John Bunyan’s the Pilgrim’s Progress as a Vehicle of Allegory

John Bunyan, an English author and Baptist preacher is best remembered as the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).  Bunyan’s artistry, is most clearly seen in his role as an allegorist. With the publication of The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman in 1680, and The Holy War in 1682, Bunyan had shown growing resourcefulness using allegorical symbols.  When allegory is used as story, additional meaning lies below the surface narrative.  Allegory presumes to engage the reader with at least two narratives: the surface narrative and the underlying one below the surface that most often contains the work’s theme.  Bunyan models his allegory after his own spiritual experiences and substantiates them with Biblical references.  In Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan refers to a fallen world that is plagued with sin which has lost the glory of God.  Christian, the central character, walks through the wilderness of this world in a quest to attain salvation.  Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory par excellence and this article explores this undeniable fact with precision and clarity. Keywords: Allegory, Pilgrim's Progress, Christian, Grace, Salvatio

EFFICIENT COMPRESSION AND ENCRYPTION SCHEME FOR SECURE TRANSMISSION OF IMAGES AND ITS RECONSTRUCTION

When it is desired to transmit redundant data over an insecure and bandwidth-constrained channel, it is customary to first compress the data and then encrypt it. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of reversing the order of these steps, i.e., first encrypting and then compressing, without compromise for compression efficiency or the informationtheoretic security. A pseudorandom permutation and a linear encoding scheme is used to encrypt an original image, and the encrypted data are efficiently compressed by discarding the excessively rough and fine information of coefficients generated from orthogonal transform. After receiving the compressed data, based on spatial correlation, a receiver can reconstruct the principal content of the original image by iteratively updating the values of coefficients and the linear decoding procedure

Controllability of linear impulsive systems – an eigenvalue approach

summary:This article considers a class of finite-dimensional linear impulsive time-varying systems for which various sufficient and necessary algebraic criteria for complete controllability, including matrix rank conditions are established. The obtained controllability results are further synthesised for the time-invariant case, and under some special conditions on the system parameters, we obtain a Popov-Belevitch-Hautus (PBH)-type rank condition which employs eigenvalues of the system matrix for the investigation of their controllability. Numerical examples are provided that demonstrate--for the linear impulsive systems, null controllability need not imply their complete controllability, unlike for the non-impulsive linear systems

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Parturient satisfaction with labour epidural and factors affecting satisfaction scores: experiences from a tertiary centre in Southern India

Background: Labour analgesia though widely practised is still not routinely administered to all parturients in India. We conducted this historical observational cross-sectional study to assess parturient knowledge and factors affecting satisfaction in those who received epidural labour analgesia; aiming at improving the services.Methods: All parturients requesting epidural labour analgesia have the catheter sited and the drug administered as per institutional protocols. A feedback form is given to these parturients, postnatally. The form consists of questions regarding her knowledge of and experience with labour analgesia, including her satisfaction score on a scale of 0 to 10. Author collected these forms and analyzed them along with information from the labour epidural register and the discharge summary.Results: The mean satisfaction score was 7.1 (SD- 2.28). 46 parturients (31.08%) had ‘low satisfaction’ (<7 score) and 102 parturients (68.9%) had ‘high satisfaction’ (≥7 score). The timing of initiation of epidural analgesia within the parturients expectations and adequate analgesia were two factors that were found to affect satisfaction scores, with statistically significant values (p=0.002 and p=0.006 respectively). Those with a very short or very long duration of labour analgesia, were more likely to give less satisfaction scores (p=0.023 and p=0.002). Only 30% of parturients had heard of labour analgesia in the past.Conclusions: In this setting good analgesia and receiving it on time are of utmost importance in those receiving epidural labor analgesia, emphasising the need for adequate analgesia and prompt initiation of the same

Max-Pooling Loss Training of Long Short-Term Memory Networks for Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting

We propose a max-pooling based loss function for training Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for small-footprint keyword spotting (KWS), with low CPU, memory, and latency requirements. The max-pooling loss training can be further guided by initializing with a cross-entropy loss trained network. A posterior smoothing based evaluation approach is employed to measure keyword spotting performance. Our experimental results show that LSTM models trained using cross-entropy loss or max-pooling loss outperform a cross-entropy loss trained baseline feed-forward Deep Neural Network (DNN). In addition, max-pooling loss trained LSTM with randomly initialized network performs better compared to cross-entropy loss trained LSTM. Finally, the max-pooling loss trained LSTM initialized with a cross-entropy pre-trained network shows the best performance, which yields $67.6\%$ relative reduction compared to baseline feed-forward DNN in Area Under the Curve (AUC) measure

Mitral Leaflet Separation Index in Assessing the Severity of Mitral Stenosis

Determining the severity of mitral stenosis (MS) is important for both prognostic and therapeutic reasons. The mitral valve area (MVA) can be measured by planimetry, pressure half-time, continuity equation, and proximal isovelocity surface area methods. In this study, we propose a novel yet simple, independent measure of MS severity–the mitral leaflet separation (MLS) index. This new index could be a useful surrogate measure of the MVA. This index would also help when there is a discrepancy between severities of MS estimated by existing methods, in the presence of atrial fibrillation and in the presence of mitral regurgitation

Seaweed distribution on diversity on the intertidal rocks at Nochiyurani coast of Gulf of Mannar

The present study deals with 21 seaweed species from the intertidal rocks at nine sampling stations along Nochiyurani coast during six month period from January to June 2014. Among the different species of seaweeds, the dominant species Gracilaria corticata in all the sampling stations indicated it's adaptability to the surf zone. Acanthophora spicifera and Caulerpa scalpellifomis var. denticulata were the next two dominant species. The present study reveals that intertidal rocks occurring along the entire coast of Nochiyurani offer suitable substratum for the luxuriant growth of seaweeds. The lack of anthropogenic activity along this coast favours for the good growth of different seaweeds