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Gastro-retentive floating drug delivery systems (GRFDDS) have emerged as a significant advancement in enhancing the bioavailability and therapeutic efficacy of various medications. This review article provides a comprehensive overview of recent innovations in GRFDDS, highlighting their formulation strategies, mechanisms of buoyancy, and various applications in drug delivery. The role of various polymeric materials, gas-forming agents, and optimization techniques is discussed which are generally employed to develop effective floating systems. Additionally, keen insight is brought on applications of GRFDDS in treating gastrointestinal disorders, enhancing the pharmacokinetics of drugs with narrow absorption windows, and their potential in controlled-release formulations. In this review, authors compiled the recent reported literatures about the gastro-retentive floating drug delivery systems since 2015 to underline the effectiveness and safety profiles of these systems. This review aims to consolidate current knowledge and inspire future research directions in the development of GRFDDS for improved patient outcomes. Keywords: Floating; Gastro-retentive; drug delivery; HPMC; Effervescent

Gastro-retentive floating drug delivery systems (GRFDDS) have emerged as a significant advancement in enhancing the bioavailability and therapeutic efficacy of various medications. This review article provides a comprehensive overview of recent innovations in GRFDDS, highlighting their formulation strategies, mechanisms of buoyancy, and various applications in drug delivery. The role of various polymeric materials, gas-forming agents, and optimization techniques is discussed which are generally employed to develop effective floating systems. Additionally, keen insight is brought on applications of GRFDDS in treating gastrointestinal disorders, enhancing the pharmacokinetics of drugs with narrow absorption windows, and their potential in controlled-release formulations. In this review, authors compiled the recent reported literatures about the gastro-retentive floating drug delivery systems since 2015 to underline the effectiveness and safety profiles of these systems. This review aims to consolidate current knowledge and inspire future research directions in the development of GRFDDS for improved patient outcomes. Keywords: Floating; Gastro-retentive; drug delivery; HPMC; Effervescent

While buying a product from the e-commerce websites, customers generally have a plethora of questions. From the perspective of both the e-commerce service provider as well as the customers, there must be an effective question answering system to provide immediate answers to the user queries. While certain questions can only be answered after using the product, there are many questions which can be answered from the product specification itself. Our work takes a first step in this direction by finding out the relevant product specifications, that can help answering the user questions. We propose an approach to automatically create a training dataset for this problem. We utilize recently proposed XLNet and BERT architectures for this problem and find that they provide much better performance than the Siamese model, previously applied for this problem. Our model gives a good performance even when trained on one vertical and tested across different verticals., Comment: 5 pages

Manufacturing organization experiences highly volatile market due to the technological updates, customer needs, environmental issues and competitor’s product. The ultimate objective of the manufacturing industries today is to provide the market with products of the highest quality, at reasonable prices, at the optimal time. Just-in-time (JIT) has been widely implemented in manufacturing industries as a survival strategy against global market competition as it offers various benefits, such as greater throughput, higher productivity and better quality. The aim of the paper is to discuss few strategic issues and some important rules for getting the system off the ground. The procedure for planning and implementation along with global status and pay off has been discussed critically. A designed questionnaire for self test has also been given along with evaluation criteria to identify the weakness and strength of the company for successful implementation of JITmanufacturing strategy. It also gives a methodology for computation and improvement of performance index using the principle of continuous improvement.This paper focuses on how to enhance the productivity/ performance index while applyingsystematically, scientifically basic principles of JIT approaches. The design guidelines are applied to a small scale industry as a case example.The ideas presented in the paper will be useful for those who want to implement JIT manufacturing in their organizations.

Climate and institutions might be crucial in lowering the vagaries of climate change impacts in terms of productivity. This study measures the relationships of productivity measures adjusted for the regulation of carbon emission and institutions together with climate change throughout the world. This paper finds that there is higher potential for reduction of CO2 emissions in developing countries at lower cost. However, the cost to reduce emissions lowers their growth potential in terms of lost productivity growth. Better institutions help to lower the negative impacts of climate change by improving the process of technological adoption in developing countries. Climate change reduces the productivity growth in developing countries by lowering the process of technological adoption, and better institutions result in higher productivity.

