An exploratory treatise on consciousness and espousal of halal supply-chain: an Indian perspective

The purpose of this research is to be acquainted with the awareness and approval of halal supply chain among Indian manufacturers and distribution network members for haulage and warehousing activities from the perception of respective service suppliers. A total of 20 respondents, which consist of 10 transportation companies and 10 warehousing companies from the State of Andhra Pradesh in India were selected for the study by using purposive sampling method. The principal focal points of the discussions are on awareness and adoption of halal transportation and warehousing services chosen for the study in the comprehensive halal supply chain. A total of 90 percent and 70 percent of respondents from the transportation and warehousing companies respectively agreed that they know only about the concept of halal but do not have any exposure and ken on the halal supply chain. However, findings of this research won’t have extensive validity in the market, gaining an enough familiarity with the halal supply chain in the Indian social context is of immense importance. This is a pioneering attempt aimed to investigate the awareness and adoption levels of halal supply chain among Indian businessmen which are precious for supply chain companies to customize their services in the country as well to the world of academia

A normalisation procedure for biaxial bias extension tests

Biaxial Bias Extension tests have been performed on a plain-weave carbon fibre engineering fabric. The test results have been normalised using both the upper and lower bound method proposed by Potluri et al. and also using a novel alternative normalisation method based on energy arguments. The normalised results from both methods are compared and discussed

Antecedents of acceptance of social networking sites in retail franchise and restaurant businesses

The paper examines the antecedents of acceptance of social networking sites in retail franchise and restaurant businesses. The success of retail franchise and restaurant business oper-ators via social networking sites depends not only on organiza-tional benefits but also on their behavioral intentions of using it. Three hundred and twenty four samples collected from South Korean retail franchise and restaurant employees are analyzed using factor analysis, structural equation model techniques and one-way analysis of variance. The results of the study identify the three constructs of organizational benefits, perceived tangible assets and perceived intangible assets as for important ante-cedents to accept social networking sites for their business use. Moreover, higher position employees tend to have more favor-able perception of tangible assets and acceptance of social net-working sites for their business use

Extending Yioop! Abilities to Search the Invisible Web

Yioop is an open source search engine written in PHP. Yioop can be used for personal crawls on predefined URLs or as any traditional search engine to crawl the entire Web. This project added to the Yioop search engine the ability to crawl and index various resources that could be considered a part of the Invisible Web. The invisible web refers to the information like database content, non-text files, JavaScript links, password restricted sites, URL shortening services etc. on the Web. Often, a user might want to crawl and index different kinds of data which are commonly not indexed by the traditional search engines. Mining of log files and converting them into a readable format often helps in system management. In this project, the file format of log files has been studied and was noticed that they contain some predefined fields and a user is provided with a user interface to provide details of field names and the field types of the log fields. Indexing databases is one of the other features that would be helpful to a user. This project will act as a resource to the user to index the database records by entering a simple query into the interface created in Yioop and the specific database records are crawled and indexed providing the user with the ability to search for his desired keywords. This project\u27s goal was to successfully embed these features in Yioop using the existing capabilities of Yioop

Hyperbolic position location estimator with TDOAs from four stations

This thesis presents a detailed derivation of a set of equations needed to locate the three dimensional position of a mobile given the locations of four fixed stations (like a global positioning system (GPS) satellite or a base station in a cell) and the signal time of arrival (TOA) from the mobile to each station. From these derived equations, a synthesizable VHDL model was developed and simulated using IEEE numen*c_std package. All the inputs and outputs were described by 32 bit vectors. From the simulations, it was observed that in the best case the mobile position was off by I meter and in the worst case the position was off by 36 meters. This model was synthesized with cadence tools and the total number of gates produced was 2.7 million

Complete Configuration Space Analysis for Structure Determination of Symmetric Homo-oligomers by NMR

Symmetric homo-oligomers (protein complexes with similar subunits arranged symmetrically) play pivotal roles in complex biological processes such as ion transport and cellular regulation. Structure determination of these complexes is necessary in order to gain valuable insights into their mechanisms. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is an experimental technique used for structural studies of such complexes. The data available for structure determination of symmetric homo-oligomers by NMR is often sparse and ambiguous in nature, raising concerns about existing heuristic approaches for structure determination. We have developed an approach that is complete in that it identifies all consistent conformations, data-driven in that it separately evaluates the consistency of structures to data and biophysical constraints and efficient in that it avoids explicit consideration of each of the possible structures separately. By being complete, we ensure that native conformations are not missed. By being data-driven, we are able to separately quantify the information content in the data alone versus data and biophysical modeling. We take a configuration space (degree-of-freedom) approach that provides a compact representation of the conformation space and enables us to efficiently explore the space of possible conformations. This thesis demonstrates that the configuration space-based method is robust to sparsity and ambiguity in the data and enables complete, data-driven and efficient structure determination of symmetric homo-oligomers

Improving DNA Quality using FFPE tissues for Array Comparative Genomic Hybridization to find Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in Melanoma

Important classes of benign and malignant neoplasms are composed of melanocytic cells which produce a pigment called melanin. Benign nevi, which are non-malignant melanocytic lesions, can sometimes give rise to malignant melanoma. Melanoma can be a lethal melanocytic neoplasm, a deadly and aggressive form of skin cancer. Finding prognostic or diagnostic markers can be very useful to reduce the deaths caused by melanoma. Array Comparative Genomic Hybridization (aCGH), a cytogenetic technique, analyzes the whole genome or chromosome for detecting genetic aberrations/variations such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a cancer. formalin fixed paraffin embedded FFPE tissues are usually taken from suspected tumor tissues, fixed with formalin to preserve the protein and cytoskeletal structure and embedded in paraffin wax so that they can be cut and used for pathological diagnosis. These specimens are the starting material for extracting the DNA, but it can be quite challenging for getting DNA of good quality. Here we compared 27 samples extracted from FFPE tissues with three different extraction methods: phenol-chloroform isoamyl alcohol, Qiagen QIAamp FFPE iv kit, and adaptive focused acoustics (AFA) to see whether the method will have any effect on the DNA quality in the samples. We found that the AFA method showed better quality control (QC) results than other methods, where AFA showed increased amplicon length and decreased RAPD PCR failure rate. These were successfully hybridized to the microarrays and the data compared between methods. A total of 42 melanocytic nevi and 21 benign nevi were analyzed by aCGH. We found some novel SNPs and the genes associated with them, these genes are already shown to be involved in melanoma as well as in benign nevi. So, these findings can help to see whether the SNPs from benign nevi are predisposing to melanoma or if the SNPs themselves are causing the melanoma and help identify potential therapeutic targets