user. It then displays a ransom notice, demanding numbers in Bitcoin to decrypt the files.

Mehr als Normativität

More than Normativity. About the Function and Meaning of Magisterial and Military Ordinances during the Second Half of the Thirty Years’ War Research about German-language countries still disputes whether stately decrees (“Policeyordnungen”, “Mandate”) could be implemented by the respective subjects, or whether they should be implemented at all. This is an important question because it determines how we need to understand governance in the early modern period. The present article shows that the previous view of decrees is too narrow. The issue is not just whether decrees were implemented, but what other functions they fulfilled. The article explores these functions by looking at military and civil decrees and the related files during the second half of the Thirty Years’ War in the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. It shows that the decrees were not only intended to regulate coexistence, but also served to store administrative knowledge. They also fulfilled diplomatic functions, recording the results of negotiations and serving as a means of sending political signals to foreign powers. By examining the multiple functions of decrees, the article sheds a new light on the military contribution system during the Thirty Years’ War.

Apple's Cost Sharing Arrangement: Frankenstein's Monster

This paper performs a forensic analysis of Apple's transfer pricing cost sharing arrangement based on facts and documents that were disclosed in hearings before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in May 2013 and an investigation of Apple's transfer pricing arrangements by the European Commission between 2013 and 2016 as part of its State Aid investigation, related court filings in Europe and other sources. The paper finds that Apple provided conflicting information to these different investigations and that, when combined, documents from both investigations, when combined with additional research reveal that Apple appears to have violated U.S. transfer pricing laws in 2009 and later years, that should have invalidated its cost sharing arrangement but were apparently not detected by the IRS. These tax violations resulted in U.S. federal tax underpayments that we estimate to be greater than $84 billion. Apple's reserves for Uncertain Tax Positions were $16.5 billion as of September 2020, much less than this amount. The proposed adjustments under the cost sharing periodic adjustment regulations are not limited by any statute of limitations, and appear to be accompoanied by additiional tax violations, including violations of the economic substance doctrine, and the regulations governing the taxation of effectively connected income.

The Right not to Forget: Cloud Based Services Moratoriums in War Zones and Data Portability Rights

Various technologies have joined forces in recent years to outsource human memory. Digital cameras, now an essential feature of cellular devices, allows individuals to document every aspect of their lives; Cloud based services allows them to store and backup such data remotely, and to use it on many online platforms. The data stored in the cloud, of course, also contains copies of valuable personal documents one accumulates during a lifetime: personal correspondence, work related files, copies of high school and university diplomas, scans of contracts and titles, and much more. Online services enable us also to develop a digital persona through which fosters alternative ways of social relations, which are at times liberated from constraints of distances or language barriers. Individuals may spend long years cultivating their digital personae and their online communities which in turn reward them with reputational and symbolic capital, as well as emotional support. However, the globally available online services facilitating both digital personae and cloud-based storage of highly valuable personal data are provided by private, non-state actors, whose business model may develop over time in manners unexpected to their users. Reviewing the Terms of Service of common cloud-based services shows that most service providers reserve the right to purge accounts which were inactive for prolonged periods, or partially delete data related to premium services when users default on their periodical payment. Flexible business models monetizing on the captive audience of online services may be deemed acceptable in peaceful times, when habitual users can respond promptly to changes adversely affecting their online persona and data by preemptively relocating their personal data or backing it up. Although in recent years some internet memes jokingly added ‘Wifi’ and ‘Battery life’ as the new basis of Maslow’s hierarchal pyramid of human needs, those will be of less concern to individuals undergoing humanitarian crisis, struggling for survival, medical care and sustenance. Humanitarian calamities may also halt automatic payments to services providers, with the collapse of local financial infrastructure on top of the potential reallocation of individual resources to provide for more immediate needs. Once the dust settles, refugees and survivors may wish to regain access to their online accounts, which may at time contain their only memories of perished loved ones, and the only ways to contact family members and friends presumed lost in the fog of war, as well as provide access to important medical, academic, professional and other irreplaceable personal documents that might be of importance to refuges striving to establish themselves in a foreign country. While under regular circumstances, such accounts – either inactive or defaulting on their periodical fees to their providers – are treated by service providers subject to changing boilerplate terms of service and fluctuating business models, during humanitarian crisis individuals are unable to promptly respond to online warnings and to timely realize their data portability rights. They are in risk of having their retained memories – at times, all that left from their former, pre-calamity lives – deleted. This chapter aims to illustrate this problem, and offers an outline for a possible solution by establishing a moratorium mechanism under which cloud-based service providers will refrain from any deletion of data or purging of personal accounts or users that may be affected by the event. Their data will be retained for a sufficiently long period, that will allow survivors access to their personal accounts and data. Accordingly, defining the geographical domain of the moratorium could evolve as the event progresses The precariousness of refugees, displaced persons and survivors of humanitarian disasters emphasizes the importance of the right not to forget, as conceptualized in this chapter. While cloud storage renders the trope of rescuing the family photo album from a burning house obsolete, without a mechanism ensuring that its digital successor remains stored in the cloud, our memory – and a part of ourselves – will fade away.