Moyamoya disease (MMD) is a rare cause of stroke in childhood. A high degree of suspicion is required for diagnosis as the neurological presentations are protean. Improving blood flow to hypoperfused regions by Encephaloduroarteriosynangiosis (EDAMS) has excellent results. We present 2 children who underwent surgical revascularization with EDAMS and had a good outcome.

The elasticity of interfuel substitution between renewable and nonrenewable energy is key to establishing effective climate change policy. This is the first study to estimate the elasticity of substitution between different fossil fuels and renewable resources. We used 12 manufacturing industry-level datasets for the OECD countries from 1995 to 2009. We found a complementary relationship from nonrenewable energy to renewable energy in eight industries, whereas a substitute relationship was maintained for four industries. In particular, the food and pulp industries had a strong complementary relationship.

The elasticity of interfuel substitution between renewable and nonrenewable energy is key to establishing effective climate change policy. This is the first study to estimate the elasticity of substitution between different fossil fuels and renewable resources. We used 12 manufacturing industry-level datasets for the OECD countries from 1995 to 2009. We found a complementary relationship from nonrenewable energy to renewable energy in eight industries, whereas a substitute relationship was maintained for four industries. In particular, the food and pulp industries had a strong complementary relationship., Applied Economics, 47(14), pp.1438-1459; 2015

Clustering is an important concept to reduce the energy consumption and prolonging the life of a wireless sensor network. In heterogeneous wireless sensor network some of the nodes are equipped with more energy than the other nodes. Many routing algorithms are proposed for heterogeneous wireless sensor network. Stable Election Protocol (SEP) is one of the important protocol in this category. In this research paper a novel energy efficient distance based cluster protocol (DBCP) is proposed for single hop heterogeneous wireless sensor network to increase the life and energy efficiency of a sensor network. DBCP use the average distance of the sensor from the base station as the major issue for the selection of a cluster head in the sensor network., Comment: 6 Pages, 4 Figures, http://www.ijcaonline.org/archives/volume76/number9/2013

Energy conservation of sensor nodes for increasing the network life is the most crucial design goal while developing efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. Recent technological advances help in the development of wide variety of sensor nodes. Heterogeneity takes the advantage of different types of sensor nodes and improves the energy efficiency and network life. Generally sensors are deployed randomly and densely in a sensing region so short distance multihop communication reduces the long distance transmission in the sensor network. In this research paper MEEP (multihop energy efficient protocol for heterogeneous sensor network) is proposed. The proposed protocol combines the idea of clustering and multihop communication. Heterogeneity is created in the network by using some nodes of high energy. Low energy nodes use a residual energy based scheme to become a cluster head. High energy nodes act as the relay nodes for low energy cluster head when they are not performing the duty of a cluster head to save their energy further. Protocol also suggests a sleep state for nodes in the cluster formation process for saving energy and increasing the life of sensor network. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme is better than other two level heterogeneous sensor network protocol like SEP in energy efficiency and network life., Comment: 9 Pages, 10 Figures, http://www.ijcst.org/Volume5/Issue3/2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1408.3110

Energy Conservation and prolonging the life of Wireless Sensor Network is one of the major issues in the wireless sensor network as sensor nodes are highly energy constrained devices. Many routing protocols have been proposed for sensor network, especially cluster based routing protocols. Cluster based routing protocols are best known for its energy efficiency, network stability and for increasing the life time of the sensor network. Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) is one of the fundamental protocols in this class. In this research paper we propose a new energy efficient cluster based protocol (EECP) for single hop heterogeneous wireless sensor network to increase the life of a sensor network. Our sensor protocol use the distance of the sensor from the sink as the major issue for the selection of a cluster in the sensor network., Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, http://www.ijarcsse.com/7_July2013.php. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1408.2914

