Capital Penetration And Coping Strategies Of Traditional Hindu Fisherfolk In Bangladesh

Bangladesh is a lower-middle-income country in South Asia where traditional fishermen, herein, Jaladas are at risk of chronic poverty. This study was conducted in two Jaladas villages to identify the socio-economic transformations caused by the inflows of capitals from different actors and the roles of various market functionaries, traditional social institutions, and power relations. Moreover, it aims to examine the coping strategies; and providing policy recommendations for their inclusion and wellbeing. This study adopted the qualitative research design, specifically the Key Informant Interview (KII), Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and household level case studies. A random survey of 100 households was conducted. The findings revealed that NGO-led interventions increase awareness, leadership development, education, access to health and sanitation facilities, and provide alternative employment skills to improve the quality of life in one of the villages studied. In the meantime, the increase numbers of commercial entrepreneurs have led higher over-exploitation of fisheries resources where powerful market functionaries control the fish marketing structure. At the same time, social bondage, kinship, and roles of traditional institutions become dysfunctional due to the entrance of multiple capitals. This situation creates critical conditions reducing the fishermen’s real income and assets, pushing their way from their inherited occupation. Jaladas communities cope with individual and collective initiatives.Based on this situation, this study urges state and global donor agencies to take special and urgent attention to the socio-economic and political empowerment of the Jaladas. Correspondingly, there is a need for a management plan for marginalized artisanal fishers, formation of specialized banks, allowing direct cash transfer during fishing ban, and ensuring the proper execution legal provisions for fishing labors in big boats, and policy revision in favor of disadvantaged fishermen

Capital Penetration And Coping Strategies Of Traditional Hindu Fisherfolk In Bangladesh

Bangladesh is a lower-middle-income country in South Asia where traditional fishermen, herein, Jaladas are at risk of chronic poverty. This study was conducted in two Jaladas villages to identify the socio-economic transformations caused by the inflows of capitals from different actors and the roles of various market functionaries, traditional social institutions, and power relations. Moreover, it aims to examine the coping strategies; and providing policy recommendations for their inclusion and wellbeing. This study adopted the qualitative research design, specifically the Key Informant Interview (KII), Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and household level case studies. A random survey of 100 households was conducted. The findings revealed that NGO-led interventions increase awareness, leadership development, education, access to health and sanitation facilities, and provide alternative employment skills to improve the quality of life in one of the villages studied. In the meantime, the increase numbers of commercial entrepreneurs have led higher over-exploitation of fisheries resources where powerful market functionaries control the fish marketing structure

BenCoref: A Multi-Domain Dataset of Nominal Phrases and Pronominal Reference Annotations

Coreference Resolution is a well studied problem in NLP. While widely studied for English and other resource-rich languages, research on coreference resolution in Bengali largely remains unexplored due to the absence of relevant datasets. Bengali, being a low-resource language, exhibits greater morphological richness compared to English. In this article, we introduce a new dataset, BenCoref, comprising coreference annotations for Bengali texts gathered from four distinct domains. This relatively small dataset contains 5200 mention annotations forming 502 mention clusters within 48,569 tokens. We describe the process of creating this dataset and report performance of multiple models trained using BenCoref. We anticipate that our work sheds some light on the variations in coreference phenomena across multiple domains in Bengali and encourages the development of additional resources for Bengali. Furthermore, we found poor crosslingual performance at zero-shot setting from English, highlighting the need for more language-specific resources for this task

DePAint: A Decentralized Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Algorithm considering Peak and Average Constraints

The field of safe multi-agent reinforcement learning, despite its potential applications in various domains such as drone delivery and vehicle automation, remains relatively unexplored. Training agents to learn optimal policies that maximize rewards while considering specific constraints can be challenging, particularly in scenarios where having a central controller to coordinate the agents during the training process is not feasible. In this paper, we address the problem of multi-agent policy optimization in a decentralized setting, where agents communicate with their neighbors to maximize the sum of their cumulative rewards while also satisfying each agent's safety constraints. We consider both peak and average constraints. In this scenario, there is no central controller coordinating the agents and both the rewards and constraints are only known to each agent locally/privately. We formulate the problem as a decentralized constrained multi-agent Markov Decision Problem and propose a momentum-based decentralized policy gradient method, DePAint, to solve it. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first privacy-preserving fully decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that considers both peak and average constraints. We also provide theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation of our algorithm in various scenarios and compare its performance to centralized algorithms that consider similar constraints

Determination of Histidine and Related Compounds in Rumen Fluid by Liquid Chromatography

