Lowered antioxidant status of red blood cells in post-parturient haemoglobinuria of buffaloes

Vaccination against tick-borne encephalitis with FSME-Immun vaccine was started in the Department of Infectious Diseases, University Medical School of Bia?ystok, Poland, in 1992. No serious adverse reactions after vaccine administration were observed. Post-vaccine side effects were reported in 242 (11.3%) persons after the first dose (n = 2,135) and only in 14 patients (1.2%) after the second one (n = 1,183). These effects were mild and transitory. No relationship was observed between the frequency of adverse reactions, general or local, and the initial anti-TBE virus antibody titres or the age of the immunized individuals. Post-vaccine side effects were reported significantly more frequently among people not bitten by ticks.     

Preparation of an anion‐exchange adsorbent by the radiation‐induced grafting of vinylbenzyltrimethylammonium chloride onto cotton cellulose and its application for protein adsorption

Poly(vinylbenzyltrimethylammonium chloride)‐graft‐cotton cellulose, an anion‐exchange matrix, was synthesized by a mutual radiation‐induced grafting technique with a ⁶⁰Co γ‐radiation source. The grafted matrix was characterized by grafting yield estimation, elemental analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. The grafting yield decreased with the increase in the dose rate. However, the grafting yield and nitrogen content of grafted samples increased almost linearly with an increase in the total irradiation dose. To evaluate the performance of the grafted anion‐exchange matrix, the protein adsorption and elution behavior were investigated in a continuous column process under various experimental conditions, with bovine serum albumin used as a model protein. The binding and elution behavior of the anion‐exchange matrix depended on different experimental parameters, such as the grafting yield, ionic strength, pH of the medium, and amount of protein loaded. From a breakthrough curve, the equilibrium binding capacity and elution percentage of the grafted anion‐exchange matrix were estimated to be 40 mg/g and 94%, respectively. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 102: 5512–5521, 2006     

A spatio‐temporal water quality assessment of the Beas and Sutlej Rivers at the Harike Wetland: A Ramsar site in Punjab,India

Lakes play a vital role in regulating water storage, flow of river water, and ultimately maintaining a balanced ecosystem. Spatial and temporal variations in physicochemical parameters of water in Harike Wetland, a Ramsar site in the northwestern state of Punjab, India, were studied. This study was conducted on a monthly basis from January to December 2015. The water quality was studied at ten locations from sites 1 to 10 upstream, central and downstream from Harike Lake for ten physicochemical parameters, including temperature, pH, electrical conductivity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen concentration biological oxygen demand, nitrate and phosphate concentrations and salinity. The findings of this study revealed that, except for temperature and pH, all parameters exhibited relatively higher values for the Sutlej River, compared with the Beas River, with sampling sites 5 to site 7 exhibiting intermediate results. The mean seasonal temperature variations ranged from 16.9 to 26.6 °C, the pH from 7.7 to 8.2, electrical conductivity from 223 to 303 μS cm^?1 and TDS concentration from 148.7 to 180.4 ppm. Correlation analysis was conducted to assess the relations between the variables. The electrical conductivity exhibited a high positive correlation with salinity and biological oxygen demand, whereas it correlated negatively with the dissolved oxygen concentration. Box and whisker plots were also plotted for the study results to better examine the data distribution.     

Automatic recognition of handwritten medical forms for search engines

A new paradigm, which models the relationships between handwriting and topic categories, in the context of medical forms, is presented. The ultimate goals are: (1) a robust method which categorizes medical forms into specified categories, and (2) the use of such information for practical applications such as an improved recognition of medical handwriting or retrieval of medical forms as in a search engine. Medical forms have diverse, complex and large lexicons consisting of English, Medical and Pharmacology corpus. Our technique shows that a few recognized characters, returned by handwriting recognition, can be used to construct a linguistic model capable of representing a medical topic category. This allows (1) a reduced lexicon to be constructed, thereby improving handwriting recognition performance, and (2) PCR (Pre-Hospital Care Report) forms to be tagged with a topic category and subsequently searched by information retrieval systems. We present an improvement of over 7% in raw recognition rate and a mean average precision of 0.28 over a set of 1,175 queries on a data set of unconstrained handwritten medical forms filled in emergency environments. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.     

