In spite of early learning phase of stamp charge operation, the 1st stamp charge battery of Tata Steel achieved life more than 27 years and still having some residual life. Optimization of coal blend on the quality of coke, battery health, cost of blend along with modified standard operating practices and well-designed oven health monitoring and repair practices are the backbones of this achievement. Stamp charging technology has provided a high degree of flexibility and offered substantial savings in coal blend costs which, in turn, had a positive impact on the coke cost and hence on the cost of hot metal. Another important aspect of this journey of excellence in stamp charge coke making is a culture of development and improvement adopted by Tata Steel. Work on understanding coal behavior in stamp charge condition, its impact on oven health and proper blending to achieve the best quality yielded immense benefit to blast furnaces. Self-learning through a process of change orientation made this coke making unit a leader in this field.

Study Design: Systematic review. Objectives: We conducted a systematic review of the literature to answer the following questions regarding the use of steroid therapy in metastatic spinal cord compression (MSCC): 1. In cases of MSCC, what is the effect of steroid administration before definitive radiotherapy or surgery on ambulatory status, bowel and bladder function and survival? 2. What steroid dosing regimens are associated with the best outcomes concerning neurological symptoms and complication prevention in cases of MSCC? Summary of Background Data: Currently, there is significant variation in the initial bolus dose, daily maintenance dose and duration of treatment when steroids are used as a bridge to definitive therapy for MSCC. Methods: A literature search following PRISMA guidelines was conducted in June 2016, using Medline via Ovid SP, Medline via PubMed, Embase, Biosis Previews and the Cochrane Library. Search terms used in each database varied slightly to optimize results. All generic steroid formulations were included along with spinal cord compression or myelopathy combined with metastatic or malignant tumors. Papers discussing acute traumatic causes of spinal cord compression were excluded, as were papers discussing cord compression from nonmetastatic tumors or epidural lipomatosis. Subjects were limited to adult humans undergoing definitive treatment with radiotherapy or surgery. Results: Of the 309 papers retrieved, 66 full text studies were reviewed and 6 papers were found to address the stated questions. Conclusions: There is a paucity of high quality literature evaluating the use of steroids in MSCC. On the basis of the evidence available an initial 10 mg intravenous bolus of dexamethasone followed by 16 mg PO QD has been associated with fewer complications compared with 100 mg bolus and 96 mg QD. Weaning of steroids should occur rapidly after definitive treatment. Risk of gastric bleeding or perforation can be managed with the routine use of proton-pump inhibitors. Level of Evidence: Level IIIa.

To produce low-cost hot metal, Tata Steel always had to deal with trilemma, that is, cost-quality-mining life to achieve maximum benefit in the steel business. Tata Steel used approximately 50-60% Indian medium captive coking coal having 15-16% clean coal ash in the stamp charged coal blend. Keeping in view, consumption, and preservation of the Indian medium coking coal by modulating clean coal ash without deteriorating the coke quality was the subject of the study. The study revealed that 55% captive Indian medium coking coal up to 19.10% clean coal ash in coal blend could be used to produce coke CSR >= 65. It also reduces the coal blend cost with added benefits of the increase in the captive mine life. This paper described in detail, the effect of variation of ash percentage of captive medium coking coal in the blend on the lateral expansion and hot strength of coke especially of coke CSR.

Prolonged sitting and physical inactivity at workplace often lead to various health risks such as diabetes, heart attack, cancer etc. Many organizations are investing in wellness programs to ensure the well-being of their employees. Generally wearable devices are used in such wellness programs to detect health problems of employees, but studies have shown that wearables do not result in sustained adoption. Heart rate measurement has emerged as an effective tool to detect various ailments such as anxiety, stress, cardiovascular diseases etc. There are pre-existing techniques that use webcam feed to sense heart rate subject to some experimental constraints like stillness of face, light illumination etc. In this paper, we show that in-situ opportunities can be found and predicted for webcam based heart rate sensing in the workplace environment by analyzing data from unobtrusive sensors in a pervasive manner.

