Prevalence of Ocular Morbidity Among School Adolescents of Gandhinagar District, Gujarat

Objective: To study the prevalence of ocular morbidity (abnormal condition) and various factors affecting it among school attending adolescents. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted to study abnormal ocular conditions like refractive errors, vitamin A deficiency, conjunctivitis, trachoma, ocular trauma, blephritis, stye, color blindness and pterygium among school adolescents of 10-19 years age in rural and urban areas of Gandhinagar district from January to July, 2009. Systematic sampling was done to select 20 schools having 6th to 12th standard education including 12 schools from rural and 8 from urban areas. Six adolescents from each age year (10-19) were selected randomly to achieve sample size of 60 from each school. In total, 1206 adolescents including 691 boys and 515 girls were selected. Information was collected from selected adolescents by using proforma. Visual acuity was assessed using a Snellen’s chart and all participants underwent an ophthalmic examination carried out by a trained doctor. Results: Prevalence of ocular morbidity among school adolescents was reported 13% (7.8% in boys, 5.6% in girls); with 5.2% have moderate visual impairment. Refractive error was most common ocular morbidity (40%) both among boys and girls. Almost 30% of boys and girls reported vitamin A deficiency in various forms of xerophthalmia. Prevalence of night blindness was 0.91% and of Bitot`s spot 1.74%. Various factors like, illiterate or lower parents’ education, lower socio-economic class and malnutrition were significantly associated with ocular morbidity. Conclusion: Ocular morbidity in adolescents is mainly due to refractive error, moderate visual impairment and xerophthalmia

Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Driving Based on Time Scaled Collision Cone

In this paper, we present a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework based on path velocity decomposition paradigm for autonomous driving. The optimization underlying the MPC has a two layer structure wherein first, an appropriate path is computed for the vehicle followed by the computation of optimal forward velocity along it. The very nature of the proposed path velocity decomposition allows for seamless compatibility between the two layers of the optimization. A key feature of the proposed work is that it offloads most of the responsibility of collision avoidance to velocity optimization layer for which computationally efficient formulations can be derived. In particular, we extend our previously developed concept of time scaled collision cone (TSCC) constraints and formulate the forward velocity optimization layer as a convex quadratic programming problem. We perform validation on autonomous driving scenarios wherein proposed MPC repeatedly solves both the optimization layers in receding horizon manner to compute lane change, overtaking and merging maneuvers among multiple dynamic obstacles.Comment: 6 page

CFD Modeling of Globe Valves for Oxygen Application

Components used in high-pressure, high-temperature, flowing oxygen are susceptible to ignition and combustion in presence of restriction or when particles impact these restriction. The valves in any systems are the common flow restrictors, hence, the design and analyses of valves are most critical tasks. The flow of oxygen through valves distinguishes itself by accentuating auto-ignition and consequent flame propagation in metals and non-metals, apart from other usual characteristics present with gases/liquids. The combination of ignition resistance, proper and reliable performance and fabrication economy marks the specification of material and design of valves in oxygen-enriched environment. The analyses have been performed by applying the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, FLUENT, to obtain the solution of the two-dimensional turbulent flow field through a globe valve for its different openings in the GOX environment. The flow control valves in high velocity oxygen systems for different openings are simulated for turbulence and eddy dissipation. The influence of pressure, flow rate and opening of the valve on the rise in temperature and eddy dissipation rate is also obtained for compressible flow range. The simulation for turbulence is done by k- and k- turbulence models and the results have been compared

Behavioral Plasticity in Response to Environmental Cues in Poison Frog Tadpoles

Behavioral plasticity is the ability of an organism to detect cues in their environment and respond by modifying behavior. In the wild, dyeing poison frog (Dendrobates tinctorius) tadpoles are delivered by their dads to pools that vary in predation risk, resource availability, con-and hetero-specific density. Conspecific density is especially important as these tadpoles are aggressive and often cannibalistic. Behavioral plasticity in response to environmental cues may help tadpoles to compete for resources and survival

JSP Custom Tag Library for In-Place Editing in Disconnected Architecture – A Case Study

Even a trivial web application involves some sort of database functionality with few basic operations. However, such applications reveal a lot of code repetition. To avoid such a scenario, various techniques have been proposed in literature for reusability of code. One such technique is implementing custom tag library. Many frameworks rely on their own proprietary tag libraries for compacting the code. For example, struts framework abundantly uses HTML tag library, Beans tag library and Logic Tag library. JSF frame work utilizes core tag library. Connected architecture suffers from severe limitations and has become obsolete in web applications where no. of users and hence no. of database connections is not predetermined. In such a scenario connected architecture becomes predominant and scores well on its connected counterpart. In order to cater this need of a typical web application, in this paper, authors have presented JSP tag libraries for in-place editing in disconnected architecture. The tag currently works with MS-Access, MySQL and Oracle and can easily be extended to incorporate other back ends. Current work reveals encapsulation basics targeting the elimination of boilerplate code where lot of repeated code is hidden behind custom tags. Such a mechanism boils down to the entire database operations to one liner when tag attributes conceal the plethora of information involved in implementation of functionality. This paper emphasizes on development of a generic tag for disparate back ends. The database extensions are properly taken care of. The proper data type casting is performed by pulling out database schema information from the underlying DBMS. The communication between Tag Handler class and JSP page is established through PageContext class. The name of JSP page becomes available to the Tag Handler class through PageContext class which can also be used for retrieving query string parameters in a Tag Handler class. Keywords-Disconnected Architecture, JDOM Parser, PageContext Class, Tag Handler Class, TagLib Directive, XML

Continuous Uniform Finite Time Stabilization of Planar Controllable Systems

Continuous homogeneous controllers are utilized in a full state feedback setting for the uniform finite time stabilization of a perturbed double integrator in the presence of uniformly decaying piecewise continuous disturbances. Semiglobal strong $\mathcal{C}^1$ Lyapunov functions are identified to establish uniform asymptotic stability of the closed-loop planar system. Uniform finite time stability is then proved by extending the homogeneity principle of discontinuous systems to the continuous case with uniformly decaying piecewise continuous nonhomogeneous disturbances. A finite upper bound on the settling time is also computed. The results extend the existing literature on homogeneity and finite time stability by both presenting uniform finite time stabilization and dealing with a broader class of nonhomogeneous disturbances for planar controllable systems while also proposing a new class of homogeneous continuous controllers