Diversity and Distribution of Polychaetes in Mangroves of East Coast of India

This research article reports an exhaustive account on the mangrove-associated polychaetes. Polychaetes are an important component in marine benthic communities and they play a major ecological role in mangrove ecosystem. This article gives an overview of polychaete diversity associated to five major mangrove forests of east coast of India (Muthupettai, Pichavaram, Coringa, Bhitarkanika and Sundarban). The results of this survey indicated that the physicochemical parameters did not vary much except a few parameters that showed only marginal variations. With regard to the macrobenthic organisms, the polychaetes topped the list. Crustaceans were found to be the next dominant group in the order of abundance and followed by gastropods and bivalves of the total benthic organisms collected. The results of the statistical analysis revealed that the parameters such as salinity, pH, silt, clay, total organic carbon (TOC), total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphate (TP) were manifested as best match in determining benthic fauna distributions followed by TOC, slit, clay and TP. The maximum number of polychaete species was recorded from Sundarban mangroves (68 species) and minimum in Muthupettai mangroves (39 species)

Impact of bottom trawling on water and sediment characteristics of Cuddalore and Parangipettai coastal waters

639-646The present study was carried out to understand the impact of bottom trawling on the hydrographic, nutrient and sediment characteristics of Cuddalore and Parangipettai coastal waters during April 2014–March 2015. The present study addressed the impact of trawling on the sediment re-suspension, biochemical composition and bioavailability of organic matter in two coastal waters off Bay of Bengal. Sampling was carried out in four depth stations at 10, 20, 30, 40 m. Water and sediment samples were collected before and after trawling. The variations in total organic carbon and sediment nutrients were prominent in relation to stations and seasons. Pronounced changes were observed in water nutrients before and after trawling, while there was a minor effect on dissolved oxygen, total organic carbon and sediment nutrients. Conforming to the results, the PCA plot drawn for both the regions also revealed similar trend by the fact that the water nutrients had positive correlation with samples collected after trawling in all the stations, while dissolved oxygen, soil nutrients and total organic carbon showed negative correlation with the samples collected before trawling in all the stations

A randomized controlled trial of quetiapine versus placebo in the treatment of delirium

Background Delirium is a commonly occurring complex neuropsychiatric disorder. Evidence for its treatment based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is poor. Aims To determine the efficacy and acceptability of quetiapine in the treatment of delirium. Method A double-blind, RCT was conducted. A total of 42 patients were randomized to quetiapine or a placebo group. The primary outcome measure was the Delirium Rating Scale Revised 98. Other scales used were the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, Mini-Mental State Examination and Clinical Global Improvement. In order to account for missing data, a nonlinear mixed-effects model was used to estimate the difference between the two groups. Results The quetiapine group improved more rapidly than the placebo group. Specifically, the quetiapine group recovered 82.7% faster (S.E. 37.1%, P=.026) than the placebo group in terms of DRS-R-98 severity score. In terms of the DRS-R-98 noncognitive subscale, the quetiapine group improved 57.7% faster (S.E. 29.2%, P=.048) than the placebo group. Conclusions Quetiapine has the potential to more quickly reduce the severity of noncognitive aspects of delirium. This study was underpowered for treatment comparisons at specific points in time but nonetheless detected significant differences when analyzing the whole study period. While it is not possible to draw definitive conclusions, further larger studies exploring the use of quetiapine in other delirium populations seem justified. Larger increments in the dose of quetiapine may yield even stronger results

Grouping and deploying fine-grained tasks on grid by learning performance data

When deciding the size or the granularity of a batch, one should consider the utilisation constraints imposed on the resources by their respective providers; e.g. the maximum time allowed for task execution and the maximum allowed storage space. In addition, the size of the batch should not overload the interconnecting network. The main objective of this thesis is to study the factors involved in deciding a batch size and design the relevant batch resizing policies and techniques. The policies and techniques are then developed and experimented in a small-scale grid environment. Throughout the conduct of this thesis, the batch resizing policies and techniques were aligned accordingly to support various purposes which led to several following major findings and contribution

Structure and blood flow in normal and diseased equine metacarpophalangeal joint

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An adaptive and parameterized job grouping algorithm for scheduling grid jobs

An unorganized deployment of grid applications with a large amount of fine-grain jobs would let the communication overhead dominate the overall processing time, resulting in a low computation-communication ratio. Grid's dynamic nature complicates the planning of the job scheduling activity for minimizing the application processing time. This paper presents a grid job scheduling algorithm, based on a parameterized job grouping strategy, which is adaptive to the runtime grid environment. Jobs are grouped based on the job processing requirements, resource policies, network conditions and user's QoS requirements. Simulations using the GridSim toolkit reveal that the algorithm reduces the overall application processing time significantly

QoS-based task group deployment on grid by learning the performance data

Overhead of executing fine-grain tasks on computational grids led to task group or batch deployment in which a batch is resized according to the characteristics of the tasks, designated resource, and the interconnecting network. An economic grid demands an application to be processed within the given budget and deadline, referred to as the quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we increase the task success rate in an economic grid by optimally mapping the tasks to the resources prior to the batch deployment. The task-resource mapping (Advance QoS Planning) is decided based on QoS requirement and by mining the historical performance data of the application tasks using a genetic algorithm. The mapping is then used to assist in creating the task groups. Practical experiments are conducted to validate the proposed method and suggestions are given to implement our method in a cloud environment as well as to process real-time tasks

An enhanced certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol

Authenticated key agreement protocol is used to share a secret key for encrypting data being transferred between two or more parties over a public network. An implementation of this protocol is the certificateless key agreement which utilizes the features of the identity-based public key cryptography and the traditional public key infrastructure. This implementation can produce multiple public keys for a corresponding private key. In this paper, an alternative key generation technique is proposed for certificateless public key cryptography in order to have one public key for one private key. This will improve the security features of the relevant key generation. Furthermore, the efficiency of the proposed protocol is presented in terms of computational operation. The comparison analysis shows that the proposed protocol conveys better efficiency with all the known security attributes compared to the existing protocols