Surveillance of Biomedical Waste Practices in a Multi Speciality Hospital, its Evaluation and Audit

Aims: To assess the knowledge of Biomedical waste (BMW) categories, colour coding, transport, storage & disposal of Biomedical waste among the healthcare workers. Study Design: Cross sectional. Place and Duration of Study: Multi speciality Hospital, Pune, over the duration of 1 month. Methodology: A predesigned questionnaire containing closed-ended questions was used to conduct this cross sectional study on HCWs. The data related to awareness & knowledge about various aspects of Biomedical waste amongst the Healthcare workers was collected. Results: Out of total 100 Healthcare workers (HCWs), 40 doctors were correctly knowing all the categories of Biomedical waste. 45 doctors & 40 nursing staff (total 85 out of 100 HCWs) could answer correctly the questions on colour coding of BMW. Only 30 doctors & 21 nursing staff could answer correctly about BMW transport. 25 doctors &18 nurses could answer correctly the questions related to BMW storage & disposal. Conclusion: The vigorous & repeated training & evaluation is needed to bridge the observed knowledge gaps amongst the HCWs.

Gender reveal parties and the construction of the prenatal gendered environment

Expecting parents are often eager to learn the sex of their baby. Gender-reveal parties offer a community or family celebration of that information, often complete with clichéd pink or blue colour coding. Common practices include party games, competitions between Team Boy and Team Girl, and the colourful surprise reveal via confetti, smoke, balloons or food. Not only is the term ‘gender-reveal’ inaccurate (at best sonograms reveal biological sex), the practice privileges stereotypical gender binaries and legitimates pre-birth personhood under the guise of merriment, appropriating the unborn body as a contested discursive site. The gender-reveal party enhances reliance on medical technology and consumerism, retrieves traditional superstitions about pregnancy, obsolesces privacy and reverses into the commodification of both mother and child. Gender-reveals do not necessarily celebrate the pregnancy or the mother. The gender-reveal party functions to reinforce traditional cisgender binaries and constructs gendered expectations for the child even before birth.

Visual Identification of Inconsistency in Pattern

The visual identification of inconsistencies in patterns is an area in computing that has been understudied. While pattern visualisation exposes the relationships among identified regularities, it is still very important to identify inconsistencies (irregularities) in identified patterns. The significance of identifying inconsistencies for example in the growth pattern of children of a particular age will enhance early intervention such as dietary modifications for stunted children. It is described in this chapter, the need to have a system that identifies inconsistencies in identified pattern of a dataset. Also, techniques that enable the visual identification of inconsistencies in patterns such as fault tolerance and colour coding are described. Two approaches are presented in this chapter for visualising inconsistencies in patterns namely; visualising inconsistencies in objects with many attribute values and visual comparison of an investigated dataset with a case control dataset. These approaches are associated with tools which were developed by the authors of this chapter: Firstly, ConTra which allows its users to mine and analyse the contradictions in attribute values whose data does not abide by the mutual exclusion rule of the dataset. Secondly, Datax which mines missing data; enables the visualisation of the missingness and the identification of the associated patterns. Finally, WellGrowth which explores Children’s growth dataset by comparing an investigated dataset (data obtained from a Primary Health Centre) with a case control dataset (data from the website of World Health Organisation). Instances of inconsistencies as discovered in the explored datasets are discussed.

Ways of text adaptation by means of creolization in pedagogical discourse

This research is focused on creolized or polycode texts functioning in pedagogical discourse and the ways of text adaptation by means of creolization. With the development of modern ways of communication, the number of texts combining verbal and non-verbal components has dramatically increased. In modern communication non-verbal component may be represented by pictures, photos, different printing types and colour coding, video and audio components. Due to their high efficiency such texts are used in all kinds of discourse: pedagogical, political, medical etc. One of the purposes of pedagogical discourse is the presentation of new information to students. This information should be adapted to the conceptual system of the addressee in order to facilitate the perception. Creolized or polycode texts often perform this function. According to our research, means of creolization can be used in adaptation of a notion, situational, motivational, and intensifying adaptation.

Costumes in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and their Literary and Painterly Sources

Sienkiewicz had to dress the characters of Quo vadis in period garments. Their descriptions rarely appear, but they are highly suggestive of how the author understood ancient Rome and tried to recreate it in his work. Sienkiewicz gives detailed descriptions of costumes only when they concern the most important figures in his novel, or if clothing plays an important role in the plot. The rest of the protagonists are treated as collective characters whose clothing is identified only in terms of togas, stolae, or the robes of the poor. Beside the ubiquitous tunic, other Latin names of clothing primarily indicate the status of characters or are mentioned when Sienkiewicz uses clothes to disguise them. In those cases, the ubiquitous tunic receives an adjectival descriptor of colour or shade, which in the world of Quo vadis has a differentiating function. The names of the characters’ outfits have their origins in Roman literature. The terms introduced in the novel allow for an easy recreation of the author’s reading list, which consists of the basic works of a classical education—Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Pliny, Horace, Propertius, Juvenal, Martial. Sometimes Sienkiewicz mixes his classical terminology with those of ecclesiastical Latin, creating an unintendedly humorous effect. However, the writer’s use of costume colour seems to have been inspired by the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Henryk Siemiradzki. This chapter will explore the very close relationship between text and paintings, and utilizes Sienkiewicz’s colour coding to pinpoint some of the images on which he drew.

Colour vision standards: Past, present, and future

Historically, signal lights (red-green-amber) were used in shipping, rail, and road transportation. This colour schema continued in the aviation industry too. However, automation has taken over aviation sector with electronic maps and colour-coded multifunction displays. Despite sweeping changes seen in the use of colour coding in aviation, there is little change in colour vision standards and in the way colour vision testing is done for the aircrew, military and civil. The changing needs of aviation dictate that renewing the standards is necessary. Furthermore, the new standards will dictate aircraft design, and hence, it is mandatory that they remain current for the next 50 years or so. It becomes necessary to understand the role colour vision plays in the modern cockpit and suggest the colour vision standards accordingly. In the same breath, it is important to understand the evolution of colour vision testing and colour theories, so as to develop or adopt a more suitable test for the changing aviation scenario.