A comparative analysis of phytoplankton diversity and abundance during monsoon season in selected beels (wetlands) of Assam, India

Water collected from 8 selected floodplain wetlands (beels) of Brahmaputra valley basin were examined using both filtered method (FM) and sedimentation method (SM) for the assessment of phytoplankton diversity and abundance. A total 22 and 41 species were recorded by employing FM and SM, respectively. There was a significance difference (p<0.05) between FM and SM. Species and abundance of phytoplankton were lesser in FM than SM and it was due to exclusion of minute size (<25?) from net and maximum retention of species in sedimentation method. Chlorophyta, Bacillariophyta, Cyanophyta, Euglenophyta, Chrysophyta and Dinophyta were recorded during study period. Chlorophyta, Bacillariophyta and Cyanophyta were dominant groups. Bacillariophyta was dominant group followed by Chlorophyta and Cyanophyta in FM while Chlorophyta was dominant group followed by Bacillariophyta and Cyanophyta SM. Total phytoplankton densities were recorded from 35 cells L-1 to 3808 cells L-1 in FM while 1.55×104 cells L-1 to 12.33×105 cells L-1 to in SM. Diversity indices of phytoplankton were varied widely in FM and SM. Siligurijan beel and Bildora beels were considered more stable environment than other beels based on diversity indices

Quantification of Fluoride Contamination of Groundwater Sources in Parts of Guwahati City, Assam, India: An Assessment of Hazard to Human Health

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

On spectra of Hermitian Randic matrix of second kind

We propose the Hermitian Randi\'c matrix $R^\omega(X)=(R^\omega_{ij})$, where $\omega=\frac{1+i \sqrt{3}}{2}$ and $R^\omega_{ij}={1}/{\sqrt{d_id_j}}$ if $v_iv_j$ is an unoriented edge, ${\omega}/{\sqrt{d_id_j}}$ if $v_i\rightarrow v_j$, ${\overline{\omega}}/{\sqrt{d_id_j}}$ if $v_i\leftarrow v_j$, and 0 otherwise. This appears to be more natural because of $\omega+\overline{\omega}=1$ and $|\omega|=1$. In this paper, we investigate some features of this novel Hermitian matrix and study a few properties like positiveness, bipartiteness, edge-interlacing etc. We also compute the characteristic polynomial for this new matrix and obtain some upper and lower bounds for the eigenvalues and the energy of this matrix

Strategies for coping with the costs of inpatient care: a mixed methods study of urban and rural poor in Vadodara District, Gujarat, India

Background In India, coping mechanisms for inpatient care costs have been explored in rural areas, but seldom among urbanites. This study aims to explore and compare mechanisms employed by the urban and rural poor for coping with inpatient expenditures, in order to help identify formal mechanisms and policies to provide improved social protection for health care

Ellora: Exploring Low-Power OFDM-based Radar Processors using Approximate Computing

In recent times, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based radar has gained wide acceptance given its applicability in joint radar-communication systems. However, realizing such a system on hardware poses a huge area and power bottleneck given its complexity. Therefore it has become ever-important to explore low-power OFDM-based radar processors in order to realize energy-efficient joint radar-communication systems targeting edge devices. This paper aims to address the aforementioned challenges by exploiting approximations on hardware for early design space exploration (DSE) of trade-offs between accuracy, area and power. We present Ellora, a DSE framework for incorporating approximations in an OFDM radar processing pipeline. Ellora uses pairs of approximate adders and multipliers to explore design points realizing energy-efficient radar processors. Particularly, we incorporate approximations into the block involving periodogram based estimation and report area, power and accuracy levels. Experimental results show that at an average accuracy loss of 0.063% in the positive SNR region, we save 22.9% of on-chip area and 26.2% of power. Towards achieving the area and power statistics, we design a fully parallel Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) core which acts as a part of periodogram based estimation and approximate the addition and multiplication operations in it. The aforementioned results show that Ellora can be used in an integrated way with various other optimization methods for generating low-power and energy-efficient radar processors.Comment: Paper accepted at IEEE-LASCAS 202

Self-organized Networks of Competing Boolean Agents

A model of Boolean agents competing in a market is presented where each agent bases his action on information obtained from a small group of other agents. The agents play a competitive game that rewards those in the minority. After a long time interval, the poorest player's strategy is changed randomly, and the process is repeated. Eventually the network evolves to a stationary but intermittent state where random mutation of the worst strategy can change the behavior of the entire network, often causing a switch in the dynamics between attractors of vastly different lengths.Comment: 4 pages, 3 included figures. Some text revision and one new figure added. To appear in PR

A New Method for tackling Asymmetric Decision Problems

Chain Event Graphs are probabilistic graphical models designed especially for the analysis of discrete statistical problems which do not admit a natural product space structure. We show here how they can be used for decision analysis through designation of some nodes as decision nodes, and the addition of utilities. We provide a local propagation algorithm for finding an optimal decision strategy and maximising expected utility. We also compare CEGs with Influence diagrams, Valuation Networks, Sequential decision diagrams, Sequential influence diagrams and Decision circuits for the representation and analysis of asymmetric decision problems

Occurrence of functional single-lobed ovary in Cirrhinus mrigala (Hamilton,1822) brood fish from Assam, India

Occurrence of abnormally developed gonads in fish is rather more uncommon in freshwater fish than marine fish. It is therefore worthwhile to disseminate the information of occurrence of a single-lobed ovary in Cirrhinus mrigala brood fish as an abnormal phenomenon. During April 2011 to March 2013, around 500 brood fish samples of Indian major carps (Labeo rohita, Catla and C. mrigala) were collected from different government and private fish farms of Assam and Tripura located in the Northeast of India. Among them, one C. mrigala specimen measuring 41 cm in total length and 640 g in weight collected from Ulubari fish seed farm of Guwahati, Assam during June, 2012 was found to have a single-lobed ovary instead of the normal bilobed structure. The ovary occupied the entire body cavity and the majority of ova were round and translucent. The ovary contributed substantially to the total body weight with gonado-somatic index of 32.81 which was the highest among all the mrigal specimens examined. The study indicates possibility of artificially inducing development of single-lobed ovary in C. mrigala for achieving possible higher spawn outputs in induced breeding of the cultivable species

A self-organized model for cell-differentiation based on variations of molecular decay rates

Systemic properties of living cells are the result of molecular dynamics governed by so-called genetic regulatory networks (GRN). These networks capture all possible features of cells and are responsible for the immense levels of adaptation characteristic to living systems. At any point in time only small subsets of these networks are active. Any active subset of the GRN leads to the expression of particular sets of molecules (expression modes). The subsets of active networks change over time, leading to the observed complex dynamics of expression patterns. Understanding of this dynamics becomes increasingly important in systems biology and medicine. While the importance of transcription rates and catalytic interactions has been widely recognized in modeling genetic regulatory systems, the understanding of the role of degradation of biochemical agents (mRNA, protein) in regulatory dynamics remains limited. Recent experimental data suggests that there exists a functional relation between mRNA and protein decay rates and expression modes. In this paper we propose a model for the dynamics of successions of sequences of active subnetworks of the GRN. The model is able to reproduce key characteristics of molecular dynamics, including homeostasis, multi-stability, periodic dynamics, alternating activity, differentiability, and self-organized critical dynamics. Moreover the model allows to naturally understand the mechanism behind the relation between decay rates and expression modes. The model explains recent experimental observations that decay-rates (or turnovers) vary between differentiated tissue-classes at a general systemic level and highlights the role of intracellular decay rate control mechanisms in cell differentiation.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure