Search

Air pollution poses significant public health risks, necessitating accurate and efficient monitoring of particulate matter (PM). These organic compounds may be released from natural sources like trees and vegetation, as well as from anthropogenic, or human-made sources including industrial activities and motor vehicle emissions. Therefore, measuring PM concentrations is paramount to understanding people’s exposure levels to pollutants. This paper introduces a novel image processing technique utilizing photographs/pictures of Do-it-Yourself (DiY) sensors for the detection and quantification of PM10 particles, enhancing community involvement and data collection accuracy in Citizen Science (CS) projects. A synthetic data generation algorithm was developed to overcome the challenge of data scarcity commonly associated with citizen-based data collection to validate the image processing technique. This algorithm generates images by precisely defining parameters such as image resolution, image dimension, and PM airborne particle density. To ensure these synthetic images mimic real-world conditions, variations like Gaussian noise, focus blur, and white balance adjustments and combinations were introduced, simulating the environmental and technical factors affecting image quality in typical smartphone digital cameras. The detection algorithm for PM10 particles demonstrates robust performance across varying levels of noise, maintaining effectiveness in realistic mobile imaging conditions. Therefore, the methodology retains sufficient accuracy, suggesting its practical applicability for environmental monitoring in diverse real-world conditions using mobile devices.

The current study aims to examine how and why actors contest the business education field through rankings. Inspired by the field structuration process and field level change, we argue that categorization systems, in this case, rankings, construct boundaries of the business education field and redefine authority and elites for the field. Ten highly ranked Pakistani business schools were selected through a purposive sampling method. For the thematic analysis adopted in the current study, we collected empirical evidence mainly through interviews with the directors of accreditation and ranking bodies, deans, and marketing directors of business schools. The interview data was also supplemented by secondary data such as internal student surveys, business school’s annual reports, and other relevant sources of data. The current study showed institutional work in the business education field. Through categorization systems, actors use their authority to challenge the existing social order and define the uncontested space of the business education field in developing countries. Actors then populate the uncontested space with new members thus legitimizing new rules and standards for the field and promoting new elites for the field thus creating new social order.

This study investigates the concept of ethical value proposition. In traditional marketing theory value proposition is primarily derived from the tangible valuables goods in the economies, that is delivered through the service, which has termed goods as dominant factor of value creation. However recent studies contradicting this concept, they claim that not the goods, but service is the base and core source of value and that value is exchanged through tangible/goods. This emergent ethical value propositions provides an interesting research point to further explore the concept of ethical value propositions through relationship managers of Islamic banking perspective. A qualitative phenomenological research design and thematic analysis method has been used in this study to make sense of the experiences of 6 relationship managers about the concept. The data is collected based on purposive sampling technique which is analyzed using QSR NVIVO 12 plus software. Based on the findings of this study a novel framework of value creation cycle is developed that shows that the concept of ethical value propositions that Islamic banks offers are service based and the associated value delivery process. The competencies of bankers and customers are bases of the offered ethical value propositions. This article provides a deeper understanding of ethical value propositions of Islamic banking products using phenomenological inquiry, which has not been explored before.Keywords: Ethics, Ethical Value Proposition, Islamic Banking ServiceJEL Classifications: M310, M30 DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/irmm.9217

Traditional advertising techniques seek to govern the consumer’s opinion toward a product, which may not reflect their actual behavior at the time of purchase. It is probable that advertisers misjudge consumer behavior because predicted opinions do not always correspond to consumers’ actual purchase behaviors. Neuromarketing is the new paradigm of understanding customer buyer behavior and decision making, as well as the prediction of their gestures for product utilization through an unconscious process. Existing methods do not focus on effective preprocessing and classification techniques of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, so in this study, an effective method for preprocessing and classification of EEG signals is proposed. The proposed method involves effective preprocessing of EEG signals by removing noise and a synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) to deal with the class imbalance problem. The dataset employed in this study is a publicly available neuromarketing dataset. Automated features were extracted by using a long short-term memory network (LSTM) and then concatenated with handcrafted features like power spectral density (PSD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to create a complete feature set. The classification was done by using the proposed hybrid classifier that optimizes the weights of two machine learning classifiers and one deep learning classifier and classifies the data between like and dislike. The machine learning classifiers include the support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and deep learning classifier (DNN). The proposed hybrid model outperforms other classifiers like RF, SVM, and DNN and achieves an accuracy of 96.89%. In the proposed method, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F1 score were computed to evaluate and compare the proposed method with recent state-of-the-art methods.

