Secularism and communalism in the UK

LSE’s Chetan Bhatt analyses how minority groups in civil society are conceived in policy terms

White extinction: metaphysical elements of contemporary western fascism

The Euro-American far-right represents a highly diverse political movement comprising numerous ideological tendencies. It includes the European New Right, the US ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-lite’, far-right accelerationism, traditionalism, and new forms of political misogyny. Despite the diversity in ideas and activities, this article argues that an overarching theme of the ‘fear of white extinction’ travels across and animates each major contemporary far-right tendency. The article explores a variety of older and contemporary metaphysical themes that are deployed in contemporary fascism. These include new configurations of racism, occultist ideas of nature and vitalism, the rendering of culture and civilization in ‘biocultural’ and ‘anthropological’ terms, and ideas about cosmic destiny. The article considers how older ideas from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hans Günther, Ludwig Klages, Arnold Gehlen and others are mobilized in contemporary fascism to generate a critique of liberal modernity, one which leads remorselessly to a logic of white supremacy and apocalyptic violence

A CommonKADS Model Framework for Web Based Agricultural Decision Support System

Increased demand of farm products and depletion of natural resources compel the agriculture community to increase the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in various farming processes. Agricultural Decision Support Systems (DSS) proved useful in this regard. The majority of available Agricultural DSSs are either crop or task specific. Less emphasis has been placed on the development of comprehensive DSS, which are non-specific regarding crops or farming processes. The crop or task specific DSSs are mainly developed with rule based or knowledge transfer based approaches. The DSSs based on these methodologies lack the ability for scaling up and generalization. The Knowledge engineering modeling approach is more suitable for the development of large and generalized DSS. Unfortunately the model based knowledge engineering approach is not much exploited for the development of Agricultural DSS. CommonKADS is one of the popular modeling frameworks used for the development of Knowledge Based System (KBS). The paper presents the organization, agent, task, communication, knowledge and design models based on the CommonKADS approach for the development of scalable Agricultural DSS. A specific web based DSS application is used for demonstrating the multi agent CommonKADS modeling approach. The system offers decision support for irrigation scheduling and weather based disease forecasting for the popular crops of India. The proposed framework along with the required expert knowledge, provides a platform on which the larger DSS can be built for any crop at a given location

Human rights activism and salafi-jihadi violence

The legal defence and high-profile campaigning by progressive human rights organisations representing or working on behalf of Al Qaeda fighters and supporters has generated furious debate internationally over the past decade. In the context of a rights-based perspective, this article explores two case studies, one related to a United States progressive, human rights delegation’s visit to Pakistan to protest drone strikes, and another focusing on the activities of a self-described human rights organisation working in the United Kingdom for those detained during the ‘global war on terror’. The article focuses on the left-wing and progressive arguments related to these two cases to examine some broader issues about the orientation of the political left to political violence, the nature of reactive human rights approaches to imperialism and war, and the prospects for more visionary orientations regarding human rights and political change

ECALTOOL: fuzzy logic based computer program to calibrate the Hargreaves equation for accurate estimation of evapotranspiration

A reference evapotranspiration rate (ET0) is vital information for irrigation scheduling as well as plant growth modeling.  Estimation of evapotranspiration using environmental variables is a convenient approach compare to direct measurement.  Several mathematical models have been proposed for the estimation of ET0.  Among all these, the Hargreaves equation has received maximum attention of the agricultural fraternity as it needs minimum weather data.  However, requirement of minimal weather data in the Hargreaves equation makes it a simple and pragmatic model for estimation of ET0.  The minimalist approach makes the equation incapable to estimate ET0 accurately under extreme weather conditions.  The calibration or adjustment of the Hargreaves equation parameter CH and EH for different climate conditions is well accepted approach to accomplish error free estimation from the equation.  The establish calibration methods are empirical and time consuming.  Further, the results obtained by these methods are valid only for the restricted area and season only.  This paper presents Evapotranspiration CALibration TOOL (ECALTOOL), which is a fuzzy based universal computer program developed on the platform of NI LabVIEW to calibrate CH and EH.  The key features of the tool are its ability to provide calibration of ET0 for 1100 locations of 190 countries, and its user friendliness.  The performance of the tool is compared and validated against the benchmark Penman-Monteith equation as well as the experimentally calibrated values for various locations with diverse climate conditions.  Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) is in the range of 0.4856 – 1.1562 and 1.21%– 2.06% respectively.  The calibrated values of CH and EH are proved to be accurate in comparison with experimentally carried out calibration.  The developed tool eliminates the need of location specific experimental calibration process for the Hargreaves equation.Keywords: evapotranspiration, fuzzy logic, Hargreaves equation, LabVIE

An Overview of Context Capturing Techniques in NLP

In the NLP context identification has become a prominent way to overcome syntactic and semantic ambiguities. Ambiguities are unsolved problems but can be reduced to a certain level. This ambiguity reduction helps to improve the quality of several NLP processes, such as text translation, text simplification, text retrieval, word sense disambiguation, etc. Context identification, also known as contextualization, takes place in the preprocessing phase of NLP processes. The essence of this identification is to uniquely represent a word or a phrase to improve the decision-making during the transfer phase of the NLP processes. The improved decision-making helps to improve the quality of the output. This paper tries to provide an overview of different context-capturing mechanisms used in NLP

