Academic Excellence in Technical Institutions

The paper describes the changes taking place in the external environment of education institutions and their effects on the functioning of institutions. It highlights various management philosophies being used by industries and companies providing employment to graduates. All the stakeholders expects the excellence in all respects from educational institutions. It is very dificult to translate and satisfy the expectations of different stakeholders. So in this paper deinition of excellence, its dimensions, and characteristics in context of education institutions are described. At the end formats are suggested to assess the effectiveness of the institution on dimensions and characteristics of excellence. The paper is based on literature review, experiences of the authors and views of experts

A REVIEW STUDY ON BIOLOGICAL ILL EFFECTS AND HEALTH HAZARDS OF AFLATOXINS

Aflatoxins are a group of secondary metabolites produced mainly by Aspergillus flavus and also by Aspergillus parasiticus, that are acutely toxic to warm blooded animals including human beings. Aflatoxin producing species of Aspergillus are quite common and widespread in nature. They can colonise and contaminate grains before harvest or during storage. Host crops are particularly susceptible to infection by Aspergillus following prolonged exposure to a high humidity environment. Other favourable conditions include high moisture content and high temperature. The aflatoxins can be found on a wide range of commodities including cereals, pulses, oilseeds, spices and dry fruits. In India, aflatoxins have been reported from a variety of edible substances such as cereals, oil seeds, spices, vegetables, dry fruits, pulses, areca nut, coconut and fast foods. The aflatoxins became the focus of intense investigations when outbreaks of disease called "Turkey X' disease" occurred in Poultry during 1960 in U.K. Since the beginning of mycotoxin research the aflatoxin problem has been an economic burden for the food crops, livestock and poultry industry. The aflatoxins are acutely toxic being carcinogenic, mutagenic and teratogenic to rat and other experimental animals, so there has always been a concern about contamination of food with aflatoxins and threat to both human and animal health. Primarily aflatoxin B1, B2, G1, G2 and M1 are of interest. The aflatoxin M1 is hydroxylated metabolite of B1 that is the most frequently occurring aflatoxin. Further aflatoxin B1, is one of the most potent hepato- carcinogens known, hence levels of aflatoxins in the diet are an important consideration for human health. It is therefore, essential to device suitable cheap and safe control measures to minimize the deleterious effects of these mycotoxins. The aim of this review study was to explore the biological ill effects and health hazards due to these aflatoxins

Formulation and Evaluation of Polyherbal Anti-Dandruff Shampoo and its Marketed Comparison

The most popular type of hair treatment is shampooing. Shampoos are an aqueous or creamy soap or detergent solution for washing hair, cleaning of hair shaft and scalp. In the current environment, it appears unlikely that herbal shampoo will be popular with customers, despite the fact that it performs better and is safer than synthetic shampoo. A more extreme strategy to popularizing herbal shampoo would be to alter customer expectations of what a shampoo should be, with a focus on safety and efficacy. The goal of this research work was to develop and formulate herbo cosmetic prepration using antifungal drug and contain polyherbal ingredients in shampoo for cosmetic purposes. In this work replace dangerous synthetic ingredients in herbal shampoo formulations with a safe alternative. Natural anti- dandruff shampoo was developed by utilizing a anti-fungal herbs Argemone mexicana and Caolotropis gigantea and herbal ingredients such as Spindus mukorrosi and Acacia concinna and the resulting formulation was evaluation for pH, viscosity, foaming stability, and evaluation satisfaction. Dandruff is a widespread scalp ailment induced by the Malassezia furfur. It can be totally eradicated, however it can be efficiently regulated and handled by such approach. Several anti-fungal drugs are used in hair care preparations for the management of dandruff in the current study

Student’s perception and experience of computer assisted learning as a teaching method in experimental pharmacology

Background: The decline in the use of animals for teaching in experimental pharmacology due to ethical concerns has led to the introduction of non-animal alternatives. These methods not only try to simulate the live experiment results but also offer the advantages of being time saving, reproducible and have minimum errors. One such alternative is computer assisted learning (CAL) which demonstrates the effect of drugs on living tissue in a virtual environment. In the present study, we assessed the outcome of CAL session among the medical students with the help of a questionnaire and compared it with the pre-CAL questionnaire to study the effectiveness of simulation experiments.Methods: A total of 109 students participated in the study. They were divided into two Batches I and II. Batch I students were given a pre-CAL questionnaire on a selected topic, followed by a CAL session on that topic and a post-CAL questionnaire. Whereas for Batch II students, we directly started with demonstration of CAL session on the same topic followed by a post-CAL questionnaire. A student feedback form based on five point Likert scale was also given to all the students to get their views about the simulation experiments.Results: The students in Batch I, after the CAL session had better average score % as compared to pre-CAL test (80.7% vs. 32.4%). Furthermore, when we compared the post-CAL scores of Batch I and Batch II, it was seen that the average score % was higher for Batch I (80.7%) than Batch II (55.4%).Conclusion: The study demonstrates the effectiveness of CAL in teaching experimental pharmacology concepts and the students felt that this method helped them in a better understanding of the topic as the effects were clearly visualized on the screen and that such simulations need to be a part of the standard curriculum

