Attitudes of parents toward play for their children at home and in the hospital

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston UniversityThe main purpose of this study is to discover the attitudes of parents toward play and to reveal how they recognize the play needs of their children at home and in the hospital. Play, especially in the preschool period, is an integral part of every child's life and necessary for his continuing development. The child entering the hospital brings with him his everyday needs along with those presented by his particular illness. Thus play as a tool for the child's growth and as a medium for expression of feeling would seem even more important in the potentially traumatic hospital setting. [TRUNCATED

Glass Transitions and Critical Points in Orientationally Disordered Crystals and Structural Glassformers: "Strong" Liquids are More Interesting Than We Thought

When liquids are classified using Tg -scaled Arrhenius plots of relaxation times (or relative rates of entropy increase above Tg) across a "strong-fragile" spectrum of behaviors, the "strong" liquids have always appeared rather uninteresting [1, 2]. Here we use updated plots of the same type for crystal phases of the "rotator" variety [3] to confirm that the same pattern of behavior exists for these simpler (center of mass ordered) systems. However, in this case we can show that the "strong" systems owe their behavior to the existence of lambda-type order-disorder transitions at higher temperatures (directly observable in the cases where observations are not interrupted by prior melting). Furthermore, the same observation can be made for other systems in which the glass transition, at which the ordering is arrested, occurs in the thermodynamic ground state of the system. This prompts an enquiry into the behavior of strong liquids at high temperatures. Using the case of silica itself, we again find strong evidence from extended ion dynamics simulations, for a lambda transition at high temperatures, but only if pressure is adjusted to a critical value. In this case the lambda point is identifiable as a liquid-liquid critical point of the type suggested for supercooled water. We recognize the possibility of exploring, a postiori, the consequences of rapid cooling of laboratory liquid SiO2 from >5000K and multi-GPa pressures, using the phenomenology of damage-induced plasmas in optical fibers. The ramifications of these considerations will be explored to establish a "big picture"2 of the relation of thermodynamic transitions to supercooled liquid phenomenology [4, 5]

Impact of Groundwater Over-draft on Farm Income and Efficiency in Crop Production

In this study, the cost of groundwater extraction, impact of groundwater depletion on farm income, wateruse efficiency, technical efficiency in crop production and costs of groundwater depletion among different categories of farmers have been reported. The study has been conducted in the Chamarajanagar district of the Karnataka state, where groundwater is the major source of irrigation. Data have been collected from over-exploited, semi-critical and safe villages. The study has shown a wide difference between large and small farms in their access to groundwater resource in terms of cost. The functional analysis has revealed that farm income is lower in over-exploited and semi-critical villages compared to safe villages. The mean technical efficiency in crop production has been found highest among farmers in over-exploited villages. The total cost of groundwater depletion has been reported more in over-exploited villages and the cost increases with increase in the size of holding. The impact of this cost would be maximum on small and marginal farmers because of their low resource base and limited means of income. The study has emphasized on the need for incentivising for efficient use of groundwater by adopting efficient irrigation technologies like drip, sprinkler, etc. to ensure livelihood security.Groundwater, Over-draft, Farm income, Water-use efficiency, Technical efficiency, Agricultural and Food Policy, Q12, Q15, Q25,

Constitutional Impediments to Decentralization in the World\u27s Largest Federal Country

Decentralization is often advocated as a means of improving local democracy and enhancing what economists call allocative efficiency. In federal countries, where power is already divided between national and state governments, decentralization involves the devolution of power from state to local governments. The world’s largest federal country, India, took an unusual step to advance decentralization: it passed the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act to confer constitutional status on municipalities. However, India’s efforts to promote the devolution of power through a national urban renewal scheme have not succeeded for three reasons. The first is that India’s decentralization process is incomplete. Political decentralization has been stymied by the language of the constitutional amendment itself; administrative decentralization has been hampered by the comparative advantage of entrenched state-level institutions; and fiscal decentralization has not occurred because financial responsibility—but not significant revenue—has been devolved. The second reason is that decentralization has been undertaken in a top-down manner, which has exacerbated Center-state relations and mitigated the goal of allocative efficiency. Third is the relative weakness of local governance structures, which has created a Catch-22 situation: as long as the local governments lack significant capacity, the states are reluctant to devolve power to them. Additional effort needs to be directed towards an effective model of cooperative federalism. With Prime Minister Narendra Modi poised to create “smart cities” and promote urban renewal, it is critical to understand why India’s prior decentralization efforts have largely failed. The lessons learned over the past decade are an important guide to the future of cities in India as well as in other federal countrie

Nonparaxial shape-preserving Airy beams with Bessel signature

Spatially accelerating beams that are solutions to the Maxwell equations may propagate along incomplete circular trajectories, after which diffraction broadening takes over and the beams spread out. Taking these truncated Bessel wave fields to the paraxial limit, some authors sustained that it is recovered the known Airy beams (AiBs). Based on the angular spectrum representation of optical fields, we demonstrated that the paraxial approximation rigorously leads to off-axis focused beams instead of finite-energy AiBs. The latter will arise under the umbrella of a nonparaxial approach following elliptical trajectories in place of parabolas. Deviations from full-wave simulations appear more severely in beam positioning rather than its local profile