An Interesting Case Of Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is an uncommon inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system. The disease typically occurs after infections or vaccinations. However, in many patients with ADEM, no evidence of prior infection or vaccination can be found. We are reporting a patient who developed clinical and radiological features of acute disseminated encephalomyelitis after trauma of repeated attempts at lumber puncture for spinal anesthesi

Modeling Drivers of Political Risk in Offshore Outsourcing

Offshore outsourcing presents many opportunities that are not available domestically. Lower labor costs are the primary driver, but companies also want to focus on their core businesses and create value for their shareholders. Recently, companies even move beyond non-strategic functions into important operational and strategic functions. Smart companies have gained strategic advantage by offshoring processes. Many risks involve in offshore outsourcing of professional services because on behalf of client organization service provider provides services. Political instability in offshore destinations is one of the risks related to offshore outsourcing. Political risks are very volatile and also often more difficult to observe, so they may go unnoticed. Terrorism, Fiscal & Monetary policies, and Corruption are obvious problems that complicate offshore process management. The main objective of this paper is to identify and understand the mutual interaction among various drivers of political risk which affects the performance of offshore outsourcing.  To this effect, authors have identified various drivers through extant review of literature.  From this information, an integrated model using interpretive structural modeling (ISM) for drivers of political risk in offshore outsourcing is developed and the structural relationships between these drivers are modeled.  Further, MICMAC analysis is done to analyze the independent power and dependency of drivers which shall be helpful to managers to identify and classify important criterions and to reveal the direct and indirect effects of each criterion of political environment on offshore outsourcing. Results show that Domestic policies of host country, Civil war, Terrorism and Human resource availability are act as independent drivers Keywords: Political risk, offshore outsourcing, interpretive structural modeling, MICMAC analysi

IceBreaker: Solving Cold Start Problem for Video Recommendation Engines

Internet has brought about a tremendous increase in content of all forms and, in that, video content constitutes the major backbone of the total content being published as well as watched. Thus it becomes imperative for video recommendation engines such as Hulu to look for novel and innovative ways to recommend the newly added videos to their users. However, the problem with new videos is that they lack any sort of metadata and user interaction so as to be able to rate the videos for the consumers. To this effect, this paper introduces the several techniques we develop for the Content Based Video Relevance Prediction (CBVRP) Challenge being hosted by Hulu for the ACM Multimedia Conference 2018. We employ different architectures on the CBVRP dataset to make use of the provided frame and video level features and generate predictions of videos that are similar to the other videos. We also implement several ensemble strategies to explore complementarity between both the types of provided features. The obtained results are encouraging and will impel the boundaries of research for multimedia based video recommendation systems

Species specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay for identification of pig (Sus domesticus) meat

A highly specific single step polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is described for the detection of pig (Sus  domesticus) meat. A PCR assay was successfully optimized for amplification of 629 and 322-bp DNA fragment extracted from pig meat using designed species-specific primer pairs based on mitochondrial D-loop and 12S ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA) gene, respectively. The optimized PCR assay was subsequently validated for its specificity with deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) extracted from cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat and pig. PCR amplification of target DNA with pig-specific primers was repeated 15 times, with consistent results  observed. The specificity of pig-specific PCR provides a valuable tool for identification of pig meat and to avoid its fraudulent substitution and adulteration.Key words: Pig meat, adulteration, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), mitochondrial D-Loop, 12S ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA) gene

A Framework for Pre-computated Multi-Constrained Quickest QoS Path Algorithm

The era of advance computer networks and advance communication leads the technology to new heights and the algorithms used for the routing needs to be updated side by side parallel with the advancement. This paper presents the new multi-constrained routing algorithm which gives quality of service full-fill the service level agreements with the user. Finding a multi-constrained path is a NP-complete problem, but still the presented algorithm gives the feasible path for the routing in a given polynomial time. Furthermore the performance comparison shows the best results with presented approach and existed approach

Identification of genomic regions associated with cereal cyst nematode (Heterodera avenae Woll.) resistance in spring and winter wheat

Cereal cyst nematode (CCN) is a major threat to cereal crop production globally including wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). In the present study, single-locus and multi-locus models of Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) were used to find marker trait associations (MTAs) against CCN (Heterodera avenae) in wheat. In total, 180 wheat accessions (100 spring and 80 winter types) were screened against H. avenae in two independent years (2018/2019 "Environment 1" and 2019/2020 "Environment 2") under controlled conditions. A set of 12,908 SNP markers were used to perform the GWAS. Altogether, 11 significant MTAs, with threshold value of -log10 (p-values) >/= 3.0, were detected using 180 wheat accessions under combined environment (CE). A novel MTA (wsnp_Ex_c53387_56641291) was detected under all environments (E1, E2 and CE) and considered to be stable MTA. Among the identified 11 MTAs, eight were novel and three were co-localized with previously known genes/QTLs/MTAs. In total, 13 putative candidate genes showing differential expression in roots, and known to be involved in plant defense mechanisms were reported. These MTAs could help us to identify resistance alleles from new sources, which could be used to identify wheat varieties with enhanced CCN resistance

(R1954) Fractional Order on Modeling the Transmission of Devastative COVID-19 Infection: Efficacy of Vaccination

The second wave of COVID-19 is an unprecedented condition in India and began in mid February 2021. Individuals who were already suffering from other comorbidities were found with lung infection, and hence, the number of disease induced deaths were rising faster during the second wave in relation to the first wave. This paper has proposed a mathematical model with fractional order derivatives by correlating the model based number of infectives with the real number of infectives in India. For the system of fractional differential equations, a disease-free state has been computed and proved to be locally asymptotically stable with certain restrictions. The mathematical model has been numerically simulated using the predictor-corrector method to highlight the role played by fractional order in controlling the disease spread. Numerical simulations signify the fact that a vital role has been played by fractional order model over integer order model in determining the transmission of COVID-19. It can be visualized that the increment rate in the infectives is lower by taking into consideration the memory effect due to a previous exposure to COVID-19