A liquid chromatographic procedure was developed for quantitative determination of histidine (His), histidinol (HDL), histamine (HTM), urocanic acid (URA), imidazolepyruvic acid (ImPA), imidazoleacetic acid (ImAA), and imidazolelactic acid (ImLA) in rumen fluid. The method is based on direct injection analysis by UV absorbance detection at 220 nm. The separation was performed under 2 different chromatographic conditions on a LiChrospher 100 NH 2 column. In the first chromatographic system, the mobile phase used for isocratic elution was 67 mM potassium phosphate buffer (monobasic and dibasic) pH 6.45-90% acetonitrile in water (21 + 79); in the second system, an acetonitrile gradient in 63 mM potassium phosphate buffer (monobasic) pH 3.0, obtained by addition of 60 mM phosphoric acid, was used. Analyses of both systems were completed within 32 and 25 min, respectively. The limits of detection of these compounds were (mM): His, 2.8; HDL, 3.7; HTM, 4.0; URA, 0.75; ImPA, 4.7; ImAA, 1.2; and ImLA, 1.3. Recovery of these compounds added to rumen fluid was 97.4-103.0% within a 1-day study and 95.4-99.0% on different day studies. Detectable levels of His were found in the deproteinized rumen fluid of goats, with average concentrations of 16.10, 10.43, 11.14, and 13.62 mM in the rumen fluid collected before the morning feeding and 2, 4, and 6 h after feeding, respectively. HDL, HTM, URA, ImPA, ImAA, and ImLA were not detected in the rumen fluid before and after feeding. Trp, Phe, and Tyr were also identified in the rumen fluid, with average concentrations of 8.25, 29.04, and 12.6 mM, respectively, before the morning feeding

Thrombolytic, Membrane Stabilizing, Analgesic activities along with Phytochemical Screening of the Methanolic Extract of Xanthium indicum Koenig Fruits

Objective: This study aimed to assess the thrombolytic, membrane stabilizing, and analgesic activities of the methanolic extract of the fruits of Xanthium indicum Koenig and undertook a phytochemical screening.Material and Methods: A qualitative analysis method to evaluate phytochemicals was adopted. Analgesic efficacy was assessed in vivo using the acetic acid-induced writhing method in a mouse model. Membranestabilizing and thrombolytic tests were done in vitro measuring the percentage of inhibition of hypotonic solution-produced hemolysis and running a clot disruption assay, respectively.Results: Crude methanolic extract was used for phytochemical screening, confirming the presence of reducing sugars, tannin, saponin, protein, phenol, and diterpenes. In the analgesic activity test, a 500 mg/ kg dose of crude extract showed 40% inhibition of writhing, while 200mg/kg showed a reduction of 22.64%. In the membrane stabilizing activity test, 10 mg/ml extract resulted in the highest inhibition rate of hemolysis with a value of 51.79%, while for acetyl salicylic acid (0.10 mg/ml), this value was 71.35%. In the thrombolytic activity test, 10 mg/ml plant extract showed 27.11% clot-lysis, which was the maximum among our tested concentrations; however, 40.08% lysis was achieved by the standard drug streptokinase. In all cases, we found a dose-dependent response. Tannin and flavonoid are known to be responsible for analgesic and thrombolytic response.Conclusion: As the methanolic extract of the fruits of X. indicum possesses potential pharmacological effects, the plant should be scrutinized comprehensively to detect the bioactive components present and the exact mechanism of their action in view of a drug development program

Neuropharmacological activity of the crude ethanolic extract of Syzygium aromaticum flowering bud

Backgroud: Present study was designed to assess the possibility of in-vivo neuropharmacological effects of the ethanolic extract of Syzygium aromaticum flowering buds by using behavioral models of mice.Methods: Anxiolytic effects of the extract were assessed using open field test (OFT), hole cross test (HCT), elevated plus maze (EPM), and hole board test (HBT) respectively; while antidepressant properties were determined using forced swimming test (FST), and tail suspension test (TST). Finally thiopental sodium (TS)-induced sleeping time test helped us to evaluate the sedative-hypnotic potential of the extract.Results: In OFT and HCT, the movement of the mice decreased significantly (*p<0.005) for the extract treated groups when compare to control. This decrease indicates the suppression of locomotor activities of mice (from 1st-5th observation periods). Moreover, the increase of the spending time in EPM open arm, and head dipping in HBT endorsed the anxiolytic-like behavior of the extract. In FST and TST, S. aromaticum extract significantly (*p<0.05, **p<0.001) reduced the immobility time of the mice. Approx. 29% and 34% reduction of the immobility time were found in FST for 250 mg/kg, and 500 mg/kg b.w. doses respectively, which clearly indicates the presence of the antidepressant compounds in extract. Finally, TS-induced sleeping time test confirmed the potency of the sedative response of the extract (sleeping duration were 45.4±2.6 minutes for control, whereas 87.0±1.79 minutes for 500 mg/kg b.w. extract treated group). The observed neurological response may be due to binding of any phytoconstituent with gamma-amino-butyric acid (GABAA) or benzodiazepine (BZD) receptors.Conclusion: Our study results suggest that the ethanolic extract of S. aromaticum possess remarkable sedative, antidepressant and anxiolytic activities with a demand of further investigation for the drug development program