In vitro Evolution and Engineering for Improved Ribozyme Polymerase Production

According to the "RNA World Hypothesis" the first self replicating molecule formed from the prebiotic chemicals is the ribozyme. A model compartmentalized self replicating system for ribozyme polymerases is designed and used to improve activity, fidelity and generality of the enzyme

Surgical Decompression of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome

Objective:  To study the out come of surgical treatment of carpel tunnel syndrome, and to evaluate symptomatic improvement. Material & Methods:  This study was conducted in the department of neurosurgery saidu teaching hospital, swat from January 2006 to December 2007.All the patients were randomly selected irrespective of their age and sex from neuro surgical out door clinic. Patients responded to conservative treatment were excluded from the study. The age range was from 20-70 years. A total of 83 patients were included in this study. 72 (8.6.74%) were females and 11 (13.25) males. Results:  83 patients with age ranging from 20-70 years, 72 (86.74%) females and 11 (13.25) males (6.5:1) were subjected to surgical decompression 30 (36.14%) patients had bilateral carpel tunnel syndrome. Excellent result were obtained in 71 (85.54%) patients, good in 9 (10.84%) while 3 (3.6%) patients had poor response. Conclusion:  Surgical decompression is more effective than conservative treatment

Environment Friendly Products: Factors that Influence the Green Purchase Intentions of Pakistani Consumers

This study examines the influence of various factors on the green purchase intentions of Pakistani consumers. To this end, a conceptual model has been proposed and subjected to empirical verification with the use of a survey. The survey results obtained in two major Pakistani cities provide reasonable support for the validity of the proposed model. Specifically, the findings from the correlation matrix, simple regression followed by multiple regression analysis confirm the influence of OGI, EK, EC and PPP&Q on consumers purchase intentions toward green products. The OGI, EK and EC, in turn, also seem to affect consumers green purchase intentions via the moderating role of PPP&Q of a green product. Although the present findings provide a better understanding of the process and significant antecedents of green purchasing intentions, this also highlights one area for more thorough investigation. This is the significant moderating role of PPP&Q variables in consumers’ green purchasing process. As the findings suggest that respondents have a high positive attitude regarding green products and are ready to buy green products more often, but as for as the product price and quality are concerned, green products must perform competitively just like the traditional products. This study also discusses how the present findings may help the Pakistani government and green marketers to fine-tune their environmental programs

Increased regeneration efficiency of _Brassica napus_ L. cultivars Star, Westar and Cyclone from hypocotyle and cotyledonary explants

The comparative organogenesis of _Brassica napus_ L cultivars Cyclone, Star and Westar was studied. The cotyledonary explants gave a higher response to all the combinations of 0.5 mg/L 2,4-D and BAP (0.5, 1.0,1.5 and 2.0 mg/L} used for optimizing the conditions for callus induction. The best mean weight and mean length of callus was obtained at 0.5 mg/L 2,4-D and 1.5mg/L BAP for Star cotyledonary explants. For the complete plant regeneration the new method of exposing the explants culture to Growth regulator free medium was performed. The method was applicable to both hypocotyl and cotyledonary explants. The Shoot Induction Frequency for hypocotyl (6-34%) in the three cultivars is higher than the cotyledonary explants (3-23%). The method is speedy and almost all of the shoots and some unshooted calli (78%) form roots on the same media without prior transfer to rooting medium

Interval-valued fuzzy ideals generated by an interval-valued fuzzy subset in ordered semigroups

In this paper, we de ne the concept of interval-valued fuzzy left (right, two sided, interior, bi-) ideal in ordered semigroups. We show that the interval- valued fuzzy subset J is an interval-valued fuzzy left (right, two sided, interior, bi-) ideal generated by an interval-valued fuzzy subset A i J and J + are fuzzy left (right, two sided, interior, bi-) ideals generated by A and A + respectivelyPeer Reviewe

