Near Field Lenses in Two Dimensions

It has been shown that a slab of materials with refractive index = -1 behaves like a perfect lens focussing all light to an exact electromagnetic copy of an object. The original lens is limited to producing images the same size as the object, but here we generalise the concept so that images can be magnified. For two dimensional systems, over distances much shorter than the free space wavelength, we apply conformal transformations to the original parallel sided slab generating a variety of new lenses. Although the new lenses are not `perfect' they are able to magnify two dimensional objects. The results apply equally to imaging of electric or magnetic sub wavelength objects in two dimensions. The concepts have potential applications ranging from microwave frequencies to the visible.Comment: PDF fil

Master’s of Science Programs in Information Systems: Match Between the Model Curriculum and Existing Programs

In a rapidly changing Information Systems (IS) field, the marketability of students from IS programs is partly related to the responsiveness of the programs to changing market conditions. Thus, curriculum development and periodic finetuning plays a very important role. This paper is an attempt to evaluate the current status of Master’s of Science programs in IS and to study their fit with the recently proposed MSIS 2000 model curriculum. We studied 86 Master’s of Science programs in IS and mapped them onto the proposed curriculum structure. Matches and mismatches with the proposed model curriculum are reported in our results. The results indicate the fit to be somewhat mixed. We have also presented some implications for university administrators and faculty for using the findings of this study and also for further curriculum research

Feature based-Learning with Data Increasing for video Recommendation and Computing

Image content analysis is crucial for determining the reliability of a link between two videos. Video characteristics are increasingly being used in image and video representation as custom pre-trained picture and video convolutional neural networks become generally available. People also have limited access to video editing tools for a variety of reasons, such as ownership and privacy concerns. You don't need to go back to the source video data to use the refined features again. An affine transformation, for instance, can be used to map a well-studied function onto an unfamiliar domain. To do this, we use a unique triplet failure in conjunction with the re-learning strategy. We propose a contemporary data augmentation method that may be applied to functionality on various frames for videos as an alternative to employing specific motion data. Extensive testing on the well-known Hulu content-based Video Relevance challenge demonstrates the process's efficacy and provides solid evidence of state-of-the-art performance

Co-refolding denatured-reduced hen egg white lysozyme with acidic and basic proteins

Refolding of denatured-reduced lysozyme and the effect of co-refolding it with other proteins such as RNase A, bovine serum albumin, histone, myelin basic protein, alcohol dehydrogenase and DNase I on the renaturation yield and the aggregation of lysozyme have been studied. Basic proteins consistently increase the renaturation yield of the basic protein lysozyme (10–20% more than in their absence) with little or no aggregation. On the other hand, co-refolding of lysozyme with acidic proteins leads to aggregation and a significant decrease in renaturation yields. Our results show that hetero-interchain interactions (non-specific interactions) occur when the basic protein lysozyme is refolded together with acidic proteins such as bovine serum albumin, alcohol dehydrogenase or DNase I. Our results also suggest that the net charge on proteins plays a significant role in such non-specific aggregation. These results should prove useful in understanding the hetero-interchain interactions between folding polypeptide chains

Few-Shot Single-View 3-D Object Reconstruction with Compositional Priors

The impressive performance of deep convolutional neural networks in single-view 3D reconstruction suggests that these models perform non-trivial reasoning about the 3D structure of the output space. However, recent work has challenged this belief, showing that complex encoder-decoder architectures perform similarly to nearest-neighbor baselines or simple linear decoder models that exploit large amounts of per category data in standard benchmarks. On the other hand settings where 3D shape must be inferred for new categories with few examples are more natural and require models that generalize about shapes. In this work we demonstrate experimentally that naive baselines do not apply when the goal is to learn to reconstruct novel objects using very few examples, and that in a \emph{few-shot} learning setting, the network must learn concepts that can be applied to new categories, avoiding rote memorization. To address deficiencies in existing approaches to this problem, we propose three approaches that efficiently integrate a class prior into a 3D reconstruction model, allowing to account for intra-class variability and imposing an implicit compositional structure that the model should learn. Experiments on the popular ShapeNet database demonstrate that our method significantly outperform existing baselines on this task in the few-shot setting

