Seed micromorphology and its taxonomic evidence in subfamily Alsinoideae (Caryophyllaceae)

Seed micromorphology of 13 species, belonging to four genera of subfamily Alsinoideae (Caryophyllaceae) were investigated with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), in order to assess their diagnostic significance at generic level and provide additional evidence on species delimitation, as well as correct identification and phylogenetic position. Genera and species of subfamily Alsinoideae exhibit great variation in ultrastructure and a high diversity of novel micromorphological characters were observed. Variation in seed shape, color, hilum, anticlinal wall, epidermal cell, cell surface, margins, and quantitative characters as length and width were studied in detail, compared, illustrated, and their taxonomic significant were discussed. Seed shapes of the species were classified as reniform, round, angular, subcircular, subreniform, and elliptical pyriform, with sub‐central, central, basal, and nearly basal hilum. Wavy, irregular, tetragonal, and elongated epidermal cells structure has been observed as an exomorphological character. The present findings show that the micromorphology of subfamily Alsinoideae provides taxonomic information and is helpful to distinguish different species. The results also explained that SEM morphology of seeds provide important data about affinity among taxa and give potential characters in delimitation of members of subfamily Alsinoideae at generic and species level. A principal component analysis allowed to highlight the most outsiders among seed micromorphology with a possible explanation. Taxonomic keys were developed based on micromorphological characters to delimit the species and useful for their quick identification within subfamily Alsinoideae.     

Image encryption algorithm using S-box and dynamic Hénon bit level permutation

Multimedia Tools and Applications - For the secure transmission of data through the medium of internet, images have significant importance. Image encryption provides secure transmission of images...     

VISCOMETRIC MEASUREMENT OF CHROMIUM(III)-POLYACRYLAMIDE GELS†

Gelled polymers are being used increasingly to modify the movement of injected fluids in secondary and enhaced oil recovery processes. A common gelation process involves the reduction of Cr(VI) to Cr(III) in the presence of polyacrylamide. The Cr(III) reacts or interacts with the polymer to form a gel network. Although correlations of gelation time with principal process variables have been obtained, viscometric data have not been reported during or after gelation. These data are needed for fluid flow calculations in surface equipment and estimation of flow behaviour in reservoir rocks.

A Weissenberg Rheogoniometer, with cone and plate geometry, was used to obtain viscometric data for the gelation of polyacrylamide and chromium (III). Solutions consisting of polyacrylamide polymer, sodium dichromate-dihydrate and sodium bisulfite were gelled under a steady shear field at constant temperature. The shear stress versus time profile for the galation process was interpreted to define a gelation time and to determine the apparent viscosity of the gelled fluid. The gelation time decreased as the applied shear rate increased up to about 14.25 sec^-1 and was affected by shear rate history. Viscometric properties of the gelled solutions were determined. Apparent viscosity of the gelled solutions decreased as the shear rate under which they were formed increased.

Post gelation studies indicated that gels exhibited a residual stress at zero shear rate and behaved as Bingham plastics under steady shear. Gels formed at low shear rates were more viscous than gels formed at high shear rates. However, the structure of these gels was susceptible to shear degradation.     

A Real-Time Data Mining Approach for Interaction Analytics Assessment: IoT Based Student Interaction Framework

Students’ interaction and collaboration with the fellows and teachers using the Internet of Things (IoT) based interoperable infrastructure is a convenient way. Measuring student attention is an essential part of the educational assessment for students’ interaction. As new learning styles develop, new tools and assessment methods are also needed. The focus in this paper is to develop IoT based interaction framework and analysis of the student experience in electronic learning (eLearning) so that the students can take full advantage of the modern interaction technology and their learning can increase to a high level. This setup has a data collection module, which is implemented using Visual C# programming language and computer vision library. The number of faces, number of eyes, and status of eyes are extracted from the video stream, which is taken from a video camera. The extracted information is saved in a dataset for further analysis. The analysis of the dataset produces interesting results for student learning assessments. Modern learning management systems can integrate the developed tool to consider student-learning behaviors when assessing electronic learning strategies. The tools are also developed for the data collection on both student and teacher ends. Correlation of data and hidden meaning are extracted to make the learning experience and teaching performance better and adaptable. IoT based infrastructure provides the facilities to fellow students about location awareness, fellows’ accessibility, social behavior and helping hand.     

An OWA‐Based Ranking Approach for University Books Recommendation

Generally the book recommendation approaches are personalized in nature, that is, they utilize the users’ purchasing behavior to recommend them the book similar to their preferences. The main problem with the personalized recommendation is its knowledge requirement about users’ past preferences. As a result, these techniques fail in producing appropriate recommendation for a new user whose preferences are not known. The personalized recommendation also needs extra space to store the users’ preferences. In this paper, a framework to recommend books to university students for their studies is presented. In order to answer which books are to be included in the syllabus, a specialized way of recommendation, where recommendations from experts of the subjects at different universities are considered, is presented. We have suggested a ranked recommendation approach for books, which employ Ordered Weighted Aggregation (OWA), a fuzzy‐based aggregation, to aggregate the several ranking of the top universities. On the one hand, it does not need user prior preferences, and on the other hand, it eases the complexities of personalized recommendation to huge number of users and replaces it with a single ranked recommendation. The experimental results are compared with the existing positional aggregation algorithm that demonstrates significant improvement in the results with respect to various performance metrics.     

