Background: Surgical mortality data are collected routinely in high-income countries, yet virtually no low-or middle-income countries have outcome surveillance in place. The aim was prospectively to collect worldwide mortality data following emergency abdominal surgery, comparing findings across countries with a low, middle or high Human Development Index (HDI).Methods: This was a prospective, multicentre, cohort study. Self-selected hospitals performing emergency surgery submitted prespecified data for consecutive patients from at least one 2-week interval during July to December 2014. Postoperative mortality was analysed by hierarchical multivariable logistic regression.
Automated assessment and prediction of marital outcome in couples therapy is a challenging task but promises to be a potentially useful tool for clinical psychologists. Computational approaches for inferring therapy outcomes using observable behavioral information obtained from conversations between spouses offer objective means for understanding relationship dynamics. In this work, we explore whether the acoustics of the spoken interactions of clinically distressed spouses provide information towards assessment of therapy outcomes. The therapy outcome prediction task in this work includes detecting whether there was a relationship improvement or not (posed as a binary classification) as well as discerning varying levels of improvement or decline in the relationship status (posed as a multiclass recognition task). We use each interlocutor’s acoustic speech signal characteristics such as vocal intonation and intensity, both independently and in relation to one another, as cues for predicting the therapy outcome. We also compare prediction performance with one obtained via standardized behavioral codes characterizing the relationship dynamics provided by human experts as features for automated classification. Our experiments, using data from a longitudinal clinical study of couples in distressed relations, showed that predictions of relationship outcomes obtained directly from vocal acoustics are comparable or superior to those obtained using human-rated behavioral codes as prediction features. In addition, combining direct signal-derived features with manually coded behavioral features improved the prediction performance in most cases, indicating the complementarity of relevant information captured by humans and machine algorithms. Additionally, considering the vocal properties of the interlocutors in relation to one another, rather than in isolation, showed to be important for improving the automatic prediction. This finding supports the notion that behavioral outcome, like many other behavioral aspects, is closely related to the dynamics and mutual influence of the interlocutors during their interaction and their resulting behavioral patterns.
Psychological empowerment at work contributes to higher individual's performance which eventually facilitates institution to accomplish excellent services and performance. Few studies have examined the specific relationships between these three constructs especially in higher education sector. The aim of this study is to see to what extent psychological empowerment and innovative work behavior affect job satisfaction. From 250 respondents and using SEM AMOS as the analytical tool, the results confirm that psychological empowerment significantly affects innovative work behavior. However, psychological empowerment does not affect job satisfaction unless mediated by innovative work behavior. Meanwhile, innovative work behavior significantly affects job satisfaction.
Entrainment is a known adaptation mechanism that causes interaction participants to adapt or synchronize their acoustic characteristics. Understanding how interlocutors tend to adapt to each other's speaking style through entrainment involves measuring a range of acoustic features and comparing those via multiple signal comparison methods. In this work, we present a turn-level distance measure obtained in an unsupervised manner using a Deep Neural Network (DNN) model, which we call Neural Entrainment Distance (NED). This metric establishes a framework that learns an embedding from the population-wide entrainment in an unlabeled training corpus. We use the framework for a set of acoustic features and validate the measure experimentally by showing its efficacy in distinguishing real conversations from fake ones created by randomly shuffling speaker turns. Moreover, we show real world evidence of the validity of the proposed measure. We find that high value of NED is associated with high ratings of emotional bond in suicide assessment interviews, which is consistent with prior studies.
Radon concentration and annual effective doses were measured in drinking water and dwellings of Kulachi city of Pakistan. Twenty samples of drinking water were collected from various sources i.e. tap water, pond water, hand pump and tube well water. CR-39 (Columbia Resin-39) based NRPB (National Radiological Protection Board) radon dosimeters were used to measure the radon concentration. Among the various types of samples, the maximum average value of radon concentration was detected (1.218±0.005 Bq/L) in tube well water while the minimum average value was (0.602±0.003 Bq/L) in tap water. The annual effective dose was calculated from the measured radon concentration which varied from 4.39 × 10-3 to 8.89 × 10-3 mSv/y. The measured values of radon concentration as well as the annual effective dose were found within the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA) and World Health Organization (WHO) recommended limits.In order to carry out radon survey in dwelling, thirty CR-39 based NRPB dosimeters were installed in various buildings in the area under study. The maximum measured indoor radon concentration was found to be 270±22 Bq/m3 while the minimum was 21±2 Bq/ m3. The mean value of indoor radon concentration in bed rooms was 98 Bq/m3 which was within the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) recommended limits however, maximum concentration of 240 Bq/m3 was observed in a mud made room which was above the US-EPA and WHO new recommended limits. The mean annual effective dose from indoor radon was found to be 1.546 mSv/y which was within the ICRP recommended limits.
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