635 research outputs found
Bauhinia bassacensis var. nicobarica Tiwari U. L., K. Ravikumar & N. Balachandran 2013, var. nov.
Bauhinia bassacensis var. nicobarica Tiwari U.L., K. Ravikumar & N. Balachandran, var. nov. (Figs. 1 & 2) Differs from the typical variety in having exstipulate leaves, lobes of leaves obtuse at apex, bract rusty tomentose and ovate, bracteoles 2, lanceolate, rusty tomentose; fertile stamens always 2; filaments hairy, anther lobes brown. Type:— INDIA. Great Nicobar Island: Near Army land, Campbell Bay, 20 February 2013, N- 71 o 2’ 2.9’’, E 93 o 55’ 2.9’’, 16 m ASL, K . Ravikumar, N. Balachandran and Umeshkumar Tiwari 115533 (holotype FRLH!; isotypes FRLH!, PBL!). Large, woody, climbers; tendrils coiled stout, glabrous; young branches rusty tomentose, mature grooved and lenticellate. Leaves exstipulate; petioles glabrescent, 2 7 cm long; lamina ovate-cordate, ca. 19 × 13 cm, 9 13-nerved, bifid, down to 3.5 4.8 cm length with narrow sinus, apex of lobes obtuse, base cordate, upper surface glabrous, lower brownish tomentose to glabrescent, base of the lamina with two distinct glands expanding up to pulvinous base. Inflorescences lateral or terminal, many-flowered, racemes or panicles; peduncles rusty tomentose; pedicels ca. 3.5 cm long in flower and ca. 7 cm long in fruit; bracts ovate, rusty tomentose, ca. 0.5 mm long; bracteoles 2, lanceolate, inserted near the middle of the pedicels, rusty tomentose, 1–1.5 mm long. Buds ovoid, rusty tomentose, 4–6 mm long. Hypanthium c. 1 mm long. Calyx during anthesis splitting into 2 segments forming right angles with the pedicels, 5–7 mm long, sometime persistent with fruit. Petals 2 above and three below, pubescent, creamish with purplish-red veins prominent on both sides, blade deltoid, crumpled, subequal, narrowly ovate to suborbicular with undulate margin, ca. 6 × 5 mm; claw 1.5–2 cm long, soft hairy. Stamens 9 (2 + 7); fertile stamens 2, staminodes absent sometime 1; filaments 1.2–1.6cm long, hairy; anthers 1–2 mm long, lobes brown; reduced stamens 7 in number, unequal, 3–9 mm long, filiform, white. Carpels densely brownish pilose, distinctly stalked, styles 6-8 mm, hairy with a small capitate stigma. Pods rusty tomentose, 8–13 × 3–4 cm with persistent style, stalks c. 3 mm long; styles persistent in fruit. Seeds, 2–5, dark brown, flattened, oblong-orbicular, c. 1.5 × 2 cm, smooth, glabrous. Flowering & Fruiting:— From February to March. Distribution:— India: Campbell Bay, Great Nicobar Island, Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Habitat:— Liana in mixed semi-evergreen forests. Ecological status:— About three individuals confined to an area of 1 km 2 were observed during field survey. Though it qualifies to be kept under Critically Endangered (CR) category, further studies and explorations in adjacent areas are required to ascertain its actual status. Etymology:— The varietal epithet refers to the place of its collection. This new variety is allied to typical var. bassacensis and var. backeri, but differs from both markedly in having exstipulate leaves, lobes of leaves obtuse at apex, bract rusty tomentose and ovate, bracteoles 2, lanceolate, rusty tomentose; fertile stamens always 2; filaments hairy, anther lobes brown (see table 1).Published as part of Tiwari, Umeshkumar, Ravikumar, Kaliamoorthy & Balachandran, Natesan, 2013, A new variety of Bauhinia bassacensis (Leguminosae: Caesalpinioideae) from Great Nicobar Island, India, pp. 12-18 in Phytotaxa 149 (1) on pages 13-16, DOI: 10.11646/phytotaxa.149.1.2, http://zenodo.org/record/510042
sj-docx-1-pie-10.1177_09544089221112162 - Supplemental material for Study on tribological behaviour of aluminium hybrid composites strengthened with novel groundnut shell ash and boron carbide
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-pie-10.1177_09544089221112162 for Study on tribological behaviour of aluminium hybrid composites strengthened with novel groundnut shell ash and boron carbide by L. Venkatesh, T.V. Arjunan, M. Arulraj and K. Ravikumar in Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering</p
Ambiguity and communication
The ambiguity of a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) N for input size n is the maximal number of accepting computations of N for an input of size n. For all k, r 2 N we construct languages Lr,k which can be recognized by NFA's with size k poly(r) and ambiguity O(nk), but Lr,k has only NFA's with exponential size, if ambiguity o(nk) is required. In particular, a hierarchy for polynomial ambiguity is obtained, solving a long standing open problem (Ravikumar and Ibarra, 1989, Leung, 1998)
URI Disambiguation in the Context of Linked Data
The Linked Data initiative has given rise to an increasing number of RDF datasets, many of which are freely accessible online. These resources often arise as a result of database exports; however sufficient consideration may not be given to the unseen implications caused when they are used in the wider context of the Semantic Web. This paper investigates two popular resources, DBLP and DBpedia, and discusses whether the issues regarding identity management and co-reference resolution have been suitably addressed. We find that a large percentage of authors in DBLP have been conflated, and that disambiguation pages have been incorrectly linked using owl:sameAs within DBpedia. Systems for dealing with these issues are presented, and directions are given for future research
