Microwave parameters for bitumen emulsion and its application in highway engineering

Bitumen emulsion is used as a bonding material between two layers and partially acts as a water proofing agent; it gained more importance when there were environmental concerns with cutbacks bitumen. A very few properties of bitumen emulsions are known so far from its physical and chemical prospective. However, a new method to measure its dielectric properties i.e. permittivity by applying electromagnetic waves (microwaves) with open ended coaxial probe (OCP) method was investigated in this study at different temperatures and frequency of 8 to 12 GHz. After examining the physical properties of certain bitumen emulsion a correlation was established on the basis of dielectric constant (permittivity) with the existing conventional property viscosity at temperature of 25, 40, 50 and 60°C. On the basis of these properties different characteristics of the bitumen emulsion were found and hence, a correlation was established to predict its behavior. A good correlation factor was found for the four types of samples used in the study which were 0.98 for SS-1K, 0.99 for MS-1K, 1.00 for RS-1K and 0.99 for K1-40. This study has provided an effective parameter to measure and predict the behavior of bitumen emulsion at different temperature, which can be applied in highway industry

Impact of Overall injustice on Employee Performance: Moderating Effect of Supportive Leadership Style

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of overall injustice on the performance of employees working in the Private sectors and to investigate how supportive leadership style in supervisors can increase employee performance when they are under high stress due to injustice perceptions. Data was collected through questionnaires that were designed and distributed to the employees working in private sectors. Sample size of 250 was equally distributed in the two sectors. This measured the perceived level of injustice related stress and its possible effect on employee performance. Supportive leadership style has a significant effect on performance of employee and increases the performance but injustice may or may not affect employee performance. Injustice is sometimes not given much importance due to low magnitude or external causes of injustice, so it is not always negatively related to employee performance. The research expands our knowledge of supportive leadership and tended to focus that how supportive leadership style in supervisors can increase employee performance working in private sectors. Public sector organizations should also be studied and sample size should be increased to cover large number of organizations. By expanding the range of organizations in the study would add credibility to the findings. Supportive leadership style plays an important role in the overall performance of an employee. Organizations need to improve leadership skills in supervisors to achieve positive outcomes and increased productivity

Impact of Overall injustice on Employee Performance: Moderating Effect of Supportive Leadership Style

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of overall injustice on the performance of employees working in the Private sectors and to investigate how supportive leadership style in supervisors can increase employee performance when they are under high stress due to injustice perceptions. Data was collected through questionnaires that were designed and distributed to the employees working in private sectors. Sample size of 250 was equally distributed in the two sectors. This measured the perceived level of injustice related stress and its possible effect on employee performance. Supportive leadership style has a significant effect on performance of employee and increases the performance but injustice may or may not affect employee performance. Injustice is sometimes not given much importance due to low magnitude or external causes of injustice, so it is not always negatively related to employee performance. The research expands our knowledge of supportive leadership and tended to focus that how supportive leadership style in supervisors can increase employee performance working in private sectors. Public sector organizations should also be studied and sample size should be increased to cover large number of organizations. By expanding the range of organizations in the study would add credibility to the findings. Supportive leadership style plays an important role in the overall performance of an employee. Organizations need to improve leadership skills in supervisors to achieve positive outcomes and increased productivity

MRI Imaging, Comparison of MRI with other Modalities, Noise in MRI Images and Machine Learning Techniques for Noise Removal : A Review

Medical imaging is to assume greater and greater significance in efficient and precise diagnosis process. It is a set of various methodologies which are used to capture internal or external images of human body and organs for clinical and diagnosis needs to examine human form for various kind of ailments [1]. Computationally intelligent machine learning techniques and their application in medical imaging can play a significant role in expediting the diagnosis process and making it more precise. This review presents an up-to-date coverage about research topics which include recent literature in the areas of MRI imaging, comparison with other modalities, noise in MRI and machine learning techniques to remove the noise

Digital Images Enhancement using Tiny Character Adjustment and Referenced Image Approach

