A simple surface realization engine for Telugu

Publisher PD

Exploring traditional and metropolitan Indian arts using the Muggu tradition as a case study

The past century has witnessed fervent debates about dichotomies in Indian art, articulated variously as high and low art, art and craft, and fine and decorative art. The current avatar of such dichotomies is expressed as a divide between metropolitan and traditional art. The former is understood to be that which is displayed and marketed in urban art institutions and associated with individualism; the latter is generally qualified by terms like folk, religious, ritual, rural or tribal, displayed and sold in non-institutional contexts and associated with a collective identity. Despite frequent attempts to resolve the above-mentioned dichotomies, such hierarchies persist. Indian art is currently experiencing a resurgence, which some see more as a by-product of a rapidly growing economy, rather than as an explicitly artistic maturing. Notwithstanding this recent boom, many writers and artists lament the state of Indian cultural institutions. One such critic is Rustom Bharucha, whose essay on Indian museums provides one of the starting points for this study. The difficulty of reconciling the modern and the traditional appears to lie at the heart of these issues – a problem that both metropolitan and traditional artists face. In this project, I consider myself as an example of a metropolitan Indian artist and the issues I encountered as possibly characteristic of those that other metropolitan artists face. As a case study of traditional arts, I look at muggus, floor-drawings made by women in Andhra Pradesh, south India. Their ephemerality, ritualism and aesthetics furnish relevant instances for a discussion on metropolitan and traditional arts, challenging existing stereotypes and prejudices in the display, production and discourse of traditional arts. This study crosses the academic boundaries of anthropology, art-practice, art history, cultural theory, ethnography and visual culture to allow for a more layered exploration of Indian metropolitan and traditional arts

Connected and disrupted hydrosocial territories: the making of modern socionatures through inter-basin water transfers

Actual and projected water scarcity has accelerated the scale of hydrological infrastructure and the number of Inter-Basin Water Transfers (IBWTs), which move freshwater from one geographically distinct river catchment or basin to another. IBWTs are supply-side programs that pose distinct water governance challenges. If all projected IBWTs are completed by 2050, the volume of water transferred would be 48% of global water withdrawals. This article examines IBWTs from a socionatural perspective. Building on the political ecology scholarship of hydrosocial territories, I probe how IWBTs co-constitute and reconfigure socionatural relations, and how these are experienced by communities and ecologies in unequal ways. I discuss how IBWTs bring about changes, what features of hydrosocial territories they influence, and what conflicts emerge. For 29 IBWTs I define their multiple socionatural dimensions – biophysical, socioeconomic and governance – and the interrelations between them. IBWTs generally degrade biophysical and socioeconomic conditions for communities in water-sending "donor" basins, and condition future territorial reconfigurations. Water governance institutions are ill-equipped to take on the challenge that IBWTs bring in governing across multiple basins, indicated by the conflicts they generate. These concern defense of territory and ways of life, as well as allocation disputes. Political conflicts emerge because worlds shift irrevocably when IBWTs become fixtures of hydrosocial territories

Marine Fisheries Information Service No.230

Marine Fisheries Information Service, Technical and Extension Serie

The New Hampshire, Vol. 55, No. 6 (Oct. 28, 1965)

An independent student produced newspaper from the University of New Hampshire

An analysis of screen reader use in India

We present the results of two surveys and a qualitative interview-based study with users of screen readers in India. Our early interviews moved us in the direction of examining patterns that differentiate users of two particular software applications -- the dominant market standard JAWS and the free, open source challenger NVDA. A comparison between the two is timely and particularly relevant to issues elsewhere in the developing world. In the short term, the question of choosing one application over another could be based on price and support for custom-made applications, but in the long term, issues of language support are likely to be of concern as well. We explore software adoption behavior and present results that show the relationship between the quality of audio and peoples' willingness to use one software over another. We also compare the switch from JAWS to NVDA to other kinds of switches from dominant software to open source options. In conclusion, we discuss the business aspects of screen readers and examine why the comparison between these two applications is particularly important in the discussion on accessible personal computing for people with vision impairments in the developing world.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95718/1/McCarthy-Pal-Cutrell-ScreenReaders.pd

Micro-level Drought Preparedness with Information Management and Rural Knowledge Centres: A Framework to Support Rural Farm Families

Drought and desertification are serious problems that significantly affect hundreds of millions of people and ecosystems. When drought occurs, the farm communities are usually the first to be affected because of their heavy dependence on the stored soil water. If the rainfall deficiencies continue, even people who are not directly engaged in agriculture will be affected by drought. This underscores the vulnerability of entire societies to this phenomenon; this vulnerability varies significantly from one nation to another. Although crisis management approach is routinely followed approach for providing relief, the studies on drought, carried out in different parts of the world, suggested that preparedness is better than relief and information is backbone of drought preparedness. However, the efforts have been taken for generating micro-level drought assessment and early warning is least understood until recent years. It was therefore, in this study, an attempt has been made to develop a micro-level drought preparedness framework to support rural farm families. The established practices such as Sources of Agricultural Information management (International/National/Extra-Institutional), Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Enabled Rural Knowledge Centres (RKC), Open and Distance Learning Methods, micro-level drought assessment and early Warning technique have been identified as key components in developing such framework. These components were considered as the objectives of this research study, and conducted series of studies and experiments to understand the existing approaches and needed arrangements in defining and developing proposed framework. For each finding reported in the experimental objectives, a clear chain of evidence was established Abstract supported also by interview statements. The individual micro-level drought preparedness framework components were integrated carefully, based on the series of findings, systemic analysis of the data and the continuous interpretation of the observations, to develop the proposed framework. The study concludes that the proposed framework has shown a way to improve micro-level drought preparedness by bringing various ICT tools, information management techniques, open learning approaches, and micro-level drought assessment technique under one umbrella with an intermediary entity called ICT enabled RKCs owned and run by rural farm families. The usability evaluation studies on individual components revealed that the approaches such as these will have implications in planning micro-level drought preparedness strategies. The vulnerable rural families now have the means to estimate their own vulnerability and can use the information available at ICT enabled RKCs to make more informed decisions, which offers a sounder basis for designing drought preparedness and adaptation strategies