COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF HORMONE-INDUCED STRESS ON HEMOSTASIS IN THE CYPRINUS CARPIO AND THE OREOCHROMIS NILOTICUS

Background: The mortality of freshwater fish due to stress during various production manipulations is a severe problem, which requires a thorough understanding of the basic mechanisms involved, including the hemostasis system. Therefore, on the application level, the study of blood clotting can perform fish coagulopathies diagnostics and develop practical preventive and therapeutic anticoagulation methods for fish farming. Aim: The goal of this research was a comparative assessment of the reaction of some hemostasis parameters of two commercial fish species, carp Cyprinus carpio and tilapia Oreochromis niloticus, to the stress of different duration induced by corticosteroids. Methods: The fishes were divided into three groups: chronically stressed (induction by betamethasone), acutely stressed (induction by dexamethasone), and control animals with blood taken from the caudal hemal canal before hormone treatment(by dexamethasone and betamethasone), then 7 and 21 days after. Results and Discussion: Changes in the following parameters were studied: thrombin time, prothrombin time, activated partial thromboplastin time, the concentration of fibrinogen, soluble fibrin monomer complexes, antithrombin. It was found that both hormone-induced stress and handling stress associated with blood sampling strongly increased blood clotting ability in carps (prothrombin time decrease by 78,5-86,1%, fibrinogen increase by 12,7-100%, thrombin time decrease by 83,4-85%, and antithrombin III decreases by 15,3-21,7%), while in tilapias, acceleration of blood clotting by intrinsic and extrinsic pathways were recorded by the end of the experiment only in fishes with imitation of chronic stress (prothrombin time decrease by 76,8%, activated partial thromboplastin time decrease by 20,0%, and 2,3 multiplying soluble fibrin monomer complexes). Conclusions: It was concluded that the adaptive mechanisms of the tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) organism allowed the clotting function to recover in most cases by the end of the experiment in all groups of fish, in contrast to carps (Cyprinus carpio).

Influence of Water Immersion on Stability of AC-WC Mixed with Gondorukem Additional Material

One of the treatments that can be given to asphalt mixtures to determine the durability of the mixture is by water immersion. This study aims to analyze the stability value of Marshall mixture of AC-WC (Asphalt Concrete Wearing Course) by using modified Asbuton as a binder and gondorukem as added material due to water immersion. The method used in this research is experimental in the laboratory. AC-WC mixture is produced using modified Asbuton as a binder (Retona Blend 55) at optimum asphalt content of 6.25% and gondorukem as an additive at 0.0% and 2.5% content. The treatment given to the mixture is by soaking water for 0, 1, 3 and 7 days. The treatment given to the mixture is by soaking water for 0, 1, 3 and 7 days. The results showed that the Marshall stability value decreased with increasing water immersion time. Decrease in Marshall stability values that occur in specimens with immersion time of 1, 3 and 7 days for specimens without immersion are 21.34%, 25.56% and 28.25%, respectively.

Gender Discrimination and Marital Discord in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors

Gender discrimination is a universal issue that results in women’s predicament. From time immemorial women become victims of gender disparities. It starts with one’s own family. The present paper explores the crisis of gender discrimination and marital discord in the life of the protagonist in particular and Indian women in general. As a Child Sarita, the Protagonist tolerates gender discrimination and as a grown-up after her marriage due to marital discontentment. In this paper, many gender issues are explored which in due course of time decrease the moral spirit of women and make them weak and subordinate. Although Sarita is an educated and economically independent woman still she silently suffers. When it crosses limits she raises her voice to assert her self-esteem.

Tool workspace consideration for assembly plan generation

Purpose During the design of a new product, the generation of assembly sequences plans (ASPs) has become one of the most important problems taken into account by researchers. In fact, a good mounting order allows the time decrease of the assembly process which leads to the reduction of production costs. In this context, researchers developed several methods to generate and optimize ASP based on various criteria. Although this paper aims to improve the quality of ASP it is necessary to increase the number of criteria which must be taken into account when generating ASPs. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, an ASP generation approach, which is based on three main algorithms, is proposed. The first one generates a set of assembly sequences based on stability criteria. The obtained results are treated by the second algorithm which is based on assembly tools (ATs) workspace criterion. An illustrative example is used to explain the different steps of this proposed approach. Moreover, a comparative study is done to highlight its advantages. Findings The proposed algorithm verifies, for each assembly sequence, the minimal required workspace of used AT and eliminates the ASPs non-respecting this criterion. Finally, the remaining assembly sequences are treated by the third algorithm to reduce the AT change during the mounting operation. Originality/value The proposed approach introduces the concept of AT workspace to simulate and select ASPs that respect this criterion. The dynamic interference process allows the eventual collision detection between tool and component and avoids it. The proposed approach reduces the AT change during the mounting operations.