A Blockchain Based Lifelong Learning Platform: The Smart University

According to today's education system, the content, applicability, quality and performance measurement criteria of the courses may vary according to countries, educational institutions and educators. Because of incorrect performance measurement, hidden skills disappear before they appear. Thanks to the graduation diploma it is observed that people with less than professional knowledge and skills come to better places than those who are more knowledgeable and skilled. In addition, due to the lack of a proper training plan according to the target learning community, boredom and financial problems may arise due to long periods of education. In this study, while trying to avoid material and temporal problems, a blockchain-based lifelong learning platform whose content, processing, reliability, decentralized, open to continuous and rapid accessibility, and evaluation criteria and method is completely objective is proposed. Thanks to this platform, the diplomas to be received by the students who have successfully passed the end-of-education exams will be time-stamped, immutable, safe and traceable. At the same time, all these documents, storage of training contents, diplomas, certificates, post-training exams and all related files , will be kept accessible, secure and immutable thanks to IPFS, the Inter Planetary File System. Achievements, employer and employee pools to be created according to the achievements, and a recruitment contract to be realized will be controlled by smart contracts and absolute reliability and objectivity will be ensured. All these concepts will be made available through a decentralized application (DApp) which will run on a private blockchain network that requires a partial permission to be established.

The Raid in the Editorial Of ice of the Turkish Newspaper Tan, 1945, and its Impact on the State of Soviet-Turkish and US-Turkish Relations in the Post-WWII Period

The author examines the demonstrations carried out by university students in Istanbul on December 4, 1945 and the raid on the printing operations of the pro-Soviet Tan newspaper, known as the Tan Raid, in light of U.S. State Department documents, namely the related fi les in National Archives Records Administration. The infl uence of the Tan Raid on Turkey’s international relations is discussed in the context of Turkish-American and Turkish-Soviet relations. The Raid is regarded as a signifi cant incident since it coincides with the post WW2 period when Turkey’s relations with the Soviet Union had already deteriorated due to Moscow’s demands to revise the Montreux Convention by 19th of March 1945. Furthermore, Turkish-American diplomatic contacts in the aftermath of the Raid show Washington’s perspective on policy towards Soviet Union, as U.S. offi cials advised a moderate line to their Turkish counterparts. On the other hand, preparations for the Raid seem highly controversial since Turkish government offi cials did not strongly condemn the event and the police did not intervene against the protestors despite of their violent actions towards Tan and some left leaning bookstores. The slogans during the demonstration show its anti-Soviet character, which Ankara denied in order to decrease tensions with the Soviets by arguing that it was Tan ’s owner, the Sertel couple to whom the anger was directed, not the Soviet Union. The intelligence obtained by diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, the meetings they conducted with Turkish politicians, their conclusions regarding the process leading up to the raid, and their opinions on Turkish-Soviet relations provide the background for the analysis.

