Network of Recurrent events - A case study of Japan

A recently proposed method of constructing seismic networks from 'record breaking events' from the earthquake catalog of California (Phy. Rev. E, 77 6,066104, 2008) was successfull in establishing causal features to seismicity and arrive at estimates for rupture length and its scaling with magnitude. The results of our implementation of this procedure on the earthquake catalog of Japan establishes the robustness of the procedure. Additionally, we find that the temporal distributions are able to detect heterogeneties in the seismicity of the region.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

A Study on Homoeopathic Management of Oppositional Defiant Disorder in Children

INTRODUCTION: Behavioural problems is defined as the symptomatic expression of emotional inadequate adjustment especially in children. Oppositional defiant disorder is one of the behavioural problems under descriptive behavioural disorder. Oppositional defiant disorder is one of the mental health problems in children and adolescents. Evidence suggests that between 1 and 16% children have oppositional defiant disorder. It is a pattern of disobedient, hostile, argue with adult. Child is angry, irritable, recent ful, they blamed other for her mistakes, non obedient, argumentative and defiant behaviour, repeated tantrum throwing, verbal aggression, spiteful or vindictive. This type of behaviour may be due to certain factors such as hereditary, emotional, pre natal factors. If oppositional defiant disorder is not treated it can progress to conduct disorder and child can changes to an anti social adult. NEED OF THE STUDY: Essential features of oppositional defiant disorder are a recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant ,and hostile behaviour towards authoritative figures. Whereas the essential features of conduct disorder are a repetitive and persistent pattern of behaviour in which the basic rights of others and rules are violated. If Oppositional defiant disorder is not treated properly the personalities will be changed in to conduct disorder. Oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder continue to be predominant juvenile disorders in mental health. Research in recent years shows that the course of antisocial behaviour from child hood through adult hood. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: 1. To study the efficacy of homoeopathic management of oppositional defiant disorder in children. 2. To assess the clinical course of oppositional defiant disorder during homoeopathic treatment. MATERIALS AND METHODS: STUDY SETTING: A sample of 30 cases presenting with oppositional defiant disorder obtaining from school health program conducted by Sarada Krishna Homoeopathic Medical College and also from the OPD, IPD and rural centers of Sarada Krishna Homoeopathic Medical College. SELECTION OF SAMPLES: • Sample Size - 30 cases. • Sampling Technique – Simple Random Sampling. INCLUSION CRITERIA: • Patients of age group between 3-17 years of age which are diagnosed as oppositional defiant disorder. • Children of both sexes. EXCLUSION CRITERIA: • Patients below 3yrs and above 17 years of age. • Patients with chromosomal disorder. • Patients of unwilling parents. STUDY DESIGN: • Screening will be done in school based on Vanderbilt parent rating scale. The study will be carried out in Sarada Krishna Homoeopathic Medical College Hospital and rural centers of Sarada Krishna Homoeopathic Medical College. • Data will be collected according to pre-structured SKHMC case format. • Pre and post treatment analysis is done using Vanderbilt parent rating scale. • Medicines will be prescribed according to the individualization of the case. • The patients will be monitored before and after administration of medicine. • It is a 6 month to one year study, therefore the data will be assessed at regular intervals. Results will be subjected to statistical analysis and hypothesis will be tested using paired t- test. RESULTS: A sample of thirty cases obtained by screening the students from the patients who attend the OPD and IPD of Sarada Krishna homoeopathic medical college and hospital was taken for this study. The children with the positive result in Vanderbilt parent rating scale for screening of oppositional defiant disorder. And start constitutional medicine. Again screen for 6 months. All the thirty cases were follow up for a period of 6 months and were subject to statistical study. The results are presented on the basis of data obtained from study group. The following tables and charts reveal the observations and results of this study. CONCLUSION: A sample of 30 cases selected after screening studentsfrom different for school health programs and patients who visited the OPD of Sarada Krishna homoeopathic medical college and hospital were selected as per the inclusion criteria. Conclusions were made after a statistical analysis of cases with oppositional defiant disorders. The following conclusions were drawn from the study as follows: • Majority of patients belong to age groups 11 years to 14 years. • Majority of screened students were males19 males and 11 were females. • Calcarea carb is the most suited constitutional remedies • Homoeopathy shows effectiveness in managing oppositional defiant disorder. • Limited number of researches are reported in oppositional defiant disorder. so more research needed in this field