DMD-based hyperspectral microscopy with flexible multiline parallel scanning

As one of the most common hyperspectral microscopy (HSM) techniques, line-scanning HSM is currently utilized in many fields. However, its scanning efficiency is still considered to be inadequate since many biological and chemical processes occur too rapidly to be captured. Accordingly, in this work, a digital micromirror device (DMD) based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is utilized to demonstrate a flexible multiline scanning HSM system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first line-scanning HSM system in which the number of scanning lines N can be tuned by simply changing the DMD’s parallel scanning units according to diverse applications. This brilliant strategy of effortless adjustability relies only on on-chip scanning methods and totally exploits the benefits of parallelization, aiming to achieve nearly an N-time improvement in the detection efficiency and an N-time decrease in the scanning time and data volume compared with the single-line method under the same operating conditions. To validate this, we selected a few samples of different spectral wavebands to perform reflection imaging, transmission imaging, and fluorescence imaging with varying numbers of scanning lines. The results show the great potential of our DMD-based HSM system for the rapid development of cellular biology, material analysis, and so on. In addition, its on-chip scanning process eliminates the inherent microscopic architecture, making the whole system compact, lightweight, portable, and not subject to site constraints.

VSC-HVDC and Its Applications for Black Start Restoration Processes

System reliability is a measure of an electric grid system’s ability to deliver uninterrupted service at the proper voltage and frequency. This property of the electric system is commonly affected by critical processes, such as a total blackout. The electric system restoration is a complex process which consists of returning generators, transmission system elements, and restoring load following an outage of the electric system. However, the absence of a generator or unit of black start capabilities may worsen the duration and effects of blackouts, having severe consequences. Black start capability is important as it can reduce the interruption time, decrease the economic loss, and restart the power supply fast and efficiently. In recent years, several works have reported advances about the High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) technology based on the Voltage-Source Converter (VSC) as an attractive and promising technology to increase black start capability. This paper is a review of the current studies of VSC-HVDC as black start power and discusses the advantages and limitations of recent methods. The major points addressed in this paper are as follows: the current theoretical approach of the black start process and the used HVDC technologies, the advantages of VSC-HVDC as black start power, a compressive review of the literature about the black start capabilities using VSC-HVDC technologies, and a description of the main methods recently used to provide an enhancement for restoration processes. Finally, this paper discusses new challenges and perspectives for VSC-HVDC links in order to provide an enhancement for restoration processes.

Structure Splitting for Elbrus Processor Compiler

This report presents a new version of Structure Splitting optimization, implemented for the compiler for Elbrus and SPARC processors. Structure Splitting tries to improve data locality by splitting arrays of structures into arrays of smaller structures. This solution helps to decrease probability of cache misses, which leads to execution time decrease. The optimization was generalized for the case of array of structures nested in another structure and possibility of its reallocation. Execution speed of two tests from SPEC CPU2000 and SPEC CPU2006 increased by 19 and 12 %.

Train Fast While Reducing False Positives: Improving Animal Classification Performance Using Convolutional Neural Networks

The combination of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with deep learning models has the capacity to replace manned aircrafts for wildlife surveys. However, the scarcity of animals in the wild often leads to highly unbalanced, large datasets for which even a good detection method can return a large amount of false detections. Our objectives in this paper were to design a training method that would reduce training time, decrease the number of false positives and alleviate the fine-tuning effort of an image classifier in a context of animal surveys. We acquired two highly unbalanced datasets of deer images with a UAV and trained a Resnet-18 classifier using hard-negative mining and a series of recent techniques. Our method achieved sub-decimal false positive rates on two test sets (1 false positive per 19,162 and 213,312 negatives respectively), while training on small but relevant fractions of the data. The resulting training times were therefore significantly shorter than they would have been using the whole datasets. This high level of efficiency was achieved with little tuning effort and using simple techniques. We believe this parsimonious approach to dealing with highly unbalanced, large datasets could be particularly useful to projects with either limited resources or extremely large datasets.

Influence of Riser Necking Ratio and Taper on the Solidification of Heavy Ingots by Numerical Simulation

The effect of riser necking ratio and taper on solidification process of 96T steel ingot have been studied numerically using the software package ProCAST. The results show that the solidification time decrease with the increase of riser necking ratio, and the position of shrinkage porosity moves up and the secondary porosity presents a tendency of increase, and the inclusions on the shoulder of body ingot decreases. The riser taper has little effect on the solidification process of heavy ingots.