In vitro germination and biochemical profiling of citrus reticulata in response to green synthesised zinc and copper nanoparticles

Green synthesis of nanoparticles by using plants is an emerging class of nanobiotechnology. It revolutionizes all the fields of nanobiotechnology by synthesizing chemical‐free nanoparticles for various purposes. In the present study, zinc and copper nanoparticles were synthesized by using the white leaves of Allium cepa and further characterized through Zeta analyzer and Scanning electron microscopy. Zeta analyzer elucidated that zinc nanoparticles ranged from 8‐32 nm while copper nanoparticles ranged from 15‐30 nm. Scanning electron microscopy clarified that zinc nanoparticles were irregular while copper nanoparticles were spherical in shape. The effects of green synthesized nanoparticles were evaluated on the germination frequency and biochemical parameters of plant tissues. The nucellus tissues were inoculated on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium augmented with 30 µg/ml suspension of zinc and copper nanoparticles. Green synthesized nanoparticles enhanced the in vitro germination parameters because of their low toxicity and high efficacy. Significant results were obtained for germination parameters in response to the applications of zinc nanoparticles as compared to copper nanoparticles. These nanoparticles could also induce stress in plantlets by manipulating the endogenous mechanism as a result various defence compounds are produced which have potential in treating various human ailments. Copper nanoparticles showed higher toxicity as compared to zinc nanoparticles and triggered the production of antioxidative enzymes and non‐ enzymatic compounds.Inspec keywords: botany, zinc, copper, nanoparticles, nanofabrication, biochemistry, scanning electron microscopy, electrokinetic effects, biological tissues, toxicology, nanobiotechnology, biological techniquesOther keywords: in vitro germination, biochemical profiling, citrus reticulata, green synthesised zinc nanoparticles, green synthesised copper nanoparticles, green chemistry, secondary metabolites, nanoparticles synthesis, white leaves, Allium cepa, zeta analyser, scanning electron microscopy, onion extract, nucellus tissues, Murashige‐Skoog medium, biologically synthesised nanoparticles, toxicity, root length, shoot length, seedling vigour index, plantlets, endogenous mechanism, human ailments, antioxidative enzymes, nonenzymatic compounds, size 8 nm to 32 nm, Zn, Cu     

Application of NIR chemometric methods for quantification of the crystalline fraction of warfarin sodium in drug product

Abstract

Monitoring of the physical state of warfarin sodium (WS) in products is essential for minimizing product quality variability in order to ensure consistent clinical performance. This study reports the development of chemometric models for quantifying the crystalline and amorphous fractions of WS in commercial drug products using NIR spectroscopy. Formulations based on commercially available products with different API to excipient ratio were used for the study. For each content, two formulations containing either lactose monohydrate or lactose anhydrous as the predominant formulation excipient were prepared. Two formulations containing either 100% amorphous WS (AWS) or crystalline WS (CWS) were prepared and mixed in various ratios to obtain sample matrices containing AWS/CWS 0–100%. The uniformity of the samples was confirmed by near infrared chemical imaging. Data were mathematically pretreated by multiplicative signal correction and Savitzky–Golay second derivative. Principal component regression and partial least square regression models were developed from mathematically treated data. All the models showed linear trend for amorphous and crystalline fractions of the WS as indicated by correlation and R²?>?0.99 and >0.98, respectively. The models demonstrated good performance parameters with a low-root mean squared error, standard error and bias. The model predicted CWS and AWS contents were in very close agreement with the actual values. The study indicated the utility of NIR chemometric methods in quantification of the crystalline and/or amorphous fraction of WS in its products.     

An Iterative Algebraic Geometric Approach for Identification of Switched ARX Models with Noise

The algebraic geometric (AG) approach has been used to identify switched auto regressive exogenous (SARX) models in hybrid systems, and it has several advantages over other SARX identification methods. This paper is focused on improving the estimation accuracy of the AG approach for systems corrupted with indispensable noises. A stochastic hybrid decoupling polynomial (SHDP) is constructed by reformulating the hybrid decoupling polynomial (HDP) used in the original AG method. An iterative scheme is developed to estimate parameters of the SHDP, which are used to calculate the SARX model parameters. This estimation involves linear regression with multiplicative noises, therefore a novel approach is proposed to solve this regression problem. Then, the parameters are recovered from the SHDP. Finally, all these steps for SARX model identification are summarized in an algorithm called the iterative algebraic geometric (IAG) approach. Simulations and experimental validation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of and the improvement made by the proposed IAG method.     

Physical distribution,logistics, supply chain management,and the material flow theory: a historical perspective

The evolution from physical distribution to logistics, and then to supply chain management has invoked many interesting studies in recent years. By applying the material flow theory that expands attributes of logistics to coordination of environment, economy, and society, this paper examines the evolution from a unique perspective: sustainable development. The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary review of the evolution of physical distribution, logistics, supply chain management, and their new stage-material flow theory. The paper aims at tracing how concepts and findings in physical distribution, logistics, supply chain management, and material flow have been developed and extended continually. The results show that the requirements for material flow services vary with the economic development level in different countries and that material flow service is required to be compatible with a country’s development stage. The paper concludes that the MF theory is the option for dealing with the overwhelming complexity of material flow systems in the global economy of the twenty-first century.     

Chattering and stability analysis of the sliding mode control using inverse hyperbolic function

Chattering is a known issue in sliding mode control (SMC) and much research has been carried out to mitigate the chattering and its effects. In this work the chattering and stability analysis of the inverse hyperbolic function (IHF) based reaching law (RL) has been carried out. The work mathematically formulates the reaching time and calculates the describing function (DF) for the IHF based RL, which is used to formulate the conditions for chattering avoidance. The bound for the gain of RL has been calculated that will result in the chattering avoidance. Finally the proposed scheme has been used to control the speed of DC motor. Experimental results show avoidance of chattering and reduction in the reaching time.