A Smart Remote Monitoring System for Prenatal Care in Rural Areas

The complications in maternity especially the women lives in rural sector can be reduced through regular monitoring of their vitals like blood pressure, SpO2 and fetal growth. The internet of things (IoT) is the modern technology bridges the gap between the traditional clinical setting with its consumers as well promotes the telemedicine industry into great levels of accessing proactive healthcare facilities. The predominant aim of this work is to bring a remote monitoring device which assesses the significant health indicators of the pregnant women and their fetus status cost effectively. In order to build such kit, the biosensors like heart rate, SpO2, pressure, temperature and load cell which gives the weight of the fetus are integrated into Arudino board. The sensor readings are processed through ThingSpeak. The timely medical attention is proposed upon observing abnormal physiological vitals of the women which is implemented through a buzzer system in this device. Like such devices in realism help to predict the pregnancy risk and decrease the mortality rate

Digital Companion for Elders in Tracking Health and Intelligent Recommendation Support using Deep Learning

Ambient assisted living (AAL) facilitates the daily routines of elderly people, particularly those who have clinical difficulties or physical limitations. The latest technologies like distributed compuring,internet of things (IoT) and machine learning pave the ground for the creation of an effective automated tracker which aids elder citizens to live independently. The suggested system is attempted to design a wearable that monitors the blood glucose level through sweat. To achieve high accuracy, the proposed system uses ambient sensing and deep learning based techniques. It places a strong emphasis on calculating the health index by taking into account numerous disease-related characteristics or vitals such as heart rate, blood pressure, SpO2, blood glucose level, respiration rate, sweat rate, uric acid, and temperature. From the wearable device designed the vital signs are gathered, further environmental sensors and camera fixed around the person continually monitors the behavioral pattern along with physiological signals. This ensures the improved accuracy of health state prediction from its conventional models in place. The key advantage of this device is that it may be held and operated anyplace without interrupting their day-to-day tasks because the device is to be cheap, reliable and speedy

Network of Earthquakes and Recurrences Therein

We quantify the correlation between earthquakes and use the same to distinguish between relevant causally connected earthquakes. Our correlation metric is a variation on the one introduced by Baiesi and Paczuski (2004). A network of earthquakes is constructed, which is time ordered and with links between the more correlated ones. Data pertaining to the California region has been used in the study. Recurrences to earthquakes are identified employing correlation thresholds to demarcate the most meaningful ones in each cluster. The distribution of recurrence lengths and recurrence times are analyzed subsequently to extract information about the complex dynamics. We find that the unimodal feature of recurrence lengths helps to associate typical rupture lengths with different magnitude earthquakes. The out-degree of the network shows a hub structure rooted on the large magnitude earthquakes. In-degree distribution is seen to be dependent on the density of events in the neighborhood. Power laws are also obtained with recurrence time distribution agreeing with the Omori law.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Intelligent intrusion detection system in smart grid using computational intelligence and machine learning

Smart grid systems enhanced the capability of traditional power networks while being vulnerable to different types of cyber-attacks. These vulnerabilities could cause attackers to crash into the network breaching the integrity and confidentiality of the smart grid systems. Therefore, an intrusion detection system (IDS) becomes an important way to provide a secure and reliable services in a smart grid environment. This article proposes a feature-based IDS for smart grid systems. The proposed system performance is evaluated in terms of accuracy, intrusion detection rate (DR), and false alarm rate (FAR). The obtained results show that the random forest and neural network classifiers have outperformed other classifiers. We have achieved a 0.5% FAR on KDD99 dataset and a 0.08% FAR on the NSLKDD dataset. The DR and the testing accuracy on average are 99% for both datasets

Secretion of Clostridium difficile Toxins A and B Requires the Holin-like Protein TcdE

