Flexural Behavior and Strength of Doubly-Reinforced Concrete Beams with Hollow Plastic Spheres

This thesis presents the outcome of an investigation into the experimental and theoretical flexural behavior and strength of doubly-reinforced concrete beams with and without hollow plastic spheres. Tests are conducted on two types of beams having simply supported end conditions. To obtain experimental results, a gradually increasing two-point loading is used up to collapse. The experimental load-deflection and load-strain curves are recorded. Theoretical analysis is based on developing non-linear moment-curvature relationships for cross sections with and without hollow spheres. These moment-curvature relationships are then coupled with three separate numerical methods namely, finite difference method, finite integral method and Newmark’s method to predict load-deflection relationships for both beams. These three approximate analysis methods gave practically the same results. In addition, a theoretical study is conducted to predict the load-deflection curves, and the cracking and collapse load indices of full-scale beams with and without hollow spheres. The predicted cracking and peak load values are in good agreement with those found in the laboratory experiments. The study shows that the use of hollow plastic spheres in reinforced concrete beams results in a substantial decrease in self-weight without compromising the ultimate strength

A study of clinicoradiological and functional outcomes of intramedullary nailing in diaphyseal radius ulna fractures

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate the results of intramedullary nailing in diaphyseal fractures of radius and ulna in age group of 10 to 49 years and to understand its clinicoradiological and functional results.Methods: This is a retrospective case series study of forearm bone fractures and the selected management for the same over a period of 3 years. We chose the cases in which intramedullary nailing was the treatment modality which were followed up over a period of minimum 6 months. Patients with galeazzi variety, monteggia variety, pathological fracture or non-union after previous surgery were excluded. The outcomes were then evaluated with disabilities of the arm, shoulder and hand (DASH) score, Green and O’Brien score, and Grace and Eversmann functional outcome score.Results: Of the 22 patients, 10 patients had excellent functional outcome according to Grace and Eversmann score, 7 patients had good outcome, 4 patients had acceptable while 1 was unacceptable. Green and O’Brien also had similar results, except that patients among fair category were 3 and poor category were 3. The mean DASH score was 16.2.Conclusions: This study shows that closed method for fixation by intramedullary nailing of both bone forearm fractures leads to excellent to good functional outcomes (according to DASH score, Green and O Brien, and Grace and Eversmann score) with less complications. In 6 months follow up x ray there is radiological union in all cases with no angulation, malunion or non-union.

Concurrent Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement in Expected-Constant Rounds, Revisited

It is well known that without randomization, Byzantine agreement (BA) requires a linear number of rounds in the synchronous setting, while it is flat out impossible in the asynchronous setting. The primitive which allows to bypass the above limitation is known as oblivious common coin (OCC). It allows parties to agree with constant probability on a random coin, where agreement is oblivious, i.e., players are not aware whether or not agreement has been achieved. The starting point of our work is the observation that no known protocol exists for information-theoretic multi-valued OCC---i.e., OCC where the coin might take a value from a domain of cardinality larger than 2---with optimal resiliency in the asynchronous (with eventual message delivery) setting. This apparent hole in the literature is particularly problematic, as multi-valued OCC is implicitly or explicitly used in several constructions. (In fact, it is often falsely attributed to the asynchronous BA result by Canetti and Rabin [STOC ’93], which, however, only achieves binary OCC and does not translate to a multi-valued OCC protocol.) In this paper, we present the first information-theoretic multi-valued OCC protocol in the asynchronous setting with optimal resiliency, i.e., tolerating $t<n/3$ corruptions, thereby filling this important gap. Further, our protocol efficiently implements OCC with an exponential-size domain, a property which is not even achieved by known constructions in the simpler, synchronous setting. We then turn to the problem of round-preserving parallel composition of asynchronous BA. A protocol for this task was proposed by Ben-Or and El-Yaniv [Distributed Computing ’03]. Their construction, however, is flawed in several ways: For starters, it relies on multi-valued OCC instantiated by Canetti and Rabin\u27s result (which, as mentioned above, only provides binary OCC). This shortcoming can be repaired by plugging in our above multi-valued OCC construction. However, as we show, even with this fix it remains unclear whether the protocol of Ben-Or and El-Yaniv achieves its goal of expected-constant-round parallel asynchronous BA, as the proof is incorrect. Thus, as a second contribution, we provide a simpler, more modular protocol for the above task. Finally, and as a contribution of independent interest, we provide proofs in Canetti\u27s Universal Composability framework; this makes our work the first one offering composability guarantees, which are important as BA is a core building block of secure multi-party computation protocols

