375 research outputs found
The Development of India’s Financial Inclusion Agenda—Some Lessons for Pakistan
Financial Inclusion has assumed a vital position in the Public
Policy discourse of developing economies. Provision of financial
services to the otherwise excluded strata of the society enhances their
potential to climb the economic ladder of opportunity and prosperity.
Access to financial services to the otherwise excluded impacts their
quality of life and enables the less privileged to increase and
diversify their incomes, improve their social and economic conditions.
Due to lack of access to financial services, most poor households have
to rely on their meagre savings or money lenders which limit their
ability to actively participate and benefit from the development
process. The main theoretical arguments that economic theory postulates
regarding the failure of financial markets in percolating poor and rural
areas are of informational asymmetries, difficulties in contract
designing and enforcement, greater transaction costs. The demand side
aspects may be low demand for such services, arising from illiteracy,
less investment opportunities in rural areas and difficult loan
contracts [Basu (2006)]. When households are access constrained with
respect to financial services, it becomes one of the important reasons
for persisting inequalities. Economic theory suggests that unrelenting
inequalities has a negative impact on the long term growth prospects of
an economy [World Bank (2007)]. While establishing causality between
financial development and economic growth has been quite tedious, with
no simple answers, the evidence of a strong link between financial
development and economic growth has continued to rise [Gattoo and Akhtar
(2014)]. The interest in the financial inclusion discourse across
developing and developing world stems from the recognition that a strong
and vibrant financial system does not necessarily imply increasing
financial to all across the societal divide [Honohan (2003)]
Collaboration: Spirit of Supply Chain Management
The paper establishes the necessity for collaboration for effective supply chain management. We briefly explore some enablers and obstacles and propose the basic components of a strategy for enabling and overcoming these obstacles. Supporting technology for collaboration involves Supply Chain Management Software, Enterprise Resource Planning systems as well as the Internet for the communication platform. A brief discussion of the benefits that go beyond the bottom line, including customer demands and personalisation are noted
Agronav: Autonomous Navigation Framework for Agricultural Robots and Vehicles using Semantic Segmentation and Semantic Line Detection
The successful implementation of vision-based navigation in agricultural
fields hinges upon two critical components: 1) the accurate identification of
key components within the scene, and 2) the identification of lanes through the
detection of boundary lines that separate the crops from the traversable
ground. We propose Agronav, an end-to-end vision-based autonomous navigation
framework, which outputs the centerline from the input image by sequentially
processing it through semantic segmentation and semantic line detection models.
We also present Agroscapes, a pixel-level annotated dataset collected across
six different crops, captured from varying heights and angles. This ensures
that the framework trained on Agroscapes is generalizable across both ground
and aerial robotic platforms. Codes, models and dataset will be released at
\href{https://github.com/shivamkumarpanda/agronav}{github.com/shivamkumarpanda/agronav}
A Fully Implicit Method for Robust Frictional Contact Handling in Elastic Rods
Accurate frictional contact is critical in simulating the assembly of
rod-like structures in the practical world, such as knots, hairs, flagella, and
more. Due to their high geometric nonlinearity and elasticity, rod-on-rod
contact remains a challenging problem tackled by researchers in both
computational mechanics and computer graphics. Typically, frictional contact is
regarded as constraints for the equations of motions of a system. Such
constraints are often computed independently at every time step in a dynamic
simulation, thus slowing down the simulation and possibly introducing numerical
convergence issues. This paper proposes a fully implicit penalty-based
frictional contact method, Implicit Contact Model (IMC), that efficiently and
robustly captures accurate frictional contact responses. We showcase our
algorithm's performance in achieving visually realistic results for the
challenging and novel contact scenario of flagella bundling in fluid medium, a
significant phenomenon in biology that motivates novel engineering applications
in soft robotics. In addition to this, we offer a side-by-side comparison with
Incremental Potential Contact (IPC), a state-of-the-art contact handling
algorithm. We show that IMC possesses comparable performance to IPC while
converging at a faster rate.Comment: * Equal contribution. A video summarizing this work is available on
YouTube: https://youtu.be/g0rlCFfWJ8
TERMINALIA CHEBULA: AN EPHEMERAL GLANCE
Herbal drugs represent a major allocation of all the recognized systems of health in the world. Also, the medicinal plants have been regarded as valuable and cheap sources of various phytoconstituents which are used extensively in the development of drugs against various diseases. Terminalia chebula, commonly called as black myrobalan, ink tree, or chebulic myrobalan, is a deciduous tree belonging to the family Combretaceae, has been regarded as one of the most important medicinal plants used in medicines of ayurveda, siddha, unani and homeopathy. Numbers of phytochemical constituents have been found to be associated with the drug such as tannins, chebulinic acid, ellagic acid, gallic acid, punicalagin and flavonoids. Moreover, Terminalia chebula has been well reported to possess antioxidant, antidiabetic, antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, anticancerous, antiulcer, antimutagenic and wound healing activities. In addition, Terminalia chebula has been used extensively in the preparation of many Ayurvedic formulations for infectious diseases like chronic ulcer, leucorrhoea, pyorrhoea and fungal infections of the skin. The present review article has been designed to elucidate data on phytochemistry, pharmacognostic characters and pharmacological activities associated with Terminali
Protective Effects of Salivary Factors in Dental Caries in Diabetic Patients of Pakistan
Salivary factors have been studied for their effects on the process of dental caries in patients of diabetes mellitus type 2. In this study, protective role of salivary pH, salivary flow rate, and salivary calcium is assessed in the patients of diabetes mellitus type 2 with dental caries. The samples of saliva were collected from 400 patients of diabetes mellitus type 2 and 300 age- and sex- matched controls after getting informed consent. All the subjects were classified into four groups according to age. The severity of dental caries was counted by decayed, missed, and filled teeth (DMFT) score. The salivary pH, flow rate, and calcium levels were found to be low in patients as compared to controls. The levels of fasting blood sugar, HbA1c, and DMFT score were found to be significantly high in patients than controls. The glycemic factors were significantly correlated with salivary factors indicating their influence on progression of caries in diabetes. On the basis of findings, it is concluded that the suitable salivary pH and flow rate may be regarded as main protective factors against dental caries in diabetes. Optimum level of salivary calcium may be responsible for continuous supply of calcium to arrest the demineralization and help reduce the occurrence of dental caries
Heparan sulphate inhibition of cell proliferation induced by TGFβ and PDGF
The effect of glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) on the proliferation of smooth muscle cells (SMC) and fibroblasts was assessed by culturing cells with or without GAGs. Porcine heparan sulphate (HS) inhibited proliferation in a dose dependent manner. At 167 μg/ml of HS this reached 88% and 72% inhibition of SMC and fibroblast growth, respectively. Pig and beef mucosal heparins also blocked proliferation, but to a lesser extent. In contrast, beef lung heparin, chondroitin sulphate, and dermatan sulphate failed to block growth factor induced proliferation. Continuous presence of HS was not required, suggesting that the inhibitory effects resulted from a direct effect on the cell rather than an interaction of the GAG with growth factors. The mechanism by which GAGs inhibit proliferation will be addressed in future studies
- …