ECONOMIC REFORMS AND MICRO, SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES

Micro, Small & Medium enterprises (MSMEs) have played a crucial role in the overall economic development of every developing economy in the world. In India, MSMEs have helped in creating a favourable environment of growth by serving as ancillary units to large scale industries. They not only create huge employment opportunities for the public but also address other challenges faced by the economy like poverty and removing regional imbalances. Keeping in view the crucial role of MSMEs in our economy, the present paper is an attempt to analyze the definition of MSMEs, the role and performance of MSMEs in Indian economy and government policies towards MSMEs as well as the various challenges and opportunities associated with MSMEs in India. The study reveals that over a period of time notable growth has been shown by the MSME sector which has been a leading contributor to export, employment and Gross domestic product in India. Therefore, some sincere action plan and their proper implementation is must for the encouragement of the MSMEs in the Indian economy

Design of FIR Filter using Distributed Arithmetic Architecture

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Listening to care leavers : a case study involving 435 care leavers and 100 child protection key stakeholders in 5 States of India

A research study by Udayan Care (Beyond 18: Leaving Child Care Institutions-Supporting Youth Leaving Care, A Study of Aftercare Practices, 2019), in India, reveals that even though, as per the Juvenile laws of India, 'care-experienced' youth (care leavers) are mandated to receive aftercare services to age 21, and in certain cases to 23, the state of affairs for this section of disadvantaged youth needs to evolve. The study is based on a mixed method approach which uses a descriptive design to collect data from 435 care leavers and 84 key informants from five states of India. This paper investigates the emotional difficulties these young adults face when reaching 18 years of age, as they need to leave their care-settings without many options or support. It also highlights the factors causing emotional distress due to gaps in policies, systems and practices in Indian juvenile laws and practice. The focus of policies and stakeholders needs to be directed towards providing reasonable support for the emotional wellbeing of care leavers along with other domains essential for aftercare, including housing, physical health, independent living skills, education and vocational skills, social support and interpersonal skills, financial independence and career, emotional wellbeing, identity, and legal awareness

Family strengthening approach towards ensuring reintegration of children restored back to their families from institutionalised care settings in India

India has well defined juvenile justice laws and policies which lay the overall framework to protect the rights of children, where institutionalisation is meant to be the last resort for children without parental care. Structured and systematic interventions are required to strengthen the families, empowering them to effectively nurture and care for their children. This paper analyses a family-strengthening project, Families Together (FiT), an initiative of Udayan Care, an NGO headquartered in Delhi during Covid-19. It underscores the relevance of family strengthening approaches, by using a child-centric approach to safeguarding the best interests of children. The project follows a 3R framework, namely reach, reinforce, and reintegrate, and works along the lines of a circle of care approach, to strengthen families for retaining their children. Circle of care addresses eight different but inter-connected domains; namely livelihood, education and skilling, housing, physical health, psychosocial wellbeing, protection and safeguarding, social relationships, awareness, and access to legal entitlements. Through appropriate and systematic interventions, FiT ensures smooth reintegration of restored children into their families. In addition, by closely working with children and their families, the project also acts as a gatekeeping mechanism to prevent the possibility of re-separation

Comparative study of the functional outcome of semitendinosus graft versus peroneus longus graft in arthroscopic reconstruction surgeries of anterior cruciate ligament

Background: ACL disruption is the commonest ligamentous knee injury among active adults, invariably leading to changes in knee kinematics which are most likely to result in secondary degenerative changes and long-term functional impairment. Thus, due to the ACL's crucial role as the primary restraint against anterior tibial translation, its reconstruction using varying graft options are being extensively studied for better functional outcome. Methods: In this prospective study, we analysed 30 patients having ACL tear (clinically and radiographically) and treated with arthroscopic reconstruction of ACL. Among these, 15 cases were operated using semitendinosus graft and 15 cases by using peroneus longus tendon graft. The study was conducted in a tertiary care hospital from January 2021 to June 2022 with minimum follow up of 6 months and maximum follow up of 15 months. Results: Mean Lysholm score (post op) in Group ST was 90.6±3.18 and in Group PLT was 92.2±2.65. The Lysholm Score and IKDC grading between the two groups was comparable and showed no significant difference. Post-Op laxity assessed using the Lachman’s grading showed normal findings in 70% patients, and of the remaining 30% (9 patients), 5 patients from ST group and 4 patients from PLT group showed 1+ laxity at follow up examination. Conclusions: Arthroscopy assisted ACL reconstruction with peroneus longus tendon autograft provides a steady knee, reduces postoperative donor site morbidity and enables early rehabilitation, similar to the traditional semitendinosus tendon autograft

