Biliary stones: an atypical cause of abdominal pain in paediatric age group

OBJECTIVE: To identify Paediatric patients with biliary stone disease presenting to a tertiary care hospital in order to determine the etiology, presentation and management. METHODS: Retrospective study of all cases of ultrasonographically proven biliary stones under the age of 15 years from January 1988 to December 2008. Data included their risk factors, complications, management and outcome. RESULTS: Total 32 patients were identified with biliary stones, treated in the hospital. Mean age at presentation was 8.25 +/- 3.33 years. Sixteen patients underwent cholecystectomy. CONCLUSION: Paediatric cholelithiasis is an atypical and under-diagnosed cause of abdominal pain in childhood. True prevalence of the disease may be higher than reported. Appropriate surgical intervention is required in patients with symptomatic and complicated biliary lithiasis

Citrus Tristeza Virus: An Increasing Trend in the Virus Occurrence and Distribution in Citrus Fruits of Northwest, Pakistan

Citrus tristeza clostervirus (CTV) is one of the most damaging fruit viruses playing havoc in citrus orchards around the world. Here, we report, an ELISA-based indexing of citrus trees over a period of eight years (2002 to 2010) in Northwest Pakistan, revealing that the incidence of CTV is increasing mainly with the distribution of infected rootstocks, putting citrus industry at the verge of complete annihilation. The surveys revealed that the average incidence of CTV in 10 major citrus growing districts in the Northwest of Pakistan has steadily increased from 24% (in 2002) to 31, 35, 39 and 44 in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, respectively. Maximum per cent increase of CTV was in citrus orchards in district Haripur, that is, 27.50% and followed by 26% increase of the virus incidence in district Swat during 2002 to 2010. The incidence of the virus was correlated with use of sour orange as root stock with rough lemon. In orchards, where rough lemon was used as root stock; the incidence of CTV was comparatively low. A comparative study of the virus incidence conducted during 2006 to 2012 in sweet orange trees grafted on sour orange and rough lemon in Northwest indicated an average per cent incidence 43 and 37, respectively. This is the first comprehensive study on citrus fruits to determine an increasing trend of CTV in Northwest of Pakistan where citrus industry has been a major source of income for local farmers. An extensive rescue plan needs to be placed to avoid complete destruction of this exportbased industry.Keywords: Citrus, Tristeza, Citrus Tristeza Clostervirus (CTV), ELISA, Incidence, Pakista

Investigating smart home security : is blockchain the answer?

Smart Home automation is increasingly gaining popularity among current applications of Internet of Things (IoT) due to the convenience and facilities it provides to the home owners. Sensors are employed within the home appliances via wireless connectivity to be accessible remotely by home owners to operate these devices. With the exponential increase of smart home IoT devices in the marketplace such as door locks, light bulbs, power switches etc, numerous security concerns are arising due to limited storage and processing power of such devices, making these devices vulnerable to several attacks. Due to this reason, security implementations in the deployment of these devices has gained popularity among researchers as a critical research area. Moreover, the adoption of traditional security schemes has failed to address the unique security concerns associated with these devices. Blockchain, a decentralised database based on cryptographic techniques, is gaining enormous attention to assure security of IoT systems. The blockchain framework within an IoT system is a fascinating substitute to the traditional centralised models, which has some significant concerns in fulfilling the demand of smart homes security. In this article, we aim to examine the security of smart homes by instigating the adoption of blockchain and exploring some of the currently proposed smart home architectures using blockchain technology. To present our findings, we describe a simple secure smart home framework based on a refined version of blockchain called Consortium blockchain. We highlight the limitations and opportunities of adopting such an architecture. We further evaluate our model and conclude with the results by designing an experimental testbed using a few household IoT devices commonly available in the marketplace. © 2013 IEEE

Madura foot

No Abstract. South African Medical Journal Vol. 97 (9) 2007: pp. 834-83

Enhancing quality-of-service conditions using a cross-layer paradigm for ad-hoc vehicular communication

The Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) is an emerging paradigm aiming to introduce a plethora of innovative applications and services that impose a certain quality of service (QoS) requirements. The IoV mainly relies on vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) for autonomous inter-vehicle communication and road-traffic safety management. With the ever-increasing demand to design new and emerging applications for VANETs, one challenge that continues to stand out is the provision of acceptable QoS requirements to particular user applications. Most existing solutions to this challenge rely on a single layer of the protocol stack. This paper presents a cross-layer decision-based routing protocol that necessitates choosing the best multi-hop path for packet delivery to meet acceptable QoS requirements. The proposed protocol acquires the information about the channel rate from the physical layer and incorporates this information in decision making, while directing traffic at the network layer level. Key performance metrics for the system design are analyzed using extensive experimental simulation scenarios. In addition, three data rate variant solutions are proposed to cater for various application-specific requirements in highways and urban environments. © 2013 IEEE

