BACKGROUND The stepped wedge cluster randomised trial (SW-CRT) is increasingly being used to evaluate policy or service delivery interventions. However, there is a dearth of trials literature addressing analytical approaches to the SW-CRT. Perhaps as a result, a significant number of published trials have major methodological shortcomings, including failure to adjust for secular trends at the a...

The aim of the study was to examine differences in stress and recovery across gender and time (preseason and play-offs) in a sample of amateur basketball players of the Italian league (C division). Fifty amateur basketball players (33 men and 17 women) age 17-30 y (23.5 ± 9.19 y) participated in the study. Twenty-eight athletes (16 men and 12 women) completed the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire f...

Document layout analysis is concerned about the decomposition of raster representation of a document into several regions which contain homogeneous entities. This paper describes a new approach to segment documents with complex layout and degraded image quality. The approach uses a local-to-global strategy which can be adapted to a variety of documents. The system was tested on different Englis...

Data quality is a serious concern in every data management application, and a variety of quality measures have been proposed, including accuracy, freshness and completeness, to capture the common sources of data quality degradation. We identify and focus attention on a novel measure, column heterogeneity, that seeks to quantify the data quality problems that can arise when merging data from dif...

This study was carried out to compare agro-morphological traits and nutritive value of 25 tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea) ecotypes grown in Tehran, Iran. The experiments were carried out in a split plot design during 2016-2018 growing seasons. The results showed that there was a significant genetic variation in existing germplasm. The highest heritability was related to dry forage yi...

Background and objectives: Hibiscus sabdariffa L. (roselle) sepals, commonly known as bissap is prepared as a cold drink which is widely drunk in Ghana and across West-Africa for their medicinal and nutritional properties. The plant is known to have anti-hypertensive, anti-hyperlipidemic, anticancer, anti-diabetic and anti-inflammatory activities. For such a widely sol...

Sustainable transportation systems are the need of modern times. There has been an unexpected growth in the number of transportation activities over years and the trend is expected to continue in the coming years. This has obviously associated environmental costs like air pollution, noise, etc. which is degrading the quality of life in modern cities. To cope us this crisis, municipal administra...

This paper demonstrates the mitigation of power quality issues in a grid connected wind energy conversion system using UPFC. The procedure to compensate the power quality issues like voltage sag and harmonics are presented. A Frame work for 25 bus test system is developed in the ETAP & load flow analysis &harmonic analysis is performed. It is observed that the UPFC is effective in compensating ...

Community detection algorithms are widely used to study the structural properties of real-world networks. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the qualitative performance of several community detection algorithms using large-scale email networks. The email networks were generated from real email traffic and contain both legitimate email (ham) and unsolicited email (spam). We compare the qu...