Teaching of Critical Analysis of Drug Advertisements to Medical Students

Background: Medical practitioners utilize drug promotional materials from pharmaceutical companies as a major source of information especially in developing countries. These promotional materials can be highly informative as long as they are critically appraised but when they are accepted without question, they lead to irrational prescribing. Aim: To sensitize the students regarding WHO criteria for medicinal drug promotion and to determine the impact of teaching critical appraisal of medicinal drug promotion to medical students. Design: The medical students of second year were given a pre test questionnaire to identify the violations in generic labeling, pharmacological information, claims, relevance and references cited in the drug advertisements. Later they were sensitized about the WHO criteria for medicinal drug promotion and how to critically appraise a drug advertisement. This was followed by a post test questionnaire with the same drug advertisement. Result: The number of students answering the post test correctly was significantly (p<0.05) more than that of pre test. Conclusion: Education of medical students regarding critical analysis of drug advertisements should be a part of the medical curriculum

Multi-response optimization in machining: exploration of TOPSIS and Deng’s similarity based approach

Machining deals with removal of unwanted material from the work piece in the form of chips in order to get required dimension. Consumption of energy, wastage of material, requirement of skilled person etc. make the process expensive. Hence, machining industries have to face the inevitable challenge to reduce cost as well as to machine material within the tolerance limit which can be accepted by the customers. The output characteristics like Material Removal Rate (MRR), surface roughness, tool wear, tool life, cutting temperature, cutting force etc. are greatly influenced by the input cutting parameters like speed, feed rate, depth of cut etc. Therefore, selection of cutting parameter plays an important role for a sound production. Optimization techniques are quite helpful for selection of appropriate cutting parameters through offline check. The industries have to concern about a number of performance characteristics simultaneously because focus on a single objective may appear as loss for rest of the objectives, and, hence, multi-objective optimization techniques may be suitable. In the present work, turning operation of aluminum was carried out using a HSS tool on a lathe machine. Cutting parameters: speed, feed rate, and depth of cut was varied at five different levels; Taguchi method was employed for designing a L25 orthogonal array. The output performances viz. MRR, surface roughness, cutting temperature, and cutting forces were recorded for each run. Deng’s similarity based method and TOPSIS (integrated with Taguchi method) were explored for determining appropriate process environment (parameter setting) for simultaneous optimization of multiple process-performance-yields

New targets for resolution of airway remodeling in obstructive lung diseases.

Airway remodeling (AR) is a progressive pathological feature of the obstructive lung diseases, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The pathology manifests itself in the form of significant, progressive, and (to date) seemingly irreversible changes to distinct respiratory structural compartments. Consequently, AR correlates with disease severity and the gradual decline in pulmonary function associated with asthma and COPD. Although current asthma/COPD drugs manage airway contraction and inflammation, none of these effectively prevent or reverse features of AR. In this review, we provide a brief overview of the features and putative mechanisms affecting AR. We further discuss recently proposed strategies with promise for deterring or treating AR

Mineralogical Characterization of Iron Ores

Mineralogical characterization of iron ore is a very important and basic aspect that has to get due attention before any attempt for its processing and has become almost inevitable these days because of the increasing demand of the ore. Mineral processing technology is evol-ved to separate and recover ore minerals from gangue in a commercially viable method and is mainly based on the process of mineral liberation and the process of mineral separation. Therefore, it is important to first get a clear understanding about ore- and gangue minerals. A mineral is a natural inorganic substance having definite chemical composition and atomic structure. If the internal atomic arrangement is lacking, then it is an amorphous substance. A rock is generally composed of various mine-rals and if the rock contains valuable minerals from which metals can be extracted at a profit, it is called n 'ore'. The unwanted mineral in an ore is called gangue (i.e., generally rock forming minerals). For example, hematite (Fe203) and magnetite (Fe304) are oxides of iron and are ore forming minerals. In iron-ore, these minerals gene-rally dominate but other unwanted minerals that occur are quartz (Si02), kaolinite (clay) etc., are gangue minerals. The terminologies `ore' and 'gangue' are subjective. For example in a mine, when the ore/rock is mined with an objective to extract iron, hematite is the desired mineral and is called ore. The same mineral hematite if found in a sulfide ore (that is being mined to extract Pb, Zn or Cu) is called gangue. Therefore, `ore' and `gangue' terminologies can broadly be assumed as the desired and `undesired' material in a rock mass respectively. Even though ore is mined with the highest efficiency of the technology, the excavated ore gets partly contaminated by the surrounding host rock (overburden) and the geol-ogical material closely associated with the ore during mining. Both the materials are undesirable and hence form the gangue