Prediction of dispersed phase holdup in a modified multi‐stage bubble column scrubber

This paper reports on the experimental investigation carried out to evaluate fractional dispersed phase holdup for a gas‐liquid mixture in a modified multi‐stage bubble column (with contraction and expansion disks), which has been conceived, designed and fabricated as a wet scrubber for control of air pollution; in addition it has versatile use as a gas‐liquid contactor in chemical process industries. A correlation developed for predicting fractional dispersed phase holdup has been found to be encouraging and highly significant from statistical analysis.     

Solvent Crystallization of the Fat and Fatty Acids of Schleichera trijuga Seed

The crystallizations of the kusum oil and the mixed fatty acids thereof were studied from several solvents at various temperatures (+10° C to ?60° C). The results indicate in general that in the range of temperatures studied, petroleum ether as a single solvent is comparable in efficiency to methanol and superior to both acetone and ethanol in respect of separation of the saturated and unsaturated components of the fatty acid mixture. The saturated and unsaturated fractions of the oil also are better separated by petroleum ether than acetone. Further, oleic acid essentially free from linoleic acid is obtainable by a preliminary crystallization of the fatty acid mixture from petroleum ether at ca. ?12° C, followed by two additional crystallizations from acetone at ca. ?55° C.     

BLAST-SSAHA Hybridization for Credit Card Fraud Detection

A phenomenal growth in the number of credit card transactions, especially for online purchases, has recently led to a substantial rise in fraudulent activities. Implementation of efficient fraud detection systems has thus become imperative for all credit card issuing banks to minimize their losses. In real life, fraudulent transactions are interspersed with genuine transactions and simple pattern matching is not often sufficient to detect them accurately. Thus, there is a need for combining both anomaly detection as well as misuse detection techniques. In this paper, we propose to use two-stage sequence alignment in which a profile analyzer (PA) first determines the similarity of an incoming sequence of transactions on a given credit card with the genuine cardholder's past spending sequences. The unusual transactions traced by the profile analyzer are next passed on to a deviation analyzer (DA) for possible alignment with past fraudulent behavior. The final decision about the nature of a transaction is taken on the basis of the observations by these two analyzers. In order to achieve online response time for both PA and DA, we suggest a new approach for combining two sequence alignment algorithms BLAST and SSAHA.     

Cognitive distortions and adolescent affective disorder. Validity of the CNCEQ in an inpatient sample. Children's Negative Cognitive Error Questionnaire

Despite a proliferation of recent research examining childhood and adolescent depression, the area still lags behind the adult depression field, particularly in the investigation of cognitive correlates of affective psychopathology. To advance cognitive research with youth, the Children's Negative Cognitive Error Questionnaire (CNCEQ) was developed to provide a measure of cognitive distortions or errors in children and adolescents. Yet, few studies have employed the CNCEQ and no evidence exists supporting the validity of its four component cognitive error scales. The purpose of the present study was to examine the construct validity of the CNCEQ and its constituent scales through the use of factor analysis and criterion-group comparisons. Groups of adolescent psychiatric inpatients, diagnosed as affective or disruptive disordered, completed the CNCEQ following admission. Results failed to support the implicit four-factor structure of the CNCEQ, instead suggesting the appropriateness of a single-factor solution labeled "negative thinking." Despite no diagnostic group differences on the CNCEQ total or other scale scores, affective disordered patients evinced more cognitive errors on the Overgeneralizing scale. Findings suggest that the CNCEQ in its current stage of development holds promise, yet requires refinement to produce a valid measure of cognitive functioning in youth.     

Extraction efficiency of saturated-gain high-power dye laser amplifiers: effect of nonlinear signal absorption

The effect of nonlinear signal absorption (NLSA) due to ground-state absorption and excited-state absorption in a transversely pumped high-power dye laser amplifier is theoretically examined with a one-dimensional steady-state model for a dye amplifier pumped by a copper vapor laser. A well-approximated analytical expression for the extraction efficiency is derived, from which the effect of NLSA in reducing the amplifier efficiency can be appreciated immediately and can also be interpreted in terms of certain characteristic lengths. The reduction in efficiency due to NLSA is found to be largely independent of the pump power, provided that the signal power is increased linearly with the pump power to continue to saturate the amplifier gain and suppress amplified spontaneous emission.     

