Introduction:The aim of the present study was to compare fixation of mandibular anterior fractures following open reduction using lag screws or miniplates.Materials and Methods:This prospective study was conducted on 20 patients diagnosed with cases of displaced mandibular anterior fractures treated with open reduction and internal fixation. The patients were then randomly allocated to either of two groups – Group A: two 2.5 mm stainless steel lag screws were placed in 10 patients. Group B: two 2.5 mm miniplates were placed in 10 patients for the fixation of fractures. Subsequent follow-up was done on the 1st day, 1st, 4th, and 36th week postoperatively. During every follow-up, patient was assessed clinically for infection, malocclusion, loosening of plate/screw, malunion/nonunion, and masticatory efficiency. Radiographs (orthopantogram) were taken preoperative, 1st, 4th, and 36th postoperative week to compare the osteosynthesis between the two groups. Pain was objectively measured using a visual analog scale. The data collected was subjected to unpaired t-test and paired t-test for statistical analysis.Result:It was found that lag screw placement was rapid in comparison of miniplate placement. 3rd month postoperative assessment revealed Lag screw group to have better biting efficiency, and better bone healing which was statistically significant when compared with miniplate group.Conculsion:Our study suggests that lag screw osteosynthesis can be advocated as a valid treatment modality in the management of mandibular symphysis and parasymphysis fractures.

This paper presents a hybrid technique combining EvolutionaryStrategy(ES) with Biogeography Based Optimization (BBO/ES) algorithm to solve economic load dispatch problems of thermal plants considering equality and inequality constraints, transmission losses and valve point loading. Biogeography is a recently developed heuristic algorithm which has shown impressive performance on many well known benchmarks. In order to improve BBO, distinctive features from ES are incorporated in BBO modification. This algorithm searches for the global optimum mainly through two steps: migration and mutation. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been verified on two different test systems, both small and large involving varying degree of complexity. A comparison of simulation results reveals that the proposed algorithm is better than those listed in the comparison table in terms of the quality of the solution. This method seems to be promising alternative approach for solving the ELD problems in practical power systems.

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The surface of silicondioxide/silicon structures is charged with the tip of a cantilever in contact mode by application of a voltage. Then, the surface potential is measured contactless using the Kelvin option of an atomic force microscope. On the position of the charged domain a potential difference in relation to the uncharged region is found. It turns out that the height and the width of this potential difference depend on the charging time, on the height of the charging voltage, on the sample thickness, and on the doping of the siliconsubstrate. Furthermore, a time dependent spread and a decay of the surface potential are observed. For dry samples the decay is slower than for wetted samples. Due to this long-term stability at dry samples and the possibility to reverse the sign of the deposited charge by recharging in opposite direction it is thinkable to use the system as a surface charge memory device.

This paper describes our approach for Task 9 of SemEval 2021: Statement Verification and Evidence Finding with Tables. We participated in both subtasks, namely statement verification and evidence finding. For the subtask of statement verification, we extend the TAPAS model to adapt to the 'unknown' class of statements by finetuning it on an augmented version of the task data. For the subtask of evidence finding, we finetune the DistilBERT model in a Siamese setting.