Energy saving to prolong the network life is an important design issue while developing a new routing protocol for wireless sensor network. Clustering is a key technique for this and helps in maximizing the network lifetime and scalability. Most of the routing and data dissemination protocols of WSN assume a homogeneous network architecture, in which all sensors have the same capabilities in terms of battery power, communication, sensing, storage, and processing. Recently, there has been an interest in heterogeneous sensor networks, especially for real deployments. This research paper has proposed a new energy aware clustering protocol (EACP) for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Heterogeneity is introduced in EACP by using two types of nodes: normal and advanced. In EACP cluster heads for normal nodes are elected with the help of a probability scheme based on residual and average energy of the normal nodes. This will ensure that only the high residual normal nodes can become the cluster head in a round. Advanced nodes use a separate probability based scheme for cluster head election and they will further act as a gateway for normal cluster heads and transmit their data load to base station when they are not doing the duty of a cluster head. Finally a sleep state is suggested for some sensor nodes during cluster formation phase to save network energy. The performance of EACP is compared with SEP and simulation result shows the better result for stability period, network life and energy saving than SEP., Comment: 15 Pages, 10 figures. in print at http://airccse.org/journal/ijc2014.html

Wireless sensor network consists of large number of tiny sensor nodes which are usually deployed in a harsh environment. Self configuration and infrastructure less are the two fundamental properties of sensor networks. Sensor nodes are highly energy constrained devices because they are battery operated devices and due to harsh environment deployment it is impossible to change or recharge their battery. Energy conservation and prolonging the network life are two major challenges in a sensor network. Communication consumes the large portion of WSN energy. Several protocols have been proposed to realize power- efficient communication in a wireless sensor network. Cluster based routing protocols are best known for increasing energy efficiency, stability and network lifetime of WSNs. Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) is an important protocol in this class. One of the disadvantages of LEACH is that it does not consider the nodes energy and distance for the election of cluster head. This paper proposes a new energy efficient clustering protocol DE-LEACH for homogeneous wireless sensor network which is an extension of LEACH. DE-LEACH elects cluster head on the basis of distance and residual energy of the nodes. Proposed protocol increases the network life, stability and throughput of sensor network and simulations result shows that DE-LEACH is better than LEACH., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. available online at http://ijcaonline.org/2014

Wireless sensor network consists of large number of inexpensive tiny sensors which are connected with low power wireless communications. Most of the routing and data dissemination protocols of WSN assume a homogeneous network architecture, in which all sensors have the same capabilities in terms of battery power, communication, sensing, storage, and processing. However the continued advances in miniaturization of processors and low-power communications have enabled the development of a wide variety of nodes. When more than one type of node is integrated into a WSN, it is called heterogeneous. Multihop short distance communication is an important scheme to reduce the energy consumption in a sensor network because nodes are densely deployed in a WSN. In this paper M-EECDA (Multihop Energy Efficient Clustering & Data Aggregation Protocol for Heterogeneous WSN) is proposed and analyzed. The protocol combines the idea of multihop communications and clustering for achieving the best performance in terms of network life and energy consumption. M-EECDA introduces a sleep state and three tier architecture for some cluster heads to save energy of the network. M-EECDA consists of three types of sensor nodes: normal, advance and super. To become cluster head in a round normal nodes use residual energy based scheme. Advance and super nodes further act as relay node to reduce the transmission load of a normal node cluster head when they are not cluster heads in a round., Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures. available at http://ijcaonline.org/2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1408.2914

Recent discussions of energy security and climate change have attracted significant attention to clean energy. We hypothesize that rising prices of conventional energy and/or placement of a price on carbon emissions would encourage investments in clean energy firms. The data from three clean energy indices show that oil prices and technology stock prices separately affect the stock prices of clean energy firms. However, the data fail to demonstrate a significant relationship between carbon prices and the stock prices of the firms.

