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Background: The ethnopharmacological relevance suggests that the ethnic minorities of India use leaves of Cissampelos pareira L. as a traditional medicine for curing various psychopharmacological disorders. Objective: To evaluate anti-depressant, anxiolytic, and muscle relaxant activity of hydro-alcoholic extract of Cissampelos pareira. Methods: Leaves of Cissampelos pareira were extracted using a hydro-alcoholic solvent. The safety of hydro-alcoholic extract of Cissampelos pareira was assessed by acute oral toxicity (OECD 423). The anti-depressant activity was measured using open field test, locomotor test, despair swim test, tail suspension test. The anxiolytic activity was assessed using elevated plus maze and hole board test, and skeletal muscle relaxant activity was assessed using rotarod, grip strength, chimney, and inclined plane test. Results: No moribund status or mortality was observed in experimental mice up to 2000 mg/kg dose of Cissampelos pareira hydro-alcoholic extract (CPHE). In the open field and actophotometer tests, CPHE 200 and 400 mg/kg treated mice significantly abridged ambulation, number of central squares crossed, total locomotion, and depicted less coordinated movements, and in despair swim and tail suspension tests, CPHE 400 mg/kg treated mice significantly decreased duration of immobility and increased number of climbing, confirming its anti-depressant effect. In an elevated plus-maze test, CPHE 200 and 400 mg/kg increased the open arm exploration, while in the hole board test, CPHE 400 mg/kg treated rats augmented the number of head dips, depicting its anxiolytic effect. In rotarod, grip strength, and inclined plane test, CPHE 400 mg/kg treated mice decreased the fall-off time on a rotating rod, suspended wire, or inclined plane. Furthermore, in the chimney test, treatment with CPHE 400 depicted less coordinated movements in mice; the mice of this group took more time to leave the cylinder, depicting its skeletal muscle relaxant effect. Conclusion: Based on the results, of this study, it can be concluded that CPHE 400 mg/kg exhibits strong anti-depressant, anxiolytic, and muscle relaxant effects, justifying its traditional uses.

Background: The extensive search for a novel therapeutic agent against Alzheimer's Disease (AD) in medical and pharmaceutical research still continues. Despite a lot being explored about its therapeutics, there is still much more to learn in order to achieve promising therapeutic agents against AD. Phytochemicals, especially secondary metabolites, are the major focus of the investigators for AD treatment. Objective: To describe major therapeutics targets of AD and the role of isothiocyanates (ITCs) in modulating these targets. Methods: Scientific databases, including Elsevier, Science Direct, Pub med, were explored. The explored literature was mainly journal publications on pathogenesis and targets of AD, and the effect of various ITCs in the modulation of these targets. Results: The major targets of AD include the Nrf-2/ARE signaling pathway, MAPKs pathway, GSK-3 signaling, and Ubiquitin-Protease system. ITCs, such as Sulforaphane, Allyl isothiocyanates, Moringin, 6-(methylsulfinyl) hexyl ITC, Phenethyl isothiocyanates, and Erucin, were reported to exert a protective effect against AD via modulating one of the several above mentioned targets. Conclusion: This article gives a detailed description of the therapeutic targets of AD and sheds light that phytochemicals, such as ITCs, can exert a protective effect against AD by targeting those pathways. However, properly designed research and clinical trials are required to include ITCs as a mainstream agent against AD.

Mastitis in dairy cattle is the most common management disorder that causes higher economic losses by lowering production and quality of milk leads to substantial economical loss. The aim of this article was to review worldwide important advances in strategies to control mastitis for production augmentation in dairy cattle. Many scientists worked to identify effective strategies to control mastitis caused by Streptococcus agalactiae, Staphylococcus aureus, and others. It is necessary to identify mechanisms of infection, define clinical and subclinical states of disease, determine exposure time, and identify pathogen-specific characteristics. Evolvement of management strategies that incorporated hygienic procedures (animal, floor, and milkman), post milking standing period of animal and strategic use of antibiotic or herbal therapy at dry-off, nutritional supplementation, fly control, body condition score optimization, etc., resulted in widespread control of mastitis. The udder, teat of animal, scientific management of milking, automatic milking procedure, genetic selection are considered as important factors to control mastitis. As farm management changed, scientists were directed to redefine control of mastitis caused by opportunistic pathogens of environmental sources and have sought to explore management strategies which will maintain animal well-being in a judicial way. Although significant advances in mastitis management have been made changing herd structure, changing climatic scenario and more rigorous milk processing standards ensure that mastitis will remain important issue for future research.

Computer vision and IoT-based systems play a significant role in the field of home security. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of IoT-based home security with integrated intrusion detection to minimize the damages caused by the burglary. Also, the proposed system combines a web server with the web application to remotely access and control their status. This system is cost-effective and efficient enough for monitoring home automatically. It includes a real-time identification system that can process images faster. The aim of this paper is to ensure home security by identifying the face. A single-board computer called the Raspberry Pi will capture the images, and from that, the system will detect and identify the face. This project uses the Haar-cascades algorithm for face detection and uses LBPH algorithm for face recognition and uses SQLite which is a lite version of SQL for the Raspberry Pi, along with MYSQL to update the database to the web server. Finally, using an IoT application called Twillo, the images and notifications will be sent to the user by SMS. According to the experimental results, the system can be used as a real-time system. This system can be used without any human intervention. The system includes instant approachability, efficient usage of power and fits user service.

Nowadays Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based applications are rising in many areas such as industry, health-care, transportation. During the class time, manual collection of attendance consumes considerable amount of time and resources. Having many students in classroom, taking attendance is a difficult task and how to automatic get the attendance rate is very important for school management. In this paper, we proposed an easier way of using the RFID technology on how a school teacher is capable of automatically record the attendance instead of taking attendance manually. An RFID-based attendance management system is designed and implemented, and information service system including programmable devices and web-based applications are used. The test results show that the presented system is practical.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are continuously emerging as key tools to support development activities undertaken by Governments, civil society and private enterprises. It has been showing significant result in addressing information asymmetry gap in many sectors and localities, especially in agriculture & allied sector. The rural people, specifically farming communities have been getting timely & relevant information, services & support, and farming inputs. However, the sustainability of these ICT based efforts in improving well-being of farming communities is key to the effectiveness of a rural ICT projects in India. The present paper aimed to determine the sustainability of the aAQUA (Almost All Questions Answered) e-Agriservice in Maharashtra state, western parts of India covering the four districts of the state. The study used the ex-post facto (cause to effect) research design in a quasi-intervention setting. The list of registered users was obtained from the service provider (presently Agrocom Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) and total of 120 users were selected randomly from four districts (30 users from each district). The sustainable-Agriservice Index (SeAGRSI) was computed based on the five dimensions viz. technological, economic, social, institutional, and political by using Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA), Mixed Method Approach and Normalized Rank Order Method (NROM). The study revealed that the SeAGRSI for the social indicators was the highest among other dimensions of the sustainability (SeAGRSI = 0.77) followed by the technologically (0.73), economic (0.71) political (0.62) and institutional (0.58) sustainable. It was also found that the mean SeAGRSI was 0.70 as reported by one third (32.50%) of the users, which means 70 per cent the aAQUA e-Agriservice was technologically, socially, economically, institutionally and politically sustainable.

The present study aimed to determine the sustainability of the aAQUA (Almost All Questions Answered) e-Agriservice in Maharashtra state, western parts of India covering the four districts of the state. The study used the ex-post facto (cause to effect) research design in a quasi-intervention setting. The list of registered users was obtained from the service provider (presently Agrocom Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) and total of 120 users were selected randomly from four districts (30 users from each district). The sustainable-Agriservice Index (SeAGRSI) was computed based on the five dimensions viz. technological, economic, social, institutional, and political by using combinations of Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA), Mixed Method Approach and Normalized Rank Order Method (NROM). The study revealed that the SeAGRSI for the social indicators was the highest among other dimensions of the sustainability (SeAGRSI = 0.77) followed by the technologically (0.73), economic (0.71) political (0.62) and institutional (0.58) sustainable. It was also found that the mean SeAGRSI was 0.70 as reported by one third (32.50%) of the users, which means 70% the aAQUA e-Agriservice was technologically, socially, economically, institutionally and politically sustainable. The indicators developed would be useful to develop strategy for sustainability of ICT efforts in many developing countries.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have potential to deliver timely and relevant information to farmers. Several projects integrate ICTs to disseminate the agricultural information to farming community. Almost All Questions Answered (aAQUA) e-Agriservice is one such web portal to address the queries raised by farmers. This study was carried out to find the attitude of farmers towards the aAQUA e-Agriservice and to assess its impact in terms of knowledge gain about Improved Dairy Farming Practices (IDFPs). The ex-post-facto research design was followed. The attitude scale and knowledge test were developed and administered to a sample of 120 each from user and non-user dairy farmers in four districts of Maharashtra state. Cronbach's alpha coefficient (#=0.91) of reliability test was employed for measuring the attitude of farmers. The results indicated that one-third (32.50%) of the users had more favourable attitude towards the e-Agriservice followed by 24.17% of the users with favourable attitude. About 47.50% of users had high level (67.72–78.29) of knowledge about IDFPs, whereas one-third (33.33%) of non-users had medium level (58.86–67.71). One way ANOVA revealed that the level of favourableness of attitude of the users towards e-Agriservice on knowledge levels of users about IDFPs found significant at 0.01% level of significance. The study suggested that the attitude of target clientele plays an important role in acceptance of ICT-based interventions which makes them knowledge empowered.

We provide a privacy-friendly cloud-based smart metering storage architecture which provides few-instance storage on encrypted measurements by at the same time allowing SQL queries on them. Our approach is most flexible with respect to two axes: on the one hand it allows to apply filtering rules on encrypted data with respect to various upcoming business cases; on the other hand it provides means for a storageefficient handling of encrypted measurements by applying serverside deduplication techniques over all incoming smart meter measurements. Although the work at hand is purely dedicated to a smart metering architecture we believe our approach to have value for a broader class of IoT cloud storage solutions. Moreover, it is an example for Privacy-by-design supporting the positive-sum paradigm.

Currently, Photovoltaic (PV) energy is the most important energy resource in electrical power applications around the world since it is inexhaustible, clean and pollution free. As the output power from the PV arrays changing with solar irradiance and temperature, so it is necessary to operate the photovoltaic (PV) system at the maximum power point (MPP) to increase the power extraction from the solar panel. For this effective operation and maximum power extraction from a PV system, Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm plays a vital role by operating the PV energy system near the MPP. In this work, amongst several existing well established MPPT algorithms, the open voltage (OV) based algorithm is chosen for simulation of a PV system using Matlab / Simscape. As maximum power point (MPP) can be attained with a certain amount of load from the PV power system, so load matching is an important concept of MPPT algorithms. Here, the performances of this open voltage (OV) based algorithm method is evaluated for different values of solar radiation and battery was used as load to see the charging performance for the algorithm.

Mela is the Hindi language word for fair, which is a traditional media to learn, earn, participate and share information. The paper describes perception scale development process and identification of different prospects of perception of the participants by administrating the tool on 60 randomly selected participants, during the three day event of national dairy mela from 25th to 27th February, 2015 at NDRI, Karnal. Final scale consisted of 20 statements (14 positive and 6 negative) for which the t-values were found to be significant at one percent level of significance at 18 df and Cronbach's alpha value of reliability was 0.851. Two other reliability tests were accomplished and Cochran's test of ANOVA was performed to test the significance level of all 3 reliability test and it was significant at 1 percent level (p

The existing milk marketing system is mostly under the unorganised sector.. The channel mainly consists of producer, village merchant or agent, wholesaler or distributor and retailer. This trend shows the parallel private unorganised traders determining the price of milk, even in the strong cooperative milk marketing system regions. The present study was aimed to find the marketing behaviour of the dairy farmers of the western region of Tamil Nadu. Two districts, namely, Erode and Coimbatore, were selected purposively and the result was derived from 240 respondents. Majority of the respondents had medium level of marketing behaviour, which is implied through six components, namely, milk transport facilities’ utilisation pattern, milk marketing channel utilisation, availing of input/credit facilities, payment receiving pattern, mode of payment for sale of milk and price satisfaction of the respondents. The study analysed the dairy farmers’ behaviour-related variables and also reflected the relationship of characteristics with their marketing behaviour. It may be concluded that large herd size and higher income possessed by the farmers ensure high marketing ability among the respondents.