Characterization and identification of plant growth promoting endophytic bacterial strain IU10

Growing evidence has suggested that plant growth-promoting endophytic bacteria can regulate, which can be used as biofertilizers, bio-stimulants, and biocontrol agent. In the present study, Bacillus subtills IU10 was isolated from plants and was subjected to advanced chromatography and spectroscopic techniques for the extraction and isolation of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA). Up to 10 µg/mL of IAA was quantified in the bacterial extract using the [2H2]-IAA internal standards in GC-MS analysis. PVK agar containing Ca3(PO4)2 was used to measure the ability of IU10 to solubilize phosphate. The clear zones formed by phosphate solubilization were measured to assess the phosphate solubilization potential. Azurol-S (CAS) medium was used for measuring siderophore production. The orange halo circles were measured to quantify the siderophore production. Endophytic IU10 inoculated plants showed significantly improvement root to shoot length, biomass and chlorophyll as compared to control. The data indicates that IU10 produce phytohormones, siderophore and immobilize nutrients could be used as biofertilizer.

An Automated System for Epilepsy Detection using EEG Brain Signals based on Deep Learning Approach

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder and for its detection, encephalography (EEG) is a commonly used clinical approach. Manual inspection of EEG brain signals is a time-consuming and laborious process, which puts heavy burden on neurologists and affects their performance. Several automatic techniques have been proposed using traditional approaches to assist neurologists in detecting binary epilepsy scenarios e.g. seizure vs. non-seizure or normal vs. ictal. These methods do not perform well when classifying ternary case e.g. ictal vs. normal vs. inter-ictal; the maximum accuracy for this case by the state-of-the-art-methods is 97+-1%. To overcome this problem, we propose a system based on deep learning, which is an ensemble of pyramidal one-dimensional convolutional neural network (P-1D-CNN) models. In a CNN model, the bottleneck is the large number of learnable parameters. P-1D-CNN works on the concept of refinement approach and it results in 60% fewer parameters compared to traditional CNN models. Further to overcome the limitations of small amount of data, we proposed augmentation schemes for learning P-1D-CNN model. In almost all the cases concerning epilepsy detection, the proposed system gives an accuracy of 99.1+-0.9% on the University of Bonn dataset.Comment: 18 page

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF RELUCTANCE ON DRINKING ALCOHOL IN ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE AND PAKISTANI LAW

Islam is a complete code of life that provides guiding principles related to every word, deed and disposition of human life, whether the person's consent or consent is absent. Determining these punishments in Islam is to maintain peace in society. However, if they do not consent to the commission of this crime, but someone has forced them to commit this crime, then Islam has allowed their compulsion to be seen. And in some cases they have been exempted from punishment. Drinking alcohol is also a crime in Islam because it causes physical and social harm, which Islam has prescribed as a punishment. No, and whether there are laws related to this in our country, Pakistan, if there are, the laws should be compared with Islamic jurisprudence, and it should be brought to public attention to what extent the country's law is compatible with Islamic jurisprudenc

THE IMPACT OF THE USE OF GEOGEBRA ON STUDENT’S MATHEMATICAL REPRESENTATION SKILLS AND ATTITUDE

Mathematics is important and applies to science, technology, society or the natural sciences. It is applied directly or indirectly. Most students find this to be a very stimulating, complex, and well-understood subject. Maths in high school is extremely important. The study was designed to investigate the impact of students' mathematical representation skills and their attitudes towards GeoGebra. This study was quasi-experimental and carried out on high school students. We have two groups belonging to the same standard class. The control group consisted of 22 students, while the experimental group consisted of 28 participants. The conventional approach was used to teach certain concepts of plane geometry to the students in the control group. On the other hand, the experimental group taught similar teachings using GeoGebra. The results show that students have more skills in mathematical representation using GeoGebra. The semi-empirical test also showed a significant change in students' attitudes between the pre-test and the post-test. Students are more active in mathematical representation skills in GeoGebra.  Article visualizations

A Comparative Study of Security Mechanism differentiation between Windows 2000 and UNIX Operating Systems

"Security" is hard to formalize, hard to design (and design for), hard to implement, hard to verify, hard to configure, and hard to use. It is particularly hard to use on a platform such as Windows, which is evolving, security-wise, along with its representative user-base. The primary environment in which a typical Windows system exists has traditionally been hostile, especially after the advent of the Internet. While UNIX systems share the same environment today, their traditional environments were comparatively trusted: research labs and universities. Similarly, UNIX users have had backgrounds differing from Windows users. Keywords: UNIX, Windows 2000, Security Mechanism, Operating Syste

