Alternate nostril breathing: a systematic review of clinical trials

Anulom-vilom Pranayama/ alternate nostril breathing (ANB)/Nadi-suddhi pranayama is one of the common yogic breathing techniques and involves breathing through one nostril at a time while closing the other nostril manually. This study aimed to summarize effects of independent ANB on various physiological parameters, to evaluate safety issues in clinical populations and collect published primary scientific evidence on the benefits of ANB. PubMed/Medline, Cinahl, Web of Science and Google Scholar were searched using the following terms: Alternate nostril breathing, Anulom-vilom/ anuloma-viloma pranayama, Nadi-shodhan/Nadi-shodhana pranayama. Forty-four randomized controlled trials were included in this review paper. These studies evaluated the effects of alternate nostril breathing on parameters of the autonomic nervous system, cardiopulmonary system, cognitive functioning, problem solving and motor memory retention. Of the studies, ten showed a high level of bias; twenty-nine showed a low level of bias and five showed an unknown level of bias as per Cochrane systemic review guidelines. Most of the studies included healthy subjects and age range was eight to seventy years. Alternate nostril breathing has few variations and standardization of the technique is yet to be established. This technique provides high level evidence for positive outcomes for the autonomic nervous and cardiopulmonary systems. There is also high level of evidence regarding improvement in cognitive functioning with regular practice of alternate nostril breathing. More clinical trials are required to evaluate the effects of alternate nostril breathing in clinical populations and to synthesize effective frequency and duration parameters

ENVIRONMENTALLY BENIGN SYNTHESIS OF N'-SUBSTITUTED NAPHTHALENE-1-SULFONOHYDRAZIDE UNDER MICROWAVE IRRADIATION AND THEIR BIOLOGICAL EVALUATION

Objective: Microwave synthesis provides an alternative environmentally benign method with excellent yield and shorter reaction time. The aim of this study is to synthesize some new sulfonohydrazide derivatives by conventional/microwave method and their antimicrobial evaluation.Methods: Condensation of naphthalene-1-sulfonohydrazide with aromatic carbonyls under Conventional refluxing/microwave irradiation.Results: A facile, rapid and eco-friendly synthetic route for the synthesis of new sulfonohydrazide derivatives by microwave irradiation method was reported. Structures of the newly synthesized compounds were elucidated by elemental analysis and spectral studies viz. IR, NMR and MS. These compounds showed good to excellent antimicrobial activity against tested microbial strains.  The zone of inhibition and minimum inhibitory concentration values for tested microbial strains was in range of 10-14 mm and 6.25-25μg/ml.Conclusion: A novel series of biologically active N′-substituted naphthalene-1-sulfonohydrazide derivatives were synthesized by green method. Most of the newly synthesized compounds showed good to excellent antimicrobial activity.Â

Automatic parallelization with separation logic

Separation logic is a recent approach to the analysis of pointer programs in which resource separation is expressed with a logical connective in assertions that describe the state at any given point in the program. We extend this approach to express properties of memory separation between different points in the program, and present an algorithm for determining independences between program statements which can be used for parallelization

An experimental study comparing the role played by the ‘pre-experience’ and the ‘post-experience’ phases in respect with ‘perception’ and ‘memory’ to test the practical application of Perception Experience Memory Model of advertising.

This study aims to bridge the gap between the theoretical and practical applications between the theories of advertising. After comparing and contrasting the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) (Petty, et al., 1983), the Information Processing Model (Engel, et al., 1993) and the Perception Experience Memory (PEM) model (Hall, 2002) of advertising, the research became more focussed towards the PEM model. Although, this relatively newer theory is a combination of merits of the ELM and the IPM, it is still not popular which made it imperative to unveil the reasons behind the “academician-practitioner gap” (Hunt, 2002, p. 305). This was achieved by exploring the role played by the pre-experience (before the usage of a product) and the post-experience (after the usage of a product) phases in determining the ‘framing of perception’ and ‘memory’ within the mind-set of consumers. This was carried out by conducting a marketing experiment by showing the Sony PlayStation 4 advertisement, followed by a questionnaire to measure the appropriate responses across the pre-experienced and the post-experienced group. The differences in the perception and memory of the participants between the two groups were recorded by analysing the questionnaires using the quantitative research techniques via individual sample t-tests. It was discovered that the theoretical aspects of the PEM model were justified and product experience had a positive impact on perception and memory of the consumers. It was also determined that the speed of processing the advertisement was higher in the post-experienced group than the pre-experienced group. However, in the case of well established brand/product such as Sony PlayStation 4, even the pre-experience leads to the function of ‘organizing memory’ which suggests that the addition of another loop should take place connecting the pre-experience exposure to the function of ‘organizing memory’. These two additions of adding a ‘time-frame’ and an additional loop would significantly reduce the “academician-practitioner gap” (Hunt, 2002, p. 305) by enhancing the accuracy and would lead to advancement in the field of advertising theory

Study - Dexamethasone-cyclophosphamide pulse therapy in systemic lupus erythematosus

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Therapy systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) has been generally discouraging. Methyl-prednisolone pulse therapy has been used for various connective tissue disorders. We used intravenous dexamethasone cyclophosphamide pulse therapy to treat SLE. METHODS: Fourteen patients (10 females and 4 males) between the age of 15-48 years with definite or classical clinical criteria laid by American Rheumatism Association criteria were treated by Dexamethasone-Cyclophosphamide pulse (DCP) therapy at our center. RESULTS: It was possible to induce a complete clinical remission with DCP therapy in most of the patients thereby offering them life free from disease and drugs. The side effects commonly observed with conventional daily dose regimen of corticosteroids were not present or were mild. CONCLUSIONS: Almost all patients had good response after 3-4 pulses to allow them a normal life style. Fever, malar rash and oral ulceration responded early but photosensitivity, discoid rash, alopecia and joint pains took some more time

Nested low-density lattice codes based on non-binary LDPC codes

textA family of low-density lattice codes (LDLC) is studied based on Construction-A for lattices. The family of Construction-A codes is already known to contain a large capacity-achieving subset. Parallels are drawn between coset non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and nested low-density Construction-A lattices codes. Most of the related research in LDPC domain assumes optimal power allocation to encoded codeword. The source coding problem of mapping message to power optimal codeword for any LDPC code is in general, NP-hard. In this thesis, we present a novel method for encoding and decoding lattice based on non-binary LDPC codes using message-passing algorithms.Electrical and Computer Engineerin