9,042 research outputs found
Community resource centres to improve the health of women and children in Mumbai slums: study protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial
Background: The trial addresses the general question of whether community resource centers run by a non-government organization improve the health of women and children in slums. The resource centers will be run by the Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action, and the trial will evaluate their effects on a series of public health indicators. Each resource center will be located in a vulnerable Mumbai slum area and will serve as a base for salaried community workers, supervised by officers and coordinators, to organize the collection and dissemination of health information, provision of services, home visits to identify and counsel families at risk, referral of individuals and families to appropriate services and support for their access, meetings of community members and providers, and events and campaigns on health issues.
Methods/design: A cluster randomized controlled trial in which 20 urban slum areas with resource centers are compared with 20 control areas. Each cluster will contain approximately 600 households and randomized allocation will be in three blocked phases, of 12, 12 and 16 clusters. Any resident of an intervention cluster will be able to participate in the intervention, but the resource centers will target women and children, particularly women of reproductive age and children under 5.
The outcomes will be assessed through a household census after 2 years of resource center operations. The primary outcomes are unmet need for family planning in women aged 15 to 49 years, proportion of children under 5 years of age not fully immunized for their ages, and proportion of children under 5 years of age with weight for height less than 2 standard deviations below the median for age and sex. Secondary outcomes describe adolescent pregnancies, home deliveries, receipt of conditional cash transfers for institutional delivery, other childhood anthropometric indices, use of public sector health and nutrition services, indices of infant and young child feeding, and consultation for violence against women and children
Community mobilization in Mumbai slums to improve perinatal care and outcomes: a cluster randomized controlled trial.
Improving maternal and newborn health in low-income settings requires both health service and community action. Previous community initiatives have been predominantly rural, but India is urbanizing. While working to improve health service quality, we tested an intervention in which urban slum-dweller women's groups worked to improve local perinatal health
Higher dimensional dust collapse with a cosmological constant
The general solution of the Einstein equation for higher dimensional (HD)
spherically symmetric collapse of inhomogeneous dust in presence of a
cosmological term, i.e., exact interior solutions of the Einstein field
equations is presented for the HD Tolman-Bondi metrics imbedded in a de Sitter
background. The solution is then matched to exterior HD Scwarschild-de Sitter.
A brief discussion on the causal structure singularities and horizons is
provided. It turns out that the collapse proceed in the same way as in the
Minkowski background, i.e., the strong curvature naked singularities form and
that the higher dimensions seem to favor black holes rather than naked
singularities.Comment: 7 Pages, no figure
Biomass and carbon stocks in mangrove stands of Kadalundi estuarine wetland, south-west coast of India
Mangroves are keystone ecosystems which provide numerous environmental services. Mangroves assume significance as standing stores of sequestered atmospheric carbon and are therefore, important in the light of climate change mitigation. In this study, we attempted to assess the biomass of mangroves in the Kadalundi wetland, south-west coast of India and evaluated the potential of these mangroves to sequester and store carbon. The C-stocks of above-ground and root biomass were 83.32±11.06 t C ha-1 and 34.96±4.30 t C ha-1 respectively, while the C-stock in sediment was estimated to be 63.87±8.67 t C ha-1. The estimates of mean combined C-stocks in the mangrove biomass and sediment of Kadalundi shows that this estuarine mangrove wetland stored 182.15 t C ha-1, which was equivalent to 668.48 t CO2 ha-1. The mangroves which cover an area of 13.23 ha in the Kadalundi wetland is assumed to have a potential to sequester and store a substantial quantity of 2,409.84 t C which is equivalent to 8,844.11 t CO2. The study underscores the importance of these intertidal forests for climate change mitigation and stresses the importance of protecting the mangroves which provide many other important ecosystem services that benefit communities
विशेष स्थानिकता और समुद्री जीव जतीयों की संपन्नता के प्रसंग में मान्नार खाडी आवास व्यवस्था की जैवविविधता
कृपया पूरा लेखा पढ
Stellar Rotation in Young Clusters. II. Evolution of Stellar Rotation and Surface Helium Abundance
We derive the effective temperatures and gravities of 461 OB stars in 19
young clusters by fitting the H-gamma profile in their spectra. We use
synthetic model profiles for rotating stars to develop a method to estimate the
polar gravity for these stars, which we argue is a useful indicator of their
evolutionary status. We combine these results with projected rotational
velocity measurements obtained in a previous paper on these same open clusters.
