Paradoxes Faced by Women Teachers in Practicing Professional Ethics in Undergraduate Colleges in Nepal

Women instructors teaching in undergraduate colleges face much unethical behavior during the tenure of their professional lives. The feeling of clashing their professional ethical concerns with institutional misconduct is wisely explained as “experience of professional ethical considerations.” This study adopted a qualitative research design with a humanist research paradigm. I adopted auto/ethnography to study the phenomenon where I myself was a participant in order to relate the feelings of “self” with the other participants. Data saturation was maintained by interviewing five women teachers from different private colleges of Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. The findings were compared and contrasted with various ethical paradigms such as care, justice, critique, and silence. This study is substantiated from theoretical perspectives, and the findings revealed that gender discrimination still exists among men and women teachers at the undergraduate level in Nepal. Therefore, in order for colleges to foster or establish gender-friendly environments, there is a dire need of consciousness amongst the administration, the stakeholders, and the women teachers as well

Electronic control of elastomeric microfluidic circuits with shape memory actuators

Recently, sophisticated fluidic circuits with hundreds of independent valves have been built by using multi-layer soft-lithography to mold elastomers. However, this shrinking of microfluidic circuits has not been matched by a corresponding miniaturization of the actuation and interfacing elements that control the circuits; while the fluidic circuits are small (~10–100 micron wide channels), the Medusa's head-like interface, consisting of external pneumatic solenoids and tubing or mechanical pins to control each independent valve, is larger by one to four orders of magnitude (mm to cm). Consequently, the dream of using large scale integration in microfluidics for portable, high throughput applications has been stymied. By combining multi-layer soft-lithography with shape memory alloys (SMA), we demonstrate electronically activated microfluidic components such as valves, pumps, latches and multiplexers, that are assembled on printed circuit boards (PCBs). Thus, high density, electronically controlled microfluidic chips can be integrated alongside standard opto-electronic components on a PCB. Furthermore, we introduce the idea of microfluidic states, which are combinations of valve states, and analogous to instruction sets of integrated circuit (IC) microprocessors. Microfluidic states may be represented in hardware or software, and we propose a control architecture that results in logarithmic reduction of external control lines. These developments bring us closer to building microfluidic circuits that resemble electronic ICs both physically, as well as in their abstract model

Effekt av gjødsling og kjørebelastning på lystgassproduksjon

Lystgass (N20) er en viktig bidragsyter til den globale oppvarmingen. Kombinasjonen kjøreskadd, våt jord og rikelige mengder lettløselig nitrogen er svært uheldig og har i enkelte år ført til tap av nitrogen og stor lystgassproduksjon selv ved bruk av moderate mengder kunstgjødsel og moderat kjørebelastning

A Novel Multi-scale Attention Feature Extraction Block for Aerial Remote Sensing Image Classification

Classification of very high-resolution (VHR) aerial remote sensing (RS) images is a well-established research area in the remote sensing community as it provides valuable spatial information for decision-making. Existing works on VHR aerial RS image classification produce an excellent classification performance; nevertheless, they have a limited capability to well-represent VHR RS images having complex and small objects, thereby leading to performance instability. As such, we propose a novel plug-and-play multi-scale attention feature extraction block (MSAFEB) based on multi-scale convolution at two levels with skip connection, producing discriminative/salient information at a deeper/finer level. The experimental study on two benchmark VHR aerial RS image datasets (AID and NWPU) demonstrates that our proposal achieves a stable/consistent performance (minimum standard deviation of $0.002$) and competent overall classification performance (AID: 95.85\% and NWPU: 94.09\%).Comment: The paper is under review in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters Journal (IEEE-GRSL). This version may be deleted and/or updated based on the journal's polic

Enhanced Multi-level Features for Very High Resolution Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing (RS) scene classification is a challenging task due to the higher inter-class similarity and intra-class variability problems. Recently, the existing deep learning (DL)-based methods have shown great promise in VHR RS scene classification. However, they still provide an unstable classification performance. To address such a problem, we, in this letter, propose a novel DL-based approach. For this, we devise an enhanced VHR attention module (EAM), followed by the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and global average pooling (GAP). This procedure imparts the enhanced features from the corresponding level. Then, the multi-level feature fusion is performed. Experimental results on two widely-used VHR RS datasets show that the proposed approach yields a competitive and stable/robust classification performance with the least standard deviation of 0.001. Further, the highest overall accuracies on the AID and the NWPU datasets are 95.39% and 93.04%, respectively.Comment: This paper is under consideration in the International Journal of Intelligent Systems (Wiley) journal. Based on the journal's policy and restrictions, this version may be updated or delete

Synthesis of Aptamer-Porphyrin Conjugate for Photodynamic Therapy & Synthesis and stability of mixed thiol/lipid coated Gold Nanoparticles

