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Recent research in the field of natural fiber reinforced composites has witnessed a tremendous increase in the usage of flax fibers as one of the major reinforcement elements in polymer composites. The sustainable nature of natural fibers and relatively good specific mechanical properties at a lower cost has attracted the researchers to focus more on flax fiber composites. This review presents the recent developments in the field of flax fiber composites along with their properties, various manufacturing process and applications. Flax fiber with various matrix systems such as thermoplastic, thermoset and biodegradable resins are also explained. Fiber and matrix modification studies such as chemical treatments and nanofiller addition on the matrix are also explained in the review sessions with the corresponding improvement achieved.

The International Finance Corporation, IFC, is a member of the World Bank Group. IFC is the largest global development institution focused exclusively on the private sector in developing countries. Habib Bank Limited (HBL) was established in 1941 and was the first commercial bank in Pakistan. Over the years, HBL has grown its branch network and maintained its position as the largest private sector bank in a number of categories. In terms of customers, HBL understands the various roles played by women in society and acknowledges the financial gaps in servicing women customers from all backgrounds. Today, HBL serves more women than any other bank in Pakistan. To do yet more, it introduced HBL Nisa, a banking platform dedicated to the women of Pakistan. HBL Nisa’s goal is to understand, educate, and develop products and services that cater to the financial needs of women. Since HBL and IFC formed a partnership in 2007, the relationship has grown, with an IFC Global Trade Finance Program (GTFP) investment. This engagement with HBL is also one of IFC’s flagship Banking on Women (BOW) projects, in which IFC also provided advisory services to assist with integrating a bank-wide gender diversity framework. Gender Intelligence for Banks — Moving the Needle on Gender Equality is the result of a joint partnership between the IFC and HBL in Pakistan. The initiative’s goal is to promote gender equality within banks and to develop insights into how gender intelligence programs can positively impact organizational gender awareness, financial inclusion for women, and bottom-line results for banks.

As elections begin in India, Mathai Joseph and Andrew Robinson call for an end to the stultifying bureaucracy that has held back the nation's science for decades.

Aim The purpose of this clinical report is to present a description of the prosthetic rehabilitation of a bilateral complete maxillectomy patient using a two piece magnetically connected prosthesis. Background A complete bilateral maxillectomy defect presents a considerable reconstructive challenge for the prosthodontist. It results in devastating effects on cosmetic, functional, and psychological aspects of the patient. Report A 46-year-old woman reported with a chief complaint of missing teeth in the upper jaw. Her primary concerns were a poor facial appearance, inability to chew food, and regurgitation of the food into the nasal cavity. She was diagnosed with carcinoma of the maxillary sinus, for which a bilateral maxillectomy was done followed by post surgical radiation therapy. The prosthetic treatment objectives were to separate the nasal and oral cavities, restore the mid-facial contour, and improve her masticatory functions by providing a full complement of maxillary teeth using a two-piece connected hollow obturator prosthesis connected by a magnet. Summary Insertion and removal of a large prostheses used for rehabilitation of midfacial defects requires good neuromotor coordination and an adequate mouth opening. Because these factors were problematic for this patient, the treatment plan was to fabricate a two piece magnetically connected prosthesis. After fabrication and insertion of the prosthesis, the fit between two sections was evaluated and instructions for insertion, removal, and maintenance of the obturator were given. The patient's speech, masticatory efficiency, and swallowing dramatically improved after insertion. Citation Chandra TS, Sholapurkar A, Joseph RM, Aparna IN, Pai KM. Prosthetic Rehabilitation of a Complete Bilateral Maxillectomy Patient Using a Simple Magnetically Connected Hollow Obturator: A Case Report. J Contemp Dent Pract 2008 January; (9)1:070-076.

Aim This clinical report describes the oral rehabilitation of a young female patient diagnosed with the hypocalcified, autosomal recessive type of Amelogenesis imperfecta (AI). A brief discussion on diagnosis of AI is also included. Background AI has been defined as a group of hereditary enamel defects not associated with evidence of systemic disease. It can be characterized by enamel hypoplasia and/or hypomaturation or hypocalcification of the existing teeth. Restoration for patients with this condition should be oriented toward the functional and esthetic rehabilitation and the protection of these teeth. Report A 31-year-old female patient presented with concerns including extreme sensitivity; dissatisfaction with size, shape, and shade of teeth; and poor masticatory efficiency. She was very conscious about the appearance of her teeth and reported that her primary dentition was affected in the same manner. The specific objectives of this treatment were to eliminate tooth sensitivity, enhance esthetics, and restore masticatory function. Treatment included crown lengthening procedures and placement of anterior and posterior metalceramic crowns. A 12-month follow-up with clinical and radiographic examinations revealed no evidence of any untoward effects of the treatment on the restored teeth or their supporting structures. Summary Management of a patient with AI is a challenge for the clinician. The treatment options vary considerably depending on several factors such as the age of the patient, socio-economic status, periodontal condition, loss of tooth structure, severity of the disorder, and, most importantly, the patient's cooperation. The clinician has to consider the long-term prognosis of the treatment outcome. This clinical report describes the fabrication of metal ceramic and all metal crowns for the restoration of severely worn teeth in a patient with AI which requires meticulous maintenance of oral hygiene and patient co-operation. Citation Sholapurkar AA, Joseph RM, Varghese JM, Neelagiri K, Acharya SRR, Hegde V, Pai KM, Bhat M. Clinical Diagnosis and Oral Rehabilitation of a Patient with Amelogenesis imperfecta: A Case Report. J Contemp Dent Pract 2008 May; (9)4:092-098.

Consider a distributed real-time program which is executed on a system with a limited set of hardware resources. Assume the program is required to satisfy some timing constraints, despite the occurrence of anticipated hardware failures. For efficient use of resources, scheduling decisions must be taken at run-time, considering deadlines, the load and hardware failures. The paper demonstrates how to reason about such dynamically scheduled programs in the framework of a timed process algebra and modal logic. The algebra provides a uniform process encoding of programs, hardware and schedulers, with an operational semantics of a process depending on the assumptions about faults. The logic specifies the timing properties of a process and verifies them via this fault-affected semantics, establishing fault-tolerance. The approach lends itself to application of existing tools and results supporting reasoning in process algebras and modal logics.

Formal refinement shows how the specification of a program can be transformed by steps into an executable implementation. The method is sound and rigorous but is not suited to dealing with large and complex programs. Thus, the construction of large programs is often assumed to remain outside the scope of formal representation altogether and informal techniques, sometimes using diagrammatic notations, are used to go from requirements to programs. In this paper, we show how large programs can be defined in terms of different views that are instances of a single meta model. Each view represents one set of properties of the program and their composition defines the specification of the program. Transformations are used to convert views into program fragments that are composed together to build the whole program. The technique has been applied for the construction of many large systems that are in practical use.

Assume that a real-time program P T consisting of a number of parallel processes is executed on a system having a set Pr of processors which are shared between the processes by a real-time scheduler S T . Assume that P T must meet some timing deadlines. We show that such an implementation of P T can be represented as a transformationL( P T ) and that the deadlines of P T will be met if they are satisfied by the timing properties of the transformed program. The condition for feasibility of a real-time program executed under a scheduler is formalized and rules are provided for verification. The scheduler S T can be specified generically and applied to different programs, making it unnecessary to introduce low-level operations such as scheduling primitives into the programming language. Thus real-time program specification and Schedulability can be considered in the same framework and the timing properties of a program can be determined at the specification level. By separating the specification of the scheduler from that of the program, the feasibility of an implementation can be proved by considering a scheduling policy rather than its implementation details.