Pharmacokinetic Study of Nifedipine in Healthy Adult Male Human Volunteers

Purpose: To evaluate the pharmacokinetics of nifedipine in healthy adult Pakistani subjects. Methods: Each of six fasting volunteers received 20 mg nifedipine (2 x Adalat® 10 mg capsules) orally once and then another one week later. Their blood samples were obtained at regular time intervals and analysed by HPLC. Using the non-compartmental approach, plasma levels of nifedipine were employed to compute their individual disposition kinetics, including Cmax (maximum plasma concentration), Tmax(time to reach maximum plasma concentration), MRT (mean residence time), AUC0-∞ (area under curve), AUMC0-∞ (area under first moment curve) and Ka (absorption rate constant). Results: The suggested therapeutic level of nifedipine for the treatment of hypertension (15-35 ng.mL-1) was achieved in all six volunteers within 0.25 h after dose administration, and maintained for more than 6 h. Tmax was 1.58 h and Cmax varied from 140 – 300 ng.mL-1. Mean absorption rate constant was 2.22 h-1 while mean absorption half-life was 0.43 h. The mean elimination rate constant was 0.16 h-1 while 5.7 h was recorded for terminal half-life. AUC0-¥, AUMC0-¥ and MRT were 1879.86 ng.h.mL-1, 8244.04ng.h2.mL-1 and 4.2 h, respectively. Conclusion: This study confirms the rapid absorption of nifedipine in humans. AUC was similar to thatpreviously reported for Nigerians but slightly lower than that stated in the literature for other south Asian races. Further studies on large segments of the local population using the non-compartmental model forkinetic analysis is recommended

HUBUNGAN HASIL BELAJAR KEWIRAUSAHAAN DAN PRAKTIK KERJA INDUSTRI TERHADAP KESIAPAN KERJA PESERTA DIDIK SMK KOMPETENSI KEAHLIAN PENGELASAN

Tujuan penelitian ini yaitu ingin memperoleh data tentang hubungan hasil belajar kewirausahaan dan praktik kerja industri terhadap kesiapan kerja peserta didik SMK kompetensi keahlian pengelasan. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode penelitian ex post pacto, penelitian dilakukan di dua sekolah yaitu SMK Negeri 1 Makassar dan SMK Negeri 5 makassar.  Subjek penelitian adalah kelas XII SMKN 1 Makassar keahlian teknik pengelasan dan kelas XII SMKN 5 Makassar keahlian teknik pengelasan. Teknik pengumpulan data menggunakan angket (kusioner) dan dokumentasi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa hasil belajar kewirausahaan dan praktik kerja industri memberikan pengaruh terhadap kesiapan kerja peseta didik, koefisien determinasi sebesar 83,1%, artinya kontribusi hasil belajar kewirausahaan dan praktik kerja industri terhadap kesiapan kerja sebesar 83,1%. Hubungan hasil belajar kewirausahaan dan praktik kerja industri terhadap kesiapan kerja sangat signifikan

PEMETAAN POTENSI DAERAH UNTUK PENGEMBANGAN SMK MASA DEPAN

Tujuan penelitian ini adalah (i) untuk mengetahui seberapa besar relevansi keberadaan SMK dengan potensi daerah yang ada. (ii) Untuk mengetahui sumber daya alam dan sumber daya manusia yang ada di daerah tersebut. (iii) untuk mengetahui prospek pengembangan SMK masa depan yang berbasis potensi lokal di kabupaten Bone. Jenis penelitian ini adalah penelitian deskriptif dengan menggunakan metode survei dalam mengumpulkan data untuk mengungkap fenomena tentang relevansi SMK terhadap potensi daerah serta menggambarkan potensi daerah yang ada di wilayah tersebut dan sebagai prospek pengembangan SMK masa depan yang berbasis potensi daerah. Teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan adalah observasi, penyebaran angket, wawancara dan data dokumentasi yang dibutuhkan. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa (i) keberadaan SMK saat ini masih belum relevan dengan potensi daerah yang ada. (ii) gambaran pemetaan potensi daerah diuraikan dalam setiap kecamatan yang ada di Kabupaten Bone, serta (iii) prospek pengembangan SMK masa depan yang paling besar di Kabupaten Bone adalah SMK pertanian

One Dimensional Steady Flow Analysis Using HECRAS – A case of River Jhelum, Jammu and Kashmir

