Study the expression level of beta 2 microglobulin gene on hepatitis C patients before and after treatment with interferon

This study has been carried out to evaluate the expression level of beta 2 microglobulin gene on patients infected by hepatitis C virus before and after treatment with interferon. The study included 117 hepatitis C patients comprising as 63 pre-treated patients, the range of age was between 20-65 year with a mean age of 48.12 ± 16.1 and 54 post-treated patients with age range was between 23-63 year with the mean of 46.1 ± 18.1. Also it was found that more than half of patients were located within third and fourth decade i.e. 30-49 year, with a percentage of 52.4% and 55.6 % for pre-treatment and post-treatment patients respectively. Moreover , regarding both groups, males are more than females with the ratio of ( 3.2:1) among pre-treatment group and 2:1 among post-treatment group. Further , It has been found that the concentration of ?2 microglobulin was (3.425±0.943mg/L) among pre-treatment group and (1.860±0.723 mg/L) among post-treatment group with significant correlation (P=0.05). Besides that , in the present study ,It has been found the concentration of ?2 microglobulin was decrease after treatment from (3.425±0.943 mg/L) to (1.860±0.723mg/L) which was statistically significant (P=0.05) , Thus ?2 microglobulin can be used as a supporting marker of responsiveness to treatment with interferon in hepatitis C patients as well as indicator for monitoring the disease progression

Determination of Antibodies (IgG, IgM) against Toxoplasma gondii in Some Iraqi individuals by using ELISA technique

A total of 258 voluntary blood donors (males 101; females 157) in the age range of 18-52 yr among males and 18-55 yr among females were examined for Toxoplasma gondii antibodies (IgG), and (IgM) by immunological technique (Enzyme linked Immunosorbant Assay) during the period from March 2009 to April 2010. This study covered a wide range of factors including immunological, age ,sex , place of residence and symptoms that may have a possible relationship with toxoplasmosis. Results presented in this study showed clearly that 38 (14.7%) of individuals participated in this study having IgG Toxoplasma Ab, among those 10 samples (9.9%) were males and 28 samples (17.8%) were females. Moreover, we found the prevalence of IgM seropositivity in the study population to be 5.8% ,as well as, the prevalence of IgM was 1.98 % in males and 8.3% in females. In addition to , the results of current study indicated that the seroprevalence of IgG Toxoplasma antibodies are more than IgM antibodies ,besides , the peak period range of toxoplasma gondii antibodies IgG among males donors was 30 to 39 years, while among female donors, the highest detection of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies IgG was between the ages of 40 to 49. What's more, the peak age range of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies IgM among males and females donors was 19 to 29 years. In conclusion , Our study showed a high prevalence of T. gondii antibodies in healthy voluntary blood donors. It may be appropriate to include screening test (ELISA) for T. gondii also in the pre transfusion blood testing schedule

Malware Detection Approaches based on Operational Codes (OpCodes) of Executable Programs: A Review

A malicious software, or Malware for a short, poses a threat to computer systems, which need to be analyzed, detected, and eliminated. Generally, malware is analyzed in two ways: dynamic malware analysis and static malware analysis. The former collects features dataset during running of the malware, and involves malware APIs, registry activities, file activities, process activities, and network activities based features. The latter collects features dataset prior and without running the malware, and involves Operational Codes (OpCodes) and text based (Bytecodes) features. However, several previous researchers addressed and reviewed malware detection approaches based on various aspects, but none of them addressed and reviewed the approaches merely based on malware OpCodes. Therefore, this paper aims to review Malware Detection Approaches based on OpCodes. The review explores, demonstrates, and compares the existing approaches for detecting malware according to their OpCodes only, and finally presents a comprehensive comparable envisage about them

