CFD simulation using FLUENT and RANS3D - A validation exercise

The present work involves two-dimensional numerical simulation of three benchmark problems like (i) Laminar flow in a lid driven cavity (ii) Turbulent flow past a backward facing step and (iii) turbulent flow past NACA0012 aerofoil, using in-house flow solution code RANS3D and the commercially available FLUENT code. The results obtained using these codes are compared with the available measurement data and/or other computations

Performance testing of rams

A good deal of progress has been made in improving the productivity of sheep through selection of performance-tested and progeny-tested breeding animals in recent years. The ram represents one-half of the sheep flock. Thus careful selection of high producing rams which will sire fast-gaining and good-type lambs of desirable market quality is of importance. There has been considerable emphasis on intrinsic qualities of the individual, the performance merit of families and the value of proven sires with ability to transmit their superior characters to their offspring. The best and most reliable method of accomplishing greater production in a reasonable period of time is through selection and breeding of superior producing animals. A new approach to make selection more effective is by the collection and use of accurate records of performance on prospective breeding rams as a supplement to the practice of selecting rams by visual appraisal, as it is impossible or impractical to collect records on every animal. The performance record on prospective breeding rams is a most valuable and useful technique in continued flock improvement through selection of performance-tested and progeny-tested rams. The data affords an opportunity to eliminate undesirable traits and to evaluate the quality and performance of sheep due to differences in inherent potential. These differences cannot be predicted accurately by visual selection because of variation in environment and genetic makeup. Studies that involve high-performing rams indicate that they are capable of siring lambs of considerably greater value than those sired by low-performing rams. Breeding experience has shown that the most important consideration in lamb selection should be individual performance. Performance testing is a great aid in selecting high-producing rams, capable of transmitting maximum performance to their progeny, at an early age with a high degree of accuracy. It has been observed that a ram which produces good lambs one year usually continues to do so throughout his working life. Progeny testing is an accurate way of selecting, but, unfortunately, it is slow. Even if a progeny testing program is followed with prospective stud rams before they are used in the main flock, only a small percentage of the most promising rams can be progeny tested. Hence performance testing of rams is often used to determine the importance of individual merit of rams when used in breeding programs. Performance testing provides a safe and solid stepping stone towards the improvement of production efficiency and better profits of sheep through early selection of high-producing animals. The main purposes of this study were; 1. To evaluate various performance criteria for selection of rams on the basis of the relative effects of various factors such as sex, type of birth, age of dam, season of birth, and rearing on birth weight and birth to weaning weight, grades and post-weaning performance; 2, To determine the improvement in quality and quantity of lamb and wool through the selection of performance tested rams; and 3. To determine the relationship of performance records taken at different times during the growing period

Comparison of dermatoglyphic patterns in oral leukoplakia and oral submucous fibrosis patients

Background: Genetics plays an important role in the detection of an Oral potentially malignant lesion. A major contributor to genetic study is Dermatoglyphics or the study of fingerprints and lines of palmer and plantar surfaces. Many researchers have used dermatoglyphics to connect genetics with oral lesions and malignancies. Thus, the current study has been conducted to find out an association between dermatoglyphic patterns and oral leukoplakia, oral submucous fibrosis and healthy subjects.Methods: The present study is conducted on subjects that have been already diagnosed with oral lesions. Fingerprint patterns (whorled, loop and arch) were evaluated by utilizing fingerprints.Results: The present study showed that the loop pattern was common in all three subjects. The frequency of whorled and arch pattern is decreased in oral leukoplakia and oral submucous fibrosis that healthy subjects. Arch pattern is comparatively decreased in subjects with oral leukoplakia than oral submucous fibrosis and there is a decrease in the frequency of whorled patterns in OSMF as compared to oral leukoplakia.Conclusions: Authors conclude that simply by observing the whorled and arch patterns in a subject, authors can hypothesize that risk of occurrence of oral leukoplakia and oral submucous Fibrosis and take preventive measures against the said lesions

Central giant cell granulomas of the jaws: A review of the literature with its emphasis on differential diagnosis on related lesions

Central giant cell granuloma (CGCG) is an uncommon benign intraosseous lesion that occurs almost exclusively in the jaws that has variable clinical behavior and is difficult to predict. The CGCG of the jaws is usually a non-neoplastic bone lesion accounting for fewer than 7% of all benign tumors of the jaws. Before the early 1950s, central giant cell lesions (GCLs) of the jaws were generally diagnosed as giant cell tumor (GCT) usually found in epiphyseal regions of long bones. Giant cell lesions (GCLs) are mandatorily diagnosed in consideration with clinical and radiological features which predicts its aggressive and non-aggressive behavior. The incidence in the general population is very low and patients are generally younger than 30 years. CGCG belongs together with GCT, brown tumor of hyperparathyroidism and cherubism to the so-called GCLs, which can be difficult to distinguish solely by microscopic examination. GCT of the long bones is practically identical with CGCG of the jaws on histopathologic examination and is considered by some authors as a manifestation of the same disease, where age and local factors are responsible for different clinical characteristics. The aim of this review is to focus on general considerations of CGCG along with its management and to differentiate between various centrally placed GCLs which mimic each other histologically and sometimes clinically

