Enhancing the Power of Endogenous Protein Phosphatase 2A to Combat Asthmatic Inflammation: Role for MAPKs and Tristetraprolin

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease, and thus corticosteroids are the mainstay of anti-inflammatory therapy to combat the disease. Typically asthma management involves long term use of corticosteroids, which often leads to severe side effects. Although corticosteroids have proven clinical efficacy in asthma, many asthmatic inflammatory conditions (e.g. infection, exacerbation) are not responsive to them. Therefore, alternative anti-inflammatory strategies are urgently needed and enhancing the function of endogenous PP2A, offer great promise. PP2A is a master controller of multiple inflammatory signalling pathways driven by MAPKs and is a target in asthma. Therefore in this thesis I aim to explore the role of PP2A in the context of asthmatic inflammation. Studies performed in this thesis provide a greater understanding of the role of some widely used inflammatory mediators such as TNFα, S1P and Pam3CSK and most importantly, the anti-inflammatory impact of PP2A. Our studies partly revealed the underlying molecular mechanisms of endogenous PP2A and its relationship with the critical anti-inflammatory protein, TTP. Besides, these studies clearly demonstrate that PP2A activators can enhance the anti-inflammatory function of TTP and repress inflammation when corticosteroid insensitivity exists. Therefore we presume that PP2A activators may have implications as alternative anti-inflammatory strategies to combat asthmatic inflammation

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF BUILDING CONSTRUCTION RULES AND THEIR IMPACT ON INDOOR TEMPERATURE OF MULTISTORIED BUILDINGS

The International Energy Agency projected that global final energyconsumption in buildings would grow by 30 percent from 2007 to 2030 ifprevailing practices and trends continued. Most of that increase is expectedto come from fast growing developing countries. New buildings in Dhaka arebeing constructed under the 2008 building construction act, termed as 'Dhakamohanagar imarat nirman bidhimala 2008' focusing more on FAR (floor arearatio) offers vertical expansion than horizontal to accommodate the requiredfloor area through providing more open spaces. Increase in building heightswith certain setbacks resulted increase in possibilities of change in naturalindoor lighting at the lower level of the structures. As a result, use ofartificial lighting in indoor spaces may be increased which may result changein fossil fuel consumption for power generation. Beside the indoor daylighting condition the question arises what would be the situation in terms ofindoor temperature due to building to building setback? Is there any impactof indoor temperature due to the setback provided in the construction rulesand the building height achieved in this regard? Thus, this paper tries to findout through theoretical investigation whether there are any impact on indoortemperature at different floor levels due to the direct component of solarradiation; and finds out that building setback and building height due tobuilding regulations influences significantly on indoor temperature atdifferent floor levels within a structure due to direct component of solarradiation. Comparisons between 1996 and 2008 imarat nirman bidhimala arepresented specially for residential buildings. The southwest facade isanalyzed in depeer detail

Advertising Effectiveness and Influence of Consumer Buying Decision of LED Television

The main aim of the present study was to identify the influence of advertising effectiveness on the consumer buying decisions of different brands of ‘LED’ television. The study was descriptive. Five television showrooms in Dinajpur district, Bangladesh (Sony, Singer, Samsung, LG, and Walton) were purposively selected for collecting primary data for this study. The respondents were selected using a convenience sampling method that came to the television showroom for purchasing ‘LED’ television. The primary data for this study were collected through a structured questionnaire. The study result shows that advertisement has a positive effect on consumer buying decisions of ‘LED’ television, Sony brand (p =.000 <0.05) and 43.9% of variation in consumer buying decision has been contributed by advertisement effectiveness. For Singer brand p =.010 <0.05), Samsung brand p =.003 <0.05), LG brand p =.341>0.05) and the null hypothesis is accepted for LG band and Walton brand p =.000 <0.05) and 42.3% of variation in consumer buying decision has been contributed by advertisement effectiveness

A Logic Simplification Approach for Very Large Scale Crosstalk Circuit Designs

Crosstalk computing, involving engineered interference between nanoscale metal lines, offers a fresh perspective to scaling through co-existence with CMOS. Through capacitive manipulations and innovative circuit style, not only primitive gates can be implemented, but custom logic cells such as an Adder, Subtractor can be implemented with huge gains. Our simulations show over 5x density and 2x power benefits over CMOS custom designs at 16nm [1]. This paper introduces the Crosstalk circuit style and a key method for large-scale circuit synthesis utilizing existing EDA tool flow. We propose to manipulate the CMOS synthesis flow by adding two extra steps: conversion of the gate-level netlist to Crosstalk implementation friendly netlist through logic simplification and Crosstalk gate mapping, and the inclusion of custom cell libraries for automated placement and layout. Our logic simplification approach first converts Cadence generated structured netlist to Boolean expressions and then uses the majority synthesis tool to obtain majority functions, which is further used to simplify functions for Crosstalk friendly implementations. We compare our approach of logic simplification to that of CMOS and majority logic-based approaches. Crosstalk circuits share some similarities to majority synthesis that are typically applied to Quantum Cellular Automata technology. However, our investigation shows that by closely following Crosstalk's core circuit styles, most benefits can be achieved. In the best case, our approach shows 36% density improvements over majority synthesis for MCNC benchmark

