Communicative Language Teaching

It has been noticed that the goal of the most of the methods whether it is Audio- Visual, the Direct method, the Silent Way or De-suggestopedia so far is for students to learn to communicate in the target language. In the 1970s, though, educators began to question if they were going about meeting the goal in the right way. Some observed that students could produce sentences accurately in a lesson, but could not use them appropriately when genuinely communicating outside of the class-room. Others noted that being able to communicate required more than mastering linguistic structures. Students may know the rules of linguistic usage, but unable to use the language. It became clear that communication required that students perform certain functions as well as, promising, inviting and declining invitations within a social context. In short, being able to communicate required more than linguistic competence, it required communicative competence – knowing when and how to say what to whom. All these observations, done at various times contributed to a shift in the late 1970s and early 1980s from a linguistic structure –centered approach to Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching Approach (Widdowson 1990)

Cohesion: its Types

Whenever we read a passage or hear some conversation, we find certain resources which determine whether the passage/conversation is a unified whole or not, whether it is meaningful or not. These elements or resources which provide organization to the passage or the conversation not only make it meaningful but also coherent. Thus, the elements which help us to make out the meaning are called cohesive devices and their act of providing coherence is called cohesion

Picaresque Elements in Starry Nights

Shobhaa De’s Starry Nights contains many picaresque features. A picaresque novel deals with the typical story of a ‘picaro’- that is Spanish word for ‘rogue’ or ‘rascal’ who lives by his own wits and shows little of any alteration of character  through the long succession of his adventures. Picaresque narrative is realistic in manners, episodic in structure, and usually satiric in aim. In other words, a picaresque novel deals with the adventures of rogues and vagabonds. The picaro is a clever and amusing adventurer of low- social class who makes his way by tricks and roguery rather than by honorable industry. Then he/she does some adventure, he /she begins with petty menial tasks such as performed by household servants and valets. His /her immoral rascality is hairbreadth sort of actual criminality and offence

An experimental study to investigate the effects of venlafaxine and escitalopram on anticonvulsant activity of conventional antiepileptic drugs in mice

Background: Depression is a common psychiatric comorbidity in patients with epilepsy which remains often untreated, due to concern of antidepressant induced seizures. The safety status of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in epileptics is controversial.Methods: Phase I acute effect of venlafaxine and escitalopram on the seizure threshold was studied. Phase II, the acute effects of test ADDs on the effective dose of AEDs viz valproate, phenobarbitone and phenytoin were studied in maximal electroshock (MES). Phase III- same study design as in phase II except that AEDs and ADDs were administered daily for 28 days.Results: Venlafaxine raised the electroconvulsive threshold in a dose dependant manner in phase I, however it was significant at a dose of 25mg/kg. In phase II, a significant reduction in ED50 of valproate was observed when it was co-administered with venlafaxine at dose of 12.5 and 25mg/kg, whereas ED50 of phenobarbitone was significantly reduced at a dose of 25mg/kg. Chronic administration of venlafaxine at 12.5mg/kg daily reduced ED50 of valproate. At 25mg/kg daily ED50 of all the three studied AEDs was reduced, Escitalopram 8mg/kg significantly raised the electroconvulsive threshold value in phase 1, Escitalopram administered in the dose of 8mg/kg reduced the ed50 value of valproate. Escitalopram given in dose of 4 and 8mg/kg reduced the ED50 value of valproate.Conclusions: From this finding, it may be concluded that venlafaxine and escitalopram administered either alone or in combination with AEDs acutely or chronically, exhibit anticonvulsant action

Audio Watermarking Scheme in MDCT Domain

In our proposed watermark embedding system, the original audio is segmented into overlapping frames. The psychoacoustic auditory model has been utilized to calculate the global threshold in modified discrete cosine transform domain. The perceptual insignificant locations have been used to insert the appropriately scaled watermark in the transform domain. Blind detection of watermark has been performed. Simulation results indicate that the proposed watermarking system is perceptually transparent and robust against various kind of attacks such as AWGN addition and MP3 compression

Channels Reallocation In Cognitive Radio Networks Based On DNA Sequence Alignment