We find that the more massive B-stars experience a spin down as predicted by
the theories for the evolution of rotating stars. Furthermore, we find that the
members of binary stars also experience a marked spin down with advanced
evolutionary state due to tidal interactions. We also derive non-LTE-corrected
helium abundances for most of the sample by fitting the He I 4026, 4387, 4471
lines. A large number of helium peculiar stars are found among cooler stars
with Teff < 23000 K. The analysis of the high mass stars (8.5 solar masses < M
< 16 solar masses) shows that the helium enrichment process progresses through
the main sequence (MS) phase and is greater among the faster rotators. This
discovery supports the theoretical claim that rotationally induced internal
mixing is the main cause of surface chemical anomalies that appear during the
MS phase. The lower mass stars appear to have slower rotation rates among the
low gravity objects, and they have a large proportion of helium peculiar stars.
We suggest that both properties are due to their youth. The low gravity stars
are probably pre-main sequence objects that will spin up as they contract.
These young objects very likely host a remnant magnetic field from their natal
cloud, and these strong fields sculpt out surface regions with unusual chemical
abundances.Comment: 50 pages 18 figures, accepted by Ap
Irreversible Aging Dynamics and Generic Phase Behavior of Aqueous Suspensions of Laponite
In this work we study the aging behavior of aqueous suspension of Laponite
having 2.8 weight % concentration using rheological tools. At various salt
concentration all the samples demonstrate orientational order when observed
using crossed polarizers. In rheological experiments we observe inherent
irreversibility in the aging dynamics which forces the system not to rejuvenate
to the same state in the shear melting experiment carried out at a later date
since preparation. The extensive rheological experiments carried out as a
function of time elapsed since preparation demonstrate the self similar trend
in the aging behavior irrespective of the concentration of salt. We observe
that the exploration of the low energy states as a function of aging time is
only kinetically affected by the presence of salt. We estimate that the energy
barrier to attain the low energy states decreases linearly with increase in the
concentration of salt. The observed superposition of all the elapsed time and
the salt concentration dependent data suggests that the aging that occurs in
low salt concentration systems over a very long period is qualitatively similar
to the aging behavior observed in systems with high salt concentration over a
shorter period.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures. Langmuir, in pres
Multiwavelength Observations of the Gamma-Ray Blazar PKS 0528+134 in Quiescence
We present multiwavelength observations of the ultraluminous blazar-type
radio loud quasar PKS 0528+134 in quiescence during the period July to December
2009. Significant flux variability on a time scale of several hours was found
in the optical regime, accompanied by a weak trend of spectral softening with
increasing flux. We suggest that this might be the signature of a contribution
from the accretion disk at the blue end of the optical spectrum. The optical
flux is weakly polarized with rapid variations of the degree and direction of
polarization, while the polarization of the 43 GHz radio core remains steady.
Optical spectropolarimetry suggests a trend of increasing degree of
polarization with increasing wavelength, providing additional evidence for an
accretion disc contribution towards the blue end of the optical spectrum. We
constructed four SEDs indicating that even in the quiescent state, the
bolometric luminosity of PKS 0528+134 is dominated by its gamma-ray emission. A
leptonic single-zone jet model produced acceptable fits to the SEDs with
contributions to the high-energy emission from synchrotron self-Compton
radiation and Comptonization of direct accretion disk emission. Fit parameters
close to equipartition were obtained. The moderate variability on long time
scales implies the existence of on-going particle acceleration, while the
observed optical polarization variability seems to point towards a turbulent
acceleration process. Turbulent particle acceleration at stationary features
along the jet therefore appears to be a viable possibility for the quiescent
state of PKS 0528+134.Comment: Accepted for Publication in The Astrophysical Journal. -
Acknowledgement adde
Stellar populations in a standard ISOGAL field in the Galactic disk
We aim to identify the stellar populations (mostly red giants and young
stars) detected in the ISOGAL survey at 7 and 15micron towards a field (LN45)
in the direction l=-45, b=0.0. The sources detected in the survey of the
Galactic plane by the Infrared Space Observatory are characterized based on
colour-colour and colour-magnitude diagrams. We combine the ISOGAL catalog with
the data from surveys such as 2MASS and GLIMPSE. Interstellar extinction and
distance are estimated using the red clump stars detected by 2MASS in
combination with the isochrones for the AGB/RGB branch. Absolute magnitudes are
thus derived and the stellar populations are identified based on their absolute
magnitudes and their infrared excess. A standard approach to the analysis of
ISOGAL disk observations has been established. We identify several hundred
RGB/AGB stars and 22 candidate young stellar objects in the direction of this
field in an area of 0.16 deg^2. An over-density of stellar sources is found at
distances corresponding to the distance of the Scutum-Crux spiral arm. In
addition, we determine mass-loss rates of AGB-stars using dust radiative
transfer models from the literature.Comment: 48pages, 38 figures, accepted for publication in A &
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