Nanoceutical Adjuvants as Wound Healing Material: Precepts and Prospects

Dermal wound healing describes the progressive repair and recalcitrant mechanism of 12 damaged skin, and eventually, reformatting and reshaping the skin. Many probiotics, nutritional supplements, metal nanoparticles, composites, skin constructs, polymers, and so forth have been associated with the improved healing process of wounds. The exact mechanism of material-cellular interaction is a point of immense importance, particularly in pathological conditions such as diabetes. Bioengineered alternative agents will likely continue to dominate the outpatient and perioperative management of chronic, recalcitrant wounds as new products continue to cut costs and improve the wound healing process. This review article provides an update on the various remedies with confirmed wound healing activities of metal-based nanoceutical adjuvanted agents and also other nano-based counterparts from previous experiments conducted by various researchers.     

Learning to classify parallel input/output access patterns

Input/output performance on current parallel file systems is sensitive to a good match of application access patterns to file system capabilities. Automatic input/output access pattern classification can determine application access patterns at execution time, guiding adaptive file system policies. In this paper, we examine and compare two novel input/output access pattern classification methods based on learning algorithms. The first approach uses a feedforward neural network previously trained on access pattern benchmarks to generate qualitative classifications. The second approach uses hidden Markov models trained on access patterns from previous executions to create a probabilistic model of input/output accesses. In a parallel application, access patterns can be recognized at the level of each local thread or as the global interleaving of all application threads. Classification of patterns at both levels is important for parallel file system performance; we propose a method for forming global classifications from local classifications. We present results from parallel and sequential benchmarks and applications that demonstrate the viability of this approach.     

An efficient algorithm for virtual-wavelength-path routing minimizing average number of hops

We present a novel heuristic algorithm for routing and wavelength assignment in virtual-wavelength-path (VWP) routed wavelength-division multiplexed optical networks. We are the first to take up the approach of both minimizing the network cost, as well as maximizing the resource utilization. Our algorithm not only minimizes the number of wavelengths required for supporting the given traffic demand on any given topology, but also aims to minimize the mean hop length of all the lightpaths which in turn maximizes the resource utilization. The algorithm initially assigns the minimum hop path to each route and then performs efficient rerouting to reduce the number of wavelengths required while also trying to minimize the average hop length. To further reduce the network cost, we also propose a wavelength assignment procedure for VWP routed networks which minimizes the number of wavelength converters required. Our algorithm has been tested on various topologies for different types of traffic demands and has been found to give solutions much better than previous standards for this problem.     

Educational Applets for active learning in properties of electronic materials

The traditional lecturer-driven classroom is giving way to a new more active environment, where students have access to a variety of multimedia course materials. The authors created several Java applets (http://www.collage.soe.ucsc.edu) that present concepts related to properties of materials in both active and passive styles. The authors evaluated the use of the applets in a classroom setting, considering student learning preferences, background profiles, and applet preferences.     

iDispatcher: A unified platform for secure planet-scale information dissemination

Traditional software and security patch update delivery mechanisms rely on a client/server approach where clients pull updates from servers regularly. This approach, however, suffers a high window of vulnerability (WOV) for clients and the risk of a single point of failure. Overlay-based information dissemination schemes overcome these problems, but often incur high infrastructure cost to set up and maintain individual information dissemination networks. Against this backdrop, we propose iDispatcher, a planet-scale, flexible and secure information dissemination platform. iDispatcher uses a hybrid approach with both push- and pull-based information dissemination to reduce the WOV period and achieve high distribution coverage. iDispatcher also uses a peer-to-peer based architecture to achieve higher scalability. We develop a self-contained key management mechanism for iDispatcher. Our prototype for iDispatcher is deployed on more than 500 PlanetLab nodes distributed around the world. Experimental results show that iDispatcher can have small dissemination latency for time-critical applications, is highly tunable to optimize the tradeoff between bandwidth and latency, and works resiliently against different attacks such as flooding attacks.     

Small MultiPiles: Piling Time to Explore Temporal Patterns in Dynamic Networks

We introduce MultiPiles, a visualization to explore time‐series of dense, weighted networks. MultiPiles is based on the physical analogy of piling adjacency matrices, each one representing a single temporal snapshot. Common interfaces for visualizing dynamic networks use techniques such as: flipping/animation; small multiples; or summary views in isolation. Our proposed ‘piling’ metaphor presents a hybrid of these techniques, leveraging each one's advantages, as well as offering the ability to scale to networks with hundreds of temporal snapshots. While the MultiPiles technique is applicable to many domains, our prototype was initially designed to help neuroscientists investigate changes in brain connectivity networks over several hundred snapshots. The piling metaphor and associated interaction and visual encodings allowed neuroscientists to explore their data, prior to a statistical analysis. They detected high‐level temporal patterns in individual networks and this helped them to formulate and reject several hypotheses.     

Application of TLC chemical confirmatory tests to minicolumn chromatography of aflatoxins

The minicolumn (MC) proposed by Holaday and Lansden was developed with standard aflatoxin solution and also with the extracts of corn, rice, wheat, cottonseed, peanut cake and black pepper; each having different levels of aflatoxins. One-half mL each of 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine,p-anisaldehyde, 20% H₂SO₄, 20% HCl and trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) with 25% HNO₃, which were used for confirming aflatoxins on TLC, were applied to the developed column. Among these, all the 3 acid reagents changed the blue fluorescence of aflatoxins to yellow and thus were found to be satisfactory confirmatory tests. The TFA with 25% HNO₃ had the lowest detection limit-5 ppb.     

Investigating spousal influence using moment-to-moment affect data from marital conflict.

Gottman and colleagues proposed using a dynamical systems model to study dyadic interaction in marriage. In this model, each spouse's affect in each 6-s window is described as a function of an uninfluenced linear steady state and a nonlinear influence function of the partner's affect in the previous window. Recently, an alternative parameter estimation procedure for the equations of marriage was introduced, which is based on threshold autoregressive models. We apply this estimation procedure to data from a study of couples (N = 124) and newlyweds (N = 130) to compare different forms of spousal influence using the Bayesian information criterion. Although results show some statistically significant evidence for influence, this is only slightly greater than what would be expected by random association. One model of influence does not fit all couples. This suggests that for many people initial state and emotional inertia dictate the outcome of the conflict discussion far more than the moment-to-moment affect of the spouse. This latter finding is in conflict with most models of couples' interaction, which suggest that the outcome of conflict discussions are determined by the nature of the couples' mutual influence processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)