NEW CLASSIFICATION AND COLOUR CODE DEVELOPMENT FOR AN EFFICIENT MEDICAL WASTE SEGREGATION

Medical waste poses serious threat to the environmental health without comprehensive guidelines and efficient management as it contains highly toxic chemicals, pathogenic viruses and bacteria. Therefore, proper handling of medical waste with specialised treatment from its source to final disposal has been a primary concern among medical institute, public and private agencies. The existing medical waste classification in many countries does not contain clear and appropriate segregation, which has created confusion among the medical staff in handling medical waste.  It is pertinent to mention that, World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance recommends different countries to conduct assessments prior to any decision-making process and improve their own guidelines incorporated with recent technologies. Therefore, the objectives of this research are: 1) to develop a new classification of medical wastes by identifying the gaps in the current classes and 2) to suggest colour code for the medical waste segregation that is adopted from the WHO's colour code with few amendments as per the recent technological development. Due to the challenge in managing medical waste, there is an urgent need in developing and adopting comprehensive medical waste segregation classification to separate the medical waste at the source itself. The methodology of classification is aimed at applying a source separation practiced by the medical personnel on the spot and given them awareness on the segregation process. The proposed new classification of medical waste is based on Malaysia's Scheduled Waste Regulations together with European Waste Code. By extracting the best classification from these two regulations and by overcoming the lacuna in them, a new classification is developed for current use. The developed medical waste classification and its colour codes must provide a better segregation and achieve cost saving at waste disposal. The current methods of classification could be extended to research on application of such classification to other parts of the world

Surface measurements of atmospheric electrical conductivity at Jnanabharathi campus, Bengaluru (12.96° N, 77.56° E)

57-63Simultaneous measurements of the atmospheric electrical conductivity and meteorological parameters were carried out during January-December 2014 at Jnanabharathi campus, Bangalore University (urban station), Bengaluru, (12.96° N, 77.56°E), Karnataka for the first time. Gerdien condenser and mini boundary layer mast (micro meteorological tower) were used to study the variation of electrical conductivity and meteorological parameters. The observations show that the change in daily and weekly variations of conductivity is strong dependent of activity of Radon (222Rn) gas and meteorological parameters that defines the stability of the lower troposphere. Significant influence of atmospheric convective instability on conductivity was observed. The negative correlation of 0.56 was found between conductivity and rain for the year 2014. The average conductivity for the study period was found to be 4.02 ± 0.02 x 10-14 S/m, with higher values during the winter as compared to summer and monsoon seasons. The atmospheric air conductivity measurements may be used to study the atmospheric stability, pollution and climate change studies

Vortex-induced vibrations of a freely vibrating cylinder near a plane boundary: experimental investigation and theoretical modelling

This work reports on experiments that were performed with a freely vibrating cylinder exposed to currents and placed near a plane boundary parallel to the cylinder axis. It is observed that the proximity of the boundary affects the vertical response of the cylinder in two ways: (i) for gaps between 0.75 and 2 diameters (D), the amplitude of oscillation is reduced; (ii) for gaps smaller than 0.75D, the cylinder impacts the boundary, resulting in an increase of amplitudes and frequencies of oscillations as the flow is accelerated. The in-line force acting on the cylinder is also examined, and the dependency of its harmonic components on the flow velocity and distance to the boundary is evaluated. Besides the typical amplification of the mean component inside the lock-in region, it is also observed that as the cylinder is placed closer to the boundary, the harmonic component with the frequency of the vertical oscillations increases, while the component with twice that frequency decreases in similar amount. Based on the experimental observations, an existing wake-oscillator model for vortex-induced vibrations is enhanced in order to account for the effect of the boundary. The proposed model introduces an effective damper that is activated when the cylinder reaches a certain distance from the boundary, and a damper/spring set representing the rigidity of the boundary and the dissipation of energy due to impact

Modeling views in the layered view model for XML using UML

In data engineering, view formalisms are used to provide flexibility to users and user applications by allowing them to extract and elaborate data from the stored data sources. Conversely, since the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML), it is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, and interchanging data among various web and heterogeneous data sources. In combination with XML Schema, XML provides rich facilities for defining and constraining user-defined data semantics and properties, a feature that is unique to XML. In this context, it is interesting to investigate traditional database features, such as view models and view design techniques for XML. However, traditional view formalisms are strongly coupled to the data language and its syntax, thus it proves to be a difficult task to support views in the case of semi-structured data models. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Layered View Model (LVM) for XML with conceptual and schemata extensions. Here our work is three-fold; first we propose an approach to separate the implementation and conceptual aspects of the views that provides a clear separation of concerns, thus, allowing analysis and design of views to be separated from their implementation. Secondly, we define representations to express and construct these views at the conceptual level. Thirdly, we define a view transformation methodology for XML views in the LVM, which carries out automated transformation to a view schema and a view query expression in an appropriate query language. Also, to validate and apply the LVM concepts, methods and transformations developed, we propose a view-driven application development framework with the flexibility to develop web and database applications for XML, at varying levels of abstraction

