Detection Limit for Optically Sensing Specific Protein Interactions in Free-solution

Optical molecular sensing techniques are often limited by the refractive index change associated with the probed interactions. In this work, we present a closed form analytical model to estimate the magnitude of optical refractive index change arising from protein-protein interactions. The model, based on the Maxwell Garnett effective medium theory and first order chemical kinetics serves as a general framework for estimating the detection limits of optical sensing of molecular interactions. The model is applicable to situations where one interacting species is immobilized to a surface, as commonly done, or to emerging techniques such as Back-Scattering Interferometry (BSI) where both interacting species are un-tethered. Our findings from this model point to the strong role of as yet unidentified factors in the origin of the BSI signal resulting in significant deviation from linear optical response.Comment: 7 Page Manuscript + 14 Page Supplementary Informatio

Employment equity in Canada and South Africa: a comparative review

The South African Government has sought to redress the historical legacy of workplace discrimination by introducing the Employment Equity Act (1998), which was largely modeled on the Canadian Employment Equity Act. Although there is very little comparative information between South Africa and Canada, we fill this gap by reviewing the literature in both countries, highlighting common features of the legislation, discussing the effectiveness of legislation in both countries as well as the progress made by the designated groups covered by the legislation. This paper provides a background on the rationale for employment equity and associated human resource management policies in both Canada and South Africa. The analysis is largely based on institutional theories of organizations. Our evaluation provides overall conclusions for policy makers and organizational leaders, taking into consideration socio-historical, political, and demographic differences between the jurisdictions. Issues include top management commitment, organizational culture, Black economic empowerment, and diversity policies and practice

Boundary Conditions for Fractional Diffusion

This paper derives physically meaningful boundary conditions for fractional diffusion equations, using a mass balance approach. Numerical solutions are presented, and theoretical properties are reviewed, including well-posedness and steady state solutions. Absorbing and reflecting boundary conditions are considered, and illustrated through several examples. Reflecting boundary conditions involve fractional derivatives. The Caputo fractional derivative is shown to be unsuitable for modeling fractional diffusion, since the resulting boundary value problem is not positivity preserving

Low Cost Swarm Based Diligent Cargo Transit System

The goal of this paper is to present the design and development of a low cost cargo transit system which can be adapted in developing countries like India where there is abundant and cheap human labour which makes the process of automation in any industry a challenge to innovators. The need of the hour is an automation system that can diligently transfer cargo from one place to another and minimize human intervention in the cargo transit industry. Therefore, a solution is being proposed which could effectively bring down human labour and the resources needed to implement them. The reduction in human labour and resources is achieved by the use of low cost components and very limited modification of the surroundings and the existing vehicles themselves. The operation of the cargo transit system has been verified and the relevant results are presented. An economical and robust cargo transit system is designed and implemented.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, 1 block diagra

A Novel Beamformed Control Channel Design for LTE with Full Dimension-MIMO

The Full Dimension-MIMO (FD-MIMO) technology is capable of achieving huge improvements in network throughput with simultaneous connectivity of a large number of mobile wireless devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In FD-MIMO, with a large number of antennae at the base station and the ability to perform beamforming, the capacity of the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) has increased a lot. However, the current specifications of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) does not allow the base station to perform beamforming techniques for the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH), and hence, PDCCH has neither the capacity nor the coverage of PDSCH. Therefore, PDCCH capacity will still limit the performance of a network as it dictates the number of users that can be scheduled at a given time instant. In Release 11, 3GPP introduced enhanced PDCCH (EPDCCH) to increase the PDCCH capacity at the cost of sacrificing the PDSCH resources. The problem of enhancing the PDCCH capacity within the available control channel resources has not been addressed yet in the literature. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel beamformed PDCCH (BF-PDCCH) design which is aligned to the 3GPP specifications and requires simple software changes at the base station. We rely on the sounding reference signals transmitted in the uplink to decide the best beam for a user and ingeniously schedule the users in PDCCH. We perform system level simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed design and show that the proposed BF-PDCCH achieves larger network throughput when compared with the current state of art algorithms, PDCCH and EPDCCH schemes