Nowadays, It has been shown that spectrum scarcity increased due to tremendous growth of new players in wireless base system by the evolution of the radio communication. Resent survey found that there are many areas of the radio spectrum that are occupied by authorized user/primary user (PU), which are not fully utilized. Cognitive radios (CR) prove to next generation wireless communication system that proposed as a way to reuse this under-utilised spectrum in an opportunistic and non-interfering basis. A CR is a self-directed entity in a wireless communications environment that senses its environment, tracks changes, and reacts upon its findings and frequently exchanges information with the networks for secondary user (SU). However, CR facing collision problem with tracks changes i.e. reallocating of other empty channels for SU while PU arrives. In this paper, channels reallocation technique based on DNA sequence alignment algorithm for CR networks has been proposed.Comment: 12 page

Genitourinary Hydatid Disease

Genitourinary echinococcosis is an uncommon cyclo-zoonotic disease. It is caused by Echinococcus species. Kidneys are the common target organs in the genitourinary tract. Clinical presentation is usually non-specific. Pre-operative diagnosis requires a high index of suspicion. It should be considered in differential diagnosis of cystic mass of genitourinary tract, especially in endemic regions. Computed tomography, ultrasonography, and antibody testing aid in diagnosing and classifying the stage of the cyst. Although a number of operative techniques have been described, complete removal of germinal layer with daughter cysts without spillage of viable cyst contents with perioperative medical therapy provides an optimum chance of cure with minimal morbidity. Considering the benign nature of the disease, organ preservation is feasible in majority of the cases. The conventional open surgical treatment has evolved into minimally invasive laparoscopic, endoscopic, and even robotic techniques with concomitant improvement in postoperative and cosmetic outcome. Given the rarity of the disease, no randomized control trial comparing the treatment modalities for genitourinary hydatid exists. Moreover, long-term follow up in many cases is unavailable. Overall, the incidence of local and systemic recurrence is low

Unusual Presentations of Adrenal Masses

With the advancement in imaging technology and pathological evaluation, several unusual adrenal gland lesions have been identified over the years. Presently, the literature consists of case reports or small case series without a comprehensive review on these uncommon adrenal pathologies. The current chapter discusses the epidemiology, pathogenesis, pathology, imaging features and management principles of uncommonly reported infectious and neoplastic adrenal masses

Enhanced Internet Access in MANETs: A Robust and Efficient Gateway Detection Approach with Amplified Backing

When a certain gateway is connected to a significant number of mobile devices, the quality of service begins to decline. As a result, we propose that the number of mobile devices up to which a specific gateway performs well within expectations be identified, and that this number be referred to as the gateway's capacity. The capacity of each node should then be verified in the optimum gateway discovery protocol before connecting to the gateway for the best results. Trust-based systems might help protect decentralised, self-organized networks like dedicated cellular carriers and dedicated vehicle networks against insider attacks. To guard against external threats, A/V encryption and access control might be utilised. Cryptographic systems, for example, are prevention-focused

LEARNet Dynamic Imaging Network for Micro Expression Recognition

Unlike prevalent facial expressions, micro expressions have subtle, involuntary muscle movements which are short-lived in nature. These minute muscle movements reflect true emotions of a person. Due to the short duration and low intensity, these micro-expressions are very difficult to perceive and interpret correctly. In this paper, we propose the dynamic representation of micro-expressions to preserve facial movement information of a video in a single frame. We also propose a Lateral Accretive Hybrid Network (LEARNet) to capture micro-level features of an expression in the facial region. The LEARNet refines the salient expression features in accretive manner by incorporating accretion layers (AL) in the network. The response of the AL holds the hybrid feature maps generated by prior laterally connected convolution layers. Moreover, LEARNet architecture incorporates the cross decoupled relationship between convolution layers which helps in preserving the tiny but influential facial muscle change information. The visual responses of the proposed LEARNet depict the effectiveness of the system by preserving both high- and micro-level edge features of facial expression. The effectiveness of the proposed LEARNet is evaluated on four benchmark datasets: CASME-I, CASME-II, CAS(ME)^2 and SMIC. The experimental results after investigation show a significant improvement of 4.03%, 1.90%, 1.79% and 2.82% as compared with ResNet on CASME-I, CASME-II, CAS(ME)^2 and SMIC datasets respectively.Comment: Dynamic imaging, accretion, lateral, micro expression recognitio