Rural buyers' perception about mosquito repellants

Mosquito repellants prevent mosquito bites and prevention of "man-mosquito contact" is a critical factor in transmission and spread of any disease through mosquitoes particularly in rural area. There has been a long standing 'bias' towards rural buyers. The rural markets are considered rigid in the nature but it is not the case in real sense. Marketing to rural buyers is not only a challenge to the marketers but to the manufacturers, communicators, national planners and economists as well. That is why it has been necessary to understand the various aspects of selected rural areas and consumption pattern for such a fast growing market i.e. mosquito repellants and rural buyers’ perception towards such urban products. The present paper aims to find out the factors influencing the purchase decisions of rural buyers for mosquito repellants and to study the perceptions of present and potential rural buyers' of selected mosquito repellant brands.mosquito, repellent, malaria, rural market, buyers

Overcoming Recession through Effective Business Communication Approaches (A Study in Indian Scenario)

No business activity can be completed without effective business communication network. The stage of economic turmoil is the most important time for any organization to regroup its strategy. At this juncture, strong, transparent and constant internal and external communication networks play a vital role. The global meltdown is a blessing in disguise for the organizations to invigorate their business communication network. The present paper aims to study multifarious approaches of Business Communication applied by Indian Organizations to combat the turbulent period of recession in a successful manner.

Characterization of a turbomolecular-pumped magnetic sector mass spectrometer

A Perkin Elmer MGA-1200, turbomolecular-pumped, magnetic sector, multiple gas analyzer mass spectrometer with modified inlet for fast response was characterized for the analysis of hydrogen, helium, oxygen and argon in nitrogen and helium background gases. This instrument was specially modified for the Vanderberg AFB SLC-6 Hydrogen Disposal Test Program, as a part of the Hydrogen Sampling System (H2S2). Linearity, precision, drift, detection limits and accuracy among other analytical parameters for each of the background gas were studied to evaluate the performance of the instrument. The result demonstrates that H2S2 mass spectrometer is a stable instrument and can be utilized for the quantitative analytical determination of hydrogen, helium, oxygen and argon in nitrogen and helium background gases

H-MAC: A Hybrid MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a hybrid medium access control protocol (H-MAC) for wireless sensor networks. It is based on the IEEE 802.11's power saving mechanism (PSM) and slotted aloha, and utilizes multiple slots dynamically to improve performance. Existing MAC protocols for sensor networks reduce energy consumptions by introducing variation in an active/sleep mechanism. But they may not provide energy efficiency in varying traffic conditions as well as they did not address Quality of Service (QoS) issues. H-MAC, the propose MAC protocol maintains energy efficiency as well as QoS issues like latency, throughput, and channel utilization. Our numerical results show that H-MAC has significant improvements in QoS parameters than the existing MAC protocols for sensor networks while consuming comparable amount of energy.Comment: 10 pages, IJCNC Journal 201

Identifying Keystone Species in the Human Gut Microbiome from Metagenomic Timeseries using Sparse Linear Regression

Human associated microbial communities exert tremendous influence over human health and disease. With modern metagenomic sequencing methods it is possible to follow the relative abundance of microbes in a community over time. These microbial communities exhibit rich ecological dynamics and an important goal of microbial ecology is to infer the interactions between species from sequence data. Any algorithm for inferring species interactions must overcome three obstacles: 1) a correlation between the abundances of two species does not imply that those species are interacting, 2) the sum constraint on the relative abundances obtained from metagenomic studies makes it difficult to infer the parameters in timeseries models, and 3) errors due to experimental uncertainty, or mis-assignment of sequencing reads into operational taxonomic units, bias inferences of species interactions. Here we introduce an approach, Learning Interactions from MIcrobial Time Series (LIMITS), that overcomes these obstacles. LIMITS uses sparse linear regression with boostrap aggregation to infer a discrete-time Lotka-Volterra model for microbial dynamics. We tested LIMITS on synthetic data and showed that it could reliably infer the topology of the inter-species ecological interactions. We then used LIMITS to characterize the species interactions in the gut microbiomes of two individuals and found that the interaction networks varied significantly between individuals. Furthermore, we found that the interaction networks of the two individuals are dominated by distinct "keystone species", Bacteroides fragilis and Bacteroided stercosis, that have a disproportionate influence on the structure of the gut microbiome even though they are only found in moderate abundance. Based on our results, we hypothesize that the abundances of certain keystone species may be responsible for individuality in the human gut microbiome

Hepcidin secretion was not directly proportional to intracellular iron-loading in recombinant-TfR1 HepG2 cells: short communication

Hepcidin is the master regulator of systemic iron homeostasis and its dysregulation is observed in several chronic liver diseases. Unlike the extracellular iron-sensing mechanisms, the intracellular iron-sensing mechanisms in the hepatocytes that lead to hepcidin induction and secretion are incompletely understood. Here, we aimed to understand the direct role of intracellular iron-loading on hepcidin mRNA and peptide secretion using our previously characterised recombinant HepG2 cells that over-express the cell-surface iron-importer protein transferrin receptor-1. Gene expression of hepcidin (HAMP) was determined by real-time PCR. Intracellular iron levels and secreted hepcidin peptide levels were measured by ferrozine assay and immunoassay, respectively. These measurements were compared in the recombinant and wild-type HepG2 cells under basal conditions at 30 min, 2 h, 4 h and 24 h. Data showed that in the recombinant cells, intracellular iron content was higher than wild-type cells at 30 min (3.1-fold, p<0.01), 2 h (4.6-fold, p<0.01), 4 h (4.6-fold, p<0.01) and 24 h (1.9-fold, p<0.01). Hepcidin (HAMP) mRNA expression was higher than wild-type cells at 30 min (5.9-fold; p=0.05) and 24 h (6.1-fold; p<0.03), but at 4 h, the expression was lower than that in wild-type cells (p<0.05). However, hepcidin secretion levels in the recombinant cells were similar to those in wild-type cells at all time-points, except at 4 h, when the level was lower than wild-type cells (p<0.01). High intracellular iron in recombinant HepG2 cells did not proportionally increase hepcidin peptide secretion. This suggests a limited role of elevated intracellular iron in hepcidin secretio