Descriptive epidemiology of childhood cancers in Bangalore, India

While fairly complete and reliable incident data on childhood cancers are available from the registries in India, mortality and survival information is not. Information concerning the latter was obtained by the Bangalore cancer registry through active follow-up involving visits to homes of patients. Between 1982 and 1989, 617 cases of cancers in childhood were registered, giving an age-standardized incidence rate of 84.8 and 48.4 per million in male and female children, respectively. Active follow-up provided mortality/survival information in 532 or 86.2 percent of these cases. Overall, observed five-year survival was 36.8 percent (both genders combined) with a relative survival of 37.5 percent when childhood mortality in the general population was taken into account. The five-year relative survival was best for thyroid carcinoma (100 percent) followed by Hodgkin's disease (73 percent) and retinoblastoma (72.9 percent). Survival was comparatively low, being 9.9 percent in acute nonlymphatic leukemia and less than 20 percent in rhabdomyosarcoma and the category grouped as 'other malignant neoplasms.' Survival in Hodgkin's disease was influenced by clinical stage at presentation, but was not statistically significant possibly due to small numbers.     

Using time-driven activity-based costing to manage digital forensic readiness in large organisations

A digital forensic readiness (DFR) programme consists of a number of activities that should be chosen and managed with respect to cost constraints and risk. Traditional cost systems, however, can not provide the cost of individual activities. This makes it difficult or impossible for organisations to consider cost when making decisions about specific activities. In this paper we show that the relatively new cost system, time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC), can be used to determine the cost of implementing and managing activities required for DFR. We show through analysis and simulation that the cost information from a TDABC model can be used for such decisions. We also discuss some of the factors that ought to be considered when implementing or managing the use of TDABC in a large organisation.     

Microstructure refinement with forced convection in aluminium and superalloys

The cooling and average local solidification times were determined for slow solidifiation of Al-4.4 wt% Cu alloy under natural convection and under electromagnetically forced axisymmetric rotation during liquid cooling and solidification in graphite moulds. Cooling rates were measured within situ thermocouples. The conditions needed to stabilize the radial temperature gradient with rotation were established. The microstructure size decreased with increasing rotation, as did the local solidification times. The average grain and dendrite size without imposed rotation is coarser near the mould wall compared with the centre of the casting. This trend is reversed with imposed rotation. Rotation also led to a smaller spread of grain and dendrite size at any chosen height of the casting. These results are discussed in relation to existing theories, and several reasons for an improved heat transfer coefficient with rotation are presented. Forced convective solidification was then carried out for various shapes of integral investment cast Nimonic-90 alloy solidifying under modified conditions that prevented columnar grain formation. Similar results to those recorded for the aluminium case were obtained and are presented here. The major conclusion is that observations indicating a reduction of microstructure spacing during forced convection should also consider improved heat extraction at the mould-metal interface.List of symbols Gr Grashof number =gTZ ^{3 3}/ ³ - g _r acceleration in radial direction - g acceleration in direction - g _z acceleration inZ direction (gravity) - h heat transfer coefficient - k _l thermal conductivity of liquid - Nu _z Nusselt number =hZ/k _l - Pr Prandtl number =/ - Ra Rayleigh numberGr Pr - R radius of mould - Re _r Reynolds number =V ₀ R/ - T temperature - T temperature difference in radial direction - Ta Taylor number = ²4H ⁴ W ²/ ² - V velocity - W r.p.m. - thermal diffusivity - coefficient of volume expansion - viscosity - density Mr G. S. Reddy is also a post graduate student registered at the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India.     

Investigation of Mechanical and Microstructural Properties of Fiber-Reinforced Geopolymer Concrete with GGBFS and Metakaolin: Novel Raw Material for Geopolymerisation

Silicon - In modern days, one or the way, development of infrastructure plays a major role that decides upon the matrix of our lifestyle. The development of geopolymer concrete (GPC) is an...     