STUDY OF HOMOGENEITY, POROSITY AND INTERNAL DEFECTS IN AERATED AND EPS AGGREGATE POLY BRICKS USING NEUTRON RADIOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE

A powerful non-destructive testing (NDT) technique is adopted to study the internal defects and elemental distribution/homogeneity and porosity of aerated brick and EPS aggregate poly brick samples. In the present study the internal defects like homogeneity, porosity, elemental distribution, EPS aggregate and aerator distributor in the test samples have been observed by the measurement of gray value/optical density of the neutron radiographic images of these samples. From this measurement it is found that the neutron intensity/optical density variation with the pixel distance of the AOI of the NR images in both expanded polystyrene (EPS) aggregate poly brick and aerated brick samples comply almost same in nature with respect to the whole AOI but individually each AOI shows different nature from one AOI to another and it confirms that the elemental distribution within a AOI is almost homogeneous. Finally it was concluded that homogeneity, elemental distribution in the EPS aggregate poly brick sample is better than that of the aerated brick sample

Financial Variables Having Significant Impact on Market Price of Shares

The purpose of investment by investors in the capital market is to seek profit either in the form of dividend or capital gain and increase wealth. Therefore, before making an investment, it is imperative to the investors to familiarize with the company's fundamental status and performance variables that guide their maximum economic welfare. But on which variable(s) the investors should rely on? Taking this matter into account, the study attempts to identify the variables that have significant influence on shares price in the capital market, to guide investors in selecting the right option to invest, by taking Reneta Pharmaceuticals Limited (RPL), Bangladesh as a case, for the periods 2004 to 2011. Using correlation coefficient, coefficient of determination and testing the formulated hypotheses through student’s ‘t’ test, the study reveals that cash flow per share, price-earnings ratio and return on assets have significant impact on price of shares and are the best metrics to explain price movements in capital market and suggest investors to use these in predicting future changes and taking investment decision thereafter. Keywords: share price, return on assets, price-earnings ratio, cash flow per share, capital market

Optimal Onsite Microgrid Design for Net-Zero Energy Operation in Manufacturing Industry

Developing an economic net-zero energy infrastructure for the manufacturing industry can play a critical role to achieve the goal of affordable, reliable, and sustainable clean energy paradigm for the next generation. However, it is quite challenging to develop such an infrastructure due to the uncertain demand of the manufacturing system, intermittent electricity generation from the renewable sources, time of use (TOU) pricing of electricity, and integrated operational planning for the long-term planning horizon. In this paper, a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model is developed to economically design an onsite microgrid system considering the critical conditions and achieve a net-zero energy operation planning for the manufacturing industry. A linearization strategy is adopted to obtain the optimal design of the microgrid and the utilization of the resources. A numerical case study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the model

Computational Procedures for a Class of GI/D/ k

A class of discrete time GI/D/k systems is considered for which the interarrival times have finite support and customers are served in first-in first-out (FIFO) order. The system is formulated as a single server queue with new general independent interarrival times and constant service duration by assuming cyclic assignment of customers to the identical servers. Then the queue length is set up as a quasi-birth-death (QBD) type Markov chain. It is shown that this transformed GI/D/1 system has special structures which make the computation of the matrix R simple and efficient, thereby reducing the number of multiplications in each iteration significantly. As a result we were able to keep the computation time very low. Moreover, use of the resulting structural properties makes the computation of the distribution of queue length of the transformed system efficient. The computation of the distribution of waiting time is also shown to be simple by exploiting the special structures

DAYLIGHT PERFORMANCE IN SOUTH FACING ROOMS OF RESIDENTIAL APARTMENTS IN RESPECT OF CURRENT BUILDING CODE (2008): RELATION BETWEEN OBSTRUCTION DISTANCE AND OPENING SIZE

Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh is one of the highly dense cities in the world. Demand of residence is increasing with the increasing number of population. Orientation of building and microclimate of surrounding varies a lot in this city. In tropical region where daylight is plenty in amount, south facing room gets blessing of sunlight almost fulltime in a day. What happen when surrounding situation changes because of following rules, building code (Floor Area Ratio, Set Back)? One size of land is selected to evaluate its daylight performance, where building volume and height is fixed. The experiment is done by computer simulation. The study was also based on the comparative analysis of the difference of opening size with the change of the building surroundings. The simulation was done by Eco-Tech software and no field survey was conducted. The research result concluded that the lighting condition of south facing room at different condition could control by changing the opening size. With the change of the percentage of opening can do better lighting environment at interior space