India’s energy and emissions future: an interpretive analysis of model scenarios

As a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, but also as a developing country starting from a low emissions base, India is an important actor in global climate change mitigation. However, perceptions of India vary widely, from an energy-hungry climate deal-breaker to a forerunner of a low carbon future. Developing clarity on India's energy and emissions future is challenged by the uncertainties of India's development transitions, including its pathway through a demographic and urban transition within a rapidly changing policy context. Model-based scenario analyses provide widely varying projections, in part because they make differing assumptions, often implicit, about these transitions. To address the uncertainty in India's energy and emissions future, this Letter applies a novel interpretive approach to existing scenario studies. First, we make explicit the implied development, technology and policy assumptions underlying model-based analysis in order to cluster and interpret results. In a second step, we analyse India's current policy landscape and use that as a benchmark against which to judge scenario assumptions and results. Using this interpretive approach, we conclude that, based on current policies, a doubling of India's CO2 energy-related emissions from 2012 levels is a likely upper bound for its 2030 emissions and that this trajectory is consistent with meeting India's Paris emissions intensity pledge. Because of its low emissions starting point, even after a doubling, India's 2030 per capita emissions will be below today's global average and absolute emissions will be less than half of China's 2015 emissions from the same sources. The analysis of recent policy trends further suggests a lower than expected electricity demand and a faster than expected transition from coal to renewable electricity. The Letter concludes by making an argument for interpretive approaches as a necessary complement to scenario analysis, particularly in rapidly changing development contexts

From Traditional to Modern : Domain Adaptation for Action Classification in Short Social Video Clips

Short internet video clips like vines present a significantly wild distribution compared to traditional video datasets. In this paper, we focus on the problem of unsupervised action classification in wild vines using traditional labeled datasets. To this end, we use a data augmentation based simple domain adaptation strategy. We utilise semantic word2vec space as a common subspace to embed video features from both, labeled source domain and unlablled target domain. Our method incrementally augments the labeled source with target samples and iteratively modifies the embedding function to bring the source and target distributions together. Additionally, we utilise a multi-modal representation that incorporates noisy semantic information available in form of hash-tags. We show the effectiveness of this simple adaptation technique on a test set of vines and achieve notable improvements in performance.Comment: 9 pages, GCPR, 201

Weekend hospitalization and additional risk of death: An analysis of inpatient data

Objective To assess whether weekend admissions to hospital and/or already being an inpatient on weekend days were associated with any additional mortality risk.Design Retrospective observational survivorship study. We analysed all admissions to the English National Health Service (NHS) during the financial year 2009/10, following up all patients for 30 days after admission and accounting for risk of death associated with diagnosis, co-morbidities, admission history, age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation, seasonality, day of admission and hospital trust, including day of death as a time dependent covariate. The principal analysis was based on time to in-hospital death.Participants National Health Service Hospitals in England.Main Outcome Measures 30 day mortality (in or out of hospital).Results There were 14,217,640 admissions included in the principal analysis, with 187,337 in-hospital deaths reported within 30 days of admission. Admission on weekend days was associated with a considerable increase in risk of subsequent death compared with admission on weekdays, hazard ratio for Sunday versus Wednesday 1.16 (95% CI 1.14 to 1.18; P < .0001), and for Saturday versus Wednesday 1.11 (95% CI 1.09 to 1.13; P < .0001). Hospital stays on weekend days were associated with a lower risk of death than midweek days, hazard ratio for being in hospital on Sunday versus Wednesday 0.92 (95% CI 0.91 to 0.94; P < .0001), and for Saturday versus Wednesday 0.95 (95% CI 0.93 to 0.96; P < .0001). Similar findings were observed on a smaller US data set.Conclusions Admission at the weekend is associated with increased risk of subsequent death within 30 days of admission. The likelihood of death actually occurring is less on a weekend day than on a mid-week day

