Representation of Women in Game of Thrones: Sensational or Realist

This paper intends to work on the portrayal of women in the television adaptation of George R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel, A Song of Ice and Fire. It is a medieval drama loosely based on the War of the Roses. The show has a huge fan base that includes people from all age groups, cultures, and nations. But at the same time, it has been strongly criticized for its explicit sexual violence, misogyny, and objectification of women. Elaina Docterman of TIME magazine wrote that the show has a “woman problem” and there are some hard-to-watch scenes of rape and sexual torture of women. Naked women have been objectified and used as props and critics have lashed out against the gratuitous nudity on the show, dismissing it as a lure to keep viewers hooked by providing exposition against the backdrop of sex and nudity

Experimental demonstration of 25 GHz wideband chaos in symmetric dual port EDFRL

We study dynamics of chaos in dual port erbium-doped fiber ring laser (EDFRL). The laser consists of two erbium-doped fibers, intracavity filters at 1549.30 nm, isolators, and couplers. At both ports, the laser transitions into the chaotic regime for pump currents greater than 100 mA via period doubling route. We calculate the Lyapunov exponents using Rosenstein’s algorithm. We obtain positive values for the largest Lyapunov exponent (≈0.2) for embedding dimensions 5, 7, 9 and 11 indicating chaos. We compute the power spectrum of the photocurrents at the output ports of the laser. We observe a bandwidth of ≈ 25 GHz at both ports. This ultra wideband nature of chaos obtained has potential applications in high speed random number generation and communication

Evaluation of anti-psychotic effect of nimodipine using methylphenidate as a model to induce psychosis in albino mice

Background: Schizophrenia is a functional psychotic disorder currently treated by typical and atypical antipsychotic drugs. A large group of patients remain resistant to therapy. Nimodipine has been found effective for treating resistant bipolar mood disorder which is linked genetically with schizophrenia and has a high overlap of neurotransmitters in the etiopathology. Previous studies to evaluate nimodipine’s antipsychotic activity have shown inconsistent results. Methylphenidate, a CNS stimulant like amphetamine, has been shown to induce stereotypy in animals and can be proposed as an alternative model for psychosis.Methods: Methylphenidate 5 mg/kg was given intraperitoneally to induce psychosis in swiss albino mice (n=6). Nimodipine was given alone in doses of 2.5 and 5 mg/kg by i.p route and in combination with haloperidol 0.1 mg/kg and effects were compared with haloperidol 0.2mg/kg. Activity of nimodipine was also assessed on the haloperidol induced catalepsy test. Statistical analysis was done with ANOVA followed by Bonferroni’s test using SPSS v. 20.0.Results: Methylphenidate successfully induced characteristic stereotypy behaviour in mice similar to amphetamine. Both nimodipine 5 mg/kg and haloperidol 0.2 mg/kg showed significant reduction in stereotypy behaviour with no statistical difference between the two; result with nimodipine were only slightly inferior to haloperidol. Nimodipine 5 mg/kg with haloperidol 0.1 mg/kg showed significantly better activity than haloperidol in standard dose of 0.2 mg/kg. Nimodipine did not show significant activity on the haloperidol induced catalepsy test.Conclusions: Methylphenidate has potential to be used as an alternative model for inducing psychosis in animals and nimodipine shows promising results for use as adjuvant antipsychotic drug

