Writing for Freedom: Exile, Marginalisation and Oppositional Militancy in Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls

This paper tries to investigate the genre of the exilic autobiographical memoir as a form of liminal writing that inhabits in the interstices between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictive’. It offers a reading of Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiographical memoir Before Night Falls, written from exile in New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which offers a form of sustained literary resistance to the systematic discrimination against, and marginalisation of the homosexual in post-revolutionary Cuba of the Castro-regime. The paper argues that Arenas’s autobiographical memoir becomes one of the principal texts through which he advances his oppositional militancy to Cuban machismo, a patriarchal and gendered code of behaviour co-opted by the Revolution. It concludes by positing Arenas’s project as a counter-hegemonic and resistant one, which adapts certain features of the testimonio (testimonial narrative) to lay bare the state-sanctioned ostracism and penal measures adopted against the homosexual individual

ISOLATION AND MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF PLASTIC DEGRADING BACTERIA FROM DUMPED GARBAGE SOIL

Objective: Plastics are polymers that are widely in application in our day-to-day life. The plastic wastes accumulation is causing threat to the environment as it causes environmental pollution and creates imbalance in the ecosystem. The natural degradation of plastic is too time consuming and the ways to do it are not highly successful. An eco-friendly approach to plastic degradation is using microbial degradation method. Microorganisms play an important role in biological decomposition of various materials in our environment. Thus, the main objective of the present study is isolation and molecular characterization of plastic degrading bacteria from dumped garbage soil. Methods: The samples were collected from two different locations in Bengaluru and further subcultured to obtain pure culture. Gram’s staining was performed to identify bacterial strains and few tests were conducted to find out the biochemical properties of the bacteria. Molecular characterization of isolated bacteria was performed using 16S rRNA method, BLAST and phylogenetic tree were constructed. Results: The bacterial isolates were found to be, namely, Aeromonas caviae, Aeromonas hydrophila, Salmonella enterica, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The polythene bag biodegradation was analyzed by incubation for a period of 2 months in liquid culture method. Conclusion: The results of the study ensure that A. hydrophila showed more degrading capability which is followed by A. caviae, whereas Pseudomonas aeruginosa and S. enterica did not contribute in much of the plastic degradation. The weight loss of polythene bag is maximum with higher incubation period rate. From the observation, we conclude that bacteria have more capability to cleave polymer

Prescribing trends of anti glaucoma medication usage in treatment naive patients of primary open angle glaucoma in a tertiary care hospital in Eastern India

Background: Primary open angle glaucoma remains a high magnitude healthcare problem due to its prevalence and chronicity. The real world scenario of anti glaucoma medical therapy needs periodical auditing as far as drug prescriptions are concerned for formulation of treatment guidelines. Few studies from India have taken a longitudinal approach in this respect. This study was undertaken to identify such lacunae.Methods: This was an open label, prospective, observational study. Each treatment naive patient was followed up for a period of 6 months, where their prescriptions were scanned for the type of the anti glaucoma medications, total number of medications, route of administration, their duration of use and their frequency of dosage and change in medications if any, in each visits.Results: A gradual shift from monotherapy towards combination therapy was observed. Overall averages for prescriptions were topped by monotherapy at 44.25 followed by fixed dose combinations at 38.25, and then combination-polytherapy at 36 and the least number of prescriptions were for concurrent polytherapy at 17.5. Amongst all monotherapy agents, beta blockers were the most frequently prescribed drugs at baseline but their share of prescriptions was almost halved at the end of our study. The prostaglandin analogs on the other hand saw an upsurge in prescriptions from their baseline to the end of this study. Prostaglandin analogs andbeta blockers as fixed dose combination was a popular prescription over the entire study duration.Conclusions: Prescribing trends were remarkable for the shift from primary monotherapy towards fixed dose combinations as the study concluded. The decline in the number of beta blocker prescriptions and a rise in prostaglandin analog prescriptions is a testament to their better effectiveness and tolerability. The future of open angle glaucoma pharmacotherapy lies in prescribing more efficacious drugs either in monotherapy or in fixed combinations

Combing for Credentials: Active Pattern Extraction from Smart Reply

With the wide availability of large pre-trained language models such as GPT-2 and BERT, the recent trend has been to fine-tune a pre-trained model to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a downstream task. One natural example is the "Smart Reply" application where a pre-trained model is tuned to provide suggested responses for a given query message. Since these models are often tuned using sensitive data such as emails or chat transcripts, it is important to understand and mitigate the risk that the model leaks its tuning data. We investigate potential information leakage vulnerabilities in a typical Smart Reply pipeline and introduce a new type of active extraction attack that exploits canonical patterns in text containing sensitive data. We show experimentally that it is possible for an adversary to extract sensitive user information present in the training data. We explore potential mitigation strategies and demonstrate empirically how differential privacy appears to be an effective defense mechanism to such pattern extraction attacks

Research Findings Of Few Medicinal Plants Highlighting The Scope For Further Study

Several plants are there which are absolutely unknown to the world but have enormous medical values in curing certain diseases. This paper aims to identify the medicinal values and importance of some of those plants which can cure some diseases which are chronic as well as can be difficult to be cured in certain cases. Four such plants, viz., Alangium salvifolium, Argyriea nervosa, Hygrophila auriculata and Oroxylum indicum are chosen to detect their pharmacological values against certain diseases alongside their ayurvedic, ethnobotanical and traditional values. Their pharmacognostical characteristics are also discussed and the phytochemicals which are so far investigated by certain studies are also been discussed. Molecular studies such as docking, LC-MS, GC-MS detections of biochemical compounds are also discussed in this paper. It is seen that every plants have certain ayurvedic uses as each parts of these plants can be applied tropically or may be used as decoctions or as pastes or can be orally consumed to cure diseases. Pharmacognostical studies reveal the microscopic, macroscopic as well as the other physical factors of different plant parts. Pharmacologically these plants in certain doses are capable of curing arthritis, inflammations, sometimes can be used as anti-cancer and anti-ulcerative agents and in many other diseases including diabetes. LC-MS, GC-MS studies and other studies revealed the presence of certain phytochemicals and biochemical compounds such as flavonoids, fatty acids, esters of fatty acids, carbohydrates, amino acids and several other compounds. This paper also aims to find out the future scopes of research on these plants where scientists can work towards fulfilling it for betterment for mankind

Visual impairment in urban school children of low-income families in Kolkata, India

To evaluate pattern of visual impairment in school children from low-income families in Kolkata, India, an institutional cross-sectional study was conducted among 2570 children of 10 primary schools. Ocular examination including refraction was done and pattern of visual impairment and refractive error was studied. The age range was 6-14 years. Refractive error was seen in 14.7%. Only 4 children were already wearing correction. Myopia and hypermetropia was present in 307 (11.9%) and 65 (2.5%) children, respectively. Visual acuity of less than 6/12 in better eye was present in 109 (4.2%) and 5 (0.2%) children pre- and post-correction, respectively. Eighteen children had amblyopia. Although prevalence of refractive error in this group is less compared to school children of all income categories reported from other cities of India, it is more compared to school children of all income categories from the same city. Refractive error mostly remains uncorrected in this group