Homogeneity and persistence of transgene expression by omitting antibiotic selection in cell line isolation

Nonuniform, mosaic expression patterns of transgenes are often linked to transcriptional silencing, triggered by epigenetic modifications of the exogenous DNA. Such phenotypes are common phenomena in genetically engineered cells and organisms. They are widely attributed to features of transgenic transcription units distinct from endogenous genes, rendering them particularly susceptible to epigenetic downregulation. Contrary to this assumption we show that the method used for the isolation of stably transfected cells has the most profound impact on transgene expression patterns. Standard antibiotic selection was directly compared to cell sorting for the establishment of stable cells. Only the latter procedure could warrant a high degree of uniformity and stability in gene expression. Marker genes useful for the essential cell sorting step encode mostly fluorescent proteins. However, by combining this approach with site-specific recombination, it can be applied to isolate stable cell lines with the desired expression characteristics for any gene of interest

Optimum time requirement for enzymic hydrolysis of food proteins

Extent of hydrolysis of different food proteins by pepsin + pancreatin enzymes was investigated to arrive at the minimum time required for complete hydrolysts. The food groups selected were cereals, decorticated legumes and defatted oilseeds. Milk protein was taken as reference. Cooked food samples were digested with pepsin and pancreatin, reaction stopped at timely intervals and nitrogen was estimated in supenatent to calculate percent protein hydrolyzed. Casein and skim milk powder were found to be highly digestible with 91.2% (25 min) and 93.8% (10 min) digestibility, respectively. Among cereals, maximum digestibility was observed at 40 min for rice (85.5%), wheat (84.2%). ragi (77.2%) and at 30 min for jowar (76.2%). Legume samples could be hydrolyzed upto 50 min with maximum digestibility of 85.7% for redgram, 84.0% for greengram, 85.3% for Bengalgram and 78.9% for blackgram. Defatted oilseeds exhibited maximum digestibility of 96.6% for groundnuts, 94.1% for sunflower and 88.2% for soybean at 30 min. Overall, food samples selected had maximum digestibility between 30-50 min and these intervals could be used for in vitro studies

Enhancing edit distance on real sequences filters using histogram distance on fixed reference ordering

Distance functions are the main tools to measure similarity of two sequences and to search the closest sequences to given query sequence. Several well known distance functions, however, have asymptotical time complexity of O(mn) which cannot be fully afforded by systems that deal with large volumes of data. These distance functions, including Edit distance on Real sequences (EDR) [5], have pruning methods to reduce execution time by dismissing false candidates as early as possible. In this paper, we propose the Histogram Distance on Fixed Reference (HDFR) ordering, with various reference histogram construction methods, to improve the filtering power of the pruning methods in EDR. Experiments show that a decrease in EDR execution time is observed after HDFR is applied. While we base our experiments on EDR, HDFR can also be applied to other distance functions with appropriate pruning methods. © 2006 IEEE

Evidence for two distinct mechanisms for holes in single-thallium layer cuprate superconductors

Cuprate superconductors derived from TlSr<SUB>2</SUB>CuO<SUB>5</SUB> and TlSr<SUB>3</SUB>Cu<SUB>2</SUB>O<SUB>7</SUB> possess unusually small concentrations of chemically titratable holes (&lt;0.1) as compared with other cuprate superconductors with the same number of CuO<SUB>2</SUB> sheets. The result suggests the presence of a band overlap contributing to a hole concentration in these materials

Development of super convergent Euler finite elements for the analysis of sandwich beams with soft core

Sandwich structures are well known for their use in aircraft, naval and automobile industries due to their high strength resistance with light weight and high energy absorption capability. Sandwich beams with soft core are very common and simple structures that are employed in day to day general use appliances. Modeling and analysis of sandwich structures is not straight forward due to the interactions between core and face sheets. In this paper, formulation of Super Convergent finite elements for analysis of the sandwich beams with soft core based on Euler Bernoulli beam theory are presented. Two elements, Eul4d with 4 degrees of freedom assuming rigid core in transverse direction and EullOd with 10 degrees of freedom assuming the flexible core were developed are presented. The formulation considers the top, bottom face sheets and core as separate entities and are coupled by beam kinematics. The performance of these elements are validated by results available in the published literature. Number of studies are performed using the formulated elements in static, free vibration and wave propagation analysis involving various boundary and loading conditions. The paper highlights the advantages of the elements developed over the traditional elements for modeling of sandwich beams and, in particular wave propagation analysis