Ferromagnetic nano model study for the peristaltic flow in a plumb duct with permeable walls

Microsystem Technologies - The purpose of the present enquiry is to analyse the mechanics of an incompressible fluid, with water as base fluid, through a radially symmetric plumb duct with...     

Identification of the DRB1*1313 allele in a sibling pair

Amines such as dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine were analysed in the brain regions of O.mossambicus exposed to quinalphos, phenthoate and their combination for 96 hr. The three types of treatments significantly (P < 0.05) altered the amines level at various intervals in the brain regions.     

PMSS: A programmable memory system and scheduler for complex memory patterns

HPC industry demands more computing units on FPGAs, to enhance the performance by using task/data parallelism. FPGAs can provide its ultimate performance on certain kernels by customizing the hardware for the applications. However, applications are getting more complex, with multiple kernels and complex data arrangements, generating overhead while scheduling/managing system resources. Due to this reason all classes of multi threaded machines–minicomputer to supercomputer–require to have efficient hardware scheduler and memory manager that improves the effective bandwidth and latency of the DRAM main memory. This architecture could be a very competitive choice for supercomputing systems that meets the demand of parallelism for HPC benchmarks. In this article, we proposed a Programmable Memory System and Scheduler (PMSS), which provides high speed complex data access pattern to the multi threaded architecture. This proposed PMSS system is implemented and tested on a Xilinx ML505 evaluation FPGA board. The performance of the system is compared with a microprocessor based system that has been integrated with the Xilkernel operating system. Results show that the modified PMSS based multi-accelerator system consumes 50% less hardware resources, 32% less on-chip power and achieves approximately a 19x speedup compared to the MicroBlaze based system.     

Multi‐agent collaboration based on enhanced cognitive awareness: an architecture for agents' profiling on the semantic web

This paper applies cognitive models, inspired by cognitive science, with the aim to propose architectural and knowledge‐based requirements to structure ontological models for the cognitive profiling of agents. The proposed architecture aims to address the lack of flexibility that most agent‐based collaborations are affected by. The resulting agents, equipped with advanced cognitive profiling, have an increased cognitive awareness of themselves and are more capable of interacting with other agents in a multi‐agents based environment. In this research, cognitive awareness identifies the ability of the web agents to diagnose their processing limitations and to establish interactions with the external environment. The outcome is the enhanced flexibility, reusability and predictability of the agent behaviour; thus contributing towards minimizing human cognitive demands. The concept of cognitive profiling presented in this paper considers the semantic web as an action mediating space, where ontological models provide affordances for improving cognitive awareness through shared knowledge‐base. The conceptual model for the cognitive profile architecture is developed with Protégé Ontology editor to generate OWL Ontology and evaluated through a proof of concept. The results show that agents equipped with cognitive awareness can undertake complex tasks more dynamically.     

A comparative analysis of video codecs for multihop wireless video sensor networks

Wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs) have drawn significant attention in recent years due to the advent of low-cost miniaturized cameras, which makes it feasible to realize large-scale WVSNs for a variety of applications including security surveillance, environmental tracking, and health monitoring. However, the conventional video coding paradigms are not suitable for WVSNs due to resource constraints such as limited computation power, battery energy, and network bandwidth. In this paper, we evaluated and analyzed the performance of video codecs based on emerging video coding paradigms such as distributed video coding and distributed compressive video sensing for multihop WVSNs. The main objective of this work was to provide an insight into the computational (encoding/decoding) complexity, energy consumption, node and network lifetime, processing and memory requirements, and the quality of reconstruction of these video codecs. Based on the findings, this paper also provides some guidelines for the selection of appropriate video codecs for a given WVSN application.     

Ear recognition with feed-forward artificial neural networks

Biometrics has become one of the most important techniques in recognizing a person’s identity. A person’s face, iris and fingerprint are mostly used in biometrics today. It has been established that there are no two ears exactly alike, even in the cases of identical twins. In this paper, we define a 7-element ear feature set and design and train a feed-forward artificial neural network to recognize a human ear. We train and test the network with 51 ear pictures from 51 different persons. Simulation experiments with various networks with various number of layers and number of neurons per layer and with and without noise are conducted. Results indicate that a 95 % ear recognition accuracy is achieved with a simple 3-layer feed-forward neural network with only a total of 18 neurons even in the presence of some noise. This design outstands previous work in simplicity and implementation cost.     

Synthesis and characterization of novel curcumin based polyurethanes varying diisocyanates structure

In this research work, novel polyurethanes (PUs) based on blends of curcumin/1,4-butane diol (BDO) by varying the structure of diisocyanates were prepared following step growth polymerization. Structural study of blends and various diisocyanates based PU through Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy confirmed the incorporation of curcumin into the backbone of the PU. The scanning electron microscopic (SEM) study confirmed the well dispersion of incorporated curcumin and homogeneity of surface of synthesized samples. The SEM results also indicated that surface morphology of synthesized samples much dependent on diisocynates structure. Moreover SEM images inferred that phase separation is more pronounced in aromatic diisocyanate based PU. The anti-bacterial and anti-fungal tests were performed against different strains in order to determine the biocompatibility of the curcumin based PU. The antimicrobial activity results revealed that the material having aromatic diisocyanate are more biocompatible than the aliphatic diisocyanates in the PU structure. On the whole, this work is actually a step towards the generation of novel biocompatible materials preferably useful for biomedical applications.     

Why Parents Drive Children to School: Implications for Safe Routes to School Programs

Problem: Rates of walking and bicycling to school have declined sharply in recent decades, and federal and state governments have committed funds to reverse these trends. To increase rates of walking and biking to school will require understanding why many parents choose to drive their children to school and how well existing programs, like Safe Routes to School, work.

Purpose: We aimed to understand why many parents choose to drive their children even short distances to school, and what implications this has for programs to increase walking and biking to school.

Methods: We used data from a telephone survey to explore why parents drive their children to school.

Results and conclusions: We found that 75% of parents driving their children less than 2 miles to school said they did this for convenience and to save time. Nearly half of parents driving their children less than 2 miles did not allow their child to walk to school without adult supervision. Accompanying a child on a walk to school greatly increases the time the household devotes to such a trip. Few Safe Routes to School programs effectively address issues of parental convenience and time constraints.

Takeaway for practice: Safe Routes to School programs should take parental convenience and time constraints into account by providing ways children can walk to school supervised by someone other than the parent, such as by using walking school buses. To be effective, such programs need institutional support. Schools should take a multimodal approach to pupil transportation.

Research support: This research was funded by the Active Living Research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the U.S. and California Departments of Transportation through the University of California Transportation Center.