Women’s changing domestic responsibilities in neoliberal Africa: a relational time-space analysis of Lesotho’s garment industry

Since 2001 when Lesotho embraced the neoliberal African Growth and Opportunities Act that offers preferential access to the US market, its garment industry has expanded dramatically to become the nation’s leading employer. Elsewhere, large-scale employment of women in low-paid factory jobs has entailed spatial restructuring of gender and age relations. Lesotho is a distinctive context, with socio-spatial relations historically adjusted to male labour migration, high levels of contemporary male unemployment and alarming AIDS prevalence. Based on semi-structured interviews with 40 female factoryworkers and 37 dependents, this article applies a relational time-space analysis to explore how financial and spatio-temporal aspects of factory employment articulate to alter women’s relationships with those for whom they have culturally determined responsibilities: their children, those suffering from ill health and their (generally rural) home communities. The analysis highlights that such employment is not merely adding to women’s responsibilities, but transforming how they are able to undertake social reproduction, as practical, social and emotional roles are converted to largely financial obligations

Analysis of MAGSAT data of the Indian region

Progress in the development of software for reading MAGSAT data tapes and for the reduction of anomaly data, and in the preparation of data for magnetic anomaly maps is reported

A comprehensive review on the removal of noxious pollutants using carrageenan based advanced adsorbents

Rapid industrial development is associated with high discharge of toxic pollutants into the environment. The industries discharge their wastewater containing organic pollutants directly into the water system without treating them that has posed many serious threats to environmental protection. The use of bioadsorbents for the removal of such toxic pollutants from the waste water due to its simple synthesis, easy operation, effectiveness, and economic viability have emerged a new dimension in the wastewater treatment approaches. Various adsorbents have been prepared to examine their adsorption capacity against different adsorbates, but, to attain sustainability, biocompatibility, and biodegradation, bio-adsorbents have been found to won the battle. Seaweed derived polysaccharide; Carrageenan (CR) has been proven to be an excellent adsorbent for the wastewater treatment. It has been successfully modified with various components to form CR based-magnetic composites, hydrogels, nanoparticle modified CR composites and many others to enrich and diversify its properties. In this review, we have explained the adsorption behaviour of various carrageenan based adsorbents for the removal of different dyes. The influence of various parameters such as the effect of initial concentration, adsorbent dosage, contact time, pH, temperature, and ion concentration on dye adsorption is well explained. This paper also summarizes the structure, morphology, swelling ability, and thermal stability of carrageenan. The data also expounds on the adsorption capacity, kinetic model, isotherm model, and nature of the adsorption process. Different types of solvents are used for the regeneration and reusability of carrageenan adsorbents and their regeneration studies and desorption efficiency is well-explained. The adsorption mechanism of dyes onto carrageenan based adsorbents has been well described in this review. This review provides a deep insight about the use of carrageenan based adsorbents for the wastewater treatment

Change in cooling degree days with global mean temperature rise increasing from 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C

Limiting global mean temperature rise to 1.5 °C is increasingly out of reach. Here we show the impact on global cooling demand in moving from 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C of global warming. African countries have the highest increase in cooling requirements. Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Norway (traditionally unprepared for heat) will sufer the largest relative cooling demand surges. Immediate and unprecedented adaptation interventions are required worldwide to be prepared for a hotter world

Characterization and its implication on beneficiation of low grade iron ore by gravity separation