Initialization and Readout of Spin Chains for Quantum Information Transport

Linear chains of spins acting as quantum wires are a promising approach to achieve scalable quantum information processors. Nuclear spins in apatite crystals provide an ideal test-bed for the experimental study of quantum information transport, as they closely emulate a one-dimensional spin chain. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance techniques can be used to drive the spin chain dynamics and probe the accompanying transport mechanisms. Here we demonstrate initialization and readout capabilities in these spin chains, even in the absence of single-spin addressability. These control schemes enable preparing desired states for quantum information transport and probing their evolution under the transport Hamiltonian. We further optimize the control schemes by a detailed analysis of $^{19}$F NMR lineshape

Strom-induzierte dynamische Kernspinpolarisation : Spintronic ohne Magnetismus

The present work deals with the study of Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP), especially current-induced DNP, in III-V semiconductors such as InP and GaAs. Localized electron centres in these semiconductors have extended wavefunctions and exhibit strong hyperfine coupling with the nuclei in their vicinity. These interactions not only play a critical role in electron and nuclear spin relaxation mechanisms, but also enable nuclear polarization enhancement via DNP. The doping concentration and temperature range favourable for DNP effects was determined by studying these semiconductors with varying doping concentration in a wide temperature range. Under suitable conditions, DNP enhancement by more than two orders of magnitude was observed by microwave saturation of electron spin transitions in InP. Additionally, we report the first experimental observation of electric-current induced DNP in InP. This is consistent with model predictions in zinc-blende semiconductors with strong spin-orbit effects. This provides a promising possibility to generate spin polarization by means of electric current and hence is an important step towards an "all electric spintronic device". Analogous to the spin Hall effect, the "spin Gunn effect" was proposed theoretically in III-V semiconductors recently. A small spin polarization is expected to grow and lead to spin polarized domains within the Gunn regime. If demonstrated experimentally, the spin Gunn effect can open a wide range of possibilities in the field of spintronics. We investigated the possible existence of spin Gunn effect in InP and GaAs by means of pulsed NMR measurements. From our measurements we conclude that the electron spin polarization and the resulting DNP effects appear to be much smaller than the theoretical predictions.Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war, die Grundlagen der strom-induzierten Dynamischen Kernspin Polarisation (DNP) in III-V Halbleitern wie InP und GaAs zu untersuchen und zu verstehen. In diesen Halbleitern weisen lokalisierte Elektronenzentren ausgedehnte Wellenfunktionen und eine starke Hyperfeinkopplung zu benachbarten Atomkernen auf. Diese Wechselwirkungen spielen nicht nur in den Elektron- und Kernspin Relaxationsmechanismen eine kritische Rolle, sondern erlauben auch die Verstärkung der Kernspinpolarisation durch DNP. Die für DNP Effekte geeignete Dotierungskonzentration und Temperaturbereiche wurde durch die Untersuchung dieser Halbleiter mit unterschiedlicher Dotierung über einen großen Temperaturbereich bestimmt. Durch die Mikrowellensättigung der Elektronenspin- Übergänge in InP unter geeigneten Bedingungen konnte eine DNP Verstärkung von mehr als zwei Größenordnungen beobachtet werden. Zusätzlich können wir über den ersten experimentellen Nachweis von strominduzierter DNP in InP berichten. Dies stimmt mit Modelvorhersagen für Halbleiter mit Zinkblendestruktur und starken Spin-Bahnkopplungseffekten überein. Dies liefert eine viel versprechende Möglichkeit für stromerzeugte Spinpolarisation, und ist ein wichtiger Schritt in Richtung eines "nur elektrisch arbeitenden Spintronic Bauelement". Ähnlich dem Spin-Hall Effekt wurde der "Spin-Gunn-Effekt" kürzlich in III-V Halbleitern vorgeschlagen. Man erwartet, dass eine kleine Spinpolarisation (entstanden durch eine zufällige thermische Fluktuation oder durch Spin-Bahnkopplungseffekte) mit der Zeit anwächst und zu spinpolarisierten Domänen im Bereich des Gunneffektes führt. Eine experimentelle Realisation des Spin-Gunn-Effektes würde weit reichende Möglichkeiten im Spintronic-Bereich eröffnen. Wir untersuchten einen möglichen Spin-Gunn-Effekt in InP und GaAs durch gepulste NMR Messungen. Aus unseren Ergebnissen folgern wir, dass die Elektronenspin Polarisation und die resultierenden DNP Effekte viel kleiner als in den theoretischen Vorhersagen sind