Photonic circuits for generating modal, spectral, and polarization entanglement

We consider the design of photonic circuits that make use of Ti:LiNbO$_{3}$ diffused channel waveguides for generating photons with various combinations of modal, spectral, and polarization entanglement. Down-converted photon pairs are generated via spontaneous optical parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in a two-mode waveguide. We study a class of photonic circuits comprising: 1) a nonlinear periodically poled two-mode waveguide structure, 2) a set of single-mode and two-mode waveguide-based couplers arranged in such a way that they suitably separate the three photons comprising the SPDC process, and, for some applications, 3) a holographic Bragg grating that acts as a dichroic reflector. The first circuit produces frequency-degenerate down-converted photons, each with even spatial parity, in two separate single-mode waveguides. Changing the parameters of the elements allows this same circuit to produce two nondegenerate down-converted photons that are entangled in frequency or simultaneously entangled in frequency and polarization. The second photonic circuit is designed to produce modal entanglement by distinguishing the photons on the basis of their frequencies. A modified version of this circuit can be used to generate photons that are doubly entangled in mode number and polarization. The third photonic circuit is designed to manage dispersion by converting modal, spectral, and polarization entanglement into path entanglement

Identifying undergraduate pharmacy students’ achievement goals and their effects on academic achievement and teachers’ qualities

The work for this thesis started with generic questions about achievement motivation and its application in pharmacy education settings. Questions like: what are pharmacy students’ preferred achievement goals? Are there any relationships between these achievement goals and academic performance? Is there any relationship between exam types and adopted achievement goals? Is student motivation in any way related to the qualities they value in their teachers? Such questions have guided this doctoral work since August 2010. For more than three decades, achievement goal theory has been one of the most influential theories investigating students’ motivation to learn (Conley, 2012). Four types of achievement goals have been identified by scholars (Huang, 2012; Hulleman et al., 2010): (1) mastery-approach, where individuals strive to understand and learn the tasks and material at hand as thoroughly as possible; (2) mastery-avoidance, where the individual’s aim is to avoid not understanding and learning the task thoroughly; (3) performance-approach, where the individual’s aim is to demonstrate superior performance compared to one’s peers; and (4) performance-avoidance, where the individual strives to avoid the demonstration of a perceived lack of ability or avoid appearing less talented than others. In order to begin to answer the above questions, a qualitative study was undertaken to investigate first year students’ and teaching academics’ expectations and perceptions of the university learning environment, including students’ preferences for what they expect and value in their teachers. The findings of this study yielded some important preliminary insights regarding learning and teaching in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Sydney, Australia. From this preliminary work emerged the chief aims of the program of doctoral work – 1) to investigate achievement goals in pharmacy students and their relationships to academic achievement both cross-sectionally and longitudinally; 2) to tease out the influence of ethnic background on goal orientation and academic achievement; and 3) to examine the relationships between achievement goals, assessment type and academic performance. A further aim was 4) to examine the effects of goal orientation on students’ preferences for teachers’ qualities. A two-step psychometric validation of two measures of achievement goal orientations was undertaken first of all. The first analysis was conducted by sampling pharmacy students from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Sydney, Australia, and in the second analysis, pharmacy students from four countries (England, New Zealand, Wales and United States) were further sampled to confirm the replicability of the instrument in comparable pharmacy education settings. The outcome of this validation study was a robust instrument suited for research into pharmacy student achievement goals. This process paved the way for a further four studies. The first study sought to identify Australian undergraduate pharmacy students’ achievement goals and their relationship to both academic achievement and ethnicity, and to conduct a cross-sectional analysis of two cohorts. The second study followed these two cohorts (Cohort I from year one to year two and Cohort II from year three to year four) to assess the extent to which students’ goal orientations changed over time. The third study investigated the relationship between achievement goals, academic performance and assessment types in undergraduate pharmacy students, again with international participation by pharmacy cohorts from four countries; England, Wales, New Zealand and Australia. The fourth and final study aimed to examine how pharmacy students’ adopted achievement goals might influence their preferences regarding the qualities they would like to see in their teachers. The outcomes of these studies provide important and novel findings regarding students’ perceptions and preferences regarding their motivations for learning; the significance of validating apparently robust measuring instruments for local conditions; the importance of avoiding global measures of academic achievement when studying their relationship with achievement motivation ; the significant role that ethnicity plays in student achievement motivation; and how students’ achievement goals influence their preferred teaching styles of their teachers. This is the first project of its kind conducted into undergraduate pharmacy students’ achievement goal orientations and academic performance. The implications for pedagogical practices are discussed