Polycythemia: a mystery solved by history

Testosterone is responsible for increased muscle mass. Leaner body mass helps control weight and increases energy. High levels of testosterone help build muscles and also stimulate growth in strength. Androgenic-anabolic steroids (AAS) are drugs that are structurally related to the cyclic steroid rings system and have similar effects to testosterone in the body. Athletes who abuse steroids do so for muscle growth and quick recovery. Testosterone - whether it's injected, applied via a patch or cream, or taken orally - allows athletes to rapidly increase muscle mass beyond their usual capacity, and also reduces their recovery time which allows them to train continuously with little need to rest their bodies in between workouts. Physiologically, erythrocytosis is defined by an erythrocyte mass that exceeds 125% of that predicted for sex and body mass. Much of the concern with the use of testosterone involves increase in blood viscosity, resulting from increased red blood cell mass causing a potential increased risk for venous thromboembolism (VTE), myocardial infarction (MI), and cerebrovascular accidents (CVA). We report a case of secondary polycythemia related to testosterone therapy

A rare case of cranial metastasis from an initial presentation of hepatocellular carcinoma

Cranial metastases from hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has been seldom reported. Reported herein is the case of a painless parietal bone mass as an initial presentation of HCC in a 63-year-old female patient who was subsequently diagnosed to have HCV related cirrhosis. The biopsy from cranial lesion was confirmatory of HCC on immunohistochemistry. The patient had no known history of chronic liver disease. The presented diagnosis was made through detailed history, laboratory parameters and cross sectional imaging

Ferricarboxy maltose to treat iron deficiency anemia in pregnancy: is it a feasible option?

Background: Iron deficiency is a common cause of anaemia in pregnancy which influences the health of mother and developing fetus. Intravenous (IV) iron preparations are considered, when oral iron therapy is ineffective or intolerant. Ferric carboxymaltose is an IV preparation that can be given with ease of administration and better tolerated. The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy and safety of IV ferric carboxymaltose in pregnant mother with all grades of anemia in the second and third trimester.Methods: This is a prospective observational study where 44 pregnant women with iron deficiency anemia [IDA] received ferric carboxymaltose up to 15mg/kg in second and third trimester. The parameters that were taken into account, to assess the effectiveness of the treatment was repeat haemoglobin [Hb] measurements and the subjective sense of wellbeing in the patient. The safety of the drug was analysed by continuous fetal heart rate [FHR] monitoring during the infusion and observation of any adverse reactions.Results: Ferric carboxymaltose intravenous infusion significantly increased Hb levels above baseline values in all women. The Increase in Hb levels were observed at 3- and 6-weeks post infusion therapy. FHR monitoring did not show any drug related unfavourable effect on the fetus. Of the 44 women interviewed, 33 (75%) women reported sense of well-being, 7 (15.9%) women could not feel any difference after the infusion and 4 (9.1%) patients could not comment. No serious adverse effects were noticed but minor side effects occurred in 3 (6.8%) patients.Conclusions: This prospective study showed safety and efficacy of ferric carboxymaltose in pregnancy with IDA which is consistent with available observational data

Correlation between prostate specific antigen and prostate volume with disease symptom severity assessed by international prostate symptom score

Background: Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is clinically defined as prostate adenoma, resulting in bladder outlet obstruction (BOO), which may eventually harm the bladder and even kidneys. For differential diagnosis of male LUTS, uroflowmetry can be used together with non-invasive ultrasound to ascertain the flow rate and IPP. PSA is also an important indicator for differential diagnosis. International prostate symptoms score (IPSS) is used to assess the severity of the symptoms for clinical BPH. There is also a recommendation to consider the quality of life (QoL) index, where a QoL score of ≥3 is considered as worrisome. Methods: This was a retro-prospective study based on secondary and primary data collection and analysis, pertaining to BPH patients who visited the study site previously as well as those who are coming for regular follow-up since 2019. Patient enrolment was done at a teaching hospital Shree Krishna Hospital affiliated to the Pramukh Swami Medical College, Bhaikaka University, Karamsad. About 100 patients presenting with lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) and histo-pathologically proven cases of BPH were enrolled to pursue research objectives. All patients were followed up to a period of 3-months after initiating the treatment and disease severity through IPSS and quality of life upon completion of treatment were also assessed. Results: PSA is also an important indicator for differential diagnosis, which is generally less than 1 μg/l in patients in absence of clinically confirmed BPH. In our study, mean prostate volume was reported to be 43.46±19.35 cc. A positive correlation was observed between prostate volume and serum PSA with disease severity. Conclusions: Our study evaluated the IPSS to predict the disease severity and correlated it with quality of life, prostate volume and serum PSA. Our findings were in line with currently available evidences, and suggested that QoL, prostate volume and serum PSA are better predictors of disease severity, IPSS