Challenges of incorporating e-learning in medical education-a review

In this modern era of electronic gadgets learning is made easy and more effective using the electronic media. E-learning is it really a boon or a burden for medical education and the educators? E-learning is defined as learning mediated by technology, such as the world wide web, internet, and multi-media, based computer applications. All peer reviewed journals articles from 2009 to 2022 that reported the challenges of implementation of the e- learning were included in the study. The search was completed by three researchers over a period of 1 month from databases like Scopus, Medline, biomedical central and Google scholar. Term used for online search was “e-learning” in medical education. The common challenges in e-learning are lack of skills, inadequate time, poor infrastructure, poor communication and negative attitude of the educators. These challenges can be overcome by developing necessary skills, adopting new tools, and by better communication and having a positive attitude. E-learning in medicine is a relatively new concept. Hence it becomes imperative that the national medical council at the policy making and enforcing level become more vigilant on the fact that whether the respective Institutions are effectively using the e-learning platform for the benefit of the students or not. Whether the institutions are effectively providing all the technologies, teacher training, teaching aids for the medical teachers or not. Finally, whether the medical teachers are receptive of the new changes and willing to make better use of e-learning for the benefit of students

Clinical trials in pediatrics-review of ethics and law

Children were acknowledged as ‘therapeutic or pharmaceutical orphans’ in 1960s, since then there has been a worldwide recognition of the need to conduct clinical trials in children, to improve their health. Prescribing in children is often based on extrapolation of trial results from adults, due to the lack of paediatric data. Children have different pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics responses as compared to adults. Hence extrapolating the adult safety and efficacy data and using it for prescribing in children can have disastrous effects. Relevant literature on clinical trials in paediatrics was gathered and scrutinized with emphasis on legal and ethical perspectives. This research is an exploratory attempt which surveys and summarizes previously published studies simultaneously trying to answer few research questions which addresses the current debates and scenario. Common problems encountered during pediatric clinical trials are unnecessary scrutiny of even minimal risk studies, difference in interpretation of research protocol in multicentre trials causing delay in trials, prolonged review process. The proposed changes to overcome the above mentioned drawbacks are standardized data security protections, enforcing universal ethical principles for conducting pediatric trials, sstandardizing adverse drug reaction reporting to regulatory bodies. There is a need to increase the number of clinicians actively involved in pediatric research. All the stake-holders such as regulators, parents, ethics committees, research institutions, investigators, sponsors, media, pharmaceutical companies and scientists have to collaborate to ensure that ethical pediatric research is promoted, equipping them with knowledge needed to provide optimal care to their patients

ALGORITHMS FOR CONSTRUCTING EDGE MAGIC TOTAL LABELING OF COMPLETE BIPARTITE GRAPHS

The study of graph labeling has focused on finding classes of graphs which admits a particular type of labeling. In this paper we consider a particular class of graphs which demonstrates Edge Magic Total Labeling. The class we considered here is a complete bipartite graph Km,n. There are various graph labeling techniques that generalize the idea of a magic square has been proposed earlier. The definition of a magic labeling on a graph with v vertices and e edges is a one to one map taking the vertices and edges onto the integers 1,2,3,………, v+e with the property that the sum of the label on an edge and the labels of its endpoints is constant independent of the choice of edge. We use m x n matrix to construct edge magic total labeling of Km,n

Diagnosis and Recommendation Integrated System (DRIS) approach on Nutritional Diagnosis in Fruit crops- A Review

Diagnosis and Recommendation Integrated System (DRIS) is widely used statistical approach for interpretation of the plant tissue analysis data and to diagnose the plant nutreint needs much earlier than the reduction of crop yield with greater accuracy. It helps in simultaneous identifying imbalances, deficiencies and excesses of crop nutrients and ranks them in the order of their importance for their remedial steps. The DRIS norms based on foliar composition can developed in any crop and at any stage of its development. It provides a mathematical means of ordering large number of nutrient ratios into nutrient indices that can be easily interpreted. The nutrient ranges been established as deficient, low, optimum, high and excessive based on the mean of nutrient concentration and standard deviation from high yielding population to serve as a guide for a quick and routine diagnostic and advisory purpose. The major advantage of DRIS lies in its ability to minimize the effect of variation in tissue age on diagnosis, which allows a choice of wider range of tissues than permissible under the conventional critical value approach. Thus, DRIS is holistic in nature for identification of nutrient imbalance in crops and formulation of nutrient management strategies for achieving higher yields

Bhoo Samruddhi : A Compendium of Success Stories, Research Report IDC-2

Across the world, rainfed areas are hotspots of poverty, malnutrition and degradation of natural resources. In India, of 142 m ha of arable lands, 60% is rainfed. Karnataka has the second largest area under rainfed agriculture only after Rajasthan in the country. Farmers’ crop yields in dryland areas are quite low (1.0 -1.5 t ha-1), about two to five times below potential yield. Recent findings from the ‘Comprehensive Assessment of Water for Food and Water for Life’ revealed that the millennium development goal of reducing the number of poor people by half can be met only through efficient use of scarce water resources for agriculture. Food production can be increased substantially in rainfed areas by applying enhanced water use efficiency measures, improving soil health status, and implementing other new technologies in an integrated approach. It is evident that the vast potential of rainfed agriculture can be unlocked by using available scientific technologies including improved cultivars. Recognizing the problem, the Department of Agriculture (DoA), Government of Karnataka (GoK), has adopted science-led initiatives for achieving impact oriented development in the state. In this endeavor, it has sought to bring in international expertise to unlock the potential of rainfed agriculture in the state. Bhoochetana, the farmer-centric initiative taken up by GoK has benefited more than 4.3 million farm households in the state. In addition, the government has initiated a number of innovative measures to improve agricultural production and livelihood of farmers in the state during the last four years. Realizing high impacts in terms of increased agricultural productivity, increased gross value of agriculture production and improved livelihoods, the state government requested ICRISAT to lead a consortium of CGIAR institutions working in India, and to operationalize impact oriented research for development with the aim of improving rural livelihoods. The ICRISAT-led consortium took up this challenge and established a “proof of concept” for translating strategic research knowledge into improving livelihoods through scaling up of the participatory research for development (PR4D) model. A number of meetings and stakeholder consultations were held to identify constraints and problems of all four pilot locations, and the project was begun in 2013-14..

Soil Nutrient Mapping for On-farm Fertility Management

Feeding the projected population of 9.1 billion globally and 1.6 billion in India by 2050 is one of the greatest challenges of the century, and in this endeavour to ensure future food security, efficient soil nutrient management is crucial (Wani et al., 2003; Sahrawat et al., 2010; Chander et al., 2013). Since the era of the Green Revolution in India in the late 1960s, the focus has been on only three macronutrients, namely nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K), and this has brought nutrient imbalances and widespread deficiencies of micro and secondary nutrients such as sulfur (S), boron (B) and zinc (Zn) in addition to macronutrients (Wani et al., 2009; Sahrawat and Wani, 2013; Chander et al., 2014). Most farmers and stakeholders are not aware of soil fertility issues and management alongside water and crop management, which is the main reason for large yield gaps in the semi-arid tropics (SAT). In order to ensure future food security and the future of smallholder farmers, science-led interventions are needed to bridge the yield gaps in the SAT. Some pilot initiatives such as the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)—Andhra Pradesh Rural Livelihood Programme (APRLP) initiative in Andhra Pradesh and the Bhoochetana initiative in Karnataka have shown that soil nutrient mapping is the best entry point activity to enhance productivity and livelihoods through soil-needbased fertility management (Wani et al., 2011; Chander et al., 2013; Sahrawat and Wani, 2013). This chapter therefore focuses on soil fertility management issues and the need of soil nutrient mapping for informed decisions..

Integrated Pest Management Options for Better Crop Production

Every one is greedy and wants to produce more and more at the cost of the nature and the natural resources. The present day natural resource management is a perfect example of how Indian agriculture is a%ecting the eco-systems. The excessive dependence on chemical pesticides led to the development of resistance in pests to pesticides, out breaks of secondary pests and pathogens/biotypes, and occurrence of residues in food chain. To overcome such situations and minimize damage to human-and animal-health, several organizations have started advocating the concept of IPM with better pro)ts. This chapter is aimed to discuss the importance of various insect pests and diseases of economic importance of major crops in India and their eco-friendly management strategies in watershed perspectiv

Requirements for Defining Utility Drive Cycles: An Exploratory Analysis of Grid Frequency Regulation Data for Establishing Battery Performance Testing Standards

Battery testing procedures are important for understanding battery performance, including degradation over the life of the battery. Standards are important to provide clear rules and uniformity to an industry. The work described in this report addresses the need for standard battery testing procedures that reflect real-world applications of energy storage systems to provide regulation services to grid operators. This work was motivated by the need to develop Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) testing procedures, or V2G drive cycles. Likewise, the stationary energy storage community is equally interested in standardized testing protocols that reflect real-world grid applications for providing regulation services. As the first of several steps toward standardizing battery testing cycles, this work focused on a statistical analysis of frequency regulation signals from the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnect with the goal to identify patterns in the regulation signal that would be representative of the entire signal as a typical regulation data set. Results from an extensive time-series analysis are discussed, and the results are explained from both the statistical and the battery-testing perspectives. The results then are interpreted in the context of defining a small set of V2G drive cycles for standardization, offering some recommendations for the next steps toward standardizing testing protocols

Bhoochetana: Process Documentation-A program that helped farmers come out of low productivity and poor economic status

To Kick start agricultural Growth rate for improving the livelihoods of 60% of population dependent on Agriculture, Government of Karnataka undertook a mission project to unlock the potential of rainfed Agriculture across the state with technical support from ICRISAT. The mission project referred as “Bhoochetana” was launched in 2009 covering all the 30 districts to increase crop productivity by 20% in four years..

Bhoochetana : A Compendium of Success Stories, Research Report IDC-3

The Government of Karnataka has upscaled the learnings from the Sujala-ICRISAT initiative to enhance agricultural productivity in the dryland areas of the state by bridging the yield gap between farmers’ fields and achievable yields with the help of science-based productivity enhancement interventions. The mission project on rainfed agriculture called “Bhoochetana” was launched by the Government of Karnataka during 2009-10 to benefit dryland farmers in 30 districts. The principle of consortium, convergence, capacity building and collective action as proposed by ICRISAT to address the issues of efficiency, economics, equity and environmental protection was adopted. The consortium partners involved in Bhoochetana are three State Agricultural Universities (UAS, Bangalore; Dharwad; and Raichur;), the Watershed Development Department (WDD), the Department of Economics and Statistics (DES), and other line departments of the Government of Karnataka, ICRISAT and the Department of Agriculture which is the nodal agency for the mission project. Farm facilitators and Lead farmers have assumed the role of trainers to train large numbers of farmers on collective action and capacity building. During the second and third year, project activities were expanded to all 30 districts in addition to the six districts of the Sujala watershed program where soil health mapping had already been completed, along with participatory selection of appropriate cultivars of the major crops. In all 30 districts efforts have been made to collect soil samples by adopting a stratified soil sampling method and covering a large number of villages..