Informatics Publishing Limited

K. Chithra ¹, Jaywant Vijayakumar ¹, U. Vijayabanu ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Psychology, Madras School of Social Work, Egmore, Chennai, IN
2 Department of Counseling Psychology, Madras School of Social Work, Egmore, Chennai, IN

Abstract

To find out the level of hope and positive attitude towards AIDS illness, among Chennai patients. Tamil Nadu has dropped from third to fifth among states with the largest number of people infected with the deadly virus. HIV positive members of the family can find themselves stigmatized and discriminated against within the home. It is found that women and non-heterosexual family members are more likely than children and men to be mistreated. In the workplace, people living with HIV may suffer stigma from their co-workers and employers, such as social isolation and ridicule, or experience discriminatory practices. People with AIDS tend become more depressed or anxious. A positive attitude towards the illness can help the patients accept or overcome the illness more effectively. Hence the present study aimed at finding out the level of hope and positive attitude towards the illness in patients. Exploratory study with ex-post facto research design was used in the present study. Random sampling strategy was used to draw the sample. The sample comprised of AIDS patients (n=30) among which 19 were male and 11 were female. Adult hope scale by Snyder (2002) was used to find out the level of hope among the patients and Silver lining questionnaire by Sodergren and Hyland (2000) was used to assess positive attitudes towards AIDS illness. The results revealed that there is a lot of hope and better positive attitude towards illness among AIDS patients. The mean difference revealed that men and women differ in their level of hope and positive attitude. Illness makes an individual realize his/her true purpose in life and the direction in which they carry their life. From this study we can understand that AIDS patients have hope and positive attitude in life. People with illness should be given more care and counselling to help the in focus in life positively.

Keywords

AIDS, Hope, Positive Psychology.

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K. Chithra ¹, P. P. Anilkumar ¹, M. A. Naseer ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Architecture, National Institute of Technology, Calicut – 673601, Kerala, IN

Abstract

United Nation’s World urbanization prospects Report 2001, projected that the proportion of urban population in the world will touch 70% by 2050. In 2012, according to the World Bank data catalogue, 53% of the world population can be categorized as urban population, people living in urban areas as defined by respective national statistical offices. Increasing trend of this urbanization has made the residential land use a major shareholder in urban land uses. Residential land use predominantly consist of buildings used or constructed or adopted to be used wholly for human habitation and also include garages, and other out-houses necessary for the normal use of the building as a residence. There are systems/methods like Environmental Impact Assessment in place to check on the impacts of individual buildings/projects on environment. However a method/system to check the environmental implications of specific/critical land uses from a holistic viewpoint is totally missing. To conduct such a check it is mandatory to know basic traits of the land use under consideration. This paper fundamentally discusses on how to capture the innate characteristics of residential land use in an area and thereby its impact generation capacity and to express it as a site specific index. For this an expert survey was performed to integrate the various characteristics of residential land use in an urban area of a large city. The study was conducted in an Indian Urban context where there is multiplicity in scale of residential development and socioeconomic back ground of people. The expert group’s organized inputs are gathered, compared and composed in this regard and the results are presented and communicated.

Keywords

Analytical Hierarchy Process, Environmental Impacts, Index Generation, Land Use Characteristic’s

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K. Chithra ¹, T. Santhanam ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science, SDNB Vaishnav College for Women, IN
2 Department of Computer Applications, DG Vaishnav College, IN

Abstract

Image denoising was a preprocessing step in image processing used to remove the noise while retaining as much as possible the important features. The fluctuations in the pixel value caused by the unwanted disturbance were known as noise. Hence, noise reduction techniques have to be used to improve the quality of the image. This article reports on the results of a research algorithm that uses median, midpoint and mean for the reduction of salt and pepper noise from the grayscale images. The median value was calculated for the uncorrupted pixels which are having the minimum distance. The proposed algorithm was tested using Euclidean distance, D4 distance and D8 distance as the distance measures. In this approach, the 3x3 window was selected as initial window size and the window size was made adaptive based on the noise density. The proposed filter was experimented using standard Lena image, 200 iris images, sample Plant images, sample MRI images and sample CT images in JPG/JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format. These grayscale images used as a test image were induced with salt and pepper noise density ranging from 10% to 90%. The simulated results proved that the proposed approach performs better than the MDBUTMF, AMMF, MNF, IUTMMF, and HYBRID filtering algorithms reported in the literature in terms of PSNR, IEF and MSE.

Keywords

Unsymmetrical, Trimmed, Median, Distance Measure, Midpoint, Salt and Pepper Noise.

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