Amelorative action of different solvent extractions of Tribulus terrestris (Linn.) extract on blood transaminase activities of mercuric chloride poisoned mice, Mus musculus (Linn.)

Haematological parameters are considered as promising indicators of the physiological status of the animal.  The present study was carried out on the influence of different solvent extractions of Tribulus terrestris extract on mercuric chloride (1.2 mg/kg body weight) intoxicated mice.  An enhanced level of  aspartate transaminase (AST), alanine transaminase (ALT) activities and bilirubin content were noticed in mercury intoxicated animal. The increased in the enzymatic activity may be due to the damage to the cells of liver caused by the heavy metal. But, the mercury intoxicated mice were treated with different solvent extraction of Tribulus terrestris  showed the restoration of haematological parameters

Outsourcing labour to the cloud

Various forms of open sourcing to the online population are establishing themselves as cheap, effective methods of getting work done. These have revolutionised the traditional methods for innovation and have contributed to the enrichment of the concept of 'open innovation'. To date, the literature concerning this emerging topic has been spread across a diverse number of media, disciplines and academic journals. This paper attempts for the first time to survey the emerging phenomenon of open outsourcing of work to the internet using 'cloud computing'. The paper describes the volunteer origins and recent commercialisation of this business service. It then surveys the current platforms, applications and academic literature. Based on this, a generic classification for crowdsourcing tasks and a number of performance metrics are proposed. After discussing strengths and limitations, the paper concludes with an agenda for academic research in this new area

Validation of purdue engineering shape benchmark clusters by crowdsourcing

The effective organization of CAD data archives is central to PLM and consequently content based retrieval of 2D drawings and 3D models is often seen as a "holy grail" for the industry. Given this context, it is not surprising that the vision of a "Google for shape", which enables engineers to search databases of 3D models for components similar in shape to a query part, has motivated numerous researchers to investigate algorithms for computing geometric similarity. Measuring the effectiveness of the many approaches proposed has in turn lead to the creation of benchmark datasets against which researchers can compare the performance of their search engines. However to be useful the datasets used to measure the effectiveness of 3D retrieval algorithms must not only define a collection of models, but also provide a canonical specification of their relative similarity. Because the objective of shape retrieval algorithms is (typically) to retrieve groups of objects that humans perceive as "similar" these benchmark similarity relationships have (by definition) to be manually determined through inspection

Geometric reasoning via internet crowdsourcing

The ability to interpret and reason about shapes is a peculiarly human capability that has proven difficult to reproduce algorithmically. So despite the fact that geometric modeling technology has made significant advances in the representation, display and modification of shapes, there have only been incremental advances in geometric reasoning. For example, although today's CAD systems can confidently identify isolated cylindrical holes, they struggle with more ambiguous tasks such as the identification of partial symmetries or similarities in arbitrary geometries. Even well defined problems such as 2D shape nesting or 3D packing generally resist elegant solution and rely instead on brute force explorations of a subset of the many possible solutions. Identifying economic ways to solving such problems would result in significant productivity gains across a wide range of industrial applications. The authors hypothesize that Internet Crowdsourcing might provide a pragmatic way of removing many geometric reasoning bottlenecks.This paper reports the results of experiments conducted with Amazon's mTurk site and designed to determine the feasibility of using Internet Crowdsourcing to carry out geometric reasoning tasks as well as establish some benchmark data for the quality, speed and costs of using this approach.After describing the general architecture and terminology of the mTurk Crowdsourcing system, the paper details the implementation and results of the following three investigations; 1) the identification of "Canonical" viewpoints for individual shapes, 2) the quantification of "similarity" relationships with-in collections of 3D models and 3) the efficient packing of 2D Strips into rectangular areas. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibilities and limitations of the approach

Intraoperative portable ultrasonography localization of clinically impalpable soft-tissue tumors

Background: Most soft-tissue tumors are clinically palpable; however, some can be impalpable to clinical examination making it difficult to plan surgical management. Methods: We present a simple method of perioperative tumor localization using a portable ultrasonography machine. Results: We used the technique for seven cases, on each occasion identifying the tumor and facilitating the optimal surgical approach. Conclusion: The technique is reproducible and readily available, and we recommend its use

Ethyl 7-oxo-3,5-diphenyl-1,4-diazepane-2-carboxyl­ate

The title compound, C20H22N2O3, crystallizes with two independent mol­ecules in the asymmetric unit. In both mol­ecules, the diazepane rings adopt chair conformations. The mean planes of the diazepane rings in the two molecules form dihedral angles of 71.6 (4)/40.3 (5) and 75.9 (5)/58.6 (7)° with the neighbouring benzene rings. The carbonyl-group O atoms deviate significantly from the diazepane rings, by 0.685 (14) and 0.498 (13) Å. The eth­oxy­carbonyl groups show conformational difference between two mol­ecules, as reflected in the orientation of the carbonyl O atoms and the C—C—O—C torsion angle of −179.0 (2)° in one mol­ecule and 73.2 (2)° in the other. In one molecule there is a short N—H⋯O contact that generates an S(5) ring motif. In the crystal, N—H⋯O inter­actions generate R 2 2(8) graph-set motifs and C—H⋯O inter­actions generate R 2 2(10) and R 2 2(14) graph-set motifs. C—H⋯π inter­actions also occur

On the Economic Sustainability of Cloud Sharing Systems: Are Dynamic Single Resource Sharing Markets Stable?

The recent emergence of the small cloud (SC), both in concept and in practice, has been driven mainly by issues related to service cost and complexity of commercial cloud providers (e.g., Amazon) employing massive data centers. However, the resource inelasticity problem faced by the SCs due to their relatively scarce resources might lead to a potential degradation of customer QoS and loss of revenue. A proposed solution to this problem recommends the sharing of resources between competing SCs to alleviate the resource inelasticity issues that might arise. Based on this idea, a recent effort proposed SC-Share, a performance-driven static market model for competitive small cloud environments that results in an efficient market equilibrium jointly optimizing customer QoS satisfaction and SC revenue generation. However, an important question with a non-obvious answer still remains to be answered, without which SC sharing markets may not be guaranteed to sustain in the long-run - is it still possible to achieve a stable market efficient state when the supply of SC resources is dynamic in nature? In this short paper, we take a first step to addressing the problem of efficient market design for single SC resource sharing in dynamic environments. We answer our previous question in the affirmative through the use of Arrow and Hurwicz's disequilibrium process in economics, and the gradient play technique in game theory that allows us to iteratively converge upon efficient and stable market equilibria.Peer reviewe