Redox-regulated chaperone function and conformational changes of Escherichia coli Hsp33

We have studied the chaperone activity and conformation of Escherichia coli heat shock protein (Hsp)33, whose activity is known to be switched on by oxidative conditions. While oxidized Hsp33 completely prevents the heat-induced aggregation of ζ-crystallin at 42°C at a ratio of 1:1 (w/w), the reduced form exhibits only a marginal effect on the aggregation. Far UV–circular dichroism (CD) spectra show that reduced Hsp33 contains a significant α-helical component. Oxidation results in significant changes in the far UV–CD spectrum. Near UV–CD spectra show changes in tertiary structural packing upon oxidation. Polarity-sensitive fluorescent probes report enhanced hydrophobic surfaces in the oxidized Hsp33. Our studies show that the oxidative activation of the chaperone function of Hsp33 involves observable conformational changes accompanying increased exposure of hydrophobic pockets

Studies on feasibility of sustainable quality seed potato production technology and development of supply chain for the benefit of small and marginal potato growers of Karnataka

Management of aphid vectors in potato is important for the production of quality seed potato. Aphids are the major vectors of many potato viruses which transmit viral diseases limiting the seed potato production. To explore the area with aphid free/low population a weekly aphid observation was made in major potato growing areas of Chikkaballapur and Chickmagalur districts during rabiand kharif seasons to assess the build-up trends on the standing crop using aphid-leaf count and catches of yellow water pan and yellow sticky traps. Aphid population was below threshold level in the areas surveyed, however in Chickmagalur aphid build-up was erratic due to heavy rain fall followed by dry spells. Harvested potato in Chikkaballapur was treated and stored in cold storage for three months. During June, 50 per cent of the seed stock was transported to Chickmagalur area for planting in kharif season and remaining seed was used for planting in Chikkaballapur area during rabi season. In Chickmagalur, the harvested and treated seed was stored in low cost country potato store for three months and 50 per cent seed from warehouse was transported to Chikkaballapur for rabi planting and remaining seed was planted in Chickmagalur area during November thereby saving nearly 40 per cent of seed cost. Thus, the feasibility supply chain has been established making the local potato growers self-sustainable in quality seed potato production resulting in 30-40 percent seed requirement met locally produced quality seed and non-traditional areas will be brought under potato cultivation. The breeder seed was multiplied under low cost insect proof net houses during rabi season in Chikkaballapur area, harvested seed was stored in cold storage thereafter distributed among the local potato growers for planting during kharif season in Chickmagalur area

Molecular conformation of gonadoliberin using two-dimensional NMR spectroscopy

Complete resonance assignments of the proton NMR spectrum of gonadoliberin (in its native amide and free acid forms) have been obtained using two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy under three different environmental conditions, namely, dimethyl sulphoxide solution, aqueous solution and lipid-bound form in model membranes. The proton chemical shifts in the three cases have been compared to derive information about inherent conformational characteristics of the molecule. It has been inferred that the molecule possesses no short-range or long-range order under any of the three solvent conditions. However, there is a nonspecific increase in the linewidths when gonadoliberin is bound to model membranes, indicating a reduced internal motion in the molecule due to lipid-peptide interactions

Epidemiological and laboratory investigations of outbreaks of diarrhoea in rural South India: implications for control of disease

Two epidemics of acute, watery diarrhoea in villages in North Arcot district, India, were investigated. The attack rates were 10.03 and 15.53 per 100 population, the median duration was 5 days and enteric pathogens were present in 56.8% and 60.3% of specimens from the two villages, but no predominant pathogen was identified. Examination of stools from a 20% age-stratified random sample of the population of one of the villages after the epidemic found 22.9% of asymptomatic subjects excreted bacterial enteric pathogens. Despite the high background of enteric pathogen carriage, the isolation rates for shigellae, enteropathogenic Escherichia coli and Shiga-toxin producing E. coli were significantly higher (P < 0.001, P < 0.02, P < 0.05) during the epidemic. The epidemics may have been caused by faecal contamination of well water following rain. Point-of-use techniques for water disinfection may be most effective for preventing such outbreaks, but further research into the development of appropriate technology is required