Kedudukan Cucu Sebagai Ahli Waris Pengganti Dalam Hukum Waris Islam (Studi Kasus Nomor: 0013/PDT.P/2015/PA.DPS)

Abstrak—Dari seluruh hukum yang berlaku saat ini, hukum kewarisan mempunyai peran yang begitu penting bahkan juga menentukan serta mencerminkan sistem kekeluargaan yang berlaku didalam masyarakat. Akhir-akhir ini sangat banyak sengketa yang timbul akibat dari kasus permohonan ahli waris yang meninggal terlebih dahulu dari seorang pewaris tersebut. Kasus tersebut memiliki jalan keluar dengan dibentuknya sebuah konsep tentang ahliwaris pengganti. Permasalahan hukum tentang penggantian ahliwaris merupakan sebuah konsep yang diperbaharui dalam KHI. Konsep ahli waris pengganti bertujuan untuk memperoleh rasa keadilan bagi ahli waris. Adapun rumusan masalah yang diangkat adalah (1) Bagaimana kedudukan cucu sebagai ahliwaris pengganti didalam sistem kewarisan Islam menurut KHI? dan (2) Bagaimanakah perttimbangan majelis hakim terhadap kedudukan cucu sebagai ahliwaris pengganti didalam Permohonan Penetapan PA Denpasar Nomor: 0013/Pdt.p/2015/Pa.Dps.? Dalam penelitian ini menggunakan penelitian hukum normatif yaitu dalam pengkajiannya mengolah bahan-bahan kepustakaan serta berkas putusan yang berkaitan. Kesimpulan dari penelitian ini dapat dikatakan cucu yang berkedudukan sebagai ahli waris pengganti didalam sistem kewarisan Islam menurut KHI PA Denpasar mengeluarkan Penetapan Nomor: 0013/Pdt.p/2015/Pa.Dps bahwa cucu tersebut bisa menggantikan posisi kedua orang tuanya yang dapat disebut ahli waris, karena sesuai Psl 185 ayat 1 KHI, seseorang dikatakan bisa mendapatkan warisan karena memperoleh kedudukan yaitu seseorang yang telah diganti harus sudah dalam keadaan meninggal dunia lebih awal dari pada si pewaris .&#x0D;

Synthesis of A Digital PID/LQR Control System for Duty-Cycle Modulation Buck Converters

&lt;p&gt;This research paper presents a synthesis approach of a digital optimal PID/LQR control system for DCM (duty-cycle cycle modulation) Buck converters. The step response of the DCM Buck converter is obtained under Multisim virtual simulation framework. The related data file is saved as *.SCP format, and imported into EditPad Lite7 editor, then exported as Matlab file to be processed. The transfer function of the DCM Buck converter is computed from the imported step response data. Then, using the zoh (zero order holder) discretization method with 100 ms resampling period, the z-transfer function of the DCM Buck converter is computed, and that of the analog optimal PID/LQR(linear quadratic regulator) controller is calculated using Tustin’s discretization technique. Furthermore, the step response of the related closed loop digital PID control system is simulated and compared to that of the original analog PID/LQR control system. The simulation results obtained are presented in order to show the high precision as well as the reliability of Matlab-based synthesis of digital optimal PID/LQR control systems for DCM Buck converters.&lt;/p&gt;

Solyntus, the New Highly Contiguous Reference Genome for Potato (Solanum tuberosum).

With the rapid expansion of the application of genomics and sequencing in plant breeding, there is a constant drive for better reference genomes. In potato (Solanum tuberosum), the third largest food crop in the world, the related species S. phureja, designated “DM”, has been used as the most popular reference genome for the last 10 years. Here, we introduce the de novo sequenced genome of Solyntus as the next standard reference in potato genome studies. A true Solanum tuberosum made up of 116 contigs that is also highly homozygous, diploid, vigorous and self-compatible, Solyntus provides a more direct and contiguous reference then ever before available. It was constructed by sequencing with state-of-the-art long and short read technology and assembled with Canu. The 116 contigs were assembled into scaffolds to form each pseudochromosome, with three contigs to 17 contigs per chromosome. This assembly contains 93.7% of the single-copy gene orthologs from the Solanaceae set and has an N50 of 63.7 Mbp. The genome and related files can be found at https://www.plantbreeding.wur.nl/Solyntus/. With the release of this research line and its draft genome we anticipate many exciting developments in (diploid) potato research.