Floods have been recurrent phenomena in the study area. A heavy precipitation, usually coming during the end months of the summer season in association with sudden cloudburst, leads to severe flooding in the study area. By now the catchment area of the river is already saturated and the high run-off swells the rivers beyond their capacity. The present study describes the application of HEC RAS Model for flood studies in the river Jhelum Kashmir valley. The peak flood records were used as inputs into HEC RAS model to find out the resultant expected flood levels. The resultant output generated by the model shows an overflow at maximum locations of the river under study for 50 years and above return period. This purpose is to give a hand to policy makers, planners and insurers, to develop a robust strategy for the development of flood mitigation measures and plans to minimise the losses associated with the disaster in the study area

Simulating Cotton Growth and Productivity Using AquaCrop Model under Deficit Irrigation in a Semi-Arid Climate

AquaCrop is a water-driven model that simulates the effect of environment and management on crop production under deficit irrigation. The model was calibrated and validated using three databases and four irrigation treatments (i.e., 100%ET, 80%ET, 70%ET, and 50%ET). Model performance was evaluated by simulating canopy cover (CC), biomass accumulation, and water productivity (WP). Statistics of root mean square error (RMSE) and Willmott’s index of agreement (d) showed that model predictions are suitable for non-stressed and moderate stressed conditions. The results showed that the simulated biomass and yield were consistent with the measured values with a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.976 and 0.950, respectively. RMSE and d-index values for canopy cover (CC) were 2.67% to 4.47% and 0.991% to 0.998% and for biomass were 0.088 to 0.666 ton/ha and 0.991 to 0.999 ton/ha, respectively. Prediction of simulated and measured biomass and final yield was acceptable with deviation ˂10%. The overall value of R2 for WP in terms of yield was 0.943. Treatment with 80% ET consumed 20% less water than the treatment with 100%ET and resulted in high WP in terms of yield (0.6 kg/m3) and biomass (1.74 kg/m3), respectively. The deviations were in the range of −2% to 11% in yield and −2% to 4% in biomass. It was concluded that AquaCrop is a useful tool in predicting the productivity of cotton under different irrigation scenarios

Roton collective mode observed in a two-dimensional Fermi liquid

International audienceUnderstanding the dynamics of correlated many-body quantum systems has been a challenge for modern physics. Due to the simplicity of their Hamiltonian, 4He (bosons) and 3He (fermions) have served as paradigm for strongly interacting quantum fluids. For this reason, substantial efforts have been devoted to their understanding. An important milestone was the direct observation of the collective "phonon-roton" mode in liquid 4He by neutron scattering, verifying Landau's prediction and his fruitful concept of elementary excitations. In a Fermi system, collective density fluctuations ("zero-sound" in 3He, "plasmons" in charged systems) as well as incoherent particle-hole (PH) excitations are observed. At small wave-vectors and energies, both types of excitations are described by Landau's theory of Fermi liquids. At higher wavevectors, the collective mode enters the PH band, where it is strongly damped. The dynamics of Fermi liquids at high wave-vectors was thus believed to be essentially incoherent. We report here the first observation of a roton-like excitation in a Fermi liquid, obtained in a monolayer of liquid 3He, studied by inelastic neutron scattering. We find that the collective density mode reappears as a well-defined excitation at momentum transfers larger than twice the Fermi momentum. We thus observe unexpected collective behaviour of a Fermi many-body system in the region outside the scope of Landau's theory. A satisfactory interpretation of the measured spectra is obtained within a novel dynamic many-body theory

Dynamics of Land use Change in Rural-Urban Fringe - A Case Study of Srinagar City

In the beginning of twentieth century, great scientific inventions like that of the steam engine had accelerated the process of industrialization. According to urban geographers, this has provided scope for the expansion of urban centers. Aguilar (2008), states that, urbanization is one of the most striking human induced land transformation of the current era. Cities are expanding in size and relative importance in many parts of the world due to rapid expansion of urban population. Many reasons have been given for the rapid growth of urban population in the developing countries. One of the chief causes has been unbridled influx of rural population in to urban areas. With improved agriculture and increasing pressure of population on land, surplus rural population is released and pushed out. In the meantime, a pull force on account of industrialization in urban areas has attracted the potential rural emigrants to the cities. With rapid pace of industrial development in the towns, progressive mechanization of the farm, disintegration of the joint family system, and an increasing demand for men and material in commercial enterprises and public utility services, the migration of rural population in to urban areas, in search of food and shelter, is expected to continue unabated. Besides above reasons the attraction furnished by job opportunities, greater economic insecurity of the adjoining villages, the lure of improved social facilities for recreation, medical care and education and higher recreation comfort have also caused the influx of people from rural districts to the towns. All these factors became responsible for fast growth of urban centers, making in depth study of urban areas an increasingly important branch of geography

