Atypical presentation and complications of term pregnancy with Mullerian duct anomaly: two case reports

Mullerian duct anomalies present as vague and overlapping features with other gynaecological conditions or may remain asymptomatic. These can lead to various obstetrical complications such as miscarriage, fetal growth restriction, preterm birth, abnormal placental implantation, malpresentation, increased risk of cesarean section, retained placenta and others. We hereby presented two cases with term pregnancy in women with Mullerian duct anomaly and the obstetrical complications they had. The first case landed up in a cesarean section at term due to breech presentation as a result of MDA. The second case had a vaginal delivery followed by entrapped retained placenta due to MDA, which had to be removed in piece meal. We hereby discussed the possible pathophysiology leading to these obstetrical complications in MDA pregnancies. MDA can lead to complications in pregnancy and previously undiagnosed women when detected with MDAs should be informed about complications and treatment options before and during pregnancy, for better maternal and neonatal outcomes

An immunocompromised dialysis patient with skin and bone lesions

Patients with chronic kidney failure have disturbances of immune function involving both innate and adaptive systems. These result in both immunodepression which increases susceptibility to infection and immunoactivation leading to a chronic inflammatory state [1]. Dialysis treatment may further aggravate aspects of this, especially the induction of inflammation. In addition, there is a growing number of patients who have returned to dialysis programmes following transplant failure. Many of these will have been intensively immunosuppressed, often over years or decades. These patients are at particular risk.Non peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Enhancing Combat Capabilities 2035 with Affordable Defence Spending

It is feasible to significantly enhance combat capabilities by 2035, within the resources realistically available. However, aiming to enhance combat capabilities by 2035 cannot be done by merely presenting wish lists and hoping that funds will be somehow available. It can only be achieved if we plan ahead realising that defence spending has to be affordable for the nation. Other major countries are restructuring their armed forces with this realisation, and there is no reason why we cannot do so too. There are opportunities that can be seized and realised within the budgets available, provided we are ready to think differently. From historical service-specific and turf-conscious thinking, we need to move on to adopt a whole-of-nation approach in support of our national security goals. We need to learn the lessons of recent experience, and look at optimal trade-offs accordingly

Electronic Properties And Atomic Scale Microscopy Of Two Dimensional Materials: Graphene And Molybdenum Disulfide

Novel two dimensional nanoscale materials like graphene and metal dichalcogenides (MX2) have attracted the attention of the scientific community, due to their rich physics and wide range of potential applications. It has been shown that novel graphene based transparent conductors and radiofrequency transistors are competitive with the existing technologies. Graphene’s properties are influenced sensitively by adsorbates and substrates. As such not surprisingly, physical properties of graphene are found to have a large variability, which cannot be controlled at the synthesis level, reducing the utility of graphene. As a part of my doctorate dissertation, I have developed atomic hydrogen as a novel technique to count the scatterers responsible for limiting the carrier mobility of graphene field effect transistors on silicon oxide (SiO2) and identified that charged impurities to be the most dominant scatterer. This result enables systematic reduction of the detrimental variability in device performance of graphene. Such sensitivity to substrates also gives an opportunity for engineering device properties of graphene using substrate interaction and atomic scale vacancies. Stacking graphene on hexagonal boron-nitride (h-BN) gives rise to nanoscale periodic potential, which influences its electronic graphene. Using state-of-the-art atomic-resolution scanning probe microscope, I correlated the observed transport properties to the substrate induced extrinsic potentials. Finally in efforts to exploit graphene’s sensitivity to discover new sensor technologies, I have explored noncovalent functionalization of graphene using peptides. Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) exhibits thickness dependent bandgap. Transistors fabricated from single layer MoS2 have shown a high on/off ratio. It is expected that ad-atom engineering can be used to induce on demand a metal-semiconductor transition in MoS2. In this direction, I have iii explored controlled/reversible fluorination and hydrogenation of monolayer MoS2 to potentially derive a full range of integrated circuit technology. The in-depth characterization of the samples is carried out by Raman/photoluminescence spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscop

