An Empirical Illustration of Positive Stigma towards Child Labor

This empirical note complements the qualitative and theoretical research on positive household stigma towards child labor. We use data from Guatemala and two instruments for measuring stigma: a child's indigenous background and household head's childhood work experience. We then adopt binomial probit regression methods to illustrate that positive stigma has a large effect on child labor practices, and a modest effect on school enrollment.child labor, education, indigenous, stigma, Guatemala

Experimental implementation controlled SPWM inverter based harmony search algorithm

An optimum PI controller using harmony search optimization algorithm (HS) is utilized in this research for the single-phase bipolar SPWM inverter. The aim of this algorithm is to avoid the conventional trial and error procedure which is usually applied in finding the PI coefficients in order to obtain the desired performance. Then, the control algorithm of the inverter prototype is experimentally implemented using the eZdsp F28355 board along with the bipolar sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) to control the output voltage drop under different load conditions. The proposed overall inverter design and the control algorithm are modelled using MATLAB environment (Simulink/m-file Code). The mean absolute error (MAE) formula is used as an objective function with the HS algorithm in finding the adaptive values of  and  parameters to minimize the error of the inverter output voltage. Based on the output results, the proposed voltage controller using HS algorithm based PI (HS-PI) showed that the inverter output performance is improved in terms of voltage amplitude, robustness, and convergence rate speed as compared to PSO algorithm based PI (PSO-PI). This is to say that the proposed controller provides a good dynamic responses in both cases; transient and steady-state. Finally, the experimental setup result of the inverter controller is verified to validate the simulation results

Effects of Circuit Training On Different Surfaces on Selected Physical and Physiological Variables of School Boys

Forty five boys in the age group of 13 to 14 years of Alagappa Model school, Karaikudi were selected at random and were divided randomly into three groups namely mud circuit training group, concrete circuit training group and control group. The experimental groups participated in the training programme for a period of 6 weeks. During this period, the control group was let off without any training. The data were collected on selected physical and physiological variables of speed, agility, leg explosive power, pulse rate, blood pressure, aerobic capacity respectively before training (pre-test) as well as after 6 weeks of training (post-test). Analysis of covariance was used to analyse the data. The result of the study clearly indicated that the mud circuit training group had improved the speed, agility, leg explosive power, pulse rate, blood pressure, aerobic capacity to a greater degree than concrete circuit training group

A Comparative Analysis of Software Reliability Growth Models using defects data of Closed and Open Source Software

The purpose of this study is to compare the fitting (goodness of fit) and prediction capability of eight Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGM) using fifty different failure Data sets. These data sets contain defect data collected from system test phase, operational phase (field defects) and Open Source Software (OSS) projects. The failure data are modelled by eight SRGM (Musa Okumoto, Inflection S-Shaped, Goel Okumoto, Delayed S-Shaped, Logistic, Gompertz, Yamada Exponential, and Generalized Goel Model). These models are chosen due to their prevalence among many software reliability models. The results can be summarized as follows -Fitting capability: Musa Okumoto fits all data sets, but all models fit all the OSS datasets -Prediction capability: Musa Okumoto, Inflection S- Shaped and Goel Okumoto are the best predictors for industrial data sets, Gompertz and Yamada are the best predictors for OSS data sets - Fitting and prediction capability: Musa Okumoto and Inflection are the best performers on industrial datasets. However this happens only on slightly more than 50% of the datasets. Gompertz and Inflection are the best performers for all OSS dataset

The Metacolonial State: Pakistan, the Deoband 'Ulama and the Biopolitics of Islam.

