Elucidating the sustained decline in under‐three child linear growth faltering in Nepal, 1996-2016

Childhood linear growth faltering remains a major public health concern in Nepal. Nevertheless, over the past 20 years, Nepal sustained one of the most rapid reductions in the prevalence of stunting worldwide. First, our study analysed the trends in height-for-age z-score (HAZ), stunting prevalence, and available nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific determinants of linear growth faltering in under-three children across Nepal's Family Health Survey 1996 and Nepal's Demographic and Health Surveys 2001, 2006, 2001, and 2016. Second, we constructed pooled multivariable linear regression models and decomposed the contributions of our time-variant determinants on the predicted changes in HAZ and stunting over the past two decades. Our findings indicate substantial improvements in HAZ (38.5%) and reductions in stunting (-42.6%) and severe stunting prevalence (-63.9%) in Nepalese children aged 0-35 months. We also report that the increment in HAZ, across the 1996-2016 period, was significantly associated (confounder-adjustedp< .05) with household asset index, maternal and paternal years of education, maternal body mass index and height, basic child vaccinations, preceding birth interval, childbirth in a medical facility, and prenatal doctor visits. Furthermore, our quantitative decomposition of HAZ identified advances in utilisation of health care and related services (31.7% of predicted change), household wealth accumulation (25%), parental education (21.7%), and maternal nutrition (8.3%) as key drivers of the long-term and sustained progress against child linear growth deficits. Our research reiterates the multifactorial nature of chronic child undernutrition and the need for coherent multisectoral nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific strategies at national scale to further improve linear growth in Nepal

Monitoring costs, credit constraints and entrepreneurship

The vast majority of firms in developing economies are micro and small enterprises owned by families whose members also provide the labour to the units. Often, they fail to grow in size even with the relaxation of credit constraints. In this paper, we show that frictions in the labour market leading to monitoring costs tend to reduce the growth of the firm via two channels: (1) it forces the entrepreneur to devote more time on monitoring hired labour from outside family which curtails her time on productive activities leading to failures of firm's projects. (2) The need to pay a premium wage over the market rate in order to incentivize workers makes it costlier for the firm to expand in size via hiring outside labour. In this framework, we show that possibility of an inverted U- shaped relationship between the credit supply and the size of the firm, measured by hiring of non family labour, indicating frictions in the labour market may outweigh the effects of the easing of borrowing constraints of the firm. We then use a unique data-set comprising large nationally representative surveys of small and micro-enterprises in Indian manufacturing and find support for the existence of such a non-monotonic relationship attributed to both frictions in the credit and labour markets

Effects of Molecular Crowding on stretching of polymers in poor solvent

We consider a linear polymer chain in a disordered environment modeled by percolation clusters on a square lattice. The disordered environment is meant to roughly represent molecular crowding as seen in cells. The model may be viewed as the simplest representation of biopolymers in a cell. We show the existence of intermediate states during stretching arising as a consequence of molecular crowding. In the constant distance ensemble the force-extension curves exhibit oscillations. We observe the emergence of two or more peaks in the probability distribution curves signaling the coexistence of different states and indicating that the transition is discontinuous unlike what is observed in the absence of molecular crowding.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Significance of Activation Energy in Process Metallurgy

A study of thermal behaviour, thermal degradation kinetics, and effect of composition on flow characterisation of blast furnace slag is important to Understanding the flow characteristics of blast furnace (B/F) slag. It is an important parameter for efficiency/productivity of a blast furnace. In the present study flow characteristics of five different B/F slag (C/S: 1.04, 1.192, 1.107, 1.101, and 1.189) were investigated. This study was predominantly based on the estimation of activation energy. The activation energy was estimated using two methods: differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and High temperature viscometer. DSC of different slag were measured at 30-1300oC @ 2o, 4o, 6o, 8o and 10oC/min. Activation energy was estimated from such DSC plots using Kissinger and Ozawa methods. It was observed that activation energy is largely dependent on C/S ratio of B/F Slag – The activation energy decreases with increase in C/S ratio. The flow characteristics of different B/F slag were also investigated by high temperature heating microscope, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM). The estimated IDT (initial deformation temperature), ST (softening temperature), HT (hemispherical temperature) and FT (fusion temperature) of different B/F slag was shown in table. Phase analysis of XRD and SEM micrographs support the results of flow characteristics measured by heating microscope

ANALYSIS OF PHYTO-CONSTITUENTS, ANTIOXIDANT, AND ALPHA AMYLASE INHIBITORY ACTIVITIES OF PERSEA AMERICANA MILL., RHODODENDRON ARBORETUM SM. RUBUS ELLIPTICUS SM. FROM ARGHAKHANCHI DISTRICT NEPAL

Objective: To evaluate the phytochemical, antioxidant activities, and α-amylase inhibition assay for methanolic extract of three ethnomedicinal plants, namely Persea americana Mill., Rubus ellipticus Sm., and Rhododendron arboretum Sm. collected from Arghakhanchi District of Nepal using in vitro studies.Methods: Methanolic plant extracts were prepared by cold percolation method. Analysis of phytochemical constituents was carried out using standard methods. The 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) assay was used to evaluate in vitro antioxidants activities. Furthermore, inhibition effect of extracts on α- amylase enzyme was carried out by using starch as a substrate, pancreatic α-amylase as the enzyme, and acarbose as standard.Results: Phytochemical screening of methanolic extract of all three selected plants displayed the presence of different chemical constituents such as alkaloids, polyphenols, flavonoids, terpenoids, saponins, glycosides, and tannins. The results of DPPH assay revealed that R. ellipticus and R. arboreum were most active with half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) values 33.41 μg/ml and 47.28 μg/ml, respectively. R. ellipticus was found to be effective toward α-amylase inhibition with IC50 values 269.94 μg/ml.Conclusion: The preliminary results of this study have put forward R. ellipticus into promising herbs with good antioxidant activities and α-amylase inhibition potential although further studies are needed to assess its mechanism of action

A Mixed-Method Study to Determine the Benefits of Periconceptional Folic Acid Supplementation and Effects of Folic Acid Deficiency in Mothers on Birth Outcomes.