Anti-nociceptive effect of seed extract of Acacia tortilis in rodents

Background: Management of pain is a primary clinical concern for any pathology in medical field. Addiction liability of opioids and troublesome gastrointestinal side effects of NSAIDs   leads to intensive research for compound with lesser side effects.The aim of the study to evaluate the anti-nociceptive activity of Acacia Tortilis Seed Extract (ATE) in experimental animals.Methods: First of all, animals were randomly allocated into four groups of six animals each. In acetic acid induced writhing test model, Group I (NC) served as vehicle control received saline/Tween 80 0.1%, 10ml/kg BW orally, group II (ATE-100) and III (ATE-200) received ATE in dose of 100 and 200mg/kg BW orally respectively and group IV received the standard drug diclofenac sodium in dose of 50 mg/kg BW orally. Group I to IV were same in rest of three experimental models. One additional group of standard drugs (group V) morphine sulfate in dose of 5 mg/kg BW subcutaneously (SC) was allocated for screening method hot plate and tail flick tests.  In Formalin induced paw licking test, three additional groups (group V) morphine sulfate in dose of 5mg/kg BW SC, group VI- morphine+naloxone (5mg/kg SC +2mg/kg intra-peritoneally (IP) and group VII - ATE+ naloxone (200mg/kg BW orally +2mg/kg BW IP) were also made.Results: The ATE when administered orally in dose of 100 and 200mg/ kg body weight (BW), produced significant analgesic activity (P <0.01) in acetic acid induced writhing syndrome and late phase of formalin test. In the hot plate test in mice and tail flick test in rats, ATE in same doses also showed significant analgesic activity (P <0.05) which is almost equally efficacious to standard drug diclofenac sodium (50mg/kg BW orally) but far less efficacious than morphine sulfate (5mg/kg BW subcutaneous).ATE (200mg/Kg BW orally) activity did not blocked by naloxone (2mg/kg intra-peritoneal).Conclusions: ATE possesss significant anti-nociceptive activity as evidenced in all the animal models of nociception. It might exert its effect through the peripheral mechanism of analgesic action possibly by interference in biosynthesis, release and/or action of prostaglandins and leukotrienes

Physiological impact of heat stress and their alleviation measures in agriculture: A review

Abiotic stresses are becoming more prevalent in modern agriculture as a result of shifting climate scenarios. Elevated temperature stress is one of the most important abiotic stresses to address since it has detrimental consequences for plant physiology, molecular structure, and phenology. The morphological impact occurs in the form of reduced germination, poor emergence, poor seedling vigor, abnormal seedling. Heat stress also results in the closure of stomata, reduced leaf size and consequent increase in stomatal density. One of the major physiological impacts of heat stress is on the fluidity of the membrane structure of the plant cell. Heat stress leads to increased fluidity of the thylakoid membrane and disruption of metabolic functions, which either deliver or accept electrons from PSII and, thus, cause dislodging of PSII from thylakoid membrane. The respiration generally increases in the temperature range of 0-35/ 40⁰C, reaches plateau at 40-50⁰C and decreases beyond 50⁰C due to damage to the respiratory mechanism. Elevated temperature directly impacts the cellular water content and indirectly through the increased water depletion rate from the soil. In order to design the appropriate corrective actions, it is crucial to research all the factors leading to heat stress thoroughly. The traditional agronomic and breeding interventions are crucial, but the rising food demand and the intensifying heat stress call for some cutting-edge biotechnological interventions, such as transgenics, genome editing, and CRISPR/cas9, to induce genome-level heat tolerance. The present review deals in detail with each of the previously listed aspects.

ESRO: Experience Assisted Service Reliability against Outages

Modern cloud services are prone to failures due to their complex architecture, making diagnosis a critical process. Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) spend hours leveraging multiple sources of data, including the alerts, error logs, and domain expertise through past experiences to locate the root cause(s). These experiences are documented as natural language text in outage reports for previous outages. However, utilizing the raw yet rich semi-structured information in the reports systematically is time-consuming. Structured information, on the other hand, such as alerts that are often used during fault diagnosis, is voluminous and requires expert knowledge to discern. Several strategies have been proposed to use each source of data separately for root cause analysis. In this work, we build a diagnostic service called ESRO that recommends root causes and remediation for failures by utilizing structured as well as semi-structured sources of data systematically. ESRO constructs a causal graph using alerts and a knowledge graph using outage reports, and merges them in a novel way to form a unified graph during training. A retrieval-based mechanism is then used to search the unified graph and rank the likely root causes and remediation techniques based on the alerts fired during an outage at inference time. Not only the individual alerts, but their respective importance in predicting an outage group is taken into account during recommendation. We evaluated our model on several cloud service outages of a large SaaS enterprise over the course of ~2 years, and obtained an average improvement of 27% in rouge scores after comparing the likely root causes against the ground truth over state-of-the-art baselines. We further establish the effectiveness of ESRO through qualitative analysis on multiple real outage examples.Comment: Accepted to 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2023

A Review Paper on Emotion Recognition Using Facial Expression

Facial expressions are the quickest means that of communication whereas transference any kind of info. These do not seem to be solely exposes the sensitivity or feelings of anyone, however, may be wont to choose his/her mental views. This paper includes the introduction of the face recognition associate in nursing face expression recognition and an investigation on the recent previous researches for extracting the effective and economical technique for face expression recognition