SCOPE OF YOGA IN REDUCING STRESS AND MANAGEMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES DURING THE CURRENT PANDEMIC- A REVIEW OF EXISTING LITERATURE

Background: With the emergence of Covid 19 pandemic due to increased socio-economic curbs and increased uncertainty of life, psychological disorders are getting surged up. Due to restricted access and poor mental health care facilities, Yoga can be seen as possibility to give a respite to the vulnerable populations and individuals. Aims and Objectives: To establish the role of Yoga as an effective therapeutic modality for catering the need of emerging psychological health issues during Covid 19 pandemic. Material and Methods: (a) Narrative review of existing scientific literature on the mental health and Yoga especially during Covid-19. (b) Studies specifically related to high-risk or vulnerable populations (c) Review of effectiveness of Yoga interventions on the mental health (d) Evidence based use of the Yogic interventions in mitigation of commonly manifested signs of psychological distress during Covid-19 pandemic. Total in depth study of 28 articles dealing with the above mentioned areas. Many methodological and research gaps are noted. Discussion: In Indian context, many research gaps exist in the study of Yoga as an effective therapeutic modality for psychological first aid and mental health care, especially in the emergent Covid 19 pandemic. Conclusion: Globally and nationally there is need to plan and execute high quality research studies to establish Yoga as an evidence based therapeutic modality especially for management of Psychological disorders and to include Yoga in existing mental health care services

Elements of Clean-room Technology and Contamination Control

The heart of the clean room is the high efticiency particualte air (HEPA)/ultra-low penetration air (ULPA) filter, which provides the highest level of air cleaning ever achieved by a singleprocess step. Filter technology has seen tremendous growth in terms of ultimate performance and air handling capacity. Mere installation of ULPA filters of 99.99995 per cent efficiency for 0.2 um aerosol is not sufficient for achieving the desired performance of a clean room. Other design aspects like flow fields, face velocity, number of air changes, make-up air fractions and precise control of other environmental parameters (temperature, humidity, airflow, noise, vibrations, electrostatic discharge, etc.) are equally important

Duavee: a tissue-selective estrogen complex for menopausal symptoms and prevention of osteoporosis

Post-menopausal women suffer from a plethora of problems like vasomotor symptoms, vulvovaginal atrophy (VVA), bone loss, and all this can be attributed to estrogen deficiency. The conventional treatment till date for these hormone deficient manifestations have been estrogen replacement therapy in hysterectomized female or a combination of estrogen and progesterone therapy in women with an intact uterus. The reason for adding progesterone is to protect the endometrium from estrogenic stimulation. The drawback with the combination therapy was irregular vaginal bleeding and breast discomfort, which led to the discontinuation of this therapy. The United States Food and Drug Administration, has recently approved a novel tissue selective estrogen complex comprising of conjugated estrogen (0.45 mg) and a selective estrogen receptor modulator, bazedoxifene (BZA) (20 mg) for the treatment of moderate to severe vasomotor symptoms and prevention of osteoporosis in non-hysterectomized post-menopausal women. This combination retains the benefits of estrogen on vasomotor symptoms, VVA and bone density along with the protective effect of BZA on endometrium and breast tissue. The results of clinical trials have been promising but what still needs to be evaluated is the long term safety of this pair on venous thromboembolism, stroke, and breast cancer

Linaclotide: a guanylate cyclase agonist for treatment of irritable bowel syndrome with constipation and chronic constipation in adults

Linaclotide, a 14 aminoacid peptide is an intestinal secretagogue and works by stimulating guanylate cyclase (GC-C) present in the intestinal epithelium, which leads to improvement in symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome with constipation and chronic constipation in adults. Treatments available currently for these gastrointestinal problems have not been very satisfactory and many new options are therefore being explored to provide relief to these patients. Linaclotide has shown promising results in various clinical trials and hence was approved by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2012

Predicting Outcomes of Horse Racing using Machine Learning

Machine learning with its vast framework is making its way into every aspect of modern society. The segment of betting sports particularly horse racing calls for the attention from a large spectrum of research community owing to its value to the stakeholders and the amount of money involved. Horse racing prediction is a complex problem as there are a large number of influencing variables. The present study aims to contribute in this domain by training machine learning algorithms for predicting horse racing results or outcomes. For this, data for a whole racing season from 2017 to 2019 of races conducted by Turf Club of India was considered which amounts to over 14,700 races.  Six algorithms namely Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Naive Bayes, and k-Nearest Neighbors) k-NN were used to predict the winning horse for each race. Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) technique was applied to the imbalanced horse racing data set and the attributes of the horse race repository were analyzed. The results were compared with other sampling methods to evaluate the relative effectiveness of this method. The proposed framework is able to give an accuracy of 97.6% which is substantially higher when compared to other similar studies. The research can be beneficial to the stakeholders as well as researchers in the same area to do further analysis and experiments