BACKGROUND: Evidence from high income countries shows mothers who are supplemented with folic acid in their periconceptional period and early pregnancy have significantly reduced adverse outcomes like birth defects. However, in India there is a paucity of data on association of birth defects and folic acid supplementation. We identified a few important questions to be answered using separate scientific methods and then planned to triangulate the information. OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we describe the protocol of our study that aims to determine the association of folic acid and pregnancy outcomes like neural tube defects (NTDs) and orofacial clefts (OFCs). We decided to fill the gaps in knowledge from India to determine public health consequences of folic acid deficiency and factors influencing dietary and periconceptional consumption of folic acid. METHODS: The proposed study will be carried out in five stages and will examine the questions related to folic acid deficiency across selected locations in South and North India. The study will be carried out over a period of 4 years through the hierarchical evidence-based approach. At first a systematic review was conducted to pool the current birth prevalence of NTDs and orofacial clefts OFCs in India. To investigate the population prevalence, we plan to use the key informant method to determine prevalence of NTDs and OFCs. To determine the normal serum estimates of folic acid, iron, and vitamin B12 among Indian women (15-35 years), we will conduct a population-based, cross-sectional study. We will further strengthen the evidence of association between OFCs and folic acid by conducting a hospital-based, case-control study across three locations of India. Lastly, using qualitative methods we will understand community and health workers perspective on factors that decide the intake of folic acid supplements. RESULTS: This study will provide evidence on the community prevalence of birth defects and prevalence folic acid and vitamin B12 deficiency in the community. The case-control study will help understand the association of folic acid deficiency with OFCs. CONCLUSIONS: The results from this study are intended to strengthen the evidence base in childhood disability for planning and policy initiatives

Catastrophic Interference is Mitigated in Naturalistic Power-Law Learning Environments

Neural networks often suffer from catastrophic interference (CI): performance on previously learned tasks drops off significantly when learning a new task. This contrasts strongly with humans, who can sequentially learn new tasks without appreciably forgetting previous tasks. Prior work has explored various techniques for mitigating CI such as regularization, rehearsal, generative replay, and distillation methods. The current work takes a different approach, one guided by cognitive science research showing that in naturalistic environments, the probability of encountering a task decreases as a power-law of the time since it was last performed. We argue that a realistic evaluation of techniques for the mitigation of CI should be performed in simulated naturalistic learning environments. Thus, we evaluate the extent of mitigation of CI when training simple rehearsal-based methods in power-law environments similar to the ones humans face. Our work explores this novel rehearsal-based approach for a domain-incremental task: learning permutations in the MNIST task. We compare our rehearsal environment with other baselines to show its efficacy in promoting continual learning. Additionally, we investigate whether this environment shows forward facilitation, i.e., faster learning of later tasks. Next, we explore the robustness of our learning environment to the number of tasks, model size, and amount of data rehearsed after each task. Notably, our results show that the performance is comparable or superior to that of models trained using popular regularization methods and also to rehearsals in non-power-law environments. The benefits of this training paradigm include simplicity and the lack of a need for extra neural circuitry. In addition, because our method is orthogonal to other methods, future research can combine training in power-law environments with other continual learning mechanisms

The Impact of Regulatory and Supervisory Structures on Bank Risk and Returns : Evidence from Dual Banking System

This project is a discussion in regard to dual banking systems and how banking regulatory and supervisory frameworks affect bank efficiency. The dual banking system in question here is one where both commercial conventional banks co-exist with Islamic or Sharia compliant financial services. This project examines 11 countries who are OIC members and have adopted either wholly or partially the requirements of Basel II and uses data from Bankscope 2.0 from the 5 year period ending 2010. It examines to what extent similar regulations would affect the 2 banking systems and how best could policymakers enact frameworks which would then help promote the efficiency of banking where both sectors are present

Impacts of Long-Term Flood-Induced Sedimentation on Agricultural Land: Case Study of the 2008 Koshi Flood in Eastern Nepal

Flood of August 2008 in eastern lowlands of Nepal affected around 2.64 million people in India and Nepal, including 65,000 people and 700 ha fertile land in Nepal. It was estimated that 20% of land was still barren even in 2016 (eight years after the flood). The long-term effect of flood-fed sedimentation in context of agriculture practices is the focus of this research. Information from questionnaire survey, field measurement and lab analysis are the adapted methods for the assessment. The affected area is divided into four zones with respect to the depths from 0.10 m to 5.0 m. The area where sedimentation thickness is less than 0.5m is in manageable condition within a year and in between 0.5m to 1.5m thickness could not be suitable for traditional crop even after 8 years. The thickness existed more than 2m is not suitable for any crop even after the 8 years because of its long-term impact on cultivation in context of flood-fed sedimentation and recovery. From Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) analysis also indicated that the recovery with vegetation trend is about 10% per year in less than 2m of thick sedimentation zones. Size of sediments and sedimentation thickness are the significant parameters to recover flood-fed sedimentation zone