Comparative studies of the effect of moderate and high altitude stress on human subjects: studies on erythrocyte ghost ATPases

Studies have been carried out on erythrocyte membrane‐bound ATPases of ten female subjects at a moderate altitude (2200 m) and at a high altitude (5100 m). Mg²⁺‐ATPase activity of the subjects was found to be significantly stimulated under conditions at a high altitude in comparison to that at a moderate altitude. The changes in total lipids and cholesterol contents of erythrocyte ghosts and plasma Na⁺/K⁺ levels at high altitude in comparison to the moderate altitude indicates an alteration in the membrane permeability under high altitude stress. On acclimatization of the subjects from a high to a moderate altitude, the studied parameters reverted to the values as observed at a moderate altitude.     

An indigenously developed electronic control system for Langmuir-Blodgett film deposition set-up

An indigenous and simple electronic control system for Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) film deposition set-up has been developed. This set-up consists of a microstepping circuit to drive the stepper motors with precision and smooth motion, essential for controlled movement of the barriers and substrate in the LB set-up. Linear variable differential transformer (LVDT)-based displacement measuring device has been developed and used to measure the surface pressure of the monolayer material spread on the water surface. A control program is written which incorporates all operational modes required to drive the set-up and to acquire the datain situ using a set of user-friendly commands. This control set-up has been successfully used to plot the pressure-area isotherm of various amphiphilic compounds such as ferric stearate, zinc arachidate etc. and for deposition of ordered LB films of ferric stearate.     

A high voltage programmable ramp generator

In this paper, a ramp generator with programmable slope is presented. It consists of a high voltage step generator, followed by integrator. The capacitor and inductor in the integrator are designed such that they can be varied by a microcontroller. This circuit generates two bipolar ramps with fastest speed <1 ns and provides continuous speed variation from 6 to 30 ns for a ramp of 500 V. This is being developed as a part of automated streak camera for deflection of electron beam.     

High-utility and diverse itemset mining

High-utility Itemset Mining (HUIM) finds patterns from a transaction database with their utility no less than a user-defined threshold. The utility of an itemset is defined as the sum of the utilities of its items. The utility notion enables a data analyst to associate a profit score with each item and thereof to a pattern. We extend the notion of high-utility with diversity to define a new pattern type called High-utility and Diverse pattern (HUD). The notion of diversity of a pattern captures the extent of the different categories covered by the selected items in the pattern. An application of diverse-pattern lies in the recommendation task where a system can recommend to a customer a set of items from a new class based on her previously bought items. Our notion of diversity is easy to compute and also captures the basic essence of a previously proposed diversity notion. The existing algorithm to compute frequent-diverse patterns is 2-phase, i.e., in the first phase, frequent patterns are computed, out of which diverse patterns are filtered out in the second phase. We, in this paper, give an integrated algorithm that efficiently computes high-utility and diverse patterns in a single phase. Our experimental study shows that our proposed algorithm is very efficient as compared to a 2-phase algorithm that extracts high-utility itemsets in the first phase and filters out the diverse itemsets in the second phase.

     

A structure-function-control paradigm for knowledge-based modeling and design of manufacturing workcells

This paper discusses the integration of structural, functional and control knowledge in manufacturing workcell modeling, simulation and design. After an overview of applications of semantic and object-oriented data models in the manufacturing domain, issues relating to the control synthesis for manufacturing workcells are presented. In particular, a data model encompassing functional and control features, along with application domain structural knowledge, is developed. This model assists in explicitly representing the control aspects of engineering design within an object-oriented database and supports a task-level, functionality-driven, manufacturing workcell design. Since manufacturing workcells consist of a number of elements interacting in a complex manner, workcell control design is one of the most difficult steps in the workcell design procedure. Message passage, commonly used in object-oriented databases, provides no explicit modeling of the database behavior. Hence, it can not serve as a tool for the design of system control. On the other hand, Petrinets (PN) have proven successful in describing complex interaction among active agents. This paper will explore the incorporation of Petri nets as a basis for describing application control knowledge within a structure-function-control data model.     

A theory of attributed equivalence in databases with application toschema integration

The authors present a common foundation for integrating pairs of entity sets, pairs of relationship sets, and an entity set with a relationship set. This common foundation is based on the basic principle of integrating attributes. Any pair of objects whose identifying attributes can be integrated can themselves be integrated. Several definitions of attribute equivalence are presented. These definitions can be used to specify the exact nature of the relationship between a pair of attributes. Based on these definitions, several strategies for attribute integration are presented and evaluated     

Control and analysis software for a laser scanning microdensitometer

A PC-based control software and data acquisition system is developed for an existing commercial microdensitometer (Biomed make model No. SL-2D/1D UV/VIS) to facilitate scanning and analysis of X-ray films. The software is developed in Labview, which includes operation of the microdensitometer in 1D and 2D scans and analysis of spatial or spectral data on X-ray films, such as optical density, intensity and wavelength. It provides a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) to analyse the scanned data and also store the analysed data/image in popular formats like data in Excel and images in jpeg. It has also on-line calibration facility with standard optical density tablets. The control software and data acquisition system is simple, inexpensive and versatile.     

Prevalence of spatial disorientation in Indian Air Force aircrew

The 1 Aero Medical Training Centre has surveyed aircrew of the Indian Air Force to determine the prevalence of Spatial Disorientation (SD), as related to aircraft stream, age, flying experience, geographical location and other operationally significant variables. The reported prevalence of SD is 75% among fighter aircrew, 64% in transport aircrew, and 55% in helicopter aircrew. Whereas the prevalence of SD does not appear to vary significantly with age and flying experience, it is higher in fully operational pilots and in pilots returning to flight duties after a ground tenure, as compared to ab-initio and type-converting pilots.