Validity as a Measure of Data Quality in Internet of Things Systems

Data quality became significant with the emergence of data warehouse systems. While accuracy is intrinsic data quality, validity of data presents a wider perspective, which is more representational and contextual in nature. Through our article we present a different perspective in data collection and collation. We focus on faults experienced in data sets and present validity as a function of allied parameters such as completeness, usability, availability and timeliness for determining the data quality. We also analyze the applicability of these metrics and apply modifications to make it conform to IoT applications. Another major focus of this article is to verify these metrics on aggregated data set instead of separate data values. This work focuses on using the different validation parameters for determining the quality of data generated in a pervasive environment. Analysis approach presented is simple and can be employed to test the validity of collected data, isolate faults in the data set and also measure the suitability of data before applying algorithms for analysis. On analyzing the data quality of the two data sets on the basis of above-mentioned parameters. We show that validity for data set 1 was found to be 75% while it was found to be 67% only for data set 2. Availability and data freshness metrics performance were analyzed graphically. It was found that for data set 1, data freshness was better while availability metric was found better for data set 2. Usability obtained for data set 2 was 86% which was higher as compared to data set 1 whose usability metric was 69%. Thus, this work presents methods that can be leveraged for estimating data quality that can be beneficial in various IoT based industries which are essentially data centric and the decisions made by them depends upon the validity of data.

     

Unconstrained handwritten document retrieval

With the ever-increasing growth of the World Wide Web, there is an urgent need for an efficient information retrieval system that can search and retrieve handwritten documents when presented with user queries. However, unconstrained handwriting recognition remains a challenging task with inadequate performance thus proving to be a major hurdle in providing robust search experience in handwritten documents. In this paper, we describe our recent research with focus on information retrieval from noisy text derived from imperfect handwriting recognizers. First, we describe a novel term frequency estimation technique incorporating the word segmentation information inside the retrieval framework to improve the overall system performance. Second, we outline a taxonomy of different techniques used for addressing the noisy text retrieval task. The first method uses a novel bootstrapping mechanism to refine the OCR’ed text and uses the cleaned text for retrieval. The second method uses the uncorrected or raw OCR’ed text but modifies the standard vector space model for handling noisy text issues. The third method employs robust image features to index the documents instead of using noisy OCR’ed text. We describe these techniques in detail and also discuss their performance measures using standard IR evaluation metrics.     

An explicit predictor-corrector solver with application to seismic wave modelling

Wave-equation-based forward modelling using explicit finite-difference methods is a standard technique for calculating synthetic seismograms. The stability criterion restricts the size of the time step. In this paper a predictor–corrector method for solving the wave equation is described which allows the use of a larger time step. A stability analysis of the method is also carried out. Parallel implementation of the algorithm is described for a distributed computing environment which makes use of MPI and PVM message passing calls for communication between processors.     

Chemically clean synthesis and characterization of graphene oxide‐poly(acrylic acid–sodium styrene sulfonate) composite thermostable elastic gel encapsulating copper nanoparticles for efficient catalytic reduction of 4‐nitrophenol

The thermostable chemically blended elastic poly‐(acrylic acid–sodium‐styrene‐sulfonate–graphene oxide) super‐absorbent hydrogel was synthesized by additive‐free gamma‐radiation induced polymerization followed by crosslinking method. It showed the best swelling ratio in water due to its porous nature. The composite material adsorbed 98 mg/g Cu(II) at room temperature from the aqueous solution of Cu(II) at pH 5 by the chemi‐adsorption of Cu(II) ions at several energetically heterogeneous functional groups. The copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) of size 12 ± 8 nm had been synthesized in situ by chemical reduction of the pre‐adsorbed Cu(II) ions. The functional groups of composite hydrogel served as complexing agent and nano‐reaction sites. Avoiding any pre‐reduction induction time, the inexpensive CuNPs catalytically completely decolorized the aqueous solution of 4‐nitrophenol (4‐NP) within 60 s in the presence of NaBH₄ at a promising calculated rate constant (9.0 × 10^?2/s) ever reported in the literatures. It is in contrast to the commonly noticeable phenomenon for other CuNPs‐based catalysis of 4‐NP. The composite hydrogel matrix helped to retain the catalytic activity of CuNPs and simultaneously it helped in the osmotic inclusion of 4‐NP into the reaction cites. This composite hydrogel synthesized through a chemically clean method could be utilized for efficient conversion of hazardous chemical 4‐NP to industrially important chemical 4‐aminophenol. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2018 , 135, 46200.     

Development and Characterization of Inorganic-Organic (Si-O-Al) Hybrid Geopolymeric Precursors via Solid State Method

Silicon - In this study, an innovative one part, solution free concept applied for the development of hybrid inorganic–organic geopolymeric precursors having Si-O-Al networks at the precursor...     

Structural elastic and thermal properties of Sr x Cd1−x O mixed compounds — a theoretical approach

In the present paper, the structural and mechanical properties of alkaline earth oxides mixed compound Sr _x Cd_1?x O (0 ? x ? 1) under high pressure have been reported. An extended interaction potential (EIP) model, including the zero point vibrational energy effect, has been developed for this study. Phase transition pressures are associated with a sudden collapse in volume. Phase transition pressure and associated volume collapses [ΔV (Pt)/V(0)] calculated from this approach are in good agreement with the experimental values for the parent compounds (x = 0 and x = 1). The results for the mixed crystal counterparts are also in fair agreement with experimental data generated from the application of Vegard’s law to the data for the parent compounds.