The pathogenesis of Clostridium difficile, the major cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea, is mainly associated with the production and activities of two major toxins. In many bacteria, toxins are released into the extracellular environment via the general secretion pathways. C. difficile toxins A and B have no export signature and their secretion is not explainable by cell lysis, suggesting that they might be secreted by an unusual mechanism. The TcdE protein encoded within the C. difficile pathogenicity locus (PaLoc) has predicted structural features similar to those of bacteriophage holin proteins. During many types of phage infection, host lysis is driven by an endolysin that crosses the cytoplasmic membrane through a pore formed by holin oligomerization. We demonstrated that TcdE has a holin-like activity by functionally complementing a λ phage deprived of its holin. Similar to λ holin, TcdE expressed in Escherichia coli and C. difficile formed oligomers in the cytoplamic membrane. A C. difficile tcdE mutant strain grew at the same rate as the wild-type strain, but accumulated a dramatically reduced amount of toxin proteins in the medium. However, the complemented tcdE mutant released the toxins efficiently. There was no difference in the abundance of tcdA and tcdB transcripts or of several cytoplasmic proteins in the mutant and the wild-type strains. In addition, TcdE did not overtly affect membrane integrity of C. difficile in the presence of TcdA/TcdB. Thus, TcdE acts as a holin-like protein to facilitate the release of C. difficile toxins to the extracellular environment, but, unlike the phage holins, does not cause the non-specific release of cytosolic contents. TcdE appears to be the first example of a bacterial protein that releases toxins into the environment by a phage-like system

Heat stress causes spatially-distinct membrane re-modelling in K562 leukemia cells

Cellular membranes respond rapidly to various environmental perturbations. Previously we showed that modulations in membrane fluidity achieved by heat stress (HS) resulted in pronounced membrane organization alterations which could be intimately linked to the expression and cellular distribution of heat shock proteins. Here we examine heat-induced membrane changes using several visualisation methods. With Laurdan two-photon microscopy we demonstrate that, in contrast to the enhanced formation of ordered domains in surface membranes, the molecular disorder is significantly elevated within the internal membranes of cells preexposed to mild HS. These results were compared with those obtained by anisotropy, fluorescence lifetime and electron paramagnetic resonance measurements. All probes detected membrane changes upon HS. However, the structurally different probes revealed substantially distinct alterations in membrane heterogeneity. These data call attention to the careful interpretation of results obtained with only a single label. Subtle changes in membrane microstructure in the decision-making of thermal cell killing could have potential application in cancer therapy

Anomalous Diffusion Induced by Cristae Geometry in the Inner Mitochondrial Membrane

Diffusion of inner membrane proteins is a prerequisite for correct functionality of mitochondria. The complicated structure of tubular, vesicular or flat cristae and their small connections to the inner boundary membrane impose constraints on the mobility of proteins making their diffusion a very complicated process. Therefore we investigate the molecular transport along the main mitochondrial axis using highly accurate computational methods. Diffusion is modeled on a curvilinear surface reproducing the shape of mitochondrial inner membrane (IM). Monte Carlo simulations are carried out for topologies resembling both tubular and lamellar cristae, for a range of physiologically viable crista sizes and densities. Geometrical confinement induces up to several-fold reduction in apparent mobility. IM surface curvature per se generates transient anomalous diffusion (TAD), while finite and stable values of projected diffusion coefficients are recovered in a quasi-normal regime for short- and long-time limits. In both these cases, a simple area-scaling law is found sufficient to explain limiting diffusion coefficients for permeable cristae junctions, while asymmetric reduction of the junction permeability leads to strong but predictable variations in molecular motion rate. A geometry-based model is given as an illustration for the time-dependence of diffusivity when IM has tubular topology. Implications for experimental observations of diffusion along mitochondria using methods of optical microscopy are drawn out: a non-homogenous power law is proposed as a suitable approach to TAD. The data demonstrate that if not taken into account appropriately, geometrical effects lead to significant misinterpretation of molecular mobility measurements in cellular curvilinear membranes