Health and Freedom: The Tense Interdependency of HIV/AIDS Interventions and LGBTIQ Activism in Kenya

In recent decades in Kenya, public health interventions to address the HIV vulnerability of sex workers and men who have sex with men have been accompanied by a rise in gender and sexual minority (hereby also interchangeably referred to as LGBTIQ) activist initiatives that frame access to healthcare, legal recognition, and social acceptance as a human right. Complementing long-term engagement and ethnographic research among sexual minorities in Kenya, in addition to fieldwork stints between 2016-2018, the authors analyzed online statements regarding priorities and strategies of LGBTIQ organizations (local and global) and legal case files. We examine one case in which transgender and intersex plaintiffs objected to the name and mission of an NGO working towards equality and full inclusion of sexual and gender minorities because it incorporated the words gay and lesbian while applying for its official registration and it would include trans and intersex in the organization’s mission. As such, the politics of naming, identity, and representation are neither new nor exclusive to Kenyan LGBTIQ activism. This case and related files reflect the everyday interactions of groups with seemingly conflicting goals, showing them to be part of a rich, connected “niche activist” scene. Rather than take this as a rigid split between activist organizations, we argue that these tensions are historically rooted in – and form a microcosm of – the politics of the global NGOization of both healthcare access and human rights advocacy in Kenya.

Cursive-Text: A Comprehensive Dataset for End-to-End Urdu Text Recognition in Natural Scene Images.

Reading text in natural scene images is an active research area in the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition as text detection, text recognition and script identification are required. In this data article, a comprehensive dataset for Urdu text detection and recognition in natural scene images is presented and analysed. To develop the dataset, more than 2500 natural scene images were captured using a digital camera and a built-in mobile phone camera. Three separate datasets for isolated Urdu character images, cropped word images and end-to-end text spotting were developed. The isolated Urdu character and cropped word images dataset contain a much larger number of samples than existing Arabic natural scene text datasets. The Urdu text spotting dataset contains images with Urdu, English and Sindhi text instances. However, the focus has been given to the Urdu text instances. The ground truths for each image in the isolated character, cropped word or text spotting datasets are provided separately. The proposed datasets can be used to perform Urdu text detection and recognition or end-to-end recognition in natural scenes. These datasets can also be helpful to develop Arabic and Persian natural scene text detection and recognition systems, as Urdu is a derived language of these scripts and has many similar letters. The datasets can also be helpful to develop multi-language translation systems, which can facilitate foreign tourists to read and translate multilingual text in natural scene images. To evaluate the datasets, state-of-the-art machine learning and deep neural networks were used to build the text detection and recognition models, where the best classification accuracies are achieved. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first dataset proposed for Urdu text detection, recognition or end-to-end text recognition in natural scene images. The aim of this data article is to present a benchmark work in the field of document analysis and recognition.Computer ScienceComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionTablesFiguresImagesText FilesUsing a digital camera with a 20 megapixels (MP) sensor, an iPhone with a 12 MP back camera and a Samsung mobile with a 16MP back camera.RawAnalyzedEnvironmental factors such as illuminations, blurring and lighting conditions were considered while capturing images. The focus was given to the text within an image.The images in the dataset were obtained from the advertisement banners, sign-boards along the road side and streets, shop name boards, text written on the passing vehicles and walls.The images provided in this dataset were collected in different cities of Sindh, Pakistan.Summarized data are hosted with the article.The datasets and their related files are hosted in a Mendeley public data repository.DOI: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/k5fz57zd9z/1URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/k5fz57zd9z.1