Crystal growth and magnetic properties of equiatomic CeAl

Single crystal of CeAl has been grown by flux method using Ce-Al self-flux. Several needle like single crystals were obtained and the length of the needle corresponds to the [001] crystallographic direction. Powder x-ray diffraction revealed that CeAl crystallizes in orthorhombic CrB-type structure with space group ${Cmcm}$ (no. 63). The magnetic properties have been investigated by means of magnetic susceptibility, isothermal magnetization, electrical transport, and heat capacity measurements. CeAl is found to order antiferromagnetically with a N$\grave{\rm e}$el temperature $T_{\rm N}$ = 10K. The magnetization data below the ordering temperature reveals two metamagentic transitions for fields less than 20kOe. From the inverse magnetic susceptibility an effective moment of $2.66\mu_{\rm B}$/Ce has been estimated, which indicates that Ce is in its trivalent state. Electrical resistivity data clearly shows a sharp drop at 10K due to the reduction of spin disorder scattering of conduction electrons thus confirming the magnetic ordering. The estimated residual resistivity ratio (RRR) is 33, thus indicating a good quality of the single crystal. The bulk nature of the magnetic ordering is also confirmed by heat capacity data. From the Schottky anomaly of the heat capacity we have estimated the crystal field level splitting energies of the $(2J+1)$ degenerate ground state as 25K and 175K respectively for the fist and second excited states.Comment: Submitted to SCES -2014 Conference Proceedings (IoP conference series); 6 pages and 5 figure

On homogeneous skewness of unimodal distributions

We introduce a new concept of skewness for unimodal continuous distributions which is built on the asymmetry of the density function around its mode. The asymmetry is captured through a skewness function. We call a distribution homogeneously skewed if this skewness function is consistently positive or negative throughout its domain, and partially homogeneously skewed if the skewness function changes its sign at most once. This type of skewness is shown to exist in many popular continuous distributions such as Triangular, Gamma, Beta, Lognormal and Weibull. Two alternative ways of partial ordering among the partially homogeneously skewed distributions are described. Extensions of the notion to broader classes of distributions including discrete distributions have also been discussed

NATURE OF SPENDING LEISURE TIME AMONG THE COLLEGE STUDENTS AND ITS EFFECTS ON THEIR MENTAL HEALTH

Purposes of the Study: Through the present study the investigators have tried to study the nature of activities of college-level students by which they were spending their leisure time. And to find out the effects of the nature of spending leisure time on the mental health of the students is another important purpose of the present study. Methodology: The investigators used the Descriptive Survey method for the present study. The Random sampling technique has been used for the selection of the sample. The investigators used two self-made questionnaires, one for measuring leisure time activities and another one for measuring mental health. For the analysis of data Mean, S.D., ‘t’ test, ANOVA and graph have been used in the present study. Major Findings of the Study: The overall results of the study explored that the college students were spending their leisure time differently by their own choices. Among them who were spending their leisure time pleasantly were comparatively more mentally healthy than those students who spent their leisure time unpleasantly. It is revealed that those students who spent their leisure time by doing different types of physical and social activities were comparatively more mentally healthy than those students who didn’t perform any physical and social activities in their leisure time. It is also explored that the time duration of spending leisure hours significantly affected the mental health condition of the students. Lastly, another important finding has come out through the present study that more time spending on entertainment activities negatively affects the mental health of the college level students. Implications: The findings of the study can be used for maintaining the mental health conditions of the college students as well as school level students and general people also who are spending their leisure time sufficiently or insufficiently. Novelty: One very interesting thing found in the present study that is more time spending on entertainment activities negatively affects the mental health conditions of the college level students

Finance and Growth: An Empirical Assessment of the Indian Economy

This study is an attempt towards an integration of financial development and its effect on the real sector via the transmission mechanism with special reference to developing and emerging market economies. It finds two cointegrating relations between the financial development, output growth and allocation of credit which makes sense from the standpoint of economic theory. The paper also addresses the issue of causality between finance and growth for the aggregate and broad sectors of the economy. The relations, however, are not similar across the broad sectors of the economy and thus have separate policy implications for different sectors.financial institutions, financial development, transmission mechanism, credit, cointegration

Religious Minorities and Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from Rural West Bengal

Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India concentration of religious minorities, namely Muslims is higher than state and country-level averages. We measures access to public goods in rural West Bengal for different strata of minority concentration. Using Least Square, Generalized Linear Models and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, we find evidence of strong horizontal inequality against Muslims in terms of access to public goods. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition shows that Muslims in larger concentrations face poorer access to infrastructure, health and transport facilities.religious minorities, public good, discrimination, welfare, West Bengal

Recent Trends and Techniques in Text Detection and Text Localization in a Natural Scene: A Survey

Text information extraction from natural scene images is a rising area of research. Since text in natural scene images generally carries valuable details, detecting and recognizing scene text has been deemed essential for a variety of advanced computer vision applications. There has been a lot of effort put into extracting text regions from scene text images in an effective and reliable manner. As most text recognition applications have high demand of robust algorithms for detecting and localizing texts from a given scene text image, so the researchers mainly focus on the two important stages text detection and text localization. This paper provides a review of various techniques of text detection and text localization

Firm Investment & Credit Constraints in India, 1997 – 2006: A stochastic frontier approach

We use the stochastic frontier approach to estimate the impact of firm characteristics on investment decisions of Indian firms during the 1997-2006 period. The use of the stochastic frontier approach allows us to define the (unobserved) optimum investment that is consistent with a firm‟s characteristics such as the Tobin‟s q during each firm-year, and then estimate the deviation from this unobserved optimum in the form of an (investment) efficiency score that varies between zero and one. This deviation is interpreted as the degree of credit constraint, and we are also able to estimate the impact of firm characteristics such as leverage and business group affiliation on the degree of credit constraint via their marginal effects. Our results suggest that the degree of credit constraint of an average firm increased over time during the sample period, despite significant reforms of the Indian banking sector by the turn of the century. We also find that the degree of credit constraint decreases with cash flow and assets, which is consistent with the available literature. Further, there is a threshold effect of leverage, and the degree of credit constraint is greater for highly leveraged firms. Finally, we find that the beneficial impact of business group affiliation on the degree of credit constraint decreases over time, and is eliminated by the end of the sample period.Investment, Credit rationing, Imperfect information, Stochastic frontier analysis