Investigation on the possible control of grain size on development of ‘mud cracks’: a preliminary experimental study of recent Gangetic alluvial samples, West Bengal, India

The so-called mud cracks, possibly the most common deformation feature in sediment, are evident in almost all dried-up exposed sediment surfaces. Several experimental attempts have so far been made to explain the evolution of mud cracks. However, most of the experiments were carried out with bentonite clay or other artificial substances in controlled heating condition. Therefore, those experiments could not or were not performed to elucidate the control of grain size on crack development although it has been observed that cracks develop in almost all types of soil. The present work is an attempt to understand the control of sediment grain size in development and evolution of these cracks. This experimental study was carried out in near-natural condition. Sediment samples of three different grain-size fractions ranging from sub-sand size to very coarse sand size were used for the experiment. The 10-day-long experiment with watering and drying of the samples under sunlight shows that the time gap between watering and appearance of cracks, smoothness of crack walls, number of cracks and also number of polygons with cracks as their arms are dependent on grain size of the sediment.http://link.springer.com/journal/125172022-01-15hj2021Geolog

Physics Potential of the ICAL detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO)

The upcoming 50 kt magnetized iron calorimeter (ICAL) detector at the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is designed to study the atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos separately over a wide range of energies and path lengths. The primary focus of this experiment is to explore the Earth matter effects by observing the energy and zenith angle dependence of the atmospheric neutrinos in the multi-GeV range. This study will be crucial to address some of the outstanding issues in neutrino oscillation physics, including the fundamental issue of neutrino mass hierarchy. In this document, we present the physics potential of the detector as obtained from realistic detector simulations. We describe the simulation framework, the neutrino interactions in the detector, and the expected response of the detector to particles traversing it. The ICAL detector can determine the energy and direction of the muons to a high precision, and in addition, its sensitivity to multi-GeV hadrons increases its physics reach substantially. Its charge identification capability, and hence its ability to distinguish neutrinos from antineutrinos, makes it an efficient detector for determining the neutrino mass hierarchy. In this report, we outline the analyses carried out for the determination of neutrino mass hierarchy and precision measurements of atmospheric neutrino mixing parameters at ICAL, and give the expected physics reach of the detector with 10 years of runtime. We also explore the potential of ICAL for probing new physics scenarios like CPT violation and the presence of magnetic monopoles.Comment: 139 pages, Physics White Paper of the ICAL (INO) Collaboration, Contents identical with the version published in Pramana - J. Physic

Treatment Expenditure Pattern of Epileptic Patients: A Study from a Tertiary Care Hospital, Kolkata, India

Introduction. Neurological diseases are very important causes of prolonged morbidity and disability leading to profound financial loss. Epilepsy is one of the most important neurological disorders. It being a cost intensive disorder poses a significant economic burden to the country. Aims and Objectives. The study was conducted among the persons with epilepsy (PWE) to assess their expenditure pattern for epilepsy treatment and its rural urban difference. Materials and Methods. 315 PWE selected by systematic random sampling and their caregivers were interviewed with the predesigned, pretested semistructured proforma. Subsequently data were compiled and analyzed using SPSS 18.0 software. Results and Conclusion. Majority of the study population were in the age group of 16–30 years. Majority belonged to classes IV and V of Prasad socioeconomic status scale. Average total expenditure per month for treatment of epilepsy was 219 INR, mainly contributed by drugs, travel, investigations, and so forth. Rural population was having higher treatment expenditure for epilepsy specially for travel and food and lodging in order to get epilepsy treatment. Wage loss in the last three months was present in 42.86% study subjects which was both affected by seizure episodes and travel for visits. Better district care would have helped in this situation

Tobacco abuse among school going adolescents in a rural area of West Bengal, India

Adolescents are vulnerable targets of tobacco industry with all consequences of usage. Studies reveal that tobacco abuse is rising in this age group in India. A cross sectional survey was carried out in two coeducational high schools of Anandanagar village of Singur block, Hooghly district, West Bengal among 276 students of VIII-IX standard to study the knowledge and abuse of tobacco and to find out influencing socio-demographic factors. Knowledge score was higher in females, students from nuclear families, and those with literate parents. Low prevalence of tobacco intake was obtained among the students, with 9.8% reported having ever used smokeless tobacco and 4.3% ever smoked. Tobacco intake was higher among those with a history of parental tobacco intake. Continued information education and communication (IEC) activities should be conducted by the school authorities, with involvement of nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and parents for primary prevention

Stable feature selection using copula based mutual information

Feature selection is a key step in many machine learning tasks. A majority of the existing methods of feature selection address the problem by devising some scoring function while treating the features independently, thereby overlooking their interdependencies. We leverage the scale invariance property of copula to construct a greedy, supervised feature selection algorithm that maximizes the feature relevance while minimizing the redundant information content. Multivariate copula is used in the proposed copula Based Feature Selection (CBFS) to discover the dependence structure between features. The incorporation of copula-based multivariate dependency in the formulation of mutual information helps avoid averaging over multiple instances of bivariate dependencies, thus eliminating the average estimation error introduced when bivariate dependency is used between a pair of feature variables. Under a controlled setting, our algorithm outperformed the existing best practice methods in warding off the noise in data. On several real and synthetic datasets, the proposed algorithm performed competitively in maximizing classification accuracy. CBFS also outperforms the other methods in terms of its noise tolerance property.</p

Domestic violence among ever married women of reproductive age group in a slum area of Kolkata

Background: Domestic violence has serious impact on women′s health and well-being. A nationwide survey conducted in India observed that 37.2% of women experienced violence after marriage. Objectives: To assess the prevalence of domestic violence among the ever married women in reproductive age group and to find out the types of domestic violence and factors associated with it. Materials and Methods: The study was a community based cross-sectional study, conducted in a slum area of Kolkata. Results and Conclusion: Overall prevalence of domestic violence was 54%, of which 41.9% suffered from both current and lifetime physical and psychological violence. Presence of property, higher per capita income and social support were protective factors against domestic violence, whereas alcohol addiction and multiple sex partners were the important contributory factors for it. The study recommended more social support, awareness and income generation for women in the slum areas

Epidemiological profile of snake bite in South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal with focus on underreporting of snake bite deaths

Background: Snake bite is a neglected public health problem in India. Very few community based epidemiological studies in India have been published so far on this issue. Most of the studies were carried out on hospital data. Previous community-based survey in the state revealed that only 22% snake bite victims attended hospitals. Objectives: The objective of the present study is to find out the epidemiological profile of snake bite in eight blocks of the South 24-Paraganas district of West Bengal and to explore the under reporting of snake bite deaths in health facilities in that area during the study period. Materials and Methods: A retrospective analysis of snake bite data was carried out from a community-based epidemiological survey on 1.9 million populations. This survey was done door-to-door from January 2009 to October 2010 to get epidemiological profile of snake bite of the previous 2 years. The data of direct survey was compared with the official report of the same area to evaluate the hospital-based data with focus on underreporting of snakebite deaths. Results: A total number of snake bite cases as found in the survey in the study area was 4871. There was a huge gap between the two data (direct survey and official data). Only 7.23% snake bite deaths were officially reported. Only 22.19% of the snake bite victims attended the hospitals. Nearly 65.7% of the snake bite deaths were due to common krait bite, most of them occurring in the months of June to September. Conclusions: Official reporting system is still having a huge deficiency in India. Snake bite needs to get more attention from the health authority