Stable transport in proton driven Fast Ignition

Proton beam transport in the context of proton driven Fast Ignition is usually assumed to be stable due to protons high inertia, but an analytical analysis of the process is still lacking. The stability of a charge and current neutralized proton beam passing through a plasma is therefore conducted here, for typical proton driven Fast Ignition parameters. In the cold regime, two fast growing Buneman-like modes are found, with an inverse growth-rate much smaller than the beam time-of-flight to the target core. The stability issue is thus not so obvious, and Kinetic effects are investigated. One unstable mode is found stabilized by the background plasma protons and electrons temperatures. The second mode is also damped, providing the proton beam thermal spread is larger than $\sim$ 10 keV. In Fusion conditions, the beam propagation should therefore be stable.Comment: Submitted to Po

Development of a Reliable Method for the Spectrophotometric Determination of Palladium(II) with o-Methoxyphenyl Thiourea: Separation of Palladium from Associated Metal Ions

A simple and sensitive method is described for the solvent extraction and spectrophotometric  determination of palladium(II) using low concentrations of o-methoxyphenyl thiourea (OMePT). Trace concentrations of palladium(II) were quantitatively extracted when equilibrated withOMePTin chloroformat 1.0 mol  L–1hydrochloric acid media for 10 s. The absorbance of a yellow coloured palladium(II)-OMePT complex was measured at 325 nm. The palladium(II)-OMePT complex was stable for more than 72 h. The composition of extracting species was 1:1, determined by mole ratio, Job’s continuous variation method and it was confirmed by a log–log plot. Beer’s law was obeyed up to 15.0 μg mL–1. The molar absorptivity and Sandell’s sensitivity were 3.38 × 103 L mol–1 cm–1 and 0.031 μg cm–2, respectively. The method was free from a large number of interferences from cations and anions. The method was applied for separation of palladium(II) from multi-component mixtures and synthetic mixtures corresponding to alloy.KEYWORDS: Solvent extraction, spectrophotometric determination, o-methoxyphenyl thiourea, palladium

Uso de rede social e participação social

Existem inúmeros estudos recentes que descrevem a penetração do uso de redes sociais entre os cidadãos mais jovens e os não tão jovens. Estes meios são caracterizados como tendo um grande potencial para promover a socialização e o sentimento de pertencimento a uma comunidade; no entanto, existem resultados de pesquisas relativas ao contrário, ou seja, que as redes não estão influenciando o desenvolvimento de uma maior participação cívica de forma real. Neste trabalho, esta questão foi analisada à luz dos desafios educacionais que são apresentados por redes sociais como promotoras da participação social. Segundo um estudo da consultoria Experian Hitwise, a rede social Facebook foi o site mais visitado nos EUA, entre 6 e 13 de março de 2010; anteriormente, esta posição tinha sido usualmente ocupada pelo motor de busca Google, ainda segundo dados da Experian Hitwise. O Facebook capturou 7,07% do tráfego de Internet, enquanto o Google recebeu apenas 7,03%. O referido estudo comparou apenas o Facebook.com e o Google.com, sem levar em conta outros sites pertencentes ao Google, como Gmail, Google Maps e YouTube. Se estes sites fossem levados em conta, o tráfego para o Google teria atingido 11,03%. De acordo com Matt Tatham, diretor de comunicações da Hitwise, esses dados mostram que “a partilha de conteúdos tornou-se uma força enorme na Internet”

(R1501) Rotational and Hall Current Effects on a Free Convection MHD Flow with Radiation and Inclined Magnetic Field

Rotational and Hall current effects on a free convection MHD flow with Radiation and inclined magnetic field are studied here. Electrically conducting, viscous, and incompressible fluid is taken. The flow is modelled with the help of partial differential equations. The analytical solutions for the velocity, concentration, and temperature are solved by the Laplace integral transform method. The outcomes acquired have been examined with the help of graphs drawn for different parameters like Hartmann number, Hall current parameter, inclination of magnetic field, angular velocity and radiation parameter, etc. The variation of the Nusselt number has been shown graphically. It is observed that Hall current parameter and inclination of magnetic field reduces the resistive effect of the applied external magnetic field. Such a study assumes importance because both rotation and Hall current induce secondary flow in the flow-field. The conclusion of the study may be useful in the field of solar physics, rotating magnetic stars, rotating MHD induction machine energy generator and many industrial applications

Hall Current and Radiation Effects on Unsteady Natural Convection MHD flow with Inclined Magnetic field

In the present paper, Hall current and radiation effects on unsteady natural convection MHD flow with inclined magnetic field is studied. The viscous, incompressible and an electrically conducting fluid is considered. This model contains equations of motion, equation of energy and diffusion equation. The system of partial differential equations is transformed to dimensionless equations by using dimensionless variables. Exact solution of governing equations is obtained by Laplace Transform Technique. For analysing the solution of the model, desirable sets of the values of the parameters have been considered. The obtained results of velocity, concentration and temperature have been analysed with the help of graphs drawn for different parameters. The numerical values of Nusselt number have been tabulated. The results of the study may find applications in the field related to the solar physics dealing with the solar cycle, Magnetohydrodynamics sensors, rotating MHD induction machine energy generator, the sunspot development, the structure of rotating magnetic stars etc

Morphometry and Geomorphological Investigations of the Neugal Watershed, Beas River Basin, Kangra District, Himachal Pradesh Using GIS Tools

