Involvement of rural women in aquaculture: an innovative approach

Although women have proved to be competent in adopting new aquaculture technologies, their role is very much restricted and often ignored. One of the major reasons is the location of aquaculture sites and several sociocultural taboos against women who strive to earn for their family’s subsistence in rural areas. There is a gender bias in many aquaculture activities. To ensure that women utilize their full potential in profitable activities like aquaculture, it is necessary to provide capacity building support to rural women, which will eventually lead to their empowerment. In countries like India, the technology provided to women must take into account cultural aspects. One such project - backyard ornamental fish breeding and management - has been found to offer immense scope for improving the livelihood of rural women. This paper gives some practical tips for dissemination of technology in the rural sector, particularly to rural women

Antichain cutsets of strongly connected posets

Rival and Zaguia showed that the antichain cutsets of a finite Boolean lattice are exactly the level sets. We show that a similar characterization of antichain cutsets holds for any strongly connected poset of locally finite height. As a corollary, we get such a characterization for semimodular lattices, supersolvable lattices, Bruhat orders, locally shellable lattices, and many more. We also consider a generalization to strongly connected hypergraphs having finite edges.Comment: 12 pages; v2 contains minor fixes for publicatio

Uptake of branched-chain alpha-keto acids in \u3ci\u3eBacillus subtilis\u3c/i\u3e

Bacillus subtilis has a constitutive system for the uptake of alpha-keto-beta-methylvalerate, alpha-ketoisovalerate, and (probably) alpha-ketoisocaproate. A mutation, kauA1, which blocks the uptake of alpha-keto-beta-methylvalerate and alpha-ketoisovalerate, is located between metB and citK on the B. subtilis chromosome

Automatically Designing CNN Architectures for Medical Image Segmentation

Deep neural network architectures have traditionally been designed and explored with human expertise in a long-lasting trial-and-error process. This process requires huge amount of time, expertise, and resources. To address this tedious problem, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally find hyperparameters of a deep network architecture automatically. We specifically focus on designing neural architectures for medical image segmentation task. Our proposed method is based on a policy gradient reinforcement learning for which the reward function is assigned a segmentation evaluation utility (i.e., dice index). We show the efficacy of the proposed method with its low computational cost in comparison with the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation networks. We also present a new architecture design, a densely connected encoder-decoder CNN, as a strong baseline architecture to apply the proposed hyperparameter search algorithm. We apply the proposed algorithm to each layer of the baseline architectures. As an application, we train the proposed system on cine cardiac MR images from Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) MICCAI 2017. Starting from a baseline segmentation architecture, the resulting network architecture obtains the state-of-the-art results in accuracy without performing any trial-and-error based architecture design approaches or close supervision of the hyperparameters changes.Comment: Accepted to Machine Learning in Medical Imaging (MLMI 2018

Method for analyzing radiation sensitivity of integrated circuits

A method for analyzing the radiation sensitivity of an integrated circuit is described to determine the components. The application of a narrow radiation beam to portions of the circuit is considered. The circuit is operated under normal bias conditions during the application of radiation in a dosage that is likely to cause malfunction of at least some transistors, while the circuit is monitored for failure of the irradiated transistor. When a radiation sensitive transistor is found, then the radiation beam is further narrowed and, using a fresh integrated circuit, a very narrow beam is applied to different parts of the transistor, such as its junctions, to locate the points of greatest sensitivity

Mandibular Dentition in Six Species of Salamanders, genus Plethodon (Caudata: Plethontidae), from Arkansas Using Scanning Electron Microscopy

The mandibular (dentary) dentition of six species of Plethodon (P. caddoensis, P. dorsalis, P. fourchensis, P. glutinosus, P. ouachitae, and P. serratus) from Arkansas was studied using scanning electron microscopy. In all species, the mandibular teeth were bicuspid, and each tooth possessed a prominent labial cusp and a well-developed, inward-curving lingual cusp. All species showed similar tooth crown features, except P. caddoensis which exhibited a reduced tooth height and a reduced lingual cusp (only slightly larger than the labial cusp). We compared our data with other studies on premaxillary, maxillary, and palatal teeth in Plethodon and found overall similarities in tooth types. Tooth morphology does not appear to be an effective tool for taxonomic purposes in our Plethodon species because of the range of morphological variation in tooth structure

Combinatorial Alexander Duality -- a Short and Elementary Proof

Let X be a simplicial complex with the ground set V. Define its Alexander dual as a simplicial complex X* = {A \subset V: V \setminus A \notin X}. The combinatorial Alexander duality states that the i-th reduced homology group of X is isomorphic to the (|V|-i-3)-th reduced cohomology group of X* (over a given commutative ring R). We give a self-contained proof.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure; v3: the sign function was simplifie