Secrecy Trade-off at the Physical Layer over Mixed Fading Multicast Channels Employing Antenna Diversity

This paper deals with the secrecy performance analysis of a multicast network over mixed fading scenarios in which a cluster of passive eavesdroppers is trying to overhear the secret transmission. Our key contribution is to prevent this malicious attack of the illegitimate receivers. Rayleigh/ Rician mixed fading channels are considered to model alternately the multicast/ eavesdropper and eavesdropper/ multicast channels as such mixed fading scenarios are often encountered in cellular communication where only one link (either multicast or eavesdropper) undergo a line-of-sight propagation path. At first, we derive the probability density functions for the single-input-multiple-output multicast scenarios and then the secrecy analysis is carried out by obtaining closed-form expressions for the performance matrices such as the probability of non-zero secrecy multicast capacity, ergodic secrecy multicast capacity, and secure outage probability for multicasting. The derived expressions are beneficial to investigate how the antenna diversity can combat the detrimental impact of fading as well as the number of multicast users and eavesdroppers, and improve the secrecy level to the acceptable limit. Moreover, the best secure scenario in terms of the secrecy parameters is obtained when the multicast channels undergo Rician fading whereas the eavesdropper channels experience Rayleigh fading. Finally, the analytical expressions are justified via the Monte-Carlo simulations.

     

Outage Performance of Uplink (UL) NOMA Network

Wireless Personal Communications - This paper proposes and analyses the power allocation coefficient normalization for successive interference cancellation in power-domain non-orthogonal multiple...     

Isolation and characterization of a monoclonal anti-quadruplex DNA antibody from autoimmune "viable motheaten" mice

A cell line that produces an autoantibody specific for DNA quadruplex structures has been isolated and cloned from a hybridoma library derived from 3-month-old nonimmunized autoimmune, immunodeficient "viable motheaten" mice. This antibody has been tested extensively in vitro and found to bind specifically to DNA quadruplex structures formed by two biologically relevant sequence motifs. Scatchard and nonlinear regression analyses using both one- and two-site models were used to derive association constants for the antibody-DNA binding reactions. In both cases, quadruplexes had higher association constants than triplex and duplex molecules. The anti-quadruplex antibody binds to the quadruplex formed by the promoter-region-derived oligonucleotide d(CGCG4GCG) (Ka = 3.3 x 10(6) M-1), and has enhanced affinity for telomere-derived quadruplexes formed by the oligonucleotides d(TG4) and d(T2G4T2G4T2G4T2G4) (Ka = 5.38 x 10(6) and 1.66 x 10(7) M-1, respectively). The antibody binds both types of quadruplexes but has preferential affinity for the parallel four-stranded structure. In vitro radioimmunofilter binding experiments demonstrated that purified anti-DNA quadruplex antibodies from anti-quadruplex antibody-producing tissue culture supernatants have at least 10-fold higher affinity for quadruplexes than for triplex and duplex DNA structures of similar base composition and length. The antibody binds intramolecular DNA triplexes formed by d(G4T3G4T3C4) and d(C4T3G4T3G4), and the duplex d(CGCGCGCGCG)2 with an affinities of 6. 76 x 10(5), 5.59 x 10(5), and 8.26 x 10(5) M-1, respectively. Competition experiments showed that melted quadruplexes are not effective competitors for antibody binding when compared to native structures, confirming that the quadruplex is bound structure-specifically. To our knowledge, this is the first immunological reagent known to specifically recognize quadruplex structures. Subsequent sequence analysis demonstrates homologies between the antibody complementarity determining regions and sequences from Myb family telomere binding proteins, which are hypothesized to control cell aging via telomeric DNA interactions. The presence of this antibody in the autoimmune repertoire suggests a possible linkage between autoimmunity, telomeric DNA binding proteins, and aging.     

Bayesian inference and prediction of the inverse Weibull distribution for Type-II censored data

This paper describes the Bayesian inference and prediction of the inverse Weibull distribution for Type-II censored data. First we consider the Bayesian inference of the unknown parameter under a squared error loss function. Although we have discussed mainly the squared error loss function, any other loss function can easily be considered. A Gibbs sampling procedure is used to draw Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samples, and they have in turn, been used to compute the Bayes estimates and also to construct the corresponding credible intervals with the help of an importance sampling technique. We have performed a simulation study in order to compare the proposed Bayes estimators with the maximum likelihood estimators. We further consider one-sample and two-sample Bayes prediction problems based on the observed sample and provide appropriate predictive intervals with a given coverage probability. A real life data set is used to illustrate the results derived. Some open problems are indicated for further research.     

Genetic algorithms based robust frequency estimation of sinusoidal signals with stationary errors

In this paper, we consider the fundamental problem of frequency estimation of multiple sinusoidal signals with stationary errors. We propose genetic algorithm and outlier-insensitive criterion function based technique for the frequency estimation problem. In the simulation studies and real life data analysis, it is observed that the proposed genetic algorithm based robust frequency estimators are able to resolve frequencies of the sinusoidal model with high degree of accuracy. Among the proposed methods, the genetic algorithm based least squares estimator, in the no-outlier scenario, provides efficient estimates, in the sense that their mean square errors attain the corresponding Cramér-Rao lower bounds. In the presence of outliers, the proposed robust methods perform quite well and seem to have a fairly high breakdown point with respect to level of outlier contamination. The proposed methods significantly do not depend on the initial guess values required for other iterative frequency estimation methods.