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A single-layer coaxial-fed compact rectangular microstrip antenna with very low voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) is presented in this paper. The simulated VSWR of the proposed antenna 1.00374 is obtained near the center frequency of the operating band (3.5 GHz). Simulation and measurement results indicate that the bandwidth (simulated: 3.36–3.715 GHz, and measured: 3.295–3.645 GHz) of the antenna exceeds 10% below VSWR 2, when the size reduction of the antenna is about 81.6%. The realized peak gain is obtained about 2.15 dBi at 3.5 GHz. For the verification of the computational results, two designs were fabricated and measured. Good agreements between simulated and measured results were found. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper the authors have proposed a new 3x3 reversible gate and also proposed the reversible combinational logic circuits with better optimized quantum cost, garbage outputs and delay. The proposed new reversible logic gate is used to design of reversible 1-bit comparator circuit and realization of different logic functions such as NOT, AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, NXOR. The proposed new reversible logic gate is represented by quantum implementation. The quantum cost of proposed gate is 4. The quantum cost, garbage output and delay of proposed reversible 1-bit comparator circuit are 6 which is better w. r. t. previously reported results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The complaint of insomnia is one of the most common symptoms a physician encounters in his/her day-to-day practice. Though rarely present as the stand-alone problem, it accompanies other organic or psychological symptoms. Its incidence is on the rise in ever increasing stressful life of present times. Objectives: The objective was to study the prevalence and some sociodemographic factors associated with insomnia among the urban population of Kamarhati municipal area of district 24 Parganas (N) of the state West Bengal. Materials and Methods: The study was carried out at "Kamarhati" municipal area. Ten percent of householders of two randomly selected wards were surveyed. Self-reported sleep questionnaire insomnia symptoms questionnaire (ISQ) was administered to all adult members. Persons with a history of major psychiatric illness, regular shift work, daily alcohol consumption more than four units and on chemotherapy or radiotherapy were excluded from the survey. Results: ISQ identified 15.4% prevalence of insomnia. It was high in persons with co-morbid chronic physical illness (28.1%) compared to persons free from that (10.9%) (P < 0.001). Insomnia was significantly higher among people living in joint families than those living in a nuclear family. The prevalence of insomnia increases significantly with the increasing age (P < 0.05). Conclusion: Findings of this study showed that the prevalence of insomnia in urban India is high. Increased life expectancy, increased burden of chronic illnesses, changing lifestyle, uncertainty of urban life contributes to high prevalence of insomnia that in turn affects quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A concentric circular antenna array (CCAA) consists of elements positioned on the periphery of imaginary circles on a plane having a common centre and different radii. The simplest way to feed the elements of such an array is to use uniform excitation. However, with a non-uniform excitation profile, considerable reduction of the side lobe level (SLL) may be achieved at the cost of the added complexity. The difference of SLLs (with respect to the uniform excitation case) becomes even more prominent when the beam width of the antenna needs to be kept fixed. In this paper, we formulate the task of designing a non-uniformly excited CCAA as a constrained optimization problem and use genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the same. The goal is to determine an optimum set of weights for antenna elements which provides a radiation pattern with maximum SLL reduction with the constraint of a fixed beamwidth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cross-sectional study was carried out at Naihati municipal area in West Bengal to study the prevalence and some epidemiological factors in transmission of leprosy. Side by side, the validity of WHO operational classification was also tested by using slit skin smear examination as gold standard. A group of trained paramedical workers, supervised by epidemiologist conducted house to house survey work. Experienced dermatologist and neurologist examined suspected cases. Overall prevalence of leprosy were 9.9 per 10000, of which 53% were new cases. Epidemiologically manual workers, living in slums and unhygienic surroundings had significantly higher risk of developing leprosy. Sensitivity and specificity of WHO operational classification (> 5 skin lesion= MB) was found to be quite high (sensitivity 85.9% and specificity 83.3%) in this study. However addition of > 2 nerve lesions to this criteria increase sensitivity to 90.1% without much affecting the specificity (79.8%).