Background: South Asia has become a major epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding South Asians’ awareness, attitudes and experiences of early measures for the prevention of COVID-19 is key to improving the effectiveness and mitigating the social and economic impacts of pandemic responses at a critical time for the Region. Methods: We assessed the knowledge, behaviours, health and socio-economic circumstances of 29,809 adult men and women, at 93 locations across four South Asian countries. Data were collected during the national lockdowns implemented from March to July 2020, and compared with data collected prior to the pandemic as part of an ongoing prospective surveillance initiative. Results: Participants were 61% female, mean age 45.1 years. Almost half had one or more chronic disease, including diabetes (16%), hypertension (23%) or obesity (16%). Knowledge of the primary COVID-19 symptoms and transmission routes was high, but access to hygiene and personal protection resources was low (running water 63%, hand sanitisers 53%, paper tissues 48%). Key preventive measures were not widely adopted. Knowledge, access to, and uptake of COVID-19 prevention measures were low amongst people from disadvantaged socio-economic groups. Fifteen percent of people receiving treatment for chronic diseases reported loss of access to long-term medications; 40% reported symptoms suggestive of anxiety or depression. The prevalence of unemployment rose from 9.3% to 39.4% (P

Introduction: Thrombocytopenia is one of the numerous complications of malaria infection, which could be lethal if not diagnosed and managed on time. Our study aims to determine the occurrence of thrombocytopenia in patients hospitalized with malaria. Material and Methods: A retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted between January 2016 till December 2019. Data was collected from the patient’s record registers. A total of 201 cases were included in this study. Data was collected, entered, and analyzed in IBM SPSS 23 software package. Results: Out of the total 201 cases, 108 (53.7%) were males and 93 (46.3%) were females. 189 (94%) cases were suffering from P. vivax, 10 (5%) were suffering from P. falciparum, and cases suffering from both were only 2 (1%). Thrombocytopenia was present in 183 (91.04%) cases (95% confidence interval 2.13-2.37). 91.53% (n=173) of cases diagnosed with P. vivax had thrombocytopenia while 90% (n=9) cases diagnosed with P. falciparum had thrombocytopenia. Conclusion: We conclude from this study that, thrombocytopenia occurs in all species of malaria and is not a distinguishing feature between the principal types of malaria. With prompt identification and management, platelets count reverts back to normal.

A double-layer broadband high-transmission terahertz linear-to-circular polarization metasurface is experimentally demonstrated in frequencies between 0.46 and 0.62 THz. The measured results show a good agreement with the simulations. The values of co-polarization transmission coefficients T x x and T y y remain above 0.82 in both simulation and experiment, and the simulated and measured axial ratio is 26.2% and 29.6%, respectively. Moreover, the experimental ellipticity remains above 0.98 in the region from 0.5 to 0.62 THz. The average measured polarization conversion ratio is 0.68. The multi-reflection and transmission interference model is used to explain the physical mechanism of polarization conversion. The proposed structure could be used in terahertz transmission and detection because of its stable, high ellipticity and transmittance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dispersion relations at the interface between magnetized plasma and a dielectric have been derived based on the effective dielectric function of anisotropic plasma. Results show that a new surface plasmon polariton (SPP) appears when an external magnetic field is introduced. The locations and transmission lengths of the two SPPs can be tuned by the external magnetic field. The collision frequency has little influence on their locations but affects the transmission length. Increasing the dielectric constant causes the two SPPs to shift to a lower frequency with the transmission lengths decreasing. These features are unique and can dynamically control the properties of SPPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A nearly structural-insensitive switchable broadband terahertz metamaterial absorber is proposed, which consists of several gold rods and a vanadium dioxide (VO2) ground plane separated by a dielectric spacer. By controlling the temperature of VO2, state of the absorber can be switched from “on” to “off” in the frequency range of 1.116–1.564 THz. The physical mechanism of the absorber is given based on the wave-interference theory and field distributions. Interestingly, the proposed absorber shows a similar performance for random arrangements of a given number of rods on the top layer, which could greatly reduce the requirement of fabrication accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]