Dural Tear, a Feared Complication of Spine Surgery

OBJECTIVES To investigate the incidence, risk factors and clinical presentation of complications in patients undergoing spinal surgery with and without Dural Tear. METHODOLOGY A one-year prospective case-control study was conducted in the department of orthopaedics and spinal surgery at the Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC) and Rahman Medical and surgical centre Dagger Buner. The spine surgeon used a discrete surgical approach. The questionnaire was used to collect patient demographic data, surgical information, and data on perioperative and postoperative complications. SPSS version 21.0 statistical software was used for all statistical analyses. RESULTS Dural tears were observed in 3.4% of the patients, among whom 20% experienced a Dural leak. After controlling for potentially confounding variables of age, sex, primary disease, and type of procedure, the surgery-related complications that were more likely to occur in the Dural Tear group than in the non-TD group were surgical site complications OR 2.69 and postoperative neurological defect O 3.28. The proportion of postoperative delirium OR 3.22 was significantly high in the Dural Tear group as perioperative complications CONCLUSION A higher proportion of surgical site infections, postoperative neurological defects and delirium in the Dural Tear group are due to direct complications, such as Dural leakage

A Step towards Softbots: Easy2Shop, a Multi Agent based Shopping bot

With the emergence and omnipresence of e-commerce on the internet, online purchasing assistants and applications have made their appearance. More commonly known as “shop bots†these intelligent agents facilitate the purchasing process, therefore saving time and money. Most shop bots provide you with a list of companies offering the best price and service for the product that you want. The first shop bot Bargain Finder was developed in 1995 by Andersen consulting and it was designed to help people find only musical CDs. Today, Shop bots are capable of finding a wide variety of products and services offered on the internet. These intelligent agents help you to make the best choice when looking for CDs, DVDs, books, computers, software, and cars. Keywords: Intelligent agents, Shopping bots, E-Commerce, Multi agents, Robotics, Easy2Shop, Intelligent agent criteria, Soft bots

Feasibility of a Solar Thermal Power Plant in Pakistan

Pakistan has been facing an unprecedented energy crisis since the last few years. The problem becomes more severe throughout the year. The current energy shortage crisis has badly hit Pakistan’s economy where hundreds of industries have closed due to lack of electricity to fulfil their requirements. The energy supply and demand gap has risen to 5000 MW [1] and is expected to rise considerably in the coming years as shown in Figure 1. Table 1 shows the existing installed power generation in Pakistan. Pakistan has a huge potential in renewable energy especially solar energy to fill this gap if utilized properly. Pakistan, being in the Sun Belt, is ideally located to take advantage of solar energy technologies. This energy source is widely distributed and abundantly available in the country. Pakistan receives 4.45- 5.83 kWh/m2/day of global horizontal insolation as an annual mean value, with 5.30 kWh/m2/day over most areas of the country [2, 3]. This minimum level of solar radiation (4.45 kWh/m2/day) is higher than the world average of 3.61 kWh/m2/day [4] which shows that Pakistan lies in an excellent solar belt range. Pakistan has six main insolation measuring stations, namely Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Quetta, Peshawar and Multan and 37 observatories distributed fairly well over the entire country, recording sunshine hours as shown in Table A in Appendix. From the sunshine hours data it can be seen that most of the cities mentioned receive more than 250 sunshine hours a month. 2006 energy policy has resulted in few practical steps taken for utilizing the abundantly available solar resource in Pakistan. A Solar Water Heating System has installed in a Leather Industry for first time in Pakistan. The system, using 400 m2 Evacuated Collector tubes, provides heated water at 70 to 80 oC (at least 10 degree rise to the incoming water) to the already used boiler system, thus saving 33% of the cost. The Project was funded by Higher Education Commission (HEC) under University-Industry Technological Support Program (UITSP). Solar water heating technology is relatively mature technology in Pakistan but its higher capital cost compared to conventional gas heaters has limited its use so far. This technology is widely recommended by a number of public sector organizations in northern mountains where natural gas is limited and difficult. The solar water heaters are now being commercially produced in the private sector. More than 2000 low cost solar cookers are used in Pakistan for cooking purposes. Similarly, solar dryers are used in Gilgit and Skardu (Northern part of Pakistan) to dry large quantities of fruits such as apricot and transport and sell them later in the urban areas, thus bringing economic prosperity to the area. Fresh water unavailability in large parts of Baluchistan, Sind and southern Punjab is a critical issue. Two solar desalination plants consisting of 240 sills each with a capacity of 6000 gallons of seawater/day have been operational at Gawadar in Baluchistan province. A number of such schemes are under active consideration by local governments in Baluchistan and Thar [5]. The need for constructing solar power plants has been realized both at federal and provincial governments. The government of Sindh recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with German company Azur Solar for building a 50 MW solar power plant at Dhabeji in District Thatta. The firm Azur Solar will initially set up a 60 kW solar power station to provide free electricity to backward 'goths' (Villages), schools and basic health centres of Badin. Both, technical and economical feasibility of a 50 MW solar thermal power plant using Stirling-Dish (SD) technology in Jacaobabad in Sindh Province of Pakistan is analysed in this chapter. The performance and environmental aspects of Stirling dish for power generation with and without solar energy is examined, discussed and compared. The solar data was collected from Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) of Pakistan and Life cycle cost analysis is performed to determine the economic feasibility of the solar thermal power plant. This study reveals that Jacobabad falls within the high solar energy belt and has minimum radiation energy of 4.45 kWh/m2/day (which is higher than the world average of 3.61 kWh/m2/day) to produce electricity, even during the low sunshine and cloudy days. The study concluded that solar thermal power plant in Pakistan is feasible using solar Stirling dish technology