Antennas and Propagation of Implanted RFIDs for Pervasive Healthcare Applications

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Performance of Kampung Chicken In Intensive Farming System In Salahutu District

This study aims to determine the performance of native chickens cultivated by breeders in an intensive rearing system in Salahutu District, Central Maluku Regency. The research method is survey and observation through direct observation and measurement of data related to native chicken performance. The materials used as samples in this study were 71 native chickens aged 6-7 months. The observed variable was the performance of native chickens in intensive rearing. The results showed that the average male body weight was 2059.667 grams and 1163.88 grams for females; the average wing length of males is 16.46 cm and females is 15.45 cm; the average male chest circumference is 30.81 cm and 27.72 cm for females; the average femur length of males is 12.39 cm and females are 6.98 cm; the average tibia length is 14.95 cm for males and 13.07 cm for females; and the average metatarsus length of males is 10.09 cm and females is 8.07 cm. While the average distance between the pubic bones of hens is 3.56 cm with egg production reaching 22.1 eggs/30 days of production. The performance of free-range chickens is still diverse but better than traditional and semi-intensive farming systems

PREPARATION AND IN VITRO EVALUATION OF LACIDIPINE ORAL LIQUID SOLID TABLET AS AN APPROACH OF SOLUBILITY AND DISSOLUTION RATE ENHANCEMENT

Objective: The aim of the present study was to prepare a new liquid-solid tablet to enhance the dissolution and bioavailability of a poor water soluble calcium channel blocker lacidipine. Methods: Firstly, solubility study of lacidipine in different media of water-miscible non-volatile solvents as tween 20, tween 80, propylene glycol, liquid paraffin, PEG200, PEG400, and PEG600 was investigated to select the most suitable solvent. A mathematical model was applied to calculate the appropriate amount of carrier and coating material. Four liquid-solid tablets of 6 mg lacidipine were prepared by dissolving the drug in the previously chosen water miscible non-volatile solvents, then a binary mixture of the carrier (Avicel PH 102) and coating material (Aerosil 200) at a ratio of 45:1 was used in all preparation since it gave the optimal flow property. Croscarmellose and magnesium stearate were incorporated in all prepared formulas as super disintegrant and lubricant respectively. On the other hand, directly compressed lacidipine tablet of the same previous composition without the addition of any non-volatile solvent was prepared for comparism study. Both characterizations of powder mixture and post-compression tablet evaluations were done. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) were investigated for the pure drug, physical mixture, and selected liquid-solid tablet to exclude any drug-excipients interaction. Results: The obtained results indicated that PEG 200 was the most suitable solvent with lacidipine solubility of 2.81 mg/ml. Flowability of all the prepared formulas was found to be within the specification limits. The liquid-solid tablet formula with PEG 200 at 10% w/w lacidipine was the most suitable one in the term of disintegration time (21±0.2 second), 100% of drug release within 10 min, and with accepted other tablet properties. DSC thermograms for both physical mixture of selected liquisolid system and its tablets illustrated the formation of lacidipine amorphous solid solution. The absence of chemical interaction between drug and other formula components was confirmed by remaining all characteristic peaks of lacidipine in all investigated FTIR spectra. Conclusion: Liquid-solid tablet was considered as a promising system to enhance solubility and dissolution rate of poor-water soluble lacidipine. Â&nbsp

Visual estimation of joint angles at the elbow

The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of visual estimation of elbow joint angles. A total of 116observers (93 doctors and 23 physiotherapists) were shown 21 digital images of two arms in predeWned degrees of elbow Xexion on two separate occasions. They estimated the angle of Xexion to the nearest 5°. Only 70.8% of estimates were within +5°, although intra-observer agreement was good among all groups tested (ICC range 0.963-0.983). Orthopaedic consultants and registrars were equivalent and statistically better at estimating the angles compared to senior house officers and physiotherapists (P < 0.001). Compared to the angles of 85 and 90°, all other angles were signifcantly less likely to be estimated to within +5° (P < 0.001). In conclusion, visual estimation of joint angles at the elbow may not be desirable in cases where accurate serial assessment is required for clinical decision making. The use of a goniometer by an agreed standardized protocol is advised

Testing Onion Market Integration in Pakistan

This paper analyses spatial market integration using monthly wholesale real price of onion in four regional markets located in each of the four provinces of Pakistan. Unit root test indicates that the price series in each location are stationary, and the series are represented as autoregressive model for eachlocation. The error correction model results show that the regional markets of onion have strong price linkages, and thus are spatially integrated.