Effect of forging on mechanical properties of rice husk ash-silicon carbide reinforced Al1100 hybrid composites
Learning dynamic prices in electronic retail markets with customer segmentation
In this paper, we use reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to determine dynamic prices in an electronic monopolistic retail market. The market that we consider consists of two natural segments of customers, captives and shoppers. Captives are mature, loyal buyers whereas the shoppers are more price sensitive and are attracted by sales promotions and volume discounts. The seller is the learning agent in the system and uses RL to learn from the environment. Under (reasonable) assumptions about the arrival process of customers, inventory replenishment policy, and replenishment lead time distribution, the system becomes a Markov decision process thus enabling the use of a wide spectrum of learning algorithms. In this paper, we use the Q-learning algorithm for RL to arrive at optimal dynamic prices that optimize the seller’s performance metric (either long term discounted profit or long run average profit per unit time). Our model and methodology can also be used to compute optimal reorder quantity and optimal reorder point for the inventory policy followed by the seller and to compute the optimal volume discounts to be offered to the shoppers
Recovering from missing data in population imaging – Cardiac MR image imputation via conditional generative adversarial nets
Accurate ventricular volume measurements are the primary indicators of normal/abnormal cardiac function and are dependent on the Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) volumes being complete. However, missing or unusable slices owing to the presence of image artefacts such as respiratory or motion ghosting, aliasing, ringing and signal loss in CMR sequences, significantly hinder accuracy of anatomical and functional cardiac quantification, and recovering from those is insufficiently addressed in population imaging. In this work, we propose a new robust approach, coined Image Imputation Generative Adversarial Network (I2-GAN), to learn key features of cardiac short axis (SAX) slices near missing information, and use them as conditional variables to infer missing slices in the query volumes. In I2-GAN, the slices are first mapped to latent vectors with position features through a regression net. The latent vector corresponding to the desired position is then projected onto the slice manifold, conditioned on intensity features through a generator net. The generator comprises residual blocks with normalisation layers that are modulated with auxiliary slice information, enabling propagation of fine details through the network. In addition, a multi-scale discriminator was implemented, along with a discriminator-based feature matching loss, to further enhance performance and encourage the synthesis of visually realistic slices. Experimental results show that our method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art, in missing slice imputation for CMR, with an average SSIM of 0.872. Linear regression analysis yields good agreement between reference and imputed CMR images for all cardiac measurements, with correlation coefficients of 0.991 for left ventricular volume, 0.977 for left ventricular mass and 0.961 for right ventricular volume
ANTIHYPERLIPIDEMIC EFFECT OF ETHANOLIC SEED EXTRACT OF CANAVALIA ENSIFORMIS (L) IN HIGH FAT DIET-STREPTOZOTOCIN INDUCED RATS
Objective: It was investigated to enlighten the phytochemical screening and antihyperlipidemic activity of seeds of Canavalia ensiformis (L.) in High fat diet Streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats.
Methods: The ethanolic seed extract of Canavalia ensiformis (EECE) at a dose of 400 mg/kg and 200 mg/kg was administered to diabetic rats. Simvastatin (4 mg/kg) is used as a standard drug.
Results: The statistics were assessed by using one way ANOVA followed by Dunnet’s multiple comparison tests. To unfold the mechanism we studied all the biochemical parameters like Total cholesterol (TC), Triglycerides (TG), high-density lipoproteins (HDL), low-density lipoproteins (LDL) and histopathological examination of Liver tissue section. The ethanolic extracts of seeds of Canavalia ensiformis showed significant reduce of the level of cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL, VLDL and a significant increase in the serum level of HDL at 400 mg/kg rather than 200 mg/kg.
Conclusion: Further the characterization and isolation of the constituents could be done to know the exact mechanism of hyperlipidemic activity. Statistical analysis of this screening method conforms that the proposed method is appropriate and it can be useful, gives the basic idea to the researcher who is working in an area like Antihyperlipidemic activity
Microstructural characterization of PAN based carbon fiber reinforced nylon 6 polymer composites
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