Enhancing Combat Capabilities 2035 with Affordable Defence Spending

It is feasible to significantly enhance combat capabilities by 2035, within the resources realistically available. However, aiming to enhance combat capabilities by 2035 cannot be done by merely presenting wish lists and hoping that funds will be somehow available. It can only be achieved if we plan ahead realising that defence spending has to be affordable for the nation. Other major countries are restructuring their armed forces with this realisation, and there is no reason why we cannot do so too. There are opportunities that can be seized and realised within the budgets available, provided we are ready to think differently. From historical service-specific and turf-conscious thinking, we need to move on to adopt a whole-of-nation approach in support of our national security goals. We need to learn the lessons of recent experience, and look at optimal trade-offs accordingly

Cointegration between Nifty 50 Spot and Future Indices: An Empirical Analysis Applying Vector Error Correction Model

This paper aims to investigate the cointegration of the spot market and future indices (NIFTY, NIKKEI, S&P 500 AND Singapore FTSE) of selected developed and developing nations from January 2011 to December, 2021. The Johansen cointegration test, Granger Causality Test, and Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) are all used to gauge the degree of cointegration. The study's empirical findings support the hypothesis that there is cointegration between the spot market and future market indices of selected global markets. Comparative Granger tests for causality using the error correction model and results of error correction tests reveal interdependencies. The fact that the S&P 500 spot market index and future market index have a bi-directional causality shows that how interdependent these stock indices are.  But, in case of Singapore FTSE, there is uni-causality from SGX future to SGX Spot indices. And in rest of indices (NIFTY and NIKKEI), there is no causality between spot and future stock indices. The study's conclusions show that investors may create diverse portfolio strategies to manage risk

Note from the Editor

This edition of the CLAWS Journal, Winter 2023, is dedicated to the memory of Late Brigadier Narender Kumar, SM, VSM (Retd), a recipient of the CLAWS Scholar Warrior award of 2021 and a Visiting Fellow at CLAWS. His contribution to CLAWS was immense and distinctive and shall forever be remembered. This edition carries eleven articles on the overarching theme of defence and national security, with contributions from strategic experts and practitioners in the field. These articles give our readers a balanced and researched view of issues related to India’s strategic interests, geopolitical developments in our neighbourhood, and measures for developing comprehensive national power and defence capability development. &nbsp

A Frequency Assessment of Prevalent Prevention Strategies in order to Manage Banks’ NPAs in MSME Loans

The vast amount of non-performing assets (NPAs) is a recurrent problem and a huge barrier to developing a successful banking sector. The MSME sector of the Indian economy is experiencing a worsening problem with delinquent assets. There has hardly been any systematic evaluation of tackling the problem in the context of loans sanctioned to MSMEs. Recent years have seen an increase in bad loans to micro, small, and medium businesses. Curative and preventive measures are both available to control non-performing assets (Meher et al., 2020). The study makes an effort to concentrate on the identification of numerous preventive methods for NPA management in the MSME sector in future. The primary data is related to the actual usage of preventive measures. The data was empirically evaluated using frequency analysis based on a survey of 316 bankers from 10 banks (5 from public and 5 from private sector). Therefore, the current study aims to shed light on the methods utilised to prevent NPAs in MMSEs while taking into account the viewpoint of the bankers who have had direct involvement in lending choices. The findings highlight the key methods for preventing NPAs which the banks must consider while making the necessary structural modifications to their mitigation measures

Load Balancing Algoritms in Cloud Computing Environment: A Review

Cloud computing is an emerging internet based technology. Cloud is a platform providing pool of resources and virtualization. It is based on pay-as-you-go model. The numbers of users accessing the cloud are rising day by day. Generally clouds are based on data centers which are powerful to handle large number of users. The reliability of clouds depends on the way it handle loads, to overcome such problems clouds must be featured with the load balancing mechanism. Load balancing is required as we don’t want one centralized severs performance to be degraded. A lot of algorithms have been proposed to do this task. In this paper we have studied the various existing load balancing algorithms and then compared them based on various parameters like resource utilization, scalability, stability etc