From kitchen to classroom: Assessing the impact of cleaner burning biomass-fuelled cookstoves on primary school attendance in Karonga district, northern Malawi

Household air pollution from burning solid fuels is responsible for an estimated 2.9 million premature deaths worldwide each year and 4.5% of global disability-adjusted life years, while cooking and fuel collection pose a considerable time burden, particularly for women and children. Cleaner burning biomass-fuelled cookstoves have the potential to lower exposure to household air pollution as well as reduce fuelwood demand by increasing the combustion efficiency of cooking fires, which may in turn yield ancillary benefits in other domains. The present paper capitalises on opportunities offered by the Cooking and Pneumonia Study (CAPS), the largest randomised trial of biomass-fuelled cookstoves on health outcomes conducted to date, the design of which allows for the evaluation of additional outcomes at scale. This mixed methods study assesses the impact of cookstoves on primary school absenteeism in Karonga district, northern Malawi, in particular by conferring health and time and resource gains on young people aged 5–18. The analysis combines quantitative data from 6168 primary school students with in-depth interviews and focus group discussions carried out among 48 students in the same catchment area in 2016. Negative binomial regression models find no evidence that the cookstoves affected primary school absenteeism overall [IRR 0.92 (0.71–1.18), p = 0.51]. Qualitative analysis suggests that the cookstoves did not sufficiently improve household health to influence school attendance, while the time and resource burdens associated with cooking activities—although reduced in intervention households—were considered to be compatible with school attendance in both trial arms. More research is needed to assess whether the cookstoves influenced educational outcomes not captured by the attendance measure available, such as timely arrival to school or hours spent on homework

Vulnerability from storm surges and cyclone wind fields on the coast of Andhra Pradesh, India

The results presented here are from a study conducted for the government of the state of Andhra Pradesh (GOAP) in India, as part of a World Bank project on cyclone mitigation. A set of detailed maps were prepared depicting the Physical Vulnerability (PV), specifically storm surge inundation zones are shown for frequent occurrence, 50-year return period, likely scenario for global warming and extreme global warming. Similarly vulnerable areas from strong wind field from tropical cyclones (TCS) are also presented for the same four parameters. Vulnerability zones are presented from a social point of view also based upon certain socio-economic parameters that were included in determining the overall vulnerability of each Mandal in a coastal district (a Mandal represents a group of villages and towns) include: population, senior citizens, women, children under different age groups, type of housing, income level, cyclone shelters, hospitals and medical centres, schools and caste based population. The study is about scenarios that could happen if global warming and the predicted intensification of TCS actually occur as predicted by some numerical models

Cytogenetic studies of early myeloid progenitor compartments in Ph<SUP>1</SUP>- positive chronic myeloid leukemia. II. Long-term culture reveals the persistence of Ph<SUP>1</SUP>-negative progenitors in treated as well as newly diagnosed patients

We recently showed that long-term marrow cultures can be used to demonstrate the presence of Philadelphia (Ph1) negative progenitors in patients with newly diagnosed Ph1-positive chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). We now report results for 6 chronic phase patients studied 5-83 mo postdiagnosis and an additional 3 newly diagnosed patients. Marrow metaphases were exclusively Ph1-positive. Clonogenic assays revealed a minor population of Ph1-negative progenitors in 3 cases (1 treated, 2 untreated). Long-term marrow culture adherent layers contained Ph1- negative progenitors in 6 cases (3 treated, 3 untreated). Whenever this occurred, the Ph1-negative population had become the only one detectable within 3-4 wk, and this was always associated with a rapid decline of the Ph1-positive population. For 2 of the 3 cases where Ph1- negative progenitors were not detected, there was a similar rapid decline in the Ph1-positive population in culture. In the other case, Ph1-positive progenitors were maintained at levels typically seen in normal long-term marrow cultures. These results suggest that chromosomally normal stem cells may persist for a considerable period in the marrow of some, but perhaps not all, patients with CML, even in the face of maintenance chemotherapy. In addition, they provide new evidence of heterogeneity in this disease, as shown by the variable ability of Ph1-positive progenitor populations to be maintained in vitro

Complex microwave conductivity of Na-DNA powders

We report the complex microwave conductivity, $\sigma=\sigma_1-i\sigma_2$, of Na-DNA powders, which was measured from 80 K to 300 K by using a microwave cavity perturbation technique. We found that the magnitude of $\sigma_1$ near room temperature was much larger than the contribution of the surrounding water molecules, and that the decrease of $\sigma_1$ with decreasing temperature was sufficiently stronger than that of the conduction of counterions. These results clearly suggest that the electrical conduction of Na-DNA is intrinsically semiconductive.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Farming of cobia, Rachycentron canadum (Linnaeus 1766) in open sea floating cages in India

Experiments on culture and growth performance of cobia were undertaken in marine cages installed in the Arabian Sea off Karwar on the south-west coast of India. Hatchery produced cobia fingerlings were stocked at two densities of 3.5 fish cubic m-1 and 14.1 fish cubic m-1 in circular HDPE cages. Mean weight and specific growth rate (SGR) of cobia stocked @ 3.5 fish cubic m -1 were 10.5 kg and 2.2% day-1, respectively, at 300 days of culture (DOC). Cobia stocked @ of 14.1 fish cubic m-1 attained an average weight of 3.68 kg and SGR of 1.9% day-1 at 300 DOC. SGR was found to be positively correlated with water temperature and salinity during the culture period. No significant variation was found in SGR and feed conversion ratio of cobia stocked at two different densities. However, absolute growth rate, relative growth rate and mean weight of cobia varied significantly between the two groups

Improving NFS Performance over Wireless Links

NFS is a widely used remote file access protocol that has been tuned to perform well on traditional LANs which exhibit low error rates. Users migrating to mobile-hosts would like to continue to use NFS for remote file accesses. However, low bandwidth and high error-rates degrade performance on mobile-hosts using wireless links thus hindering the use of NFS. In this paper, we present two mechanisms to improve NFS performance over wireless links : an aggressive NFS client and link-level retransmissions. Our experiments show that these mechanisms improve throughput by up to 200%, which brings the performance to within 5% of that obtained in zero error conditions. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-126