Malaria continues to be one of the major public health problem of India. Almost all deaths are caused by Plasmodium falciparum infected malaria. 1 Under normal physiological conditions, liver ensures homeostasis of lipid and lipoprotein metabolism. 2 Hepatocellular damage often associated with severe and acute P falciparum infections impairs these processes, leading to alteration in plasma lipid profile and lipoprotein patterns. An observation on the nature of dyslipidaemia in malaria patients with reference to correlation if any that exists between malaria and lipid profile in these patients was performed. Results revealed that the total cholesterol, HDL and LDL decreased while triglyceride and VLDL were found to increase in malaria patients. It can be concluded that alteration in lipid profile can be an index of malaria infection but specificity of malaria infection with lipid changes is questionable and need further studies.

A new strategy for screening of solvents for sulfur, nitrogen, and aromatic compounds removal from gas oil is presented. This ranking is based on comparative assessment of solvents’ capacity, selectivity, performance, and newly defined industrial usability indices. Twenty eight solvents comprising of six most widely used industrially proven conventional solvents and 22 imidazolium‐based ionic liquids solvents were selected to illustrate the strategy. The solvents were ranked for removal of sulfur compounds namely benzothiophene, dibenzothiophene and their alkylated derivatives, and nitrogenous compounds namely quinoline, indole and carbazole from gas oil. Performance index (P I ) which combines the effect of both capacity and selectivity seems to be better index than individual capacity and selectivity indices to rank the solvents. Industrial usability index (S IUI ) of solvents which includes P I and process complexity factor for solvent recovery section seems more practical and realistic criteria for solvent assessment. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 2257–2267, 2015

With the increasing number of desk jobs, workplaces have become the epicentre of several health risks. In this paper, we design and develop a pervasive wellness monitoring platform, SenseX, that uses a variety of devices and sensors to track physical activity level of employees in an organization. SenseX platform offers APIs which can be used by 3rd party applications to create services and applications, which can focus on specific interventions (e.g. to reduce prolonged sitting). We performed a real-world evaluation of the platform by deploying it in an IT organization for 6 weeks and observed longitudinal variations. We believe that SenseX platform helps in realizing the vision of "wellness as a service" in modern workplaces, enabling multitudes of different wellness services, which will be a key for sustained adoption of wellness programs.

Poor signal quality results in frequent dropped calls, degradation of throughput, and high battery consumption. Coverage maps advertised by cellular operators are very abstract and provide coverage information for outdoor areas. In real-world, most of the cellular phone usage is reported indoors and therefore, call drops are more frequent in these environments. Aiming to provide seamless connectivity indoors, we develop a system RadioMap that uses sensing capabilities of a smartphone to create fine-grained cellular signal maps in indoor environments. These signal maps provide a low-cost and pervasive solution to the cellular operators for finding signal dead spots in indoor environments and accordingly, take rectifying measures such as installing signal boosters, etc.

Emerging class of context-aware mobile applications, such as Google Now and Foursquare require continuous location sensing to deliver different location-aware services. Existing research, in finding location at higher abstraction, use GPS and WiFi location interfaces to discover places, which result in high power consumption. These interfaces are also not available on all feature phones that are in majority in developing countries. In this paper, we present a framework PlaceMap that discovers different places and routes, solely using GSM information, i.e., Cell ID. PlaceMap stores and manages all the discovered places and routes, which are used to build spatio-temporal mobility profiles for the users. PlaceMap provides algorithms that can complement GSM-based place discovery with an initial WiFi-based training to increase accuracy. We performed a comprehensive offline evaluation of PlaceMap algorithms on two large real-world diverse datasets, self-collected dataset of 62 participants for 4 weeks in India and MDC dataset of 38 participants for 45 weeks in Switzerland. We found that PlaceMap is able to discover up to 81% of the places correctly as compared to GPS. To corroborate the potential of PlaceMap in real-world, we deployed a life-logging application for a small set of 18 participants and observed similar place discovery accuracy.