Aligning Non-Causal Factors for Transformer-Based Source-Free Domain Adaptation

Conventional domain adaptation algorithms aim to achieve better generalization by aligning only the task-discriminative causal factors between a source and target domain. However, we find that retaining the spurious correlation between causal and non-causal factors plays a vital role in bridging the domain gap and improving target adaptation. Therefore, we propose to build a framework that disentangles and supports causal factor alignment by aligning the non-causal factors first. We also investigate and find that the strong shape bias of vision transformers, coupled with its multi-head attention, make it a suitable architecture for realizing our proposed disentanglement. Hence, we propose to build a Causality-enforcing Source-Free Transformer framework (C-SFTrans) to achieve disentanglement via a novel two-stage alignment approach: a) non-causal factor alignment: non-causal factors are aligned using a style classification task which leads to an overall global alignment, b) task-discriminative causal factor alignment: causal factors are aligned via target adaptation. We are the first to investigate the role of vision transformers (ViTs) in a privacy-preserving source-free setting. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results in several DA benchmarks.Comment: WACV 2024. Project Page: https://val.cds.iisc.ac.in/C-SFTrans

Synthesis of novel chitosan resin derivatized with serine diacetic acid moiety and its application to on-line collection/concentration of trace elements and their determination using inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometry

A novel chelating resin functionalized with serine diacetic acid moiety was synthesized by using chitosan as base material, and applied to the collection/concentration of trace elements in environmental water samples, followed by the determination using inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES). The synthesized resin, crosslinked chitosan serine diacetic acid (CCTS-SDA), showed good adsorption behavior toward trace amounts of Cd, Pb, Cu, Ni, V, Ga, Sc, In, and Th in a wide pH range. Additionally, rare earth elements also can be retained on the resin at neutral pH region. The adsorbed elements can be easily eluted with 1 mol L-1 of nitric acid, and their recoveries were found to be 90-100%. The CCTS-SDA was packed in a mini-column, which was then installed in a cornputer-controlled auto-pretreatment system (Auto-Pret System) for on-line trace elements collection and determination with ICP-AES. Experimental parameters which related to the improvement of sensitivity and reproducibility were optimized. The limits of detection (LOD) for 13 elements were found to be in sub-ppb level. The proposed method with CCTS-SDA resin was successfully applied to the determination of trace elements in river water samples. The method was validated by determining a certified reference material of river water, SLRS-4

Needle(s) in the Haystack – Synchronous Multifocal Tumor Induced Osteomalacia

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Endocrine Society via http://dx.doi.org/10.1210/jc.2015-3854MG is supported by the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre

Stability analysis of the GAL regulatory network in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Kluyveromyces lactis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In the yeast <it>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</it>, interactions between galactose, Gal3p, Gal80p, and Gal4p determine the transcriptional status of the genes required for the galactose utilization. Increase in the cellular galactose concentration causes the galactose molecules to bind onto Gal3p which, via Gal80p, activates Gal4p, which induces the GAL3 and GAL80 gene transcription. Recently, a linear time-invariant multi-input multi-output (MIMO) model of this GAL regulatory network has been proposed; the inputs being galactose and Gal4p, and the outputs being the active Gal4p and galactose utilization. Unfortunately, this model assumes the cell culture to be homogeneous, although it is not so in practice. We overcome this drawback by including more biochemical reactions, and derive a quadratic ordinary differential equation (ODE) based model.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We show that the model, referred to above, does not exhibit bistability. We establish sufficiency conditions for the domain of attraction of an equilibrium point of our ODE model for the special case of full-state feedback controller. We observe that the GAL regulatory system of <it>Kluyveromyces lactis </it>exhibits an aberration of monotone nonlinearity and apply the Rantzer multipliers to establish a class of stabilizing controllers for this system.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Feedback in a GAL regulatory system can be used to enhance the cellular memory. We show that the system can be modeled as a quadratic nonlinear system for which the effect of feedback on the domain of attraction of the equilibrium point can be characterized using <it>linear matrix inequality </it>(LMI) conditions that are easily implementable in software. The benefit of this result is that a mathematically sound approach to the synthesis of full-state and partial-state feedback controllers to regulate the cellular memory is now possible, irrespective of the number of state-variables or parameters of interest.</p

Challenges and opportunities in mixed method data collection on mental health issues of health care workers during COVID-19 pandemic in India

Background: The present paper describes the key challenges and opportunities of mixed method telephonic data collection for mental health research using field notes and the experiences of the investigators in a multicenter study in ten sites of India. The study was conducted in public and private hospitals to understand the mental health status, social stigma and coping strategies of different healthcare personnel during the COVID-19 pandemic in India.Methods: Qualitative and quantitative interviews were conducted telephonically. The experiences of data collection were noted as a field notes/diary by the data collectors and principal investigators.Results: The interviewers reported challenges such as network issues, lack of transfer of visual cues and sensitive content of data. Although the telephonic interviews present various challenges in mixed method data collection, it can be used as an alternative to face-to-face data collection using available technology.Conclusions: It is important that the investigators are well trained keeping these challenges in mind so that their capacity is built to deal with these challenges and good quality data is obtained

Factors associated with stigma and manifestations experienced by Indian health care workers involved in COVID-19 management in India: A qualitative study

Healthcare personnel who deal with COVID-19 experience stigma. There is a lack of national-level representative qualitative data to study COVID-19-related stigma among healthcare workers in India. The present study explores factors associated with stigma and manifestations experienced by Indian healthcare workers involved in COVID-19 management. We conducted in-depth interviews across 10 centres in India, which were analysed using NVivo software version 12. Thematic and sentiment analysis was performed to gain deep insights into the complex phenomenon by categorising the qualitative data into meaningful and related categories. Healthcare workers (HCW) usually addressed the stigma they encountered when doing their COVID duties under the superordinate theme of stigma. Among them, 77.42% said they had been stigmatised in some way. Analyses revealed seven interrelated themes surrounding stigma among healthcare workers. It can be seen that the majority of the stigma and coping sentiments fall into the mixed category, followed by the negative sentiment category. This study contributes to our understanding of stigma and discrimination in low- and middle-income settings. Our data show that the emergence of fear of the virus has quickly turned into a stigma against healthcare workers