Closing the gap between sustainability and affordability: communal sanitation in urban slums of India

This research paper is based on assessment of community toilet blocks in urban slums of Lucknow and Kanpur, UP, India. The objective of the research was to assess the current set of practices and usages from perspective of financial sustainability and affordability of services to urban poor. Economic analysis shows that low-income households are currently paying 3 to 6 times the UN standard for accessing affordable sanitation, and 104 times that of an affluent household with a household latrine. Financial and managerial structures vary across facilities, with observed under-budgeting resulting in poor sanitation access and services. The lessons learnt include developing existing community toilets as WASH Resource Centers through diversification service, major role of women in managing these to ensure gender inclusive model and city or sub city -level cluster based management through a federation of Community toilet blocks, ensuring financial and operational sustainability

Transition detection in body movement activities for wearable ECG

It has been shown by Pawar (2007) that the motion artifacts induced by body movement activity (BMA) in a single-lead wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) signal recorder, while monitoring an ambulatory patient, can be detected and removed by using a principal component analysis (PCA)-based classification technique. However, this requires the ECG signal to be temporally segmented so that each segment comprises of artifacts due to a single type of body movement activity. In this paper, we propose a simple, recursively updated PCA-based technique to detect transitions wherever the type of body movement is changed

Dipole moments of camphor compounds. Part II. The dipole moments of d1-borneol, camphoric acid and 3-bromo-camphorenic acid

Dipole moment measurements ondl-borneol, 3-bromocamphorenic acid and camphoric acid are reported. The results with dilute solutions ofdl-borneol indicate a possible independent existence of the antipodes in very dilute solutions besides the racemic form. The values for camphoric acid in dioxan demonstrate the presence of solvent-solute interactions in this solvent