Crowdsourcing through web technologies has emerged as a key method and tool for conducting distributed work. There are new platforms constantly emerging that aim to provide crowdsourcing opportunities on mobile phones. However, most of these systems are very specific to certain types of tasks and do not address various mobile resource constraints experienced in developing countries such as India. We propose and design a new platform Wallah that tries to address these limitations with a broad vision to make crowdsourcing opportunities pervasively available and feasible to do (i.e., at all times, locations, and with minimum investment in infrastructure from the crowd-workers). It supports task-centric applications to minimize the impact of screen size and facilitates caching of crowd-sourcing tasks to deal with network limitations. Wallah supports both physical as well as virtual crowdsourcing tasks. The current version of Wallah implements an end-to-end platform for Android devices and includes five different task-centric applications for different categories of crowdsourcing tasks (human OCR, image tagging, language translation, audio transcription, and video tagging) developed by us. We evaluated the system with a 2 week pilot deployment among 59 crowd-workers where over 16000 tasks were performed. We analyzed the platform usage in detail and present descriptive statistics related to task completion time and task accuracy rates with other analysis such as the impact of screen size on task completion time and accuracy. We also conducted a post study survey to get participant's qualitative feedback and their perceived difficulties of different crowdsourcing tasks.

Most of the contextual dependent applications require high level location attributes in terms of places and routes, more than just fine-grained latitude and longitude. Currently, these applications perform place discovery and recognition in an isolated manner with very little coordination and collaboration with each other. This approach is inhibiting for the application developer as well as the endmobile user, as former has to write redundant and undesirable code for place discovery and the latter's device is subjected to redundant sensing, processing, storage, and higher energy consumption. In this paper we present a novel framework PMWare, which is a middleware that caters to place and route sensing needs of 3rd party applications in a unified and integrated manner. It provides an end-to-end service from sensing user's location to discovering high-level location attributes while providing interfaces for managing and storing large-scale human mobility patterns. PMWare handles the energy-accuracy tradeoff and uses triggered-sensing approach to reduce battery consumption. To demonstrate the end-to-end working of our middleware, we developed an application PlaceADs that uses place visiting history of a person to push relevant advertisements. We deployed this application among 16 participants in real-world to check the effectiveness of PMWare.

this article, we investigate the effect of electric-field on the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) and strain properties in nanoscaled CoFeB/MgO magnetic tunnel junction using tunnel magnetoresistance and piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) measurements, respectively. We show that while the PMA change under electric-field is consistent with the previous reports, the PFM data show that the applied electric-field induces strain in a nanoscaled MgO. We demonstrate that the development of compressive and tensile strains corresponding to different polarities of applied electric-field. We discuss the interplay between the electric-field controlled PMA and strain properties. Our results may accelerate the development of magnetoelectrically controlled spintronic devices for low-power and high-density magnetic data storage applications. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.