"The Metacolonial State" is a genealogical project that is concerned with understanding the nature of political space in contemporary Pakistan. My contention is that political Islam, and specifically the Deoband and Taliban ‘ulama, have taken on an increasingly biopolitical character. As “a history of the present” I show how the crisis in Pakistan today is itself a manifestation of the biopoliticization of Islam. While the Deoband ‘ulama remain the primary thematic subject and focus of the work, they are largely signposts towards a broader attempt to disclose a cartography of power. Within the multiplicity of Islamist practices in Pakistan, the Deoband movement has emerged as one of the most highly organized and yet remarkably polycentric institutions that claim orthodox religious authority. Until September 11 2001, scholarship on political Islam in Pakistan had been focused on ‘modernist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ movements; traditional ‘ulama were considered to be politically and culturally insignificant. The dramatic rise of the Taliban and its fateful alliance with Al-Qaeda have however resulted in a proliferation of new discourses about the ‘ulama, their traditions and educational institutions. Precisely because of the imperial gaze directed towards the control, reform and regulation of Islam, this study places our understanding of Islamist politics within a broader, complex, and overlapping set of governmentalities and competing sovereign powers. The work aims to be a material, embodied history and politics of the ‘ulama as a form of power. I argue that while ‘ulama practices have undergone a series of dramatic transformations since 1947, these cannot be understood in isolation from the broader militarization of political space; hence the need for opening this investigation with an analysis of the mullah-military complex that emerged in the 1980’s. The ‘metacolonial’ is itself a neologism that articulates two influential critical paradigms: Foucault’s concern with biopolitics and governmentality and Agamben’s illuminating thesis on sovereign power, bare life and the state of exception. Pakistan is shown to be an exemplary space of biopolitical sovereignty where the state of exception takes on a near permanent localization and where distinctions between dictatorship and democracy, between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ forces becomes indistinctPh.D.HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75807/1/janna_1.pd

Comparing autoregressive moving average (ARMA) coefficients determination using artificial neural networks with other techniques

Autoregressive Moving average (ARMA) is a parametric based method of signal representation. It is suitable for problems in which the signal can be modeled by explicit known source functions with a few adjustable parameters. Various methods have been suggested for the coefficients determination among which are Prony, Pade, Autocorrelation, Covariance and most recently, the use of Artificial Neural Network technique. In this paper, the method of using Artificial Neural network (ANN) technique is compared with some known and widely acceptable techniques. The comparisons is entirely based on the value of the coefficients obtained. Result obtained shows that the use of ANN also gives accurate in computing the coefficients of an ARMA system

Coral recovery in the central Maldives archipelago since the last major mass-bleaching, in 1998

Increasing frequency and severity of disturbances is causing global degradation of coral reef ecosystems. This study examined temporal changes in live coral cover and coral composition in the central Maldives from 1997 to 2016, encompassing two bleaching events, a tsunami, and an outbreak of Acanthaster planci. We also examined the contemporary size structure for five dominant coral taxa (tabular Acropora, Acropora muricata, Acropora humilis, Pocillopora spp, and massive Porites). Total coral cover increased throughout the study period, with marked increases following the 1998 mass-bleaching. The relative abundance of key genera has changed through time, where Acropora and Pocillopora (which are highly susceptible to bleaching) were under-represented following 1998 mass-bleaching but increased until outbreaks of A. planci in 2015. The contemporary size-structure for all coral taxa was dominated by larger colonies with peaked distributions suggesting that recent disturbances had a disproportionate impact on smaller colonies, or that recruitment is currently limited. This may suggest that coral resilience has been compromised by recent disturbances, and further bleaching (expected in 2016) could lead to highly protracted recovery times. We showed that Maldivian reefs recovered following the 1998 mass-bleaching event, but it took up to a decade, and ongoing disturbances may be eroding reef resilience

MRI reconstruction using discrete Fourier transform: a tutorial

The use of Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform (IDFT) implemented in the form of Inverse Fourier Transform (IFFT) is one of the standard method of reconstructing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) from uniformly sampled K-space data. In this tutorial, three of the major problems associated with the use of IFFT in MRI reconstruction are highlighted. The tutorial also gives brief introduction to MRI physics; MRI system from instrumentation point of view; K-space signal and the process of IDFT and IFFT for One and two dimensional (1D and 2D) data