Text to speech using Mel-Spectrogram with deep learning algorithms

The purpose of text to speech (TTS), sometimes called speech synthesis, is to synthesize a natural and intelligible speech for a given text. A wide range of applications uses TTS technologies in media, chatbots, and entertainment, among other fields, making it a hot topic for the research community. Recently, the progress achieved by artificial intelligence, especially in deep learning and neural networks, enables TTS to produce a high-quality synthesized speech. However, despite the success achieved, currently, available works suffer from the need for very long training and inference time, which makes it dominated by big tech companies. This paper proposes a model based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and gated recurrent units (GRU). The proposed model can work even in low computational environments and requires low training time. The MOS achieved is 4.26, higher than the MOS performed by state-of-the-art methods

Predicting the Breach Hydrograph Resulting Due to Hypothetical Failure of Haditha Dam

A hydrologic model is developed to compute the reservoir outflow hydrograph resulting from a hypothetical failure of Haditha dam located across the Euphrates river in Iraq due to enemy attack. In this program, the reservoir routing is analyzed by the level pool method in which storage is a nonlinear function of discharge. The results indicate that the maximum reservoir outflow is (202547 m3/s) which occurred about three and half hours after dam failure, and the reservoir will be depleted after about 65 hours. The results of the hydrologic model are compared with available results reported by Macdonald and Monopolis (1984), and it is found that the hydrologic results situate within the limits of their study

Modal, spectral, and polarization entanglement in guided-wave parametric down-conversion

We examine the modal, spectral, and polarization entanglement properties of photon pairs generated in a nonlinear periodically poled two-mode waveguide (one-dimensional planar or two-dimensional circular) via nondegenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Any of the possible degrees of freedom-mode number, frequency, or polarization-can be used to distinguish the down-converted photons while the others serve as attributes of entanglement. Distinguishing the down-converted photons based on their mode numbers enables us to efficiently generate spectral or polarization entanglement that is either narrowband or broadband. On the other hand, when the generated photons are distinguished by their frequencies in a type-0 process, modal entanglement turns out to be an efficient alternative to polarization entanglement. Moreover, modal entanglement in type-II down-conversion may be used to generate a doubly entangled state in frequency and polarization

Mutated N-ras does not induce p19arf in CO25 cell line

The mouse cell line (CO25) used in this study was transfected with a glucocorticoid inducible mutated human N-ras oncogene under transcriptional control of the steroid-sensitive promoter of the mouse mammary tumors virus long terminal repeat MMTV-LTR. This study was aimed to investigate the expression of p19arf and MDM2 genes under the effect of N-ras oncogene induction and to invent the role of p19arf, MDM2 in N-ras pathway during various periods (12, 24, 48, 72, 96 h) using western blotting method. The levels of â-actin proteins in the same periods were our control group. The observations showed no increase of p19arf protein expression in normal, cancer and differentiated CO25 cells. MDM2 was accumulated until 72 h and after 96 h, it showed a dramatical decrease while β-actin levels were increased correlated to the volume of protein loaded to the gel. Because of the role of p19arf as tumor suppressor and p53-MDM2 linker, it is highly recommended to  investigate the relationship between N-ras and p53 and MDM2 in the same system to recognize the molecule that may play a linker molecule between p53 and MDM2 in p19arf lack system.Key words: Oncogene, N-ras, p19arf, myoblast, CO25 cells, differentiation, MDM2