A Machine Learning Approach For Enhancing Security And Quality Of Service Of Optical Burst Switching Networks

The Optical Bust Switching (OBS) network has become one of the most promising switching technologies for building the next-generation of internet backbone infrastructure. However, OBS networks still face a number of security and Quality of Service (QoS) challenges, particularly from Burst Header Packet (BHP) flooding attacks. In OBS, a core switch handles requests, reserving one of the unoccupied channels for incoming data bursts (DB) through BHP. An attacker can exploit this fact and send malicious BHP without the corresponding DB. If unresolved, threats such as BHP flooding attacks can result in low bandwidth utilization, limited network performance, high burst loss rate, and eventually, denial of service (DoS). In this dissertation, we focus our investigations on the network security and QoS in the presence of BHP flooding attacks. First, we proposed and developed a new security model that can be embedded into OBS core switch architecture to prevent BHP flooding attacks. The countermeasure security model allows the OBS core switch to classify the ingress nodes based on their behavior and the amount of reserved resources not being utilized. A malicious node causing a BHP flooding attack will be blocked by the developed model until the risk disappears or the malicious node redeems itself. Using our security model, we can effectively and preemptively prevent a BHP flooding attack regardless of the strength of the attacker. In the second part of this dissertation, we investigated the potential use of machine learning (ML) in countering the risk of the BHP flood attack problem. In particular, we proposed and developed a new series of rules, using the decision tree method to prevent the risk of a BHP flooding attack. The proposed classification rule models were evaluated using different metrics to measure the overall performance of this approach. The experiments showed that using rules derived from the decision trees did indeed counter BHP flooding attacks, and enabled the automatic classification of edge nodes at an early stage. In the third part of this dissertation, we performed a comparative study, evaluating a number of ML techniques in classifying edge nodes, to determine the most suitable ML method to prevent this type of attack. The experimental results from a preprocessed dataset related to BHP flooding attacks showed that rule-based classifiers, in particular decision trees (C4.5), Bagging, and RIDOR, consistently derive classifiers that are more predictive, compared to alternate ML algorithms, including AdaBoost, Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, SVM-SMO and ANN-MultilayerPerceptron. Moreover, the harmonic mean, recall and precision results of the rule-based and tree classifiers were more competitive than those of the remaining ML algorithms. Lastly, the runtime results in ms showed that decision tree classifiers are not only more predictive, but are also more efficient than other algorithms. Thus, our findings show that decision tree identifier is the most appropriate technique for classifying ingress nodes to combat the BHP flooding attack problem

FORMULATION AND IN VITRO EVALUATION OF PIROXICAM MICROSPONGE AS A TABLET

Objective: Piroxicam is a poor water soluble drug; an effort had been made to enhance their dissolution rate through formulating it as a microsponge and then fabricated as a tablet for oral administration. Methods: Piroxicam microsponges were prepared by quasi-emulsion solvent diffusion method using Eudragit RS100, RL100, S100 with different drug-polymer ratios, three different types of inner phase solvent were used, along with various volumes of the selected organic solvent, the prepared formulas were examined for it its production yield, loading efficiency, particle size and in vitro drug release for formulas have excellent physical properties. Optimum formula that had fast release profile was further fabricated into a tablet using direct compression method, two types of disintegrants along with two different amounts were used, also the addition of microcrystalline cellulose was examined.Results: The results showed that as the ratio of drug to polymer was increased, the production yield and loading efficiency were enhanced, but the particle size had an inverse relationship. Among the three types of solvent, ethanol was most preferable one; 5 ml of ethanol was most favorable. PF13 (containing Eudragit RS100) have the rapid release profile. No any chemical interaction was observed, microsponge with spherical shape, porous structure was obtained. The prepared tablets have acceptable physical parameters. A dramatic enhancement in the dissolution rate as compared with the pure piroxicam tablet was shown, as well as release profile follows Hixson-Crowell kinetic with non Fickian diffusion.Conclusion: Microsponge may represent a promising way to increase the dissolution rate of poorly water-soluble drug.Â

Generating Relations by Using Some Classes of Near Open Sets

The purpose of this paper is to introduce some definitions of relations generated by using some classes of near open sets in topological spaces. Proved results and examples are provided

An efficient method for stamps recognition using Haar wavelet sub-bands

The problem facing certain organizations such as insurance companies and government institutions where a huge amount of documents is handled every day, hence an automated stamp recognition system is required. The image of the stamp may be on a different background, with different sizes, and suffers from rotating in different directions, also, the appearance of soft areas (patches) or small points as noise. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to extract and recognize the color stamp image. This paper proposed a method to recognize stamps, by using a technique named Haar wavelet sub-bands. The devised method has four stages: 1) extracts the stamp image; 2) preprocessing the image; 3) feature extraction; and 4) matching. This paper is implemented using C sharp (Microsoft Visual Studio 2012) programming language. The experiments conducted on a stamp dataset showed that the proposed method has a great capability to recognize stamps when using Haar wavelet transform with two sets of features (i.e., 100% recognition rate for energy features and 99.93% recognition rate for low order moment)