Natural convection in polyethylene glycol based molybdenum disulfide nanofluid with thermal radiation, chemical reaction and ramped wall temperature

© 2018 International Information and Engineering Technology Association. All Rights Reserved. The aim of this study is to investigate the unsteady magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow of Casson nanofluid over an infinite oscillating vertical plate with ramped wall temperature. The effects of porosity, thermal radiation and first order chemical reaction have been considered. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is chosen as base fluid which contained molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) nanoparticles. The Laplace transform technique is applied to the momentum, energy and concentration equations to obtain the closed form solutions. The obtained solutions are for both cases ramped and isothermal boundary conditions and compared graphically. From graphical analysis, it is observed that for isothermal plate, the magnitude of velocity, temperature and concentration profiles are greater than ramped wall temperature. Skin-friction, Nusselt number and Sherwood number are evaluated and presented in tabular forms. The effects of various embedded parameters on velocity, temperature and concentration profiles are discussed graphically

Single image super resolution technique: An extension to true color images

The super-resolution (SR) technique reconstructs a high-resolution image from single or multiple low-resolution images. SR has gained much attention over the past decade, as it has significant applications in our daily life. This paper provides a new technique of a single image super-resolution on true colored images. The key idea is to obtain the super-resolved image from observed low-resolution images. A proposed technique is based on both the wavelet and spatial domain-based algorithms by exploiting the advantages of both of the algorithms. A back projection with an iterative method is implemented to minimize the reconstruction error and for noise removal wavelet-based de-noising method is used. Previously, this technique has been followed for the grayscale images. In this proposed algorithm, the colored images are taken into account for super-resolution. The results of the proposed method have been examined both subjectively by observation of the results visually and objectively by considering the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and mean squared error (MSE), which gives significant results and visually better in quality from the bi-cubic interpolation technique

Integrated use of Biochar: A tool for improving soil and wheat quality of degraded soil under wheat-maiza cropping pattern

Wheat quality, nutrient uptake and nutrient use efficiency are significantly influenced by nutrient sources and application rate. To investigate the integrative effect of biochar, farmyard manure (FYM) and nitrogen (organic and inorganic soil amendments) in a wheat-maize cropping system, a two year study was designed to assess the interactive outcome of biochar, FYM and nitrogenous fertilizer on wheat nitrogen (N) parameters and associated soil quality parameters. Three levels of biochar (0, 25 and 50 t ha-1), two levels of FYM (5 and 10 t ha-1) and two levels of nitrogen fertilizer (60 and 120 kg ha-1) were used in the study. Biochar application displayed a significantly increased in wheat leaf, stem, straw and grain N content; grain and total N-uptake and grain protein content by 24, 20, 24, 56, 50, 17 and 20% respectively. Similarly, biochar application significantly increased soil total N (TN) and soil mineral N (SMN) by 63 and 40% respectively in second year. FYM application increased grain, leaf and straw N content by 20, 19.5 and 18% respectively, and increased total N-uptake and grain protein content by 49 and 19% respectively. FYM increased soil TN and SMN by 63 and 32% in both the years of the experiment. Mineral N application increased soil TN by over a half and SMN by a third, and grain protein content increased 16%. In contrast, nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) decreased for all amendments relative to the control. However, biochar treated plots improved NUE by 38% compared to plots without biochar. In conclusion, this field experiment has illustrated the potential of biochar to bring about short-term benefits in wheat and soil quality parameters in wheat-maize cropping systems. However, the long-term benefits remain to be quantified

Optical absorption and fluorescent behaviour of selenium in ternary silicate glasses

Optical absorption and fluorescent behaviour of selenium in the ternary soda-lime-silica, soda-strontia-silica and soda-baria-silica glasses having molar composition 20Na2O-10RO-70SiO2 (where R = Ca, Sr and Ba) were studied systematically. Selenium in its elemental form was found to produce a variety of pink colour shades in soda-lime-siliea and soda-strontia-silica glasses by optical absorption measurements whereas the infrared transmission studies detected the presence of selenium as selenite (SeO3 2-) and selenate (SeO4 2-) ions which did not produce any color in glass. The results of optical measurements in the glass containing Se ⇌ SeO3 2- ⇌ SeO4 2- species were discussed in the light of the general principles of spectroscopy. The molar extinetion coefficient of selenium was calculated and found to be around 20 and 80 1 ∙ mol-1 ∙ cm-1 respectively, in soda-lime-siliea and soda-strontia-silica glasses at their wavelength maxima at around 485 and 500 nm, whieh dictated the intensity of the broad absorption bands marked due to selenium in the glass. However, the selenium was found to produce a golden yellow color in soda-baria-silica glass. This is due to the shift of the valence state of selenium towards the selenite (SeO3 2-) and selenate (SeO4 2-) state with increasing basicity of the glass. The values of the emission cross-section obtained for selenium based on the fluorescence spectral studies showed that the soda-lime-siliea glass emitted more intense fluorescence than the rest of the silicate glasses