How Many People Are Within Walking Distance of a Library in Manhattan?

The main focus of this project is to find out population distribution across the island of Manhattan and to find how many people are within walking distance of a library using an exploratory study to visualize location of libraries in relation to population densities and low income areas.https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/gis_poster/1082/thumbnail.jp

The nasal route, advanced drug delivery systems and evaluation: a review

Nasal drug delivery is a well-known alternative to oral and parenteral drug delivery systems. Protein, peptides, hormones, and vaccines are the sensitive molecules for the oral route; hence those can be reached via nasal delivery. The nasal way has several advantages: higher permeability, more vasculature, less contact with enzymes due to less nasal space, and no hepatic first-pass metabolism. Therefore, it is a suitable route for sensitive drug molecules. Different applicators can deliver solid, liquid, and semisolid formulations for treating various diseases. The present review considers a brief introduction to the nasal route and problems associated with the nasal course for drug delivery, conventional and novel formulations, their applications, and evaluation parameters. Moreover, some of the marketed formulations for the nasal route of drug delivery systems and patented technologies are tabulated by reviewing the previous and updated literature

Universally Composable Almost-Everywhere Secure Computation

Most existing work on secure multi-party computation (MPC) ignores a key idiosyncrasy of modern communication networks, that there are a limited number of communication paths between any two nodes, many of which might even be corrupted. The problem becomes particularly acute in the information-theoretic setting, where the lack of trusted setups (and the cryptographic primitives they enable) makes communication over sparse networks more challenging. The work by Garay and Ostrovsky [EUROCRYPT\u2708] on almost-everywhere MPC (AE-MPC), introduced ``best-possible security\u27\u27 properties for MPC over such incomplete networks, where necessarily some of the honest parties may be excluded from the computation. In this work, we provide a universally composable definition of almost-everywhere security, which allows us to automatically and accurately capture the guarantees of AE-MPC (as well as AE-communication, the analogous ``best-possible security\u27\u27 version of secure communication) in the Universal Composability (UC) framework of Canetti. Our results offer the first simulation-based treatment of this important but under-investigated problem, along with the first simulation-based proof of AE-MPC. To achieve that goal, we state and prove a general composition theorem, which makes precise the level or ``quality\u27\u27 of AE-security that is obtained when a protocol\u27s hybrids are replaced with almost-everywhere components

Relationship between diabetes mellitus and periodontal disease - A clinical study.

Introduction: The relation between diabetes mellitus and periodontal disease is not clear. From the available data, it seemed reasonable to believe that diabetics were more susceptible to periodontal disease than non diabetics. Aim: The present study was to clinically evaluate the relationship of diabetes mellitus with periodontal disease along with various parameters. Materials and Methods: 200 patients with diabetes mellitus were examined. A thorough oral examination was carried out and relevant history was recorded for all the patients. Results: The prevalence of periodontal disease in diabetic patients was 88.4% (gingivitis 26.3% and periodontitis 62%) and complete edentulousness was 9.8%. Remaining 1.9% of patients were periodontally healthy. Conclusion: It can be concluded that poorer the glycemic control and longer the duration of diabetes, the greater will be the prevalence and severity of periodontal disease