Flood Vulnerability Assessment and Hazard Zonation of Greater Srinagar

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A multilayer multimodal detection and prediction model based on explainable artificial intelligence for Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia. Its diagnosis and progression detection have been intensively studied. Nevertheless, research studies often have little effect on clinical practice mainly due to the following reasons: (1) Most studies depend mainly on a single modality, especially neuroimaging; (2) diagnosis and progression detection are usually studied separately as two independent problems; and (3) current studies concentrate mainly on optimizing the performance of complex machine learning models, while disregarding their explainability. As a result, physicians struggle to interpret these models, and feel it is hard to trust them. In this paper, we carefully develop an accurate and interpretable AD diagnosis and progression detection model. This model provides physicians with accurate decisions along with a set of explanations for every decision. Specifically, the model integrates 11 modalities of 1048 subjects from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) real-world dataset: 294 cognitively normal, 254 stable mild cognitive impairment (MCI), 232 progressive MCI, and 268 AD. It is actually a two-layer model with random forest (RF) as classifier algorithm. In the first layer, the model carries out a multi-class classification for the early diagnosis of AD patients. In the second layer, the model applies binary classification to detect possible MCI-to-AD progression within three years from a baseline diagnosis. The performance of the model is optimized with key markers selected from a large set of biological and clinical measures. Regarding explainability, we provide, for each layer, global and instance-based explanations of the RF classifier by using the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) feature attribution framework. In addition, we implement 22 explainers based on decision trees and fuzzy rule-based systems to provide complementary justifications for every RF decision in each layer. Furthermore, these explanations are represented in natural language form to help physicians understand the predictions. The designed model achieves a cross-validation accuracy of 93.95% and an F1-score of 93.94% in the first layer, while it achieves a cross-validation accuracy of 87.08% and an F1-Score of 87.09% in the second layer. The resulting system is not only accurate, but also trustworthy, accountable, and medically applicable, thanks to the provided explanations which are broadly consistent with each other and with the AD medical literature. The proposed system can help to enhance the clinical understanding of AD diagnosis and progression processes by providing detailed insights into the effect of different modalities on the disease riskThis work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea-Grant funded by the Korean Government (Ministry of Science and ICT)-NRF-2020R1A2B5B02002478). In addition, Dr. Jose M. Alonso is Ramon y Cajal Researcher (RYC-2016-19802), and its research is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (grants RTI2018-099646-B-I00, TIN2017-84796-C2-1-R, TIN2017-90773-REDT, and RED2018-102641-T) and the Galician Ministry of Education, University and Professional Training (grants ED431F 2018/02, ED431C 2018/29, ED431G/08, and ED431G2019/04), with all grants co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER program)S

Dynamics of cropping land use pattern and status of food scenario in Jammu and Kashmir- a Spatio-Temporal analysis.

Economic activity is the work that people do to enhance their quality of life. Economic activities include all the tasks that people do to get, refine or use natural resources. Land is one important natural resource used by man from times immemorial in a number of ways (Siddhartha, 2008). It was in Neolithic age (10000-2500 B.C.) when man used first time land for cultivation (Dinham, 2003). This practice of care of the soil or the cultivation of land is referred to as „agriculture‟ [Hussain (1970), Varsha and Datye (1976), Mounton (1981), Timmer and Szirmai (2000), Kurosaki (1999), Huffman and Evenson (2001), Misra and Rao (2003), Hayami (2003), Ainsworth and Leakey (2008)] and is by far the most important of the world economic activities. It has been a popular theme of geographic studies in India as well. It is not only because most of the people depend for food and several raw materials on it, but also because of the largest fraction of land under human occupancy is used for agricultural purposes. Therefore, the geographers are primarily concerned with man‟s varied impact upon the earth‟s surface, i.e., land husbandry or land use analysis (Zamir, 2005). Cropping land-use is a highly dynamic process. It implies that policy discussions and development planning have to be based on a sound understanding of these dynamics. Therefore, it is imperative to make a comprehensive study of the pattern and magnitude of cropping land-use shifts for sustainability and productivity of agriculture in an area (Wani et al, 2009). The very purpose of cropping land use classification is to get an idea of the extent the land has been put into different uses (cereals, non-cereals, cash crops etc). Knowledge of cropping land use helps in maximization of productivity and conservation of land. Physical and human factors influence cropping land use pattern. Cropping pattern refers to the proportion of the area under different crops at a point of time (Siddhartha & Mukherjee, 2007). It also reveals the rotation of crops and the area under double cropping etc. in any state or country.Digital copy of ThesisUniversity of Kashmi