Digital image enhancement has been a hot topic during the past decades. In this paper, we have established a new approach for local gray contrast adjustment of tiny characters and global referenced base contrast enhancement approach to improve the contrast of degraded images. The proposed approach initially adjusts the contrast of tiny characters and then enhances the contrast of whole image by finding out some vital information from the histogram of the referenced image. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can adjust the tiny characters and increase the image contrast efficiently

Op2Vec: An Opcode Embedding Technique and Dataset Design for End-to-End Detection of Android Malware

Android is one of the leading operating systems for smart phones in terms of market share and usage. Unfortunately, it is also an appealing target for attackers to compromise its security through malicious applications. To tackle this issue, domain experts and researchers are trying different techniques to stop such attacks. All the attempts of securing Android platform are somewhat successful. However, existing detection techniques have severe shortcomings, including the cumbersome process of feature engineering. Designing representative features require expert domain knowledge. There is a need for minimizing human experts' intervention by circumventing handcrafted feature engineering. Deep learning could be exploited by extracting deep features automatically. Previous work has shown that operational codes (opcodes) of executables provide key information to be used with deep learning models for detection process of malicious applications. The only challenge is to feed opcodes information to deep learning models. Existing techniques use one-hot encoding to tackle the challenge. However, the one-hot encoding scheme has severe limitations. In this paper, we introduce; (1) a novel technique for opcodes embedding, which we name Op2Vec, (2) based on the learned Op2Vec we have developed a dataset for end-to-end detection of android malware. Introducing the end-to-end Android malware detection technique avoids expert-intensive handcrafted features extraction, and ensures automation. Some of the recent deep learning-based techniques showed significantly improved results when tested with the proposed approach and achieved an average detection accuracy of 97.47%, precision of 0.976 and F1 score of 0.979

A Close Assessment of X-ray Image Enhancement Techniques for Contraband Detection

X-ray image enhancement plays a vital role in the detection of explosive or illicit objects. X-ray image viewability is still a challenging task. To overcome this task, in this paper, we compare both new and old techniques of X-ray image enhancement for baggage inspection system on the basis of nine statistical measures of X-ray image viewability. From the experiments, it is concluded that some new techniques outclass the recent X-ray image enhancement methods that are regularly used at airports. From the viewability measurements, it is concluded that airport security baggage inspection system must be updated with our suggested enhancement approaches

Anti-hyperglycemic activity of Heliotropium strigosum (Boraginaecae) whole plant extract in alloxan-induced diabetic mice

Purpose: To investigate Heliotropium strigosum whole plant extract for its potential to reduce the blood glucose level of alloxan-induced diabetic mice.Methods: Preliminary phytochemical analysis was carried out using standard  procedures. Diabetes was induced in Balb/c mice by injecting alloxan (200 mg/kg i.p.). The crude methanol extract of Heliotropium strigosum (Hs.Cr, 30, 100 and 300 mg/kg doses) was administered daily to alloxan-induced diabetic mice for 15 days and its effect on fasting blood glucose levels, body weight and oral glucose tolerancewas evaluated. Two control groups (non-diabetic control and diabetic control)  received normal saline (0.2 ml). Metformin (500 mg/kg) was used as reference standard.Results: Heliotropium strigosum showed positive for the presence of alkaloids, tannins and flavonoids. The extract (30, 100 and 300 mg/kg) caused significant reduction in the fasting blood glucose level of alloxan-induced diabetic mice on days 5, 10 and 15 compared to diabetic control (p < 0.001). In this regard, the  anti-hyperglycemic effect compared to the reference (metformin). The extract also timedependently decreased the body weight of the treated animals as well as improved tolerance of the oral glucose overload.Conclusion: These results indicate that Heliotropium strigosum possesses  anti-hyperglycemic effect, reduces body weight and enhances the tolerance of  glucose overload in mice. Further studies are therefore required to determine its  feasiilty as an alternate herbal medicine in the management of diabetes in humans.Keywords: Heliotropium strigosum, Anti-hyperglycemic, Alloxan-induced diabetic mice, Blood glucose, Oral glucose tolerance, Body weigh