The decline of the Saljuqid Empire.

After a critical examination of the available sources and a chronological survey of the period, the thesis sets out to analyse the institutions of the Saljuqid State, so far as they can be identified. Among them are the royal family and Court including relations of princes and activities of wives, constitution of the armed forces, relations with amirs and Turkmen and Arab tribes, civil administration, relations with the caliphate, religious opposition, and economic factors. The bearing of each upon the fortunes of the dynasty and the conditions in the Middle East is examined as fully as possible. Finally, the political history of the period is surveyed in the light of the factors analysed above. The thesis thus aims at presenting for the first time a critical history of a period hitherto known only in general outline, and at isolating the features which marked the political life of the Eastern Islamic world during this period

A Parallel Tabu Search Strategy for Cell Placement in VLSI Circuit Design

—Tabu Search based cell placement approaches for VLSI circuit design have shown excellent results when executed on a single processor. However, they require signicant computation time. Of the various acceleration strategies attempted, parallelization has always exhibited the most potential. The parallel Tabu Search approach presented in this work can be classied as a synchronous master-slave p-control, RS and MPSS strategy. The approach is implemented on a dedicated Linux-based cluster of workstations, using MPI libraries for communication. Experimental results for ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show excellent performance in terms of scalability & speed-up

Spatial distribution and catalytic mechanisms of β-glucosidase activity at the root-soil interface

© 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.We compared modifications of soil zymography, a new in situ technique to visualize enzyme activities, based on contact of fluorgenic substrate-saturated membranes with soil either through the gel layer (gel zymography) or without gel application (direct zymography). We coupled zymography with quantitative measurements of enzyme kinetics to characterize catalytic mechanisms of β-glucosidase activity at the plant-soil interface including root surface (rhizoplane), rhizosphere, and bulk soil. Direct zymography refined and focused image resolution. The area of hotspots (i.e., spots with most intensive enzyme activity) as well as color intensity ratios estimated using direct zymography exceeded by a factor of 2 the corresponding values obtained with gel zymography. As determined by direct zymography, the percentage of hotspots associated to root surfaces was 58–68 % of total hotspot area. Hotspot area comprised only 6.8 ± 0.1 % of the total area of an image and 9.0 ± 3 % of the root surface area. The intensity of β-glucosidase activity, however, was up to 20 times higher in the hotspots versus bulk soil. The contribution of rhizosphere to β-glucosidase activity of the whole image (77–82 %) was four times higher than the contribution of the root surface. Enzyme kinetic parameters indicated different enzyme systems in bulk and rhizosphere soil. Higher substrate affinity and catalytic efficiency in bulk than in rhizosphere soil suggested relative domination of microorganisms with more efficient enzyme systems in the former. Coupling direct zymography and kinetic assays enabled mapping the two-dimensional (2D) distribution of enzyme activity at the root-soil interface and estimating the catalytic properties of root-associated and soil-associated enzymes

Multiobjective VLSI cell placement using distributed genetic algorithm

ABSTRACT Genetic Algorithms have worked fairly well for the VLSI cell placement problem, albeit with significant run times. Two parallel models for GA are presented for VLSI cell placement where the objectives are optimizing power dissipation, timing performance and interconnect wirelength, while layout width is a constraint. A Master-Slave approach is mentioned wherein both fitness calculation and crossover mechanism are distributed among slaves. A Multi-Deme parallel GA is also presented in which each processor works independently on an allocated subpopulation followed by information exchange through migration of chromosomes. A pseudo-diversity approach is taken, wherein similar solutions with the same overall cost values are not permitted in the population at any given time. A series of experiments are performed on ISCAS-85/89 benchmarks to show the performance of the Multi-Deme approach