Community empowerment through water and sanitation project among an indigenous people group

This paper is an experience of the water and sanitation project in an indigenous group in Kerala, South India where community empowerment has been achieved through the support of world bank assisted water and sanitation project “JALANIDHI”. The experience in Sholayoor Grama Panchayath reduced the burden of women and children for fetching water. Through this project the tribal women played active roles in decision making, implementation, operation and maintenance. This experience is a showcase of restoring dignity of socially disadvantaged people, increased access to WATSAN services etc. Hither to, not heard concepts like cost recovery, participation of tribal community especially women community contracting etc became a reality

PONDER - A Real time software backend for pulsar and IPS observations at the Ooty Radio Telescope

This paper describes a new real-time versatile backend, the Pulsar Ooty Radio Telescope New Digital Efficient Receiver (PONDER), which has been designed to operate along with the legacy analog system of the Ooty Radio Telescope (ORT). PONDER makes use of the current state of the art computing hardware, a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and sufficiently large disk storage to support high time resolution real-time data of pulsar observations, obtained by coherent dedispersion over a bandpass of 16 MHz. Four different modes for pulsar observations are implemented in PONDER to provide standard reduced data products, such as time-stamped integrated profiles and dedispersed time series, allowing faster avenues to scientific results for a variety of pulsar studies. Additionally, PONDER also supports general modes of interplanetary scintillation (IPS) measurements and very long baseline interferometry data recording. The IPS mode yields a single polarisation correlated time series of solar wind scintillation over a bandwidth of about four times larger (16 MHz) than that of the legacy system as well as its fluctuation spectrum with high temporal and frequency resolutions. The key point is that all the above modes operate in real time. This paper presents the design aspects of PONDER and outlines the design methodology for future similar backends. It also explains the principal operations of PONDER, illustrates its capabilities for a variety of pulsar and IPS observations and demonstrates its usefulness for a variety of astrophysical studies using the high sensitivity of the ORT.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures, Accepted by Experimental Astronom

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Framework For Cooperative Three-Agent Target Defense Game

This paper presents cooperative target defense guidance strategies using nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) framework for a target-attacker-defender (TAD) game. The TAD game consists of an attacker and a cooperative target-defender pair. The attacker's objective is to capture the target, whereas the target-defender team acts together such that the defender can intercept the attacker and ensure target survival. We assume that the cooperative target-defender pair do not have perfect knowledge of the attacker states, and hence the states are estimated using an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The capture analysis based on the Apollonius circles is performed to identify the target survival regions. The efficacy of the NMPC-based solution is evaluated through extensive numerical simulations. The results show that the NMPC-based solution offers robustness to the different unknown attacker models and has better performance than CLOS and A-CLOS based strategies.Comment: 16 page

Spontaneous Interlayer Charge Transfer near the Magnetic Quantum Limit

Experiments reveal that a confined electron system with two equally-populated layers at zero magnetic field can spontaneously break this symmetry through an interlayer charge transfer near the magnetic quantum limit. New fractional quantum Hall states at unusual total filling factors such as \nu = 11/15 (= 1/3 + 2/5) stabilize as signatures that the system deforms itself, at substantial electrostatic energy cost, in order to gain crucial correlation energy by "locking in" separate incompressible liquid phases at unequal fillings in the two layers (e.g., layered 1/3 and 2/5 states in the case of \nu = 11/15).Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures (1 color) included in text. Related papers at http://www.ee.princeton.edu/~hari/papers.htm

Protective Effects of Hydroalcoholic Extract of Boerhaavia Diffusa Linn Against Cisplatin Induced Nephrotoxicity in Rats

The present studies, the cisplatin treated animals showed a significant increase in blood urea, blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine. As shown in [Table no:4] serum creatinine, Blood urea nitrogen (BUN), and blood urea levels were significantly higher after 72 h respectively, after administration of single dose of cisplatin when compared to the control group. The pre-treatment with Hydro alcoholic extract of Boerhaavia diffusa (HAEBD) p.o. significantly (P < 0.01) lowered the elevated serum urea creatinine, and Blood urea nitrogen (BUN). When compared to the cisplatin group. The pre-treatment with silymarin showed a marked decrease in concentrations of blood urea, serum creatinine, Blood urea nitrogen and alkaline phosphatise, it was shown that cisplatin treatment induced renal damage and pretreatment with hydro alcoholic extract of Boerhaavia diffusa (HAEBD) provided protective effect against this cisplatin-induced nephrotoxicity. However, before concluding a potential usefulness of hydro alcoholic extract of Boerhaavia diffusa (HAEBD) as adjunct to the cisplatin therapy, further clinical investigation is needed

Multi-Wavelength View of Flare Events on November 20, 2003

We analyze two flare events which occurred in active region NOAA 501 on November 20, 2003. The H-alpha and magnetogram measurements show interaction between two filaments which produced a slowly rising flare event, corresponding to two stages of magnetic reconnection. The relative clockwise rotation between the two sunspot systems caused filament destabilization. The cusp-shaped magnetic field in the main phase of the second flare and its evolution in correlation with ribbon separation provide evidence for the cause of the CME eruption. The propagation and orientation of the CME with respect to the ecliptic plane is illustrated by IPS images.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures; To appear in "Magnetic Coupling between the Interior and the Atmosphere of the Sun", eds. S.S. Hasan and R.J. Rutten, Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Berlin, 200