Book review: employment in india by Ajit Kumar Ghose

In Employment in India, Ajit Kumar Ghose offers a concise guide to understanding different aspects of employment in India, written using accessible language for a general audience. With the book’s analysis supported by rigorous empirical work and up-to-date data, Varsha Gupta recommends it to researchers of labour economics

A Null-model Exhibiting Synchronized Dynamics in Uncoupled Oscillators

The phenomenon of phase synchronization of oscillatory systems arising out of feedback coupling is ubiquitous across physics and biology. In noisy, complex systems, one generally observes transient epochs of synchronization followed by non-synchronous dynamics. How does one guarantee that the observed transient epochs of synchronization are arising from an underlying feedback mechanism and not from some peculiar statistical properties of the system? This question is particularly important for complex biological systems where the search for a non-existent feedback mechanism may turn out be an enormous waste of resources. In this article, we propose a null model for synchronization motivated by expectations on the dynamical behaviour of biological systems to provide a quantitative measure of the confidence with which one can infer the existence of a feedback mechanism based on observation of transient synchronized behaviour. We demonstrate the application of our null model to the phenomenon of gait synchronization in free-swimming nematodes, C. elegans

Fast Detection of Community Structures using Graph Traversal in Social Networks

Finding community structures in social networks is considered to be a challenging task as many of the proposed algorithms are computationally expensive and does not scale well for large graphs. Most of the community detection algorithms proposed till date are unsuitable for applications that would require detection of communities in real-time, especially for massive networks. The Louvain method, which uses modularity maximization to detect clusters, is usually considered to be one of the fastest community detection algorithms even without any provable bound on its running time. We propose a novel graph traversal-based community detection framework, which not only runs faster than the Louvain method but also generates clusters of better quality for most of the benchmark datasets. We show that our algorithms run in O(|V | + |E|) time to create an initial cover before using modularity maximization to get the final cover. Keywords - community detection; Influenced Neighbor Score; brokers; community nodes; communitiesComment: 29 pages, 9 tables, and 13 figures. Accepted in "Knowledge and Information Systems", 201

Interaction of two memory enhancing herbal drugs memory plus and mentat with morphine and imipramine in mice

Background: The non-medical self-administration of memory enhancing drugs is a common practice. Present study was designed to evaluate interactions of two such herbal drugs- Memory plus (MP) and Mentat, with other central nervous system active drugs.Methods: Two activities-analgesic activity and antidepressant activity were performed using adult albino mice of both sexes weighing 25-30g to observe the interactions of the herbal drugs with morphine and imipramine respectively. For each activity animals were divided into seven groups of six mice each. Group-I was control group receiving 0.2ml of 1% Tween 80 ip/ 0.2 ml saline p.o, Group II, III and IV acute treatment groups; received single dose of herbal (2mg/kg ip MP or 200mg/kg po Mentat) CNS active drugs alone in subeffective doses. Group II received morphine 2mg/kg ip, group III imipramine 2mg/kg ip and group IV-received MP/Mentat+ morphine or imipramine respectively. Groups V, VI and VII were subchronic treatment groups, received drugs once daily for eight days in same dose as acute treatment groups II, III and IV respectively. Analgesic activity was measured as prolongation of reaction time by hot plate method and antidepressant activity by reduction in despair time using Porsolt’s forced swimming test.Results: When administered for 8 days, both MP and Mentat potentiated the effect of morphine preventing the development of tolerance to analgesic effect (P< 0.05). However the antidepressant effect of imipramine was not modified by any in subchronic treatment groups.Conclusions: Two herbal memory enhancing preparations Memory plus and Mentat potentiate analgesic effect of morphine but not the antidepressant action of imipramine in mice

On the Power of Choice for k-Colorability of Random Graphs

In an r-choice Achlioptas process, random edges are generated r at a time, and an online strategy is used to select one of them for inclusion in a graph. We investigate the problem of whether such a selection strategy can shift the k-colorability transition; that is, the number of edges at which the graph goes from being k-colorable to non-k-colorable. We show that, for k ? 9, two choices suffice to delay the k-colorability threshold, and that for every k ? 2, six choices suffice

Amphid sensory neurons of Caenorhabditis elegans orchestrate its survival from infection with broad classes of pathogens

The survival of a host during infection relies on its ability to rapidly sense the invading pathogen and mount an appropriate response. The bacterivorous nematode Caenorhabditis elegans lacks most of the traditional pattern recognition mechanisms. In this study, we hypothesized that the 12 pairs of amphid sensory neurons in the heads of worms provide sensing capability and thus affect survival during infection. We tested animals lacking amphid neurons to three major classes of pathogens, namely—a Gram-negative bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a Gram-positive bacterium Enterococcus faecalis, and a pathogenic yeast Cryptococcus neoformans. By using individual neuronal ablation lines or mutants lacking specific neurons, we demonstrate that some neurons broadly suppress the survival of the host and colonization of all pathogens, whereas other amphid neurons differentially regulate host survival during infection. We also show that the roles of some of these neurons are pathogen-specific, as seen with the AWB odor sensory neurons that promote survival only during infections with P. aeruginosa. Overall, our study reveals broad and specific roles for amphid neurons during infections.</p

Outbreak of Salmonella Typhi enteric fever in sub-urban area of North India: A public health perspective

AbstractOutbreaks of enteric fever are a major health concern not only due to significant human morbidity and mortality but also fear of spread of multidrug resistant strains. We report an outbreak of enteric fever caused by Salmonella enterica serotype Typhi in a suburban area, in city Chandigarh of North India. Twenty-seven strains of S. typhi were isolated from blood cultures over a period of two weeks with 18 of these 27 patients residing in the same area. Maximum cases were in the age group 5-14 years (10 patients, 55.5%) while 4 (22.2%) cases were children under 5 years. All the strains showed similar resistogram being resistant to ampicillin and nalidixic acid, intermediate to ciprofloxacin and sensitive to chloramphenicol, ceftriaxone, cefotaxime, cotrimoxazole and azithromycin on disc diffusion testing. Minimum inhibitory concentration of ciprofloxacin was determined by agar dilution method and was found to be raised (⩾ 2 μ g/mL). This nalidixic acid resistant S. typhi outbreak report warrants the necessity of implementing stringent sanitation practices in public health interest