Seasonal Variations in Birth Weight in Suzhou Industrial Park

Many environmental factors have been shown to adversely influence birth weight,and new insight has been gained into＇seasonal programming＇.We studied a total of 23,064 infants.The mean birth weight varied across seasons.Logistic regression analysis was used to obtain the crude and adjusted odds ratios（ORs）for dichotomous outcomes（e.g.,macrosomia,low birth weight）.

Gradient effect of road transportation on economic development in different geomorphic regions

The economic benefits of transport infrastructure investment have been widely accepted.However,the varying influence of road transport development across vertical space has rarely been discussed.Taking Sichuan province in China as case study area where the landform is diverse and complex,administrative counties were categorized into 4 main types:plain counties,hill counties,mountain counties,and plateau counties.Using statistical data during 2006-2014,theperformanceofeconomic development and transport construction level in the four types of counties are discussed.Subsequently,the heterogeneous effect of each grade road on economy was calculated by local regression model(GWR).The results indicate that plain counties largely surpassed the other geomorphic counties in economic development level,while the gradient gap among them was on the decline.Similarly,distribution of transport infrastructure presented a decreasing trend from the low plain counties to high plateau counties.Regional imbalances were mainly reflected in the County road and Village road.Regarding the changes of regional gaps,National&Provincial roads and County roads were constantly expanding,whereas the disparity of Village road was slowly narrowing over time.Particularly noteworthy was the non-stationary economic influence of traffic factors across vertical gradients.On average,National&Provincial roads generated higher benefits in the high elevation regions than the lowlands.In contrast,County road and Village road were found to be more effective in promoting economic development in plains.With regard to local estimates of traffic factors,coefficients in mountain counties exhibited larger fluctuation ranges than other geomorphic units.The conclusions provide a basis for government decisionmaking in a more reasonable construction arrangement of road facilities and sustainable economic development.

Compressive Sensing Reconstruction Based on Weighted Directional Total Variation

Directionality of image plays a very important role in human visual system and it is important prior information of image. In this paper we propose a weighted directional total variation model to reconstruct image from its finite number of noisy compressive samples. A novel self-adaption, texture preservation method is designed to select the weight. Inspired by majorization-minimization scheme, we develop an efficient algorithm to seek the optimal solution of the proposed model by minimizing a sequence of quadratic surrogate penalties. The numerical examples are performed to compare its performance with four state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results clearly show that our method has better reconstruction accuracy on texture images than the existing scheme.

Pharmaceutical evaluation and comparison of different brands of metronidazole available in the local market of Peshawar(Pakistan)

Objective:To assess the pharmaceutical quality of different brands of metronidazole manufactured,available and prescribed by the doctors of Peshawar,Pakistan.Methods:Different film-coated metronidazole products manufactured by multinational and national pharmaceutical industries and prescribed by the doctors were collected from Peshawar,Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,Pakistan.Their hysico-chemical properties were assessed,which included friability,hardness,disintegration,dissolution and weight variation tests according to the the United States Pharmacopoeia(USP)standards.Results:All the brands showed a average weight of 5.74 g for 13 tablets(products A-M).Product J had the highest weight and products D and E failed the hardness,friability and disintegration time according to USP standards.Products M,K and G,L failed disintegration test and dissolution test,respectively.Weight variation of all the products proved statistically that they were in accordance with the standards of USP.Conclusions:The study suggested that products A,F,H and J passed all the tests according to the USP standards while the rest of them did not fulfill the standards specification.