Human Development Report 2013 - The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World

The 2013 Human Development Report -- "The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World" -- examines the profound shift in global dynamics driven by the fast-rising new powers of the developing world and its long-term implications for human development.China has already overtaken Japan as the worlds second biggest economy while lifting hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty. India is reshaping its future with new entrepreneurial creativity and social policy innovation. Brazil is lifting its living standards through expanding international relationships and antipoverty programs that are emulated worldwide.But the "Rise of the South" analyzed in the Report is a much larger phenomenon: Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, South Africa, Indonesia and many other developing nations are also becoming leading actors on the world stage

Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience - Human Development Report 2014

The 2014 Human Development Report -- Sustaining Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience -- looks at two concepts which are both interconnected and immensely important to securing human development progress. Since the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) first global Human Development Report (HDR) in 1990, most countries have registered significant human development. This year's Report shows that overall global trends are positive and that progress is continuing. Yet, lives are being lost, and livelihoods and development undermined, by natural or human-induced disasters and crises. However, these setbacks are not inevitable. While every society is vulnerable to risk, some suffer far less harm and recover more quickly than others when adversity strikes. This Report asks why that is and, for the first time in a global HDR, considers vulnerability and resilience through a human development lens

Summary: Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience - Human Development Report 2014

The 2014 Human Development Report -- Sustaining Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience -- looks at two concepts which are both interconnected and immensely important to securing human development progress. Since the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) first global Human Development Report (HDR) in 1990, most countries have registered significant human development This year's Report shows that overall global trends are positive and that progress is continuing. Yet, lives are being lost, and livelihoods and development undermined, by natural or human-induced disasters and crises. However these setbacks are not inevitable. While every society is vulnerable to risk, some suffer far less harm and recover more quickly than others when adversity strikes. The Report asks why that is and, for the first time in a global HDR considers vulnerability and resilience through a human development lens

Effect of Intraumbilical Oxytocin on Duration of Third Stage of Labour

Background:To determine the efficacy of intraumbilical oxytocin in reducing duration of third stage of labor, compared to routine active management of third stage of labor(AMTSL).Methods: In this randomized controlled trial one hundred parturient women were divided in two groups consisting of 50 each. Active management of third stage was done in both the groups. The study group in addition to active management, received oxytocin 10 international units( IU) diluted in 10ml normal saline through the umbilical vein and control group received equal volume of normal saline as placebo .The mean time taken for the completion of third stage was calculated for both groups in terms of minutes. The mean time “t” between the two groups was compared using Independent sample- t test. P value<0.05 was taken significant.Results: The mean duration of third stage of labor was 4.38±0.88 minutes in the study group, compared to 5.12±1.32 minutes in the control group which was significant statistically p=0.001. There was no incidence of retained placenta and none of placenta remain undelivered beyond 15 minutes in both groups.Conclusion: Intraumbilical oxytocin when given along with active management significantly reduces the mean duration of third stage of labour, compared to active management alone

Bridging the Spoof Gap: A Unified Parallel Aggregation Network for Voice Presentation Attacks

Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems are increasingly used in voice bio-metrics for user authentication but are susceptible to logical and physical spoofing attacks, posing security risks. Existing research mainly tackles logical or physical attacks separately, leading to a gap in unified spoofing detection. Moreover, when existing systems attempt to handle both types of attacks, they often exhibit significant disparities in the Equal Error Rate (EER). To bridge this gap, we present a Parallel Stacked Aggregation Network that processes raw audio. Our approach employs a split-transform-aggregation technique, dividing utterances into convolved representations, applying transformations, and aggregating the results to identify logical (LA) and physical (PA) spoofing attacks. Evaluation of the ASVspoof-2019 and VSDC datasets shows the effectiveness of the proposed system. It outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, displaying reduced EER disparities and superior performance in detecting spoofing attacks. This highlights the proposed method's generalizability and superiority. In a world increasingly reliant on voice-based security, our unified spoofing detection system provides a robust defense against a spectrum of voice spoofing attacks, safeguarding ASVs and user data effectively

Securing Voice Biometrics: One-Shot Learning Approach for Audio Deepfake Detection

The Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) system is vulnerable to fraudulent activities using audio deepfakes, also known as logical-access voice spoofing attacks. These deepfakes pose a concerning threat to voice biometrics due to recent advancements in generative AI and speech synthesis technologies. While several deep learning models for speech synthesis detection have been developed, most of them show poor generalizability, especially when the attacks have different statistical distributions from the ones seen. Therefore, this paper presents Quick-SpoofNet, an approach for detecting both seen and unseen synthetic attacks in the ASV system using one-shot learning and metric learning techniques. By using the effective spectral feature set, the proposed method extracts compact and representative temporal embeddings from the voice samples and utilizes metric learning and triplet loss to assess the similarity index and distinguish different embeddings. The system effectively clusters similar speech embeddings, classifying bona fide speeches as the target class and identifying other clusters as spoofing attacks. The proposed system is evaluated using the ASVspoof 2019 logical access (LA) dataset and tested against unseen deepfake attacks from the ASVspoof 2021 dataset. Additionally, its generalization ability towards unseen bona fide speech is assessed using speech data from the VSDC dataset