CNN Transfer Learning for Automatic Fruit Recognition for Future Class of Fruit

Deep fruit recognition model learned on big dataset outperform fruit recognition task on difficult unconstrained fruit dataset. But in practice, we are often lack of resources to learn such a complex model, or we only have very limited training samples for a specific fruit recognition task. In this study we address the problem of adding new classes to an existing deep convolutional neural network framework. We extended our prior work for automatic fruit recognition by applying transfer learning techniques to adding new classes to existing model which was trained for 15 different kind of fruits. Pre-trained model was previously trained on a large-scale dataset of 44406 images. To add new class of fruit in our pre-trained model, we need to train a new classifier which will be trained for scratch, on the top of pre-trained model so, that we can re- purpose the feature learned previously for the dataset. Transfer learning using our pre-trained model has been demonstrated to give the best classification accuracy of 95.00%. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CNN framework is superior to the previous state-of-the- art networks

Cost Efficiency and Total Factor Productivity of Islamic and Conventional Banks in Pakistan

Purpose – The purpose of the study is to compare the Cost Efficiency and Total Factor Productivity growth rate of Islamic, Conventional and Conventional Islamic Windows banks in Pakistan from 2007-2011.Design/methodology/approach – a sample of fifteen banks has been selected from the whole of population. Five banks from each of the banking sector have been chosen by random sampling technique. Secondary data for the subject study has been taken from the banks statistics of Pakistan, annual statements of the respective banks and periodical reports of State Bank of Pakistan. For the comparison of cost efficiency Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used. To find out the total factor productivity growth rate, we used Malmquist productivity indices (MPI). Tobit Regression Analysis was used to determine the bank specific factors on cost efficiency.Findings – The findings of the study suggest that the cost efficiency of Islamic banks is lower than its comparing counterparts. But on the other side the total factor productivity growth rate of the Islamic banks is on the boom as compared to its peers. The factors like SIZE and DEPOSITS indicate an inverse association with the cost efficiency of banks. While checking for the factors i.e. ROE and DEBT, both have a positive significant relationship with the cost efficiency of banks. Keywords:  Cost efficiency, DEA, MPI, Islamic banks, Conventional banks

An Empirical Analysis on Software Development Efforts Estimation in Machine Learning Perspective

The prediction of effort estimation is a vital factor in the success of any software development project. The available of expert systems for the software effort estimation supports in minimization of effort and cost for every software project at same time leads to timely completion and proper resource management of the project. This article supports software project managers and decision makers by providing the state-of-the-art empirical analysis of effort estimation methods based on machine learning approaches. In this paper ?ve machine learning techniques; polynomial linear regression, ridge regression, decision trees, support vector regression and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) are investigated for the purpose software development effort estimation by using bench mark publicly available data sets. The empirical performance of machine learning methods for software effort estimation is investigated on seven standard data sets i.e. Albretch, Desharnais, COCOMO81, NASA, Kemerer, China and Kitchenham. Furthermore, the performance of software effort estimation approaches are evaluated statistically applying the performance metrics i.e. MMRE, PRED (25), R2-score, MMRE, Pred(25). The empirical results reveal that the decision tree-based techniques on Deshnaris, COCOMO, China and kitchenham data sets produce more adequate results in terms of all three-performance metrics. On the Albretch and nasa datasets, the ridge regression method outperformed then other techniques except pred(25) metric where decision trees performed better

Association Mapping of Root Traits for Drought Tolerance in Bread Wheat

Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L., 2n = 6x = 42, AABBDD) is one of the most important crops, making staple food for more than 40 countries and over 35% of the global population. Drought stress is among the major constraints to wheat production as it affects plant growth, gene expression and yield potential of the crop. Development of elite wheat cultivars with the ability to grow and reproduce in water-limited soils seems to be the most enduring solution of addressing drought stress. A total of 100 lines including well-adapted wheat cultivars were evaluated for important root traits and complemented with 102 PCR-based markers aiming to understand their genetic structure and to identify molecular markers that are closely associated to quantitative trait loci (QTLs) of important root traits. Alleles per locus are counted and polymorphic information content (PIC) values are calculated. Population structure of these lines was analyzed with general linear model (GLM) and mixed linear model (MLM) approaches for identification of QTLs associated with important root traits. The results indicated the presence of two novel QTLs on the homoeologous group 2 and group 5 of wheat that may be related to drought stress resistance. Our results may facilitate the development of agronomically desirable drought stress-resistant wheat germplasm