INTRODUCTION Obesity is an increasing problem in South Asian countries and Sri Lanka is no exception. The socioeconomic determinants of obesity in Sri Lanka, and in neighbouring countries are inadequately described. Aim was to describe social, cultural and economic determinants of obesity in a representative sample from Kalutara District in Sri Lanka. METHODS This was a cross sectional descri...

Weiyuan gas field, located in the Sichuan basin of south China, is a large marine gas field with the oldest reservoir (the Sinian sequences) in south China. The hydrocarbon origin of the gas field has long been debated by petroleum geologists. Recently, it was recognized that a paleo-oil pool maybe the significant contributor to the gas field. Consequently, when the paleo-oil pool had been crac...

We present a training approach for recurrent neural networks by combing evolutionary and gradient descent learning. We train the weights of the network using genetic algorithms. We then apply gradient descent learning on the knowledge acquired by genetic training to further refine the knowledge. We also use genetic neural learning and gradient descent learning for training on the same network t...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of cardiac rhythm on the echocardiographic mitral valve area (MVA) and transmitral gradient calculation in relation to net atrioventricular compliance (Cn). METHODS Patients (n=22) with mild or moderate pure rheumatic mitral stenosis (MS) (MVA <2 cm2 and MVA >1 cm2) and atrial fibrillation (AF) were evaluated. All patients underwent t...

We study the percolation threshold for fully penetrable discs by measuring the average location of the frontier for a statistically inhomogeneous distribution of fully penetrable discs. We use two different algorithms to efficiently simulate the frontier, including the continuum analogue of an algorithm previously used for gradient percolation on a square lattice. We find that φc = 0.676 339 ± ...

A comparative analysis was performed on datasets from two Global Seismographic Network (GSN) stations near the South Pole, Antarctica. The results of this analysis are provided and show that there is significant reduction of the background seismic noise generated by the activities at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station as a function of distance and depth. Data gathered from site selection wor...

Forest vegetation patterns alongside the Poerua River, south Westland, were studied to determine whether a distinct riparian community could be defined either immediately adjacent to the river, or out to the limit of overbank flooding. Ten randomly located 100 m transects were established perpendicular to the river at each of two sites. Ground cover of alluvial sediment indicated that annual ov...