There is an upward trend in facial injuries following changes in population pattern, increasing industrialization and urbanization, hence maxillofacial trauma is becoming a burden and a leading medical problem in emergency rooms worldwide. This study was performed to evaluate the pattern of maxillofacial fractures, associated injuries, and treatment used at Jai Prakash Narayan Apex Trauma Center (JPNATC), All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, India, between January 2007 and June 2010. The study provides basis for establishment of trauma as major etiology of maxillofacial injuries and planning for preventive strategies. A retrospective study of patients seen and treated at JPNATC, AIIMS, New Delhi, between January 2007 and June 2010 was performed. Data extracted from patient records included etiology, age, sex, types and sites of fractures, treatment modality, and concomitant injuries. There were 795 fractures of the maxillofacial skeleton and 86 concomitant injuries from 542 patients. Road traffic accident (RTA) (56.8%) was the most common etiologic factor, followed by falls (22.3%) and fights (18.5%). The age range was from 3 to 75 years (mean, 34.7 years) with a peak incidence in the third decade with a male-to-female ratio of 3.7:1. The most common location of maxillofacial fractures was the mandible 615 (77%) and middle third 180 (23%). With regard to mandibular fractures, the body (29.6%) was the most common site, followed by the angle (24.4%), ramus (19.5%), dentoalveolar (14.6%), symphysis (11.0%), condyle (0.8%) while in the middle third, the nasal bone (36.7%) was the most common, followed by zygomatic bone (27.8), Lefort II (14.4), Lefort I (7.8%), dentoalveolar (10.0%), and Lefort III (3.3%). Majority of the patients were treated by open reduction and internal fixation (70.6). Concomitant injuries were 84 (10.8%) with orthopedic injuries accounting for the majority (63.9%). Head injury was associated in 16.3% of cases. RTA was the major etiologic factor of maxillofacial injuries in our setting and the young adult males were the main victims. Henceforth, establishment of regionalized, efficient, and focused trauma centers in various parts of the country particularly for acute trauma should be emphasized. Also, the laws regarding the precautions such as seat belts, speed limits, and traffic rules must be observed strictly to reduce the incidence of RTA.

The study was undertaken to elucidate the association of host haematological and biochemical indices in Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax malaria in order to explore whether these parameters are unique to disease or act as a potential diagnostic marker. Haematological and biochemical parameters in 106 malarial patients and 33 healthy subjects were evaluated. Following parameters were significantly lower in all infection types (P. vivax, P. falciparum and mixed infection); haemoglobin, blood sugar, PCV and blood urea, while ESR is significantly higher in all types of infection whereas serum bilirubin and creatinine are significantly higher except mixed and vivax infection, respectively. Interestingly, parasitaemia, temperature and age are significantly correlated with blood urea, blood sugar and ESR respectively in vivax infection whereas parasitaemia with PCV and blood sugar and age with PCV in falciparum infection. Malaria infected subjects exhibited alterations in some haematological parameters with low haemoglobin, blood sugar and PCV whereas elevated ESR and serum bilirubin being the important findings observed in our study. These evaluations could be considered to be reliable clinical and biochemical markers for promising diagnostic potential during clinical malarial infection in combination with other genetic and classical microscopic parameters. Haematological evaluation could help in prompt and accurate diagnosis and prevent disease progression by facilitating physicians in clinical correlation for better drug regime.

Large proliferation of mobile phone applications result in extensive use of data intensive services such as multimedia download and social network communication. With limited penetration of 3G/4G networks in developing countries, it is common to use low bandwidth 2G services for data communication, resulting in larger download time and correspondingly high power consumption.In this paper, we present a system architecture, Unity, that enables collaborative downloading across co-located peers. Unity uses short range radio interfaces such as Bluetooth/WiFi for local coordination, while the actual content is downloaded using a cellular connection. Unity is designed to support mobile phones with diverse capabilities. End-to-end implementation and evaluation of Unity on Android based phones, with varying workload sizes and number of peers, show that Unity can result in multifold increase in download rate for the co-located peers. We also describe architecture of cloud-based Unity which uses principles of mobility prediction, social interactions, and opportunistic networking to make collaboration more pervasive and useful.

A 3.5-year-old grossly cachectic female child presenting with recurrent vomiting, fever, abdominal distention, abdominal pain and severe weight loss was evaluated for the cause of severe protein energy malnutrition. Investigation revealed a massively dilated stomach with delayed gastric emptying and normal pylorus. On exploratory laparotomy, diagnosis of primary acquired gastric outlet obstruction (Jodhpur disease) was confirmed and she underwent pyloroplasty with uneventful post-operative period. To conclude, this entity should always be included in the differential diagnosis of gastric outlet obstruction with severe malnutrition especially in older children.