An underlying problem in Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) is low selectivity of photosensitizers currently being used for the treatment of tumors. This thesis is focused on developing new PDT drugs and is divided into two parts. The first chapter describes a method for selective delivery of the photosensitizers to the tumor site by conjugating porphyrins to an aptamer for the targeted PDT. To achieve this, a novel synthesis of 2\u27-porphyrin-modified uridine was developed. The 3\u27-H-phosphonate derivatives of both 2\u27-porphyrin and 2\u27-dithiaporphyrin modified uridine were also synthesized. The 3\u2741-phosphonate derivative of 2\u27-porphyrin-modified uridine was conjugated to a 19-mer DNA and to a 3l-mer aptamer that binds to under-glycosylated mucin 1 (uMUC1) glycoprotein, a well known tumor marker. The uMUC1 aptamer-porphyrin conjugate has potential applications for various tumor-targeted PDT. Potential applications of internally modified 2\u27-porphyrin 3\u27-H-phosphonate could be in the synthesis of various other aptamer-porphyrin conjugates or in creating porphyrin arrays on DNA scaffold by using automated solid phase synthesis. The second part of the thesis describes the functionalization of gold nanoparticles with phospholipids. The idea behind this effort is to pave the way for future applications for the functionalization of bilayer gold nanoparticles with aptamer-porphyrin conjugates that could play dual roles for selective delivery of drugs and PDT. Both natural and synthetic phospholipids were used to synthesize gold nanoparticles coated with various types of phospholipid bilayers. Bilayer gold nanoparticles were converted to hybrid bilayer gold nanoparticles by partial thiol exchange. TEM image analysis showed only small changes in size by varying phospholipids in hybrid bilayer gold nanoparticles. The stabilities of bilayer and hybrid bilayer gold nanoparticles were tested with potassium cyanide and iodine. Results showed that the stability of various types of phospholipid-coated bilayer gold nanoparticles can be tuned by using partial alkanethiol exchange. Stable gold nanoparticles were obtained by exchanging hydrophobic alkanethiol for various types of phospholipid-coated bilayers gold nanoparticles, which forms a submonolayer on the gold surface with a gold: 1-decanethiol ratio of 21:1. The stable hybrid bilayer gold nanoparticles could find applications in micropatterning and formation of solid supported lipid bilayers for biosensor design

Effects of different combinations of poultry manure and urea on growth, yield and economics of garlic (Allium sativum L.)

A field experiment was carried out in garlic (Allium sativum L.) in Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with four replications and five treatments in horticulture farm of Agriculture and Forestry University, Chitwan, Nepal to find out the efficacy of different combination of poultry manure and Urea as nitrogen fertilizers in its yield and yield attributes. The five treatments used for experiment were designed altering the recommended nitrogen dose through different sources i.e. (T1) 100% Urea, (T2) 7% Urea and 25% poultry manure, (T3) 50% Urea and 50% poultry manure, (T4) 25% Urea and 75% poultry manure and (T5) 100% poultry manure. The data regarding to the plant height, number of cloves, diameter of bulbs and fresh bulb weight were taken. In case of plant height, non-significant result was found between various treatments. The number of cloves was found highest in T5 (24.69±1.30), the diameter of bulb was found highest in T2 (3.93±0.39 cm), fresh bulb weight was found highest in T2 (14.32±0.39 gm) and total bulb yield was found highest in T2 (7.16±0.19 t/ha) which were significant at 5 % level of significance. The total bulb yield was found positively correlated (r=0.53) with diameter of bulb at 1 % level of significance. The benefit cost (B/C) ratio was found highest in T2 (1.54) and lowest in T3 (1.28). So 75% Urea and 25 % Poultry Manure stood one of the best combinations of nitrogen fertilizers providing higher economic yields

The Biology Of Platelet-Rich Plasma In Regenerative Medicine

Background: Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is a blood derivative prepared via centrifugation, characterized by an elevated platelet concentration, typically 4 to 6 times higher than average. Objective: To provide a comprehensive review of PRP, assessing its biological foundation, established applications, and emerging potential in regenerative medicine. Methods: A critical analysis of literature from its inception in 1980, when PRP was first utilized for healing skin ulcers, encompassing diverse medical fields such as ophthalmology, otorhinolaryngology, maxillofacial, aesthetic surgery, surgical wounds, skeletal muscle disorders, burns, and peripheral nerve repair. Results: PRP is rich in trophic factors, suggesting its potential in tissue repair and regeneration. However, despite extensive research and clinical evaluations, its efficacy remains inconclusive in several therapeutic areas. The current evidence underscores the necessity for methodologically rigorous clinical trials to bolster the evidence base supporting PRP's therapeutic potential. Conclusion: While PRP shows promise in various applications within regenerative medicine, continued research and robust clinical trials are imperative to ascertain its efficacy definitively and optimize its therapeutic utilization

ReCOVery: A Multimodal Repository for COVID-19 News Credibility Research

First identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the outbreak of COVID-19 has been declared as a global emergency in January, and a pandemic in March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO). Along with this pandemic, we are also experiencing an "infodemic" of information with low credibility such as fake news and conspiracies. In this work, we present ReCOVery, a repository designed and constructed to facilitate research on combating such information regarding COVID-19. We first broadly search and investigate ~2,000 news publishers, from which 60 are identified with extreme [high or low] levels of credibility. By inheriting the credibility of the media on which they were published, a total of 2,029 news articles on coronavirus, published from January to May 2020, are collected in the repository, along with 140,820 tweets that reveal how these news articles have spread on the Twitter social network. The repository provides multimodal information of news articles on coronavirus, including textual, visual, temporal, and network information. The way that news credibility is obtained allows a trade-off between dataset scalability and label accuracy. Extensive experiments are conducted to present data statistics and distributions, as well as to provide baseline performances for predicting news credibility so that future methods can be compared. Our repository is available at http://coronavirus-fakenews.com.Comment: Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '20