Exploring the Psychological Antecedents of Attitude towards Indigenous Wetland Practices

A study was conducted in the North eastern agro-climatic zone of Tamil Nadu, India to analyze the possible impact of the psychological antecedents of attitude towards Indigenous Wetland Practices(IWPs) among the farming community. Two hundred and nine farmers were selected at random from ten blocks in three districts of the state. Their psychological characteristics and attitude towards IWPs were assessed. The mean attitude score and the mean attitude index were analysed. The highest variable index was found in the case of Progressivism and Traditionalism, followed by Self-Reliance. Environmental orientation and Decision making ability had a positive and highly significant relationship while Scientific Orientation had a negative and highly significant relationship with attitude towards Indigenous Wetland Practices.

LAND TRANSFORMATION: A THREAT ON BANGALORE’S ECOLOGY - A CHALLENGE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Land constitutes the most important character for sustainable development in a region. Rapid urbanization has become an area of crucial concern against the bonanza of urban ecology. The land use pattern of any urban area hints not only its immediate current space requirements of the inheriting community but rather the cumulative requirements over a period of year. Thus, the way a land use changes into, reveals a physical transformation of its economic use that indirectly unveils the demand for built-up space and as a result, the urban ecology is in imbroglio. For much of human existence, the available land for human use has appeared limitless. Wherever population densities have risen too high, there is a decline noticed in resource base. People moved on to occupy new lands by extending the urban area into rural fringe. Land transformation as the word suggests, traces the change of form in the land use. Land use change is an inevitable phenomenon in an urban space. How the use of land changed from one to another is a problem that has interconnections with various entities and the interaction between them in spatio-temporal environment. Bangalore over the years has grown as a robust technology hub, and has been ever- growing in terms of urban space with its inhabits. How this growth has affected its ecological space is the thrust of the study. The ecology of this urban land constitutes of agricultural plantation, forest area and lakes which comprise the green and blue spots. The objectives are accomplished through Geoinformatics which is able to apprehend statistics of ecological to the urban environment.Environmental Degradation, GIS, Remote Sensing, Digital Image Processing, Urban Land Transformation Analysis.

The overlap lattice Dirac operator and dynamical fermions

I show how to avoid a two level nested conjugate gradient procedure in the context of Hybrid Monte Carlo with the overlap fermionic action. The resulting procedure is quite similar to Hybrid Monte Carlo with domain wall fermions, but is more flexible and therefore has some potential worth exploring.Comment: Further expanded version. 12 pages, plain Te

Cosmic Origins Spectrograph Observations of Warm Intervening Gas Towards 3C263

We present HST/COS high S/N observations of the z = 0.32566 multi-phase absorber towards 3C263. The COS data shows absorption from H I, O VI, C III, N III, Si III and C II. The Ne VIII in this absorber is detected in the FUSE spectrum. The low and intermediate ions are kinematically aligned with each other and H I and display narrow line widths of 6 km/s. The O VI lines are kinematically offset by 12 km/s from the low ions and are a factor of four broader. All metal ions except O VI and Ne VIII are consistent with an origin in gas photoionized by the extragalactic background radiation. The bulk of the observed H I is also traced by this photoionized medium. The carbon abundance in this gas phase is near-solar. The O VI and Ne VIII favor an origin in collisionally ionized gas at T = 5.2 x 10^5 K. The H I absorption associated with this warm absorber is a BLA marginally detected in the COS spectrum. This warm gas phase has total hydrogen column density of N(H) ~ 3 x 10^19 which is 2 dex higher than what is traced by the photoionized gas. Simultaneous detection of O VI, Ne VIII and BLAs in an absorber can be a strong diagnostic of gas with temperature in the range of 10^5 - 10^6 K corresponding to the warm phase of the WHIM or shock-heated gas in the extended halos of galaxies.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Luminosity Function of the Perigalactocentric Region

We present H and K photometry of 42,000 stars in an area of 250 arcmin$^{2}$ centered on the Galactic center. We use the photometry to construct a dereddened K band luminosity function (LF) for this region, excluding the excessively crowded inner 2' of the Galaxy. This LF is intermediate between the LF of Baade's window and the LF of inner 2' of the Galactic center. We speculate that the bright stars in this region have an age which is intermediate between the starburst population in the Galactic center and the old bulge population. We present the coordinates and mags for 16 stars with K_{0} < 5 for spectroscopic follow up.Comment: 25 pages. Tarred, gzipped and uuencoded. Includes LaTex source file, Figures 3 to 9 and 5 Tables. Figures 1 and 2 are available at ftp://bessel.mps.ohio-state.edu/pub/vijay . Submitted to Ap

Chiral Symmetry Restoration in the Schwinger Model with Domain Wall Fermions

Domain Wall Fermions utilize an extra space time dimension to provide a method for restoring the regularization induced chiral symmetry breaking in lattice vector gauge theories even at finite lattice spacing. The breaking is restored at an exponential rate as the size of the extra dimension increases. Before this method can be used in dynamical simulations of lattice QCD, the dependence of the restoration rate to the other parameters of the theory and, in particular, the lattice spacing must be investigated. In this paper such an investigation is carried out in the context of the two flavor lattice Schwinger model.Comment: LaTeX, 37 pages including 18 figures. Added comments regarding power law fitting in sect 7. Also, few changes were made to elucidate the content in sect. 5.1 and 5.3. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Approaching Capacity at High-Rates with Iterative Hard-Decision Decoding

A variety of low-density parity-check (LDPC) ensembles have now been observed to approach capacity with message-passing decoding. However, all of them use soft (i.e., non-binary) messages and a posteriori probability (APP) decoding of their component codes. In this paper, we show that one can approach capacity at high rates using iterative hard-decision decoding (HDD) of generalized product codes. Specifically, a class of spatially-coupled GLDPC codes with BCH component codes is considered, and it is observed that, in the high-rate regime, they can approach capacity under the proposed iterative HDD. These codes can be seen as generalized product codes and are closely related to braided block codes. An iterative HDD algorithm is proposed that enables one to analyze the performance of these codes via density evolution (DE).Comment: 22 pages, this version accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Quantum critical behavior of clean itinerant ferromagnets

We consider the quantum ferromagnetic transition at zero temperature in clean itinerant electron systems. We find that the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson order parameter field theory breaks down since the electron-electron interaction leads to singular coupling constants in the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson functional. These couplings generate an effective long-range interaction between the spin or order parameter fluctuations of the form 1/r^{2d-1}, with d the spatial dimension. This leads to unusual scaling behavior at the quantum critical point in 1 < d\leq 3, which we determine exactly. We also discuss the quantum-to-classical crossover at small but finite temperatures, which is characterized by the appearance of multiple temperature scales. A comparison with recent results on disordered itinerant ferromagnets is given.Comment: 13 pp., REVTeX, psfig, 3 eps figs, final version as publishe