A single step extraction-cleanup procedure using porous membrane-protected micro-solid phase extraction (μ-SPE) in conjunction with liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry for the extraction and determination of aflatoxins (AFs) B1, B2, G1 and G2 from food was successfully developed. After the extraction, AFs were desorbed from the μ-SPE device by ultrasonication using acetonitrile. The optimum extraction conditions were: sorbent material, C8; sorbent mass, 20 mg; extraction time, 90 min; stirring speed, 1000 rpm; sample volume, 10 mL; desorption solvent, acetonitrile; solvent volume, 350 μL and ultrasonication period, 25 min without salt addition. Under the optimum conditions, enrichment factor of 11, 9, 9 and 10 for AFG2, AFG1

A simple, economic, rapid, reliable, and stability-indicating high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method has been developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of paracetamol (PCM) and caffeine (CF) in solid dosage form. The chromatographic separations were achieved with a Waters Symmetry® C18 column (5 μm, 4.6 × 150 mm), using a mixture of methanol and water (40:60, v/v) as a mobile phase, under isocratic elution mode with a flow rate of 0.8 mL/min, and ultraviolet (UV) detection was set at 264 nm. The oven temperature for the column was set and maintained at 35 °C. The method was validated according to International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines, and it demonstrated excellent linearity, wi

This study examines postgraduate students’ awareness of pragmatic aspects, including Grice Maxims, Politeness, and Direct and Indirect forms of speech. According to Paul Grice’s theory of implicature, which is considered one of the most important contributions to pragmatics, this paper discusses how postgraduate students can meet the cooperative principle when communicating effectively. It also outlines how does politeness principles influence obeying or violating the maxims and how is the use of direct or indirect forms of utterances prompted by politeness. Sixteen master’s students of Linguistics and Literature were asked to take a multiple-choice test. The test will be represented along with the interpretation of each optio

In Computer-based applications, there is a need for simple, low-cost devices for user authentication. Biometric authentication methods namely keystroke dynamics are being increasingly used to strengthen the commonly knowledge based method (example a password) effectively and cheaply for many types of applications. Due to the semi-independent nature of the typing behavior it is difficult to masquerade, making it useful as a biometric. In this paper, C4.5 approach is used to classify user as authenticated user or impostor by combining unigraph features (namely Dwell time (DT) and flight time (FT)) and digraph features (namely Up-Up Time (UUT) and Down-Down Time (DDT)). The results show that DT enhances the performance of digraph features by i

The ability of using aluminum filings which is locally solid waste was tested as a mono media in gravity rapid filter. The present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of variation of influent water turbidity (10, 20and 30 NTU); flow rate(30, 40, and 60 l/hr) and bed height (30and60)cm on the performance of aluminum filings filter media for 5 hours run time and compare it with the conventional sand filter. The results indicated that aluminum filings filter showed better performance than sand filter in the removal of turbidity and in the reduction of head loss. Results showed that the statistical model developed by the multiple linear regression was proved to be
valid, and it could be used to predict head loss in aluminum filings

     Many authors investigated the problem of the early visibility of the new crescent moon after the conjunction and proposed many criteria addressing this issue in the literature. This article presented a proposed criterion for early crescent moon sighting based on a deep-learned pattern recognizer artificial neural network (ANN) performance. Moon sight datasets were collected from various sources and used to learn the ANN. The new criterion relied on the crescent width and the arc of vision from the edge of the crescent bright limb. The result of that criterion was a control value indicating the moon's visibility condition, which separated the datasets into four regions: invisible, telescope only, probably visible, and certai

This paper features the modeling and design of a pole placement and output Feedback control technique for the Active Vibration Control (AVC) of a smart flexible cantilever beam for a Single Input Single Output (SISO) case. Measurements and actuation actions done by using patches of piezoelectric layer, it is bonded to the master structure as sensor/actuator at a certain position of the cantilever beam.
The smart structure is modeled based on the concept of piezoelectric theory, Bernoulli -Euler beam theory, using Finite Element Method (FEM) and the state space techniques. The number of modes is reduced using the controllability and observability grammians retaining the first three
dominant vibratory modes, and for the reduced syste

The Dirichlet process is an important fundamental object in nonparametric Bayesian modelling, applied to a wide range of problems in machine learning, statistics, and bioinformatics, among other fields. This flexible stochastic process models rich data structures with unknown or evolving number of clusters. It is a valuable tool for encoding the true complexity of real-world data in computer models. Our results show that the Dirichlet process improves, both in distribution density and in signal-to-noise ratio, with larger sample size; achieves slow decay rate to its base distribution; has improved convergence and stability; and thrives with a Gaussian base distribution, which is much better than the Gamma distribution. The performance depen