Simulation Study of Dielectric Modulated Dual Material Gate TFET Based Biosensor by Considering Ambipolar Conduction

Silicon - In this paper, a dielectric modulated dual material gate TFET (DM-DMG_TFET)based biosensor is proposed. In order to detect various biomolecules, a nanogap cavity is formed by the...     

A Numerical Investigation of Heat Suppression in HEMT for Power Electronics Application

Silicon - In this paper, AlGaN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) with stacked passivation (Diamond/SiN) is proposed and investigated. The implementation of stacked passivation in HEMT...     

Visible‐light‐induced controlled/living radical polymerization of styrene with a phenyl seleno group at one terminal chain end: 1‐(Phenylseleno)ethyl benzene as a photoiniferter

The photopolymerization of styrene with a well‐defined molecular architecture and a low polydispersity index and with methyl and phenylseleno (? SePh) groups at α‐ and ω‐chain ends, respectively, was performed via a controlled/living radical polymerization with a new initiating system, 1‐(phenylseleno)ethyl benzene/tert‐butyl diphenyl (phenylseleno) silane, through the absorption of visible light at room temperature. A novel initiating living radical polymerization was examined. The yield and number‐average molecular weight (M_n) of the resulting polymer increased with the reaction time. Furthermore, a linear relationship was found in a plot of M_n versus the polymer yield. These results indicated that this polymerization proceeded through a living radical mechanism. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 93: 348–355, 2004     

Ozone Contactor Hydrodynamics

Tracer tests were conducted at the 6,000 pounds of ozone per day Tucson, CAP Water Treatment Plant in Tucson, Arizona. The tests were designed to determine T₁₀ values through the contactors at various operating conditions. The tests were modeled using three techniques. Peclet Number was calculated for each of the runs, which would indicate the hydrodynamic conditions inside the ozone contactor. The results indicated that the increase in water flow rate and the number of cells with gas flow increased Peclet Number. The flow rate of liquid seemed to impact the Peclet Number more than gas flow. The headloss in each cell appeared to be important in controlling the distribution of liquid and gas through the cell. A correlation was developed between the product of gas and liquid phase Reynolds Number and Peclet Number.     

A study on the effect of new cyanate and phenoxy polymer on TGDDM/DDS/GMP formulations

An attempt was made on the modification of the tetraglycidyl‐4,4′‐diaminodiphenyl methane/diaminodiphenyl sulfone (TGDDM/DDS) system to improve properties for several industrial applications. Epoxy resins [TGDDM and 1‐glycidyloxy‐4‐methoxy phenol (GMP)] were synthesized in the laboratory. Also, a new cyanate ester and phenoxy polymer were synthesized and characterized by FTIR, ¹H‐/¹³C‐NMR, and thermal studies. GMP was added as a diluent and a new cyanate ester (DCDPT) was introduced to reduce the tight crosslinking density. Further, a new phenoxy polymer was added to improve the toughness property. A variety of neat resin casts using different compositions of the blends were made and their physical, chemical, thermal, and mechanical properties were evaluated to study the effect of GMP as a diluent, cyanate ester as a comonomer, and phenoxy polymer as a toughener. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 88: 2963–2973, 2003     

Efficient mining of discriminative co-clusters from gene expression data

Discriminative models are used to analyze the differences between two classes and to identify class-specific patterns. Most of the existing discriminative models depend on using the entire feature space to compute the discriminative patterns for each class. Co-clustering has been proposed to capture the patterns that are correlated in a subset of features, but it cannot handle discriminative patterns in labeled datasets. In certain biological applications such as gene expression analysis, it is critical to consider the discriminative patterns that are correlated only in a subset of the feature space. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, it presents an algorithm to efficiently find arbitrarily positioned co-clusters from complex data. Second, it extends this co-clustering algorithm to discover discriminative co-clusters by incorporating the class information into the co-cluster search process. In addition, we also characterize the discriminative co-clusters and propose three novel measures that can be used to evaluate the performance of any discriminative subspace pattern-mining algorithm. We evaluated the proposed algorithms on several synthetic and real gene expression datasets, and our experimental results showed that the proposed algorithms outperformed several existing algorithms available in the literature.