BMP-SMAD (bone morphogenetic protein) signaling pathways in association with APT play paramount roles in osteoblastic differentiation, bone formation and embryonic development of human and animals. However, the implications of potent components (BMP6, Smad1, Smad2 and APT) of this pathway in SCD (sickle cell disease) pathology with orthopedic complications (Ortho + SS) are poorly elucidated and substantially unknown. Here, we address the role of BMP6, Smad1, Smad2 and APT mRNA and protein expression in hMDDCs obtained from Ortho + SS patients, employing RT-PCR, qRT-PCR and immunoblotting. Interestingly, we observed that SCD pathology exhibited significantly up-regulated expression of those signaling components at the level of mRNA and protein. Furthermore, exogenous BMP6 induced apoptosis was observed to be significantly associated in Ortho + SS complication and markedly increased the percentage of cells undergoing apoptosis as compared to healthy group. Interestingly, the non-stimulated cells have shown higher apoptotic nuclei percentage than the stimulated cells in pathological condition. Thus, expression of BMP-SMAD signaling components augments apoptosis and up regulates the transcription of these genes and it suggests that induction is due to transcriptional regulation. Taken together, our findings provide evidence that BMP-SMAD signaling components along with APT were over expressed, mediates apoptosis and may play an important role in the SCD pathology with orthopedic complications.

Background: Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) are involved in the various orthopedic complications such as avascular necrosis, osteonecrosis and bone turnover, therefore genes coding for proteins, like BMP4, can be potential candidate for studying orthopedic disorders.Methods: A case-control study was conducted to examine the association between SNP T538C of BMP4 and orthopedic complications in sickling patients by employing PCR-RFLP.Results: A total of 200 cases and 172 control groups were studied from Indian population. T538C SNP has not been implicated in disease and doesn't increase the risk (OR = 0.89, OR = 0.68). We observed no significant association between the T538C polymorphism and case group in the studied population. However, we observed significantly increased uric acid and LDH level in homowild cm, heteromutant (TC) and homomutant (CC) in case group compared to control group (all p = 0.0001) and (p = 0.0001, p = 0.0001, p = 0.015 and p = 0.0001, p = 0.0001, p = 0.0001 respectively) in the studied population.Conclusions: The T/C polymorphism in BMP4 is not associated with case group and in view of present observation, we suggest that evaluation of LDH and uric acid level and its association with polymorphisms in the BMP4 may be considered to be reliable molecular and biochemical markers, and possess promising rational for diagnostic potential in clinical cases. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Spontaneous dissection of the internal carotid artery usually presents with stroke-like symptoms secondary to ischemia in its vascular territory, as well as local signs and symptoms, which may include head, face or neck pain, Horner's syndrome, pulsatile tinnitus, and cranial nerve palsies. We report a case of a 44-year-old healthy white male who presented with tongue swelling mimicking angioedema as an unusual manifestation of spontaneous dissection of the internal carotid artery. Two weeks after the initial presentation, the patient returned with similar symptoms and slurred speech. Upon physical examination, he was noted to have isolated left-sided hypoglossal nerve palsy. Subsequent diagnostic imaging revealed segmental narrowing of the left internal carotid artery. The appearance was consistent with the presence of a spontaneous internal carotid artery dissection with associated pseudoaneurysm formation.

Background: Epinastine is a topical ophthalmic antihistamine and a mast cell stabilizer indicated for treatment of symptoms associated with allergic conjunctivitis. Objective: The objective of this review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the pharmacology, clinical efficacy, tolerability and safety of epinastine 0.05% ophthalmic solution. Methods: Medline literature review from 1950 to 2008. Conclusions: Epinastine 0.05% ophthalmic solution was found to be a safe and effective medication for the relief of symptoms of allergic conjunctivitis. Epinastine demonstrates very low CNS and cardiac toxicity.