Influence of Word of Mouth on Consumer Buying Decision: Evidence from Bangladesh Market.

The purpose of this study is to define how word of mouth influence consumer’s buying behavior.  Word of mouth is becoming a strong tool for building brand in present time. The research used primary and secondary data for analysis. In primary data, 500 respondents’ data were collected and Microsoft excel used for analysis. The findings recommend that word of mouth has impact on consumer buying behavior. The results suggest that word of mouth built by trust and loyalty. The findings are based on small sample size however; the framework may be used for future research. The significance of word of mouth, particularly consumer buying behavior, is increased rapidly. The paper will give marketers a better understanding of word of mouth as well as consumer perceptions. Keywords: Word of mouth, Network marketing, Consumer buying behaviour, Consumer trust, Consumer loyalty

On mitigating hop-to-hop congestion problem in IoT enabled Intra-Vehicular communication

Internet of Things enabled Intra-Vehicular Network (IVN) refers to the network where large number of sensors are connected with each other for sharing the vehicle's status information in order to develop a smart vehicular system. The number of sensor nodes in the vehicle has increased significantly due to the increasing vehicular applications. The phenomenon of congestion poses a problem in the IVN where the traffic load and number of sensors are increased. This problem can be resolved by mitigating the limitation of the existing Media Access Control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, we address this issue and proposed a MAC strategy for solving this problem in this network. Furthermore, we discuss the design of IVN scenario and the performance is evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay. The simulation results reveal the effectiveness of our proposal

Antioxidant, antimicrobial, toxicity and analgesic properties of ethanol extract of Solena amplexicaulis root

BACKGROUND: This study was subjected to investigate different pharmacological properties of ethanol extract ofSolena amplexicaulis root. RESULTS: The extract contains flavonoid, alkaloid, saponin and steroid compounds. The extract exhibited excellent antioxidant activity in DPPH radical scavenging activity. The extract also showed potent activity in brine shrimp lethality bioassay. The LC50 value was found to 44.677 µg/ml. The extract showed better anti-bacterial activity against gram-negative bacteria. In antifungal assay, the maximum 79.31% of anti-mycotic activity was observed against Aspergillus ochraceus while minimum 44.2% against Rhizopus oryzae. MIC value ranged between 1500 - 3000 µg/ml. The extract was found moderately toxic with a 24-hr LD50 value of 81.47 mg/kg in Swiss albino mice. The degree of inhibition by the ethanolic extract of the root was found less than that of standard analgesic drug diclofenac sodium. The extract also showed moderate anti-inflammatory and antinociceptive activity and anti-diabetic property. Reducing power of the extract was comparable with standard ascorbic acid. Moderate in vitro thrombolytic activity, lipid peroxidation inhibition property, metal chelating ability and stress-protective activity was also observed. CONCLUSION: Ethanol extract of Solena amplexicaulis root can be valuable for treatment of different diseases

Phenotypic and Genotypic Characteristics of Antimicrobial Resistance in Citrobacter freundii Isolated from Domestic Ducks (Anas platyrhynchos domesticus) in Bangladesh

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Citrobacter freundii poses a serious challenge as this species is one of the sources of nosocomial infection and causes diarrheal infections in humans. Ducks could be the potential source of multidrug-resistant (MDR) C. freundii; however, AMR profiles in C. freundii from non-human sources in Bangladesh have remained elusive. This study aimed to detect C. freundii in domestic ducks (Anas platyrhynchos domesticus) in Bangladesh and to determine their phenotypic and genotypic antibiotic susceptibility patterns. A total of 150 cloacal swabs of diseased domestic ducks were screened using culturing, staining, biochemical, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) to detect C. freundii. Phenotypic and genotypic antibiotic susceptibility patterns were done by the disk diffusion method and PCR, respectively. In total, 16.67% (25/150) of the samples were positive for C. freundii. C. freundii isolates showed a range of 20% to 96% resistance to cefotaxime, gentamicin, levofloxacin, ciprofloxacin, cotrimoxazole, tetracycline, ampicillin, and cephalexin. More than 60% of the isolates were phenotypically MDR, and the index of multiple antibiotic resistance ranged from 0.07 to 0.79. Genes encoding resistance to beta-lactams [blaTEM-1-88% (22/25), blaCMY-2-56% (14/25), blaCMY-9-8% (2/25), and blaCTX-M-14-20% (5/25)], sulfonamides [sul1-52% (13/25), sul2-24% (6/25)], tetracyclines [tetA-32% (8/25) and tetB-4% (1/25)], aminoglycosides [aacC4-16% (4/25)], and fluoroquinolones [qnrA-4% (1/25), qnrB-12% (3/25), and qnrS-4% (1/25)] were detected in the isolated C. freundii. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in Bangladesh to detect MDR C. freundii with their associated resistance genes from duck samples. We suggest addressing the burden of diseases in ducks and humans and associated AMR issues using the One Health approach

BenLLMEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation into the Potentials and Pitfalls of Large Language Models on Bengali NLP

