Book review: the new sectarianism: the Arab uprisings and the rebirth of the Shi’a-Sunni divide by Geneive Abdo

In The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi’a-Sunni Divide, Geneive Abdo argues that growing tensions between Sunni and Shi’a Islam have become the primary conflict and challenge within the Middle East. While Abdo’s analysis of social media discourse is original, Nagothu Naresh Kumar fundamentally questions the book’s reliance on a primordialist understanding of sectarian conflict in the region

Book review: God in the tumult of the global square: religion in global civil society by Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego and John Soboslai

In God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society, authors Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego and John Soboslai explore new forms of religion emerging in the contemporary moment, drawing upon workshops staged over five years with religious leaders, scholars and public figures in Cairo, Moscow, Delhi, Shanghai, Bueno Aires and Santa Barbara. Nagothu Naresh Kumar praises the book’s lucid mapping of the role of religion in global civil society, but calls for more analysis of post-secular projects

Communications for underwater robotics research platforms

This paper presents a distributed protocol for communication among autonomous underwater vehicles. It is a complementary approach for coordination between the autonomous underwater vehicles. This paper mainly describes different methods for underwater communication. One of the methods is brute force approach in which messages are broadcasted to all the communication nodes, which in turn will broadcast the acknowledgement. Issues relating to this brute force approach are time delay, number of hops, power consumption, message collision and other practical issues. These issues are discussed and solved by proposing a new method to improve efficiency of this proposed approach and its effectiveness in communication among autonomous underwater vehicles.<br /

Distributed protocol for communications among underwater vehicles

Underwater surveying by swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles presents problems in communication among the robots. These problems involve the bandwidth, power consumption, timing, processing power, and other issues. This paper presents a novel approach to communicate and coordinate effectively among underwater vehicles to accomplish this task successfully. The proposed approach solves issues by reducing the number of hops to conserve power, while reducing computation time and bandwidth, effectively utilizing resources to reduce the load on each node. Finally, the simulation results are presented, in order to prove that the proposed approach improves efficiency and effectiveness in communicating among underwater vehicles.<br /

Machine Transplantation: Labour and Water Saving Technology in Paddy Cultivation

publishedVersio

RF communication between surface and underwater robotic swarms

In order for underwater robots to communicate with land and air based robots on an equal basis, high speed communications is required. If the robots are not to be tethered then wireless communications is the only possibility. Sonar communications is too slow. Unfortunately radio waves are rapidly attenuated under water due to phenomena such as skin depth. These experiments attempt to extend the range of underwater radio communications.<br /