An attempt has been made to study the detailed morphometric and geomorphological characteristics of the Neugal Watershed, which is a part of the Beas River Basin, in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, India.  For detailed study of this watershed, geographical information system (GIS) was used in the evaluation of slope, linear stream ordering and relief aspects of morphometric parameters and also in presentation of geomorphological subdivisions of the basin. Surface Tools in ArcGIS-10 software and ASTER (DEM) were used in the preparation of watershed boundary, slope-aspect and different thematic maps like drainage density, slope and relief. More than eight morphometric parameter of different aspects have been computed. It is observed that the stream frequency decreases as the stream order increases and the densities of 1st order streams are higher in the northern, southern and south-eastern part of the Neugal watershed area. Based on the relationship between absolute and relative relief in the study area, it can be indicated that the relative relief increases with the increase in the absolute relief and shows active correlation. In Neugal watershed, the slope is controlled by the structure, and the erosional processes which have resulted in varied landform leading to environmental hazards. Keywords: Morphometric parameters, Geomorphological analysis, Neugal watershed, Relief, Environmental hazard

The transversality of civic learning as the basis for development in the university

The social dimension of higher education seems to have been highlighted in the most recent documents of the European Higher Education Area. Furthermore, the interest in providing future graduates with the competences necessary for their future jobs seems to have grown in recent decades. In this context, the key questions are what social competences could help graduates to enter the world of work and how universities can facilitate the development of such competences. In the present article, we clarify the role of civic and social competence in university education and offer some guidelines to orientate their learning. To address these objectives, the present study is divided into five parts. First, we define what we understand as civic or citizen competence. In the second part, we describe the reasons why we consider that the learning of civic competence may occur in different settings (formal, informal, or non-formal) of university life. We propose character education and integrated learning (IL) as promising approaches to foster civic learning in the third and fourth sections. Finally, we offer recommendations on how university leaders and professors might promote civic or citizenship competence

The comparison of the efficacy of intra-peritoneal instillation along with local infiltration with bupivacaine versus placebo for post-operative analgesia after laparoscopic tubal ligation

Background: Intra-peritoneal instillation of local anesthetics has been shown to minimize post-operative pain after laparoscopic surgeries. The present study was undertaken with the following aim to compare the efficacy of intra-peritoneal instillation and local infiltration with bupivacaine versus placebo for post-operative analgesia after laparoscopic tubal ligation. To correlate the advantages and side effects of the drugs during the procedure. To establish a protocol for the use of bupivacaine instillation and infiltration for post-operative analgesia after laparoscopic tubal ligation.Methods: A prospective study was carried out in a tertiary care hospital attached to a teaching medical institute. Institutional ethics committee approval was obtained for this randomized control study (double blind) including 50 women who will be divided in two groups. Group A will be administered intra-peritoneal bupivacaine along with local infiltration. Group B will be administered normal saline. Post-operative pain will be monitored by a blind observer and rescue analgesia will be administered at visual analogue score of 3.Results: Both the groups were comparable with respect to age and BMI. The mean duration of analgesia in Group A with bupivacaine was 315.60±79.9 min (Median 300 min).  The mean duration of analgesia in Group B with normal saline was 138.20±46.97 min (Median 150 min, p value <0.001).Conclusions: The study depicts a significant pain relief after use of bupivacaine. Bupivacaine instillation in the peritoneal cavity along with local infiltration of the drug gives prolongs pain relief as compared to normal saline

Employing Program Semantics for Malware Detection

In recent years, malware has emerged as a critical security threat. Additionally, malware authors continue to embed numerous anti–detection features to evade existing malware detection approaches. Against this advanced class of malicious programs, dynamic behavior–based malware detection approaches outperform the traditional signature–based approaches by neutralizing the effects of obfuscation and morphing techniques. The majority of dynamic behavior detectors rely on system–calls to model the infection and propagation dynamics of malware. However, these approaches do not account an important anti–detection feature of modern malware, i.e., system–call injection attack. This attack allows the malicious binaries to inject irrelevant and independent system–calls during the program execution thus modifying the execution sequences defeating the existing system–call based detection. To address this problem, we propose an evasion–proof solution that is not vulnerable to system–call injection attacks. Our proposed approach precisely characterizes the program semantics using Asymptotic Equipartition Property (AEP) mainly applied in information theoretic domain. The AEP allows us to extract the information–rich call sequences that are further quantified to detect the malicious binaries. Furthermore, the proposed detection model is less vulnerable to call–injection attacks as the discriminating components are not directly visible to malware authors. This particular characteristic of proposed approach hampers a malware author’s aim of defeating our approach. We run a thorough set of experiments to evaluate our solution and compare it with existing system-call based malware detection techniques. The results demonstrate that the proposed solution is effective in identifying real malware instances

Underwater Gesture Recognition Using Classical Computer Vision and Deep Learning Techniques

Underwater Gesture Recognition is a challenging task since conditions which are normally not an issue in gesture recognition on land must be considered. Such issues include low visibility, low contrast, and unequal spectral propagation. In this work, we explore the underwater gesture recognition problem by taking on the recently released Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy Underwater Gestures dataset. The contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) Use traditional computer vision techniques along with classical machine learning to perform gesture recognition on the CADDY dataset; (2) Apply deep learning using a convolutional neural network to solve the same problem; (3) Perform confusion matrix analysis to determine the types of gestures that are relatively difficult to recognize and understand why; (4) Compare the performance of the methods above in terms of accuracy and inference speed. We achieve up to 97.06% accuracy with our CNN. To the best of our knowledge, our work is one of the earliest attempts, if not the first, to apply computer vision and machine learning techniques for gesture recognition on the said dataset. As such, we hope this work will serve as a benchmark for future work on the CADDY dataset