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as one of the most important breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) for their impressive skills in language generation and other language-specific tasks. Though LLMs have been evaluated in various tasks, mostly in English, they have not yet undergone thorough evaluation in under-resourced languages such as Bengali (Bangla). In this paper, we evaluate the performance of LLMs for the low-resourced Bangla language. We select various important and diverse Bangla NLP tasks, such as abstractive summarization, question answering, paraphrasing, natural language inference, text classification, and sentiment analysis for zero-shot evaluation with ChatGPT, LLaMA-2, and Claude-2 and compare the performance with state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. Our experimental results demonstrate an inferior performance of LLMs for different Bangla NLP tasks, calling for further effort to develop better understanding of LLMs in low-resource languages like Bangla.Comment: First two authors contributed equall

IoT Enabled Intra-Vehicular Communication for Designing A Smart Car

Nowadays, the number of sensor nodes in the vehicle has expanded altogether because of the expanding of various vehicular applications. Moreover, the wired connection is not adaptable and flexible due to the internal structure of the vehicle, thus, there is an expanding level of appeal to design a system in which the wired connections with the sensor node are supplanted with wireless connections. Design a wireless sensor system inside the vehicle is quite challenging than other systems, e.g., wireless, sensor and computer network, due to the unpredictable environment inside the vehicle. In this project, we discuss about Internet of Things (IoT) enabled Intra-Vehicular Communication for Designing a Smart Car. IoT enabled Intra-Vehicular Communication (IoT-IVC) refers to the system where huge number of sensors are associated with each other for sharing the car components’ information to build up a smart vehicular system. The marvel of congestion represents an issue in the IoT-IVC while the traffic load and number of sensors are expanded. A new scheduling algorithm is proposed for minimizing the congestion. A Test-Bed is designed in order to validate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results justify the effectiveness of the proposal

IoT enable relay network for demand based light intensity controlled seamless highway lighting system

Highway authority spends huge amount of money per year for Highway Lighting System worldwide (e.g., Malaysia USD 25 Million per year). Internet of Things (IoT) becomes one of the popular concepts that provides prominent solutions in various paradigms. Exploiting IoT, this work develops a prototype for efficient highway lighting system at lower energy consumption. Two key features need to be taken into account for designing such a system are: i) Road users’ point of view (i.e., Comfort and safety) ii) Road service providers’ point of view (i.e., Reduce Energy Consumption and Maintenance Cost). The characteristics of this prototype revile the effectiveness of the proposal

DTPA Captopril Renogram: Still an Invaluable Tool for Probability Assessment in Suspected Cases of Renovascular Hypertension

Background: Renovascular hypertension is a secondary form of hypertension which occurs due to renal artery stenosis and is potentially curable. The gold standard for diagnosis of this condition is renal angiography which is rather invasive. Captopril renography on the other hand is an established technique used for more than three decades for accurate and non-invasive diagnosis of significant renovascular hypertension. At NINMAS captopril renography is also used to screen renovascular hypertension and has been a routine procedure since the mid- nineties. Aim: The aim of the present study is to reassess the value of captopril renography test after two decades of its use at NINMAS.Materials and Methods: This is a retrospective study of patients who underwent DTPA Captopril renography for evaluation of renovascular hypertension at the National Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Allied Sciences (NINMAS). Divisional archive was searched and patient's clinical record files were screened from January 2014- September 2015. In total thirty patients who had both baseline and post Captopril renography test during this period were selected and analyzed for the study.Results: Total 30 patients (male 21 and female 09, mean age 24± 5.5 years); were analyzed who completed both post Captopril and base line studies in two different days. The records showed that a baseline renal scintigraphy was performed with 370-444 MBq Tc-99m diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid (Tc-99m DTPA renogram). Scintigraphy was repeated within a week with 25-50 mg of oral Captopril given 60 min prior to the test. Among the 30 patients studied, normal post-captopril renogram was revealed in 08(26%) cases, abnormal findings in 12(40%) , the study was not sensitive in 06 (20%) due to gross parenchyma impairment (GPI) and no change was found in 04(14%) cases. On the basis of diagnostic criteria for gradation for renal arterial stenosis in 12 abnormal finding of Captopril study, the findings were, grade-1 in 06(20%), grade-2 in 05(17%) and grade -3 in 01(3%) cases. After assessing time activity curve, glomerular filtration and renal split function the probability assessment of renal arterial stenosis (RAS) among the abnormal Captopril studies (n=12) were determined and the high probability for RAS was found in 05 (42%), indeterminate in 03(25%) and low probability in 04(33%) cases.Conclusion: Captopril renography is a sensitive test for detection of RVH in patients in whom the renal function is as yet unimpaired. Even though our study is severely limited by the lack of confirmatory renal angiogram data, yet we can conclude that captopril renogram by itself is of considerable value since it can predict the functional significance of the stenosis. Therefore we conclude that captopril renography can add value to the diagnosis of RVH and should remain a method of choice even in this era of Doppler Ultrasound.Bangladesh J. Nuclear Med. 18(2): 131-134, July 201