Recovery of an Acid Mine Drainage-Impacted Stream Treated by Steel Slag Leach Beds

Mine Water and the Environment - The East Branch of Raccoon Creek, Ohio is highly impacted by pre-regulation coal mining and contains 10 steel slag leach beds that passively treat the low pH, and...     

Analysis and revamping of heat exchanger networks for crude oil refineries using temperature driving force graphical technique

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - The refining industry is an energy-intensive industry; most of the energy is consumed in heating and cooling requirements. Revamping or retrofitting of...     

In situ boron carbide–titanium diboride composites prepared by mechanical milling and subsequent Spark Plasma Sintering

Boron carbide–titanium diboride composites were synthesized and consolidated by Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) of mechanically milled elemental powder mixtures. The phase and microstructure evolution of the composites during sintering in the 1,200–1,700 °C temperature range was studied. With increasing sintering temperature, the phase formation of the samples was completed well before full density was achieved. The distribution of titanium diboride in the sintered samples was significantly improved with increasing milling time of the Ti–B–C powder mixtures. A bulk composite material of nearly full density, fine uniform microstructure, and increased fracture toughness was obtained by SPS at 1,700 °C. The grain size of boron carbide and titanium diboride in this material was 5–7 and 1–2 μm, respectively.     

HLR-Net: A Hybrid Lip-Reading Model Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Lip reading is typically regarded as visually interpreting the speaker’s lip movements during the speaking. This is a task of decoding the text from the speaker’s mouth movement. This paper proposes a lip-reading model that helps deaf people and persons with hearing problems to understand a speaker by capturing a video of the speaker and inputting it into the proposed model to obtain the corresponding subtitles. Using deep learning technologies makes it easier for users to extract a large number of different features, which can then be converted to probabilities of letters to obtain accurate results. Recently proposed methods for lip reading are based on sequence-to-sequence architectures that are designed for natural machine translation and audio speech recognition. However, in this paper, a deep convolutional neural network model called the hybrid lip-reading (HLR-Net) model is developed for lip reading from a video. The proposed model includes three stages, namely, pre-processing, encoder, and decoder stages, which produce the output subtitle. The inception, gradient, and bidirectional GRU layers are used to build the encoder, and the attention, fully-connected, activation function layers are used to build the decoder, which performs the connectionist temporal classification (CTC). In comparison with the three recent models, namely, the LipNet model, the lip-reading model with cascaded attention (LCANet), and attention-CTC (A-ACA) model, on the GRID corpus dataset, the proposed HLR-Net model can achieve significant improvements, achieving the CER of 4.9%, WER of 9.7%, and Bleu score of 92% in the case of unseen speakers, and the CER of 1.4%, WER of 3.3%, and Bleu score of 99% in the case of overlapped speakers.

     

Using adjusted GPA and adjusted course difficulty measures to evaluate differential grading practices in college

In this study, the Rasch rating scale model (Andrich, 1978) was applied to college grades of four freshman cohorts from a large public university. After editing, the data represented approximately 34,000 students, 1,700 courses and 119 departments. The rating scale model analysis yielded measures of student achievement and course difficulty. Indices of the difficulty of academic departments were derived through secondary analyses of course difficulty measures. Differences between rating scale model measures and simple grade averages were examined for both students, courses, and academic departments. The differences were provocative and suggest that the rating scale model could be a useful tool in addressing a variety of issues that concern college administrators.     

Application of liquisolid technology for promoting the renoprotective efficacy of walnut extracts in chronic renal failure rat model

Chronic renal failure (CRF) is among the major health problems that could lead to increased morbidity and mortality among population. ‘Nutraceuticals’ is an emerging field for natural agents from plant foods that could reduce the progression of such disease. Many newly developed drugs are having bioavailability problems owing to their water insolubility. Liquisolid technique is one of the promising technological approaches to increase solubility and hence, drug absorption. The aim of the present research is to prepare and evaluate the renoprotective effect of the walnut extracts liquisolid formulations in CRF rat model. Saturation solubility study claimed PEG 400 and Tween 20 as good solubilizers for walnut extracts, thus chosen for preparation. The angle of slide was determined for the carrier; microcrystalline cellulose and coating material; silicon dioxide and liquid load factor was evaluated. Eight liquisolid systems were prepared employing 25% and 50% of liquid medication. Their flow and compressibility parameters showed good properties. Dissolution study was more in favor of formulations prepared using PEG 400. Of these, formulation F8 comprising carrier/coat ratio (10:1) and 50% liquid medication, showing superior dissolution properties was selected to perform stability and in-vivo evaluations. Two CRF induced rat groups received F8 at two oral doses (50 and 100?mg/kg). Biochemical and nutritional parameters were compared with both normal and CRF control rats. Results showed improvement of renal function, oxidative stress, antioxidant and inflammatory biomarkers as well as increased appetite and body weight gain on administration of both doses of walnut liquisolid formulation, F8.     

The effect of ferrous ions,calcium ions and citric acid on absorption of ciprofloxacin across caco-2 cells: practical and structural approach

Objective: To study the potential influence of selected metal ions on absorption (and hence oral bioavailability of ciprofloxacin (Cipro) in presence and absence of a competing ligand.

Significance: The presence of metal ions together with Cipro results in complexes exhibiting a decreased bioavailability. Attempts were made to better understand the mechanism of decreased Cipro bioavailability in the presence of metals such as calcium and ferrous ions, and a small-sized ligand citric acid (CitA).

Methods: Effect of complex size or other potential factors was studied using diffusion through synthetic membrane, permeation studies across Caco-2 cells and capillary electrophoresis. A molecular dynamics (MD) simulation study was conducted to find the arrangement and the nature of the interactions between Cipro molecules and ferrous ions.

Results: Cipro was shown to form complexes with metals and CitA. The presence of CitA improved permeation of Cipro through the synthetic membrane but this was not as obvious in case of Caco-2 cells. Capillary electrophoresis suggested the existence of large molecular aggregates of Cipro: metal complexes. MD simulations offered clear evidence of large size aggregates in line with the experimental findings. CitA alone significantly improved permeation of Cipro through Caco-2 cells.

Conclusions: The size of the formed complexes, rather than the decrease in the solubility of formed complexes, plays a significant role in permeation (absorption) of Cipro. CitA might ameliorate the effect of co-administered metal ions on the bioavailability of Cipro.     

Cognitive-Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy as a Maintenance Treatment for Chronic Depression.

Although the efficacy of maintenance pharmacotherapy for the prevention of recurrence in major depressive disorder (MDD) is well documented, few studies have tested the efficacy of psychotherapy as a maintenance treatment. The authors examined the efficacy of the cognitive-behavioral analysis system of psychotherapy (CBASP) as a maintenance treatment for chronic forms of MDD. Eighty-two patients who had responded to acute and continuation phase CBASP were randomized to monthly CBASP or assessment only for 1 year. Significantly fewer patients in the CBASP than assessment only condition experienced a recurrence. The 2 conditions also differed significantly on change in depressive symptoms over time. These findings support the use of CBASP as a maintenance treatment for chronic forms of MDD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)