Out-Of-Core MapReduce System for Large Datasets

While single machine MapReduce systems can squeeze out maximum performance from available multi-cores, they are often limited by the size of main memory and can thus only process small datasets. Even though today’s computers are equipped with efficient secondary storage devices, the frameworks do not utilize these devices mainly because disk access latencies are much higher than those for main memory. Therefore, a single machine set up of Hadoop system performs much slower when it is presented with the datasets larger than the main memory. Moreover, such frameworks also require tuning a lot of parameters which puts an added burden on the programmer. While distributed computational resources are now easily available, efficiently performing large scale computations still remain a challenge due to out-of-memory errors and complexity involved in handling distributed systems. Therefore, we develop techniques to perform large-scale processing on a single machine by reducing the amount of IO and exploiting sequential locality when using disks.First, this dissertation presents OMR, a single machine out-of-core MapReduce system that can efficiently handle datasets that are far larger than the size of main memory and guarantees linear scaling with the growing data sizes. OMR actively minimizes the amount of data to be read/written to/from disk via on-the-fly aggregation and it uses block sequential disk read/write operations whenever disk accesses become necessary to avoid running out of memory. We theoretically prove OMR’s linear scalability and empirically demonstrate it by processing datasets that are up to 5× larger than main memory. Our experiments show that in comparison to the standalone single-machine setup of the Hadoop system, OMR delivers far higher performance. Also OMR avoids out-of-memory crashes for large datasets and delivers high performance for datasets that fit in main memory.Second, this dissertation presents a single-level out-of-core partitioner for large irregular graphs GO, which can successfully partition large graphs by performing just two passes over the entire input graph, partition creation pass that creates balanced partitions and partition refinement pass that reduces edgecuts in a memory constrained manner via disk-based processing. For graphs that can be successfully partitioned by the widely used Mt-Metis system on a single machine, GO produces balanced 8-way partitions with 11.8× to 76.2× fewer edgecuts using 1.9× to 8.3× less memory in comparable runtime.Finally, we extend the API of the OMR system to enable graph partitioning and partition-based graph processing for large graphs that do not fit in memory. Our ex- periments show that the extended OMRGx system can be easily used to partition large graphs and perform the partition-based graph processing. The API provided allows the programmer to focus on the programming logic while remaining completely oblivious of the out-of-core processing required to handle large graphs

Managing product families: Conceptual and structural architecture reusability/commonality and resource change implications

Many companies strive to strike the right balance between the level of customization and the degree of commonality between product variants. The rapid change in technologies and customer preferences renders the issue of customization vs. commonality a pivotal problem to strategically managing evolving product families and achieving economies of scale. Platform formation is seen as the key means to increase structural commonality. To date, most commonality indices have been reported at the structural level. Considerations to compute similar indices at the conceptual level of the product architecture have not yet been undertaken. We argue that it is essential to determine indices estimating the extent of architectural reuse and commonality at two levels of architecture design: concept design and detailed design. Product architectures are known to have profound impacts on company resources and hence it is therefore necessary to understand the implications of resource changes much before the detailed design is materialized. This work proposes a two step methodology to compute the reusability/commonality and the associated implication indices based on the global and detailed attributes of the conceptual and structural architectures. An illustrative example of a computer mouse family is used to demonstrate the working of the proposed methodology --Abstract, page iv

The influence of climate change on crop yields in the Canadian Prairies

Agriculture in Canada and specifically the Prairies is a key provider of global calories but is vulnerable given it is mostly rainfed and is prone to droughts. In this dissertation we examine how growing conditions and productivity in the Canadian Prairies have changed and could shift in the future. Historical trends in yields and climate are examined to understand factors that have shaped production on the Prairies. We also delve into future predictions of climate change and their impact on yields as well as exploring shifts in key agroclimatic indices under a range of possible futures. First we compare and contrast yields in key field crops for both Canada and U.S. to understand spatial and temporal trends, including crops developed predominantly through private industry and through publicly funded programs. We find lower yield growths in publicly funded crops such as wheat, particularly in the U.S. This underscores the need for more targeted investments in underperforming areas and crops as well as strategies to continue increasing yields in the high-performing areas. Second, we estimated the historical impacts of climate change on yields in the Prairies. Examining trends in agroclimatic indices and developing statistical models for assessing climate impact, we find that historical temperature trends have had a negative effect on yields for most of the Palliser triangle in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Overall from 1980-2021 climate change has resulted in an accumulated net loss of -1.9MT of barley (mostly due to negative yield impacts in Alberta) while canola and spring wheat gained 1.27MT and 0.5MT respectively, compared to a counterfactual of no climate change. We then used these statistical models to estimate the impact of climate change scenarios on future Canadian Prairie crop yields. We found that by 2050 under an intermediate scenario (SSP2-4.5) the average yields of barley, canola and spring wheat could be reduced by 25%, 19% and 21% respectively. Our findings highlight that agriculture productivity in the Canadian Prairies has experienced significant change in the last 4 decades and there is a need to focus on regionally specific resilience and adaption planning to address climate change impacts.Science, Faculty ofResources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute forGraduat