Studies were undertaken on low grade iron ore sample from Noamundi iron ore mines. The objective of this study was to examine the possibility of the physical beneficiation of low grade iron ore sample by physical methods for the blast furnace route of iron production. The present investigation relies on petrography and ore mineralogical characterization, ore textures (primary, secondary, metamorphic), liberation characters and its impact on the mineral beneficiation methods to produce quality concentrate. The geological characters, alteration mineralogy, morphometric variation, ore microscopy (using model microscope with transmitted and reflected light) and thereby understanding the genesis has given proper insight into the occurrence of various minerals. In addition to this, representative samples were employed for detailed investigation by using XRD, SEM-EDS and cathodoluminescence (CL) studies for confirmation of major as well as minor ore minerals and associated gangue minerals. Investigations suggest that lateritic iron ore samples obtained from the study area are composed of hematite (two generations), goethite (two generations) and limonitic material (younger generation) in association with major gangue minerals such as clay minerals (kaolinite, illite), bauxitic minerals(gibbsite, boehmite and diaspore), cryptocrystalline silica(japer, chert) and crystalline quartz as well as apatite and collophane. Fair liberation obtained below 74 micron size. It was interesting to find that inspite of the complex mineralogy of iron ore, beneficiation results using gravity separation like multi gravity separator (MGS), particularly in finer size ranges was encouraging. The result of ore-gangue mineralogical studies were found quite useful in evaluating the separation efficacy of gravity separation process. The process mineralogical data corroborated well with beneficiation results

Successful cryopreservation of coral larvae using vitrification and laser warming.

Climate change has increased the incidence of coral bleaching events, resulting in the loss of ecosystem function and biodiversity on reefs around the world. As reef degradation accelerates, the need for innovative restoration tools has become acute. Despite past successes with ultra-low temperature storage of coral sperm to conserve genetic diversity, cryopreservation of larvae has remained elusive due to their large volume, membrane complexity, and sensitivity to chilling injury. Here we show for the first time that coral larvae can survive cryopreservation and resume swimming after warming. Vitrification in a 3.5 M cryoprotectant solution (10% v/v propylene glycol, 5% v/v dimethyl sulfoxide, and 1 M trehalose in phosphate buffered saline) followed by warming at a rate of approximately 4,500,000 °C/min with an infrared laser resulted in up to 43% survival of Fungia scutaria larvae on day 2 post-fertilization. Surviving larvae swam and continued to develop for at least 12 hours after laser-warming. This technology will enable biobanking of coral larvae to secure biodiversity, and, if managed in a high-throughput manner where millions of larvae in a species are frozen at one time, could become an invaluable research and conservation tool to help restore and diversify wild reef habitats

Ex vivo normothermic perfusion of isolated segmental porcine bowel: a novel functional model of the small intestine.

BACKGROUND: There is an unmet need for suitable ex vivo large animal models in experimental gastroenterology and intestinal transplantation. This study details a reliable and effective technique for ex vivo normothermic perfusion (EVNP) of segmental porcine small intestine. METHODS: Segments of small intestine, 1.5-3.0 m in length, were retrieved from terminally anaesthetized pigs. After a period of cold ischaemia, EVNP was performed for 2 h at 37°C with a mean pressure of 80 mmHg using oxygenated autologous blood diluted with Ringer's solution. The duration of EVNP was extended to 4 h for a second set of experiments in which two segments of proximal to mid-ileum (1.5-3.0 m) were retrieved from each animal and reperfused with whole blood (control) or leucocyte-depleted blood to examine the impact of leucocyte depletion on reperfusion injury. RESULTS: After a mean cold ischaemia time of 5 h and 20 min, EVNP was performed in an initial group of four pigs. In the second set of experiments, five pigs were used in each group. In all experiments bowel segments were well perfused and exhibited peristalsis during EVNP. Venous glucose levels significantly increased following luminal glucose stimulation (mean(s.e.m.) basal level 1.8(0.6) mmol/l versus peak 15.5(5.8) mmol/l; P < 0.001) and glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) levels increased in all experiments, demonstrating intact absorptive and secretory intestinal functions. There were no significant differences between control and leucocyte-depleted animals regarding blood flow, venous glucose, GLP-1 levels or histopathology at the end of 4 h of EVNP. CONCLUSIONS: This novel model is suitable for the investigation of gastrointestinal physiology, pathology and ischaemia reperfusion injury, along with evaluation of potential therapeutic interventions