Aim: To know the presence of Escherichia coli on the udder skin of the dairy farm buffaloes in the Phagwara region, Punjab, India. Materials and Methods: A total of 135 swabbed samples were collected randomly from the udder of buffaloes in ten dairy farms over the period of three months from August to October 2011 without concern to their breed with the prior approval of the farm owners. The st...

Matrix inversion is a mathematical algorithm that is widely used and applied in many real time engineering applications. It is one of the most computational intensive and time consuming operations especially when it is performed in software. Gauss-Jordan Elimination is one of the many matrix inversion algorithms which has the advantage of using simpler mathematical operations to get the result....

The objective of this work is to improve the preventive maintenance processes used by the electricity distributions companies. This paper is focused on the maintenance of a transformation module in a mid-voltage electrical substation, specifically on the times and prices. Starting from actual data of a mid-voltage electrical substation for a specific transformation module, a Genetic Algorithm w...

In addition to preventing crosstalk among related signaling pathways, scaffold proteins might facilitate signal transduction by preforming multimolecular complexes that can be rapidly activated by incoming signal. In many cases, such as mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades, scaffold proteins are necessary for full activation of a signaling pathway. To date, however, no detailed bioc...

We present a supported membrane platform consisting of a fluid lipid bilayer membrane embedded with a fixed array of gold nanoparticles. The system is realized by preforming a hexagonal array of gold nanoparticles (∼5-7 nm) with controlled spacing (∼50-150 nm) fixed to a silica or glass substrate by block copolymer lithography. Subsequently, a supported membrane is assembled over the intervenin...

One of the basic motivations for solving DCOPs is maintaining agents’ privacy. Thus, researchers have evaluated the privacy loss of DCOP algorithms and defined corresponding notions of privacy preservation for secured DCOP algorithms. However, no secured protocol was proposed for Max-Sum, which is among the most studied DCOP algorithms. As part of the ongoing effort of designing secure DCOP alg...

Textual analysis using machine learning is in high demand for a wide range of applications including recommender systems, business intelligence tools, and electronic personal assistants. Some of these applications need to operate over a wide and unpredictable array of topic areas, but current in-domain, domain adaptation, and multi-domain approaches cannot adequately support this need, due to t...

Thermoplastic towpregs are convenient and scalable raw materials for the fabrication of continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastic matrix composites. In this paper, the potential to employ epoxy and styrene-acrylic sizing agents was evaluated for the making of carbon fiber thermoplastic towpregs via a powder-coating method. The protective effects and thermal stability of these sizing agents were...

Many potential real-world planning applications are on the border of planning and scheduling. Consider a group of robots (like NASA’s Mars Rovers), that can maneuver over a designated area, perform soil tests, and can take pictures of interesting objects. There are many temporal and resource constraints that the robots have to satisfy while preforming any given set of tasks. For example, robots...

From the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer (VCPOL) held in 1985 to the joint United Nations Convention of Climate Change held in 2010, environmental protection has become increasingly urgent. In 2011, the International Standards Organization launched a new energy management system ISO50001 for improving energy efficiency. As an adjunct to these increasingly stringent inter...