Total factor productivity plays an important role in the growth of the Indian economy. Using state-level data from 1993 to 2005 that were recently made available, we find widespread regional variation in productivity changes. In the years immediately following economic liberalization, productivity growth improved technical efficiency; however, in subsequent years, productivity growth was propelled by technological progress. We find a tendency toward convergence with regard to productivity growth among states; however, the states that were technically efficient when the economic reforms were instituted remained innovative in later years.

The design and implementation of environmental policy often involve more than one pollutant, and must consider pollution as a byproduct of the production of marketable output. In this paper, we test the implicit assumption in the empirical literature that (1) production of marketable output, pollution and abatement are separable, and (2) different pollutants can be abated separately. Using unique plant-level data in India, we reject the null hypotheses of separability between marketable output and pollutants, and between different pollutants. Firms must incur abatement costs for reducing pollution levels. In addition, complement and substitute relationships between water pollutants are demonstrated with statistical significance.

The conventional measures of benchmarking focus mainly on the water produced or water delivered, and ignore the service quality, and as a result the 'low-cost and low-quality' utilities are rated as efficient units. Benchmarking must credit utilities for improvements in service delivery. This study measures the performance of 20 urban water utilities using data from an Asian Development Bank survey of Indian water utilities in 2005. It applies data envelopment analysis to measure the performance of utilities. The results reveal that incorporation of a quality dimension into the analysis significantly increases the average performance of utilities. The difference between conventional quantity-based measures and quality-adjusted estimates implies that there are significant opportunity costs of maintaining the quality of services in water delivery.

We propose a productivity index for undesirable outputs such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions and measure it using data from 51 developed and developing countries over the period 1971-2000. About half of the countries exhibit the productivity growth. The changes in the productivity index are linked with their respective per capita income using a semi-parametric model. Our results show technological catch up of low-income countries. However, overall productivities both of SO2 and CO2 show somewhat different results.

The US Clean Air Act Amendments introduce an emissions trading system to regulate SO2 emissions. This study finds that changes in SO2 emissions prices are related to innovations induced by these amendments. We find that electricity-generating plants are able to increase electricity output and reduce emissions of SO2 and NOx from 1995 to 2007 due to the introduction of the allowance trading system. However, compared to the approximate 8% per year of exogenous technological progress, the induced effect is relatively small, and the contribution of the induced effect to overall technological progress is about 1-2%.

Coordinated checkpointing is an effective fault tolerant technique in distributed system as it avoids the domino effect and require minimum storage requirement. Most of the earlier coordinated checkpoint algorithms block their computation during checkpointing and forces minimum-process or non-blocking but forces all nodes to takes checkpoint even though many of them may not be necessary or non-blocking minimum-process but takes useless checkpoints or reduced useless checkpoint but has higher synchronization message overhead or has high checkpoint request propagation time. Hence in mobile distributed systems there is a great need of minimizing the number of communication message and checkpointing overhead as it raise new issues such as mobility, low bandwidth of wireless channels, frequently disconnections, limited battery power and lack of reliable stable storage on mobile nodes. In this paper, we propose a minimum-process coordinated checkpointing algorithm for mobile distributed system where no useless checkpoints are taken, no blocking of processes takes place and enforces a minimum-number of processes to take checkpoints. Our algorithm imposes low memory and computation overheads on MH's and low communication overheads on wireless channels. It avoids awakening of an MH if it is not required to take its checkpoint and has reduced latency time as each process involved in a global checkpoint can forward its own decision directly to the checkpoint initiator., Comment: 19 Pages, IJMA

This paper studies mechanisms to compensate local government for the public provision of environmental services using the theory of optimal fiscal transfers in India. Especially, we analyzed the role of intergovernmental fiscal transfers in achieving the environmental goal. Simply assigning the functions at appropriate levels does not ensure optimal provision of environmental services. Optimality in resource allocation could be achieved by combining the assignment system with an appropriate compensation mechanism. Intergovernmental fiscal transfers would be a suitable mechanism for compensating the local governments and help in internalizing the spillover effects of providing environmental public goods. Illustrations are also provided for India.

