REVIEW OF MAST CELL PROGENITORS

Mast cells are cells of immune systems which plays an major role in inflammatory responses such as hypersensitivity reactions. They are found in connective tissues of the body, especially below the surface of the skin, near blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, within nerves, throughout the respiratory system, and in the digestive and urinary tracts. These cells store a variety of different chemical mediators such as histamine, interleukins, proteoglycans (e.g., heparin), and various enzymes. When the mast cell activated by an by an allergen, the mast cells release the contents of their granules into the surrounding tissues. This process was named as Degranulation. This chemical mediators produce local responses characteristic of an allergic reaction, such as increased permeability of blood vessels (i.e., inflammation and swelling), contraction of smooth muscles (e.g., bronchial muscles), and increased mucus production. Mast cells are produced from the mast cell progenitors in the place of bone marrow by the process regulated by transcription factors. Based on the character of Surface markers the mast cells are characterized by flow cytometry. The centre of attraction of this review article was the origin and development of mast cell progenitors.&nbsp

Four approaches for managing stakeholders

As the pressure and need for firms to perform socially as well as financially grows greater than ever before, managing the balance of power between stakeholders becomes an increasingly delicate exercise. However, new research shows that firms have much to learn from philanthropic organisations and the ways in which they deal with their own stakeholder groups

Environmental and Waste Management in Iron and Steel Industry

The Indian Iron and Steel scenario has changed considerably after the announcement of Government Policy on de-control and liberalization. Several new entrepreneurs have entered the steel industry. It is heartening to see that the steel industry is set to carve a niche for itself in the domestic and foreign market. The rapid progress of steel industry has aggravated environmental and waste management problems. This has led to increasing pressure from Government and the public to speed up action plan for effective industrial waste management. The waste management in steel industry is an emerging complex issue and can be implemented after regulating through monitoring, analysis, legalization , addition of infra-structural facilities for enforcement, waste auditing , change of process technology etc. The paper reviews current knowledge of waste management in Indian Steel Industry, approaches to environmental improvement and examines various options to environmental management plan keeping in view of the importance of sustainable endurance of environment and other natural resources

Hybrid Deterministic-Stochastic Methods for Data Fitting

Many structured data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum over a potentially large number of measurements. Incremental gradient algorithms offer inexpensive iterations by sampling a subset of the terms in the sum. These methods can make great progress initially, but often slow as they approach a solution. In contrast, full-gradient methods achieve steady convergence at the expense of evaluating the full objective and gradient on each iteration. We explore hybrid methods that exhibit the benefits of both approaches. Rate-of-convergence analysis shows that by controlling the sample size in an incremental gradient algorithm, it is possible to maintain the steady convergence rates of full-gradient methods. We detail a practical quasi-Newton implementation based on this approach. Numerical experiments illustrate its potential benefits.Comment: 26 pages. Revised proofs of Theorems 2.6 and 3.1, results unchange

Governing for Stakeholders

This PhD thesis lies at the intersection of stakeholder theory and corporate governance research. Stakeholder theory proposes that firms are best understood as a set of relationships among groups that have a stake in the activities of the firm. Corporate governance research, on the other hand, has almost exclusively focused on the owners of firms as it deals with the question of how decision-making structures and accountability practices should be designed within organizations, such that owners can ensure themselves of getting a return on their investment. By adopting a stakeholder theory lens to corporate governance, I seek to broaden the theoretical and empirical scope of corporate governance such that various stakeholder groups can be included in the analysis of the corporate governance of organizations

Genetic structure and affinities among tribal populations of southern India: a study of 24 autosomal DNA markers

We describe the genetic structure and affinities of five Dravidian-speaking tribal populations inhabiting the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, in south India, using 24 autosomal DNA markers. Our goals were: (i) to examine what evolutionary forces have most significantly impacted south Indian tribal genetic variation, and (ii) to test whether the phenotypic similarities of some south Indian tribal groups to Africans represent a signature of close relationship to Africans or are due to convergence. All loci were polymorphic and average heterozygosities were substantial (range: 0.347-0.423). Genetic differentiation was high (Gst= 6.7%) and genetic distances were not significantly correlated with geographic distances. Genetic drift therefore probably played a significant role in shaping the patterns of genetic variation observed in southern Indian tribal populations. Otherwise, analyses of population relationships showed that Indian populations are closely related to one another, regardless of phenotypic characteristics, and do not show particular affinities to Africans. We conclude that the phenotypic similarities of some Indian groups to Africans do not reflect a close relationship between these groups, but are better explained by convergence

Competitive Algorithms for Layered Graph Traversal

A layered graph is a connected graph whose vertices are partitioned into sets L0=s, L1, L2,..., and whose edges, which have nonnegative integral weights, run between consecutive layers. Its width is {|Li|}. In the on-line layered graph traversal problem, a searcher starts at s in a layered graph of unknown width and tries to reach a target vertex t; however, the vertices in layer i and the edges between layers i-1 and i are only revealed when the searcher reaches layer i-1. We give upper and lower bounds on the competitive ratio of layered graph traversal algorithms. We give a deterministic on-line algorithm which is O(9w)-competitive on width-w graphs and prove that for no w can a deterministic on-line algorithm have a competitive ratio better than 2w-2 on width-w graphs. We prove that for all w, w/2 is a lower bound on the competitive ratio of any randomized on-line layered graph traversal algorithm. For traversing layered graphs consisting of w disjoint paths tied together at a common source, we give a randomized on-line algorithm with a competitive ratio of O(log w) and prove that this is optimal up to a constant factor