An Economic Analysis of Tank Rehabilitation in Madurai District of Tamil Nadu

There has been a growing realization for rehabilitation and restoration of irrigation tanks with farmers’ participation. The study has presented the costs and benefits of tank rehabilitation and financial feasibility of investment in tank rehabilitation. The total annual income has been found higher in the rehabilitated tanks than the non-rehabilitated tanks and amongst the rehabilitated tanks, panchayat tanks with community well has depicted the highest annual income. The investment analysis has revealed the net present worth to be positive, the B-C ratio to be more than 1.5 and the internal rate of return to be more than the opportunity cost of capital. This shows that all the three investments in tank rehabilitation are economically viable. The study has suggested that rehabilitation work should be undertaken in all the non-rehabilitated tanks also. Besides, efforts should be made to provide supplemental irrigation to crops and to improve the PWD tank management regime.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Balancing Relevance and Diversity in Online Bipartite Matching via Submodularity

In bipartite matching problems, vertices on one side of a bipartite graph are paired with those on the other. In its online variant, one side of the graph is available offline, while the vertices on the other side arrive online. When a vertex arrives, an irrevocable and immediate decision should be made by the algorithm; either match it to an available vertex or drop it. Examples of such problems include matching workers to firms, advertisers to keywords, organs to patients, and so on. Much of the literature focuses on maximizing the total relevance---modeled via total weight---of the matching. However, in many real-world problems, it is also important to consider contributions of diversity: hiring a diverse pool of candidates, displaying a relevant but diverse set of ads, and so on. In this paper, we propose the Online Submodular Bipartite Matching (\osbm) problem, where the goal is to maximize a submodular function $f$ over the set of matched edges. This objective is general enough to capture the notion of both diversity (\emph{e.g.,} a weighted coverage function) and relevance (\emph{e.g.,} the traditional linear function)---as well as many other natural objective functions occurring in practice (\emph{e.g.,} limited total budget in advertising settings). We propose novel algorithms that have provable guarantees and are essentially optimal when restricted to various special cases. We also run experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets to validate our algorithms.Comment: To appear in AAAI 201

In vitro Evaluation of Antibacterial Efficacy using Passiflora foetida Activated Carbon

Activated carbon (AC) has found its attention in pollution control and wastewater treatment to remove various pollutants. Activated carbon can be prepared by physical and chemical activation methods. The chemical activation methods were advantageous over physical activation due to process accomplishment at lower temperature and greater yield which avoids burn-off char. Activated carbon was usually used as an adsorbent for dye removal from wastewater which could be related to their extended surface area, high adsorption capacity, microporous structure and special surface reactivity. Microbial pollution and contamination have produced various problems in industrial and medical fields. Based on this, the present study was attempted on the preparation of activated carbon from Passiflora foetida and evaluating for its antibacterial efficacy against twelve different microorganisms by agar well diffusion method. The results were found to be very effective with higher zone of inhibition against almost all the microorganisms tested. Moreover, the activity was considerably more against Shigella flexneri (MTCC 1457) and Klebsiella pneumoniae (MTCC 10309).In addition to this, the shake flask test in saline had proved that the colonial growth of E.coli was inhibited with respect to the concentration of activated carbon and time of incubation.Â

Application of A Distributed Nucleus Approximation In Grid Based Minimization of the Kohn-Sham Energy Functional

In the distributed nucleus approximation we represent the singular nucleus as smeared over a smallportion of a Cartesian grid. Delocalizing the nucleus allows us to solve the Poisson equation for theoverall electrostatic potential using a linear scaling multigrid algorithm.This work is done in the context of minimizing the Kohn-Sham energy functionaldirectly in real space with a multiscale approach. The efficacy of the approximation is illustrated bylocating the ground state density of simple one electron atoms and moleculesand more complicated multiorbital systems.Comment: Submitted to JCP (July 1, 1995 Issue), latex, 27pages, 2figure

A Motion Estimation based Algorithm for Encoding Time Reduction in HEVC

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a video compression standard that offers 50% more efficiency at the expense of high encoding time contrasted with the H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard. The encoding time must be reduced to satisfy the needs of real-time applications. This paper has proposed the Multi- Level Resolution Vertical Subsampling (MLRVS) algorithm to reduce the encoding time. The vertical subsampling minimizes the number of Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD) computations during the motion estimation process. The complexity reduction algorithm is also used for fast coding the coefficients of the quantised block using a flag decision. Two distinct search patterns are suggested: New Cross Diamond Diamond (NCDD) and New Cross Diamond Hexagonal (NCDH) search patterns, which reduce the time needed to locate the motion vectors. In this paper, the MLRVS algorithm with NCDD and MLRVS algorithm with NCDH search patterns are simulated separately and analyzed. The results show that the encoding time of the encoder is decreased by 55% with MLRVS algorithm using NCDD search pattern and 56% with MLRVS using NCDH search pattern compared to HM16.5 with Test Zone (TZ) search algorithm. These results are achieved with a slight increase in bit rate and negligible deterioration in output video quality