We analyze how changes in trade openness are related to induced technological innovations that are not only GDP increasing but also pollution saving. Our model includes by-products of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions. We estimate a directional distance function for 76 countries over the period 1963-2000 to measure exogenous and trade-induced technological change. On average, we find substantial trade-induced technological progress, and its magnitude is about one third of the overall technological change. The trade-induced technological changes, however, are GDP reducing and pollution increasing. Empirically, we find that increased trade openness correlates to increased pollution.

In this paper, we distinguish between factor/output substitution and shifts in the production technology frontier. Our model includes the by-products of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions where the function requires the simultaneous expansion of good outputs and reductions in emissions. We estimate a directional output distance function for 80 countries over the period 1971-2000 to measure the exogenous and oil price-induced technological change. On average, we find substantial oil price-induced technological progress at the world level when long-term oil prices are rising, although the growth rate is more volatile in developed countries than in developing countries. The results also show that developed countries experience higher exogenous technological progress in comparison with developing countries, and the gap between the two has increased during the period of our study.

Measuring available bandwidth over a network path in the Internet is a challenging research problem. In this thesis we have studied this problem and developed a new technique called "eChirp". First, the effectiveness of pathChirp [1] is studied in terms of model performance of chirp packet train structure, actual bandwidth, queuing delay and excursion segmentation. Then we remodeled the chirp train structure. The eChirp can measure the available bandwidth over a network path efficiently and accurately with heavy and light load links. To measure the available bandwidth, the packet probing rate configuration used in pathChirp technique is modified by changing its chirp train structure. The modified structure uses multiple chirp trains (three trains) that provides better probing rate configuration and ultimately gives better bandwidth measurement. Per-packet available bandwidth is calculated using weighted average of per-packet bandwidth of three trains. We also determined the bounds of probing rate parameter which was questionable in pathChirp and affects the available bandwidth measurement accuracy. The eChirp technique has been experimented with numerous network path topologies with low and high link loads with CBR cross-traffic conditions using NS-2 simulated network and results are compared with most recent pathChirp technique. Simulation results show that the proposed eChirp technique is better than pathChirp scheme in terms of estimating available bandwidth.

To determine the suitable food media for the mass production of Corcyra cephalonica (Stainton), eleven types of food media viz., sorghum, pearlmillet, maize, coarse rice, wheat bran, rice husk, sorghum + rice husk (9:1), pearl millet + rice husk (9:1), pearl millet + rice husk + wheat bran (5:1:1), maize + rice husk (9:1) and rice + rice husk (9:1) were used for rearing. Observations were taken on average development period, percentage of moth emergence and weight of eggs. Food efficiency index (FEI) was calculated by dividing the product of percent emergence and egg weight by average development period. The FEI was highest in case of sorghum followed by pearlmillet, maize, pearlmillet + rice husk + wheat bran, sorghum + rice husk, wheat bran and rice, while in other food media it was extremely low.

To determine the suitable food media for the mass production of Corcyra cephalonica (Stainton), eleven types of food media viz., sorghum, pearlmillet, maize, coarse rice, wheat bran, rice husk, sorghum + rice husk (9:1), pearl millet + rice husk (9:1), pearl millet + rice husk + wheat bran (5:1:1), maize + rice husk (9:1) and rice + rice husk (9:1) were used for rearing. Observations were taken on average development period, percentage of moth emergence and weight of eggs. Food efficiency index (FEI) was calculated by dividing the product of percent emergence and egg weight by average development period. The FEI was highest in case of sorghum followed by pearlmillet, maize, pearlmillet + rice husk + wheat bran, sorghum + rice husk, wheat bran and rice, while in other food media it was extremely low.