Effectiveness of Planned Teaching Programme on Knowledge of Mothers of School-Aged Children on Prevention of Typhoid Fever in Selected Hospitals of Hassan, Karnataka.

Introduction: Typhoid fever is also known as enteric fever, is a systemic infection by salmonella typhi or by the related but less virulent salmonella paratyphi. Since ancient times this bacteria have thrived during war time and during the break down of basic sanitation. Salmonella typhi persists mostly in developing nations where sanitation is generally poor. Methodology: The research approach for the study was a true experimental design in nature to assess the effectiveness of the planned teaching programme. The investigator had utilised probability sampling in which simple random technique had been used for the selection of the subjects. A sample of 100 mothers of school-age children were selected for the study by a lottery method and through randomization among the 100 mothers, 50 mothers were selected for the experimental while 50 mothers were selected for the control group. The instrument used for the study was structured knowledge questionnaire. Results: The results showed that Pre-Test findings  were 34.6% and 33.4% in experimental and control group respectively. While post-test score were 80.9% and 35.3% in experimental and control group respectively. Hence the post-test Mean knowledge score of the experimental group was significantly higher than the post-test knowledge score of control group. The paired student‘t’ test value was 53.52 which is highly significant and p=0.001 level. Conclusion: The knowledge level of mothers on prevention of typhoid fever is higher in experimental than control group. Keywords: Knowledge, typhoid fever, Planned teaching program

Thermal Degradation of Erythritol

The Insulated Solar Electric Cooker (ISEC) is a double walled Aluminum pot with a resistive heater directly connected to a solar panel whose goal is to create and disseminate cheap solar cookers in rural areas that primarily rely on biomass for cooking. Phase Change Materials (PCMs) like Erythritol, a sugar substitute, take a tremendous amount of energy to melt, and when they solidify they release the energy. Through the use of PCMs, the ISECs will produce enough heat to cook food even after the sun sets. However, PCMs like Erythritol degrade over repeated heat exposure, so the purpose of this experiment is to evaluate its viability for the ISEC

Efficiently identifying top k similar entities

With the rapid growth in genomic studies, more and more successful researches are being produced that integrate tools and technologies from interdisciplinary sciences. Computational biology or bioinformatics is one such field that successfully applies computational tools to capture and transcribe biological data. Specifically in genomic studies, detection and analysis of co-occurring mutations is an leading area of study. Concurrently, in the recent years, computer science and information technology have seen an increased interest in the area association analysis and co-occurrence computation. The traditional method of finding top similar entities involves examining every possible pair of entities, which leads to a prohibitive quadratic time complexity. Most of the existing approaches also require a similarity measure and threshold beforehand to retrieve the top similar entities. These parameters are not always easy to tune. Heuristically, an adaptive method can have wider applications for identifying the top most similar pair of mutations (or entities in general). In this thesis, we have presented an algorithm to efficiently identify top k similar pair of mutations using co-occurrence as the similarity measure. Our approach used an upperbound condition to iteratively prune the search space and tackled the quadratic complexity. The empirical evaluations show that the proposed approach shows the computational efficiency in terms of execution time and accuracy of our approach particularly in large size datasets. In addition, we also evaluate the impact of various parameters like input size, k on the execution time in top k approaches. This study concludes that systematic pruning of the search space using an adaptive threshold condition optimizes the process of identifying top similar pair of entities

Crystal structure and physical properties of half-doped manganite nanocrystals with size < 100nm

In this paper we report the structural and property (magnetic and electrical transport) measurements of nanocrystals of half-doped $\mathrm{La_{0.5}Ca_{0.5}MnO_3}$(LCMO) synthesized by chemical route, having particle size down to an average diameter of 15nm. It was observed that the size reduction leads to change in crystal structure and the room temperature structure is arrested so that the structure does not evolve on cooling unlike bulk samples. The structural change mainly affects the orthorhombic distortion of the lattice. By making comparison with observed crystal structure data under hydrostatic pressure it is suggested that the change in the crystal structure of the nanocrystals occurs due to an effective hydrostatic pressure created by the surface pressure on size reduction. This not only changes the structure but also causes the room temperature structure to freeze-in. The size reduction also does not allow the long supercell modulation needed for the Charge Ordering, characteristic of this half-doped manganite, to set-in. The magnetic and transport measurements also show that the Charge Ordering (CO) does not occur when the size is reduced below a critical size. Instead, the nanocrystals show ferromagnetic ordering down to the lowest temperatures along with metallic type conductivity. Our investigation establishes a structural basis for the destabilization of CO state observed in half-doped manganite nanocrystals.Comment: 11 pages, 13 Figure

An ultrasonic c-scan system for the NDE of advanced composites

A state-of-the-art computer controlled ultrasonic through transmission jet probe c-scan system for the Non- Destructive Evaluation (NDE) of advanced composites has been set up in the Composite Structures Laboratory (NAL), under the advanced composite technology programme funded by the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA). The system configuration and specification details were arrived at, after considerable studies, with a view to establish a cost effective c-scan system that would meet most of the NDE requirements of advanced composites, notably that of the CFRP rudder - of the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA). The salient features of the NAL c-scan system are presented in this report. In addition, various aspects of the pre-shipment inspection and acceptance tests carried out at the manufacturer's works as well as during the commissioning at NAL are discussed here

Current-induced phase control in charged-ordered Nd0.5Ca0.5MnO3 and Pr0.6Ca0.4MnO3 crystals

Single crystals of Nd0.5Ca0.5MnO3 and Pr0.6Ca0.4MnO3 show current-induced insulator-metal transitions at low temperatures. In addition, the charge-ordering transition temperature decreases with increasing current. The electroresistive ratio, defined as r0.5/rI where r0.5 is the resistivity at a current of 0.5 mA and rI the resistivity at a given applied current, I, varies markedly with temperature and the value of I. Thermal hysteresis observed in Nd0.5Ca0.5MnO3 and Pr0.6Ca0.4MnO3 at the insulator-metal transition indicates that the transition is first-order. The current-induced changes are comparable to those induced by magnetic fields, and the insulator-metal transition in Pr0.6Ca0.4MnO3 is accordingly associated with a larger drop in resistivity.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, first submitted to submitted to J. Phys. D; applied physics on 18th march 200