An approximate dynamic programming approach to food security of communities following hazards

Food security can be threatened by extreme natural hazard events for households of all social classes within a community. To address food security issues following a natural disaster, the recovery of several elements of the built environment within a community, including its building portfolio, must be considered. Building portfolio restoration is one of the most challenging elements of recovery owing to the complexity and dimensionality of the problem. This study introduces a stochastic scheduling algorithm for the identification of optimal building portfolio recovery strategies. The proposed approach provides a computationally tractable formulation to manage multi-state, large-scale infrastructure systems. A testbed community modeled after Gilroy, California, is used to illustrate how the proposed approach can be implemented efficiently and accurately to find the near-optimal decisions related to building recovery following a severe earthquake.Comment: As opposed to the preemptive scheduling problem, which was addressed in multiple works by us, we deal with a non-preemptive stochastic scheduling problem in this work. Submitted to 13th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering, ICASP13 Seoul, South Korea, May 26-30, 201

Effectiveness of public awareness programme on knowledge and attitude regarding ill effects of tobacco among tobacco users in selected village, Vellore District.

A study to assess the effectiveness of public awareness programme on knowledge and attitude regarding the ill effects of tobacco among tobacco users at selected village, Vellore District. OBJECTIVES 1. To assess the prevalence of tobacco users in the selected village. 2. To identify the factors influencing tobacco use among tobacco users. 3. To assess the pre and post test level of knowledge and attitude regarding the ill effects of tobacco among tobacco users. 4. To assess the effectiveness of public awareness programme on knowledge and attitude regarding the ill effects of tobacco among tobacco users. 5. To correlate the mean differed knowledge score with attitude score regarding the ill effects of tobacco among tobacco users. 6. To associate the mean differed knowledge and attitude score with their selected demographic variables Major finding of the study The first objective was to assess the prevalence of tobacco users in the selected village. The findings of the study revealed that out of the total population of the village (1444) around 223(15.5%) people were using one or more types of tobacco products. Among them 191(85.6%) were males and 32(14.4%) were females. Among the total tobacco users, 193(86.5%) were smokers, 78(34.9%) of people were using chewing type of tobacco and 24(10.7%) were using snuff. All forms of tobacco use like smoking, chewing and snuff were more prevalent among males (100%, 65% and 79% respectively). The second objective was to identify the factors influencing tobacco use. The findings of the study showed that, majority 63(63%) were unaware about the adverse effects of tobacco use, 58(58%) were using tobacco because of curiosity, 31(31%) were using tobacco to lift themselves, 28(28%) were using tobacco to get rid of tension and 44(44%) was considering tobacco as an unavoidable thing in their life. With respect to parental factor, 78(78%) had a family history of tobacco use, 67(67%) experienced that their family members were asking about tobacco use and none of them were using tobacco as a revenge to their family. With respect to socio-economic and cultural factors, 56(56%) were encouraged by friends to use tobacco, 89(89%) were not spending money for tobacco because they are getting enough money from job, 94(94%) were not attracted by any tobacco advertisement, 72(72%) were not using tobacco with a purpose to cope up with job workload, 93(93%) were not using tobacco because it is easily available and none of them consider it as an accepted behavior in their culture. The third objective was to assess the pre and post test level of knowledge and attitude regarding the ill effects of tobacco among tobacco users. The findings of the study revealed that majority of tobacco users 66(66%) had inadequate knowledge, 34(34%) had moderately adequate knowledge and none of them had adequate knowledge regarding the ill effects of tobacco. The findings of the study revealed that majority, 76(76%) had moderately favorable attitude, 19(19%) had unfavorable attitude and 5(5%) had favorable attitude. Analysis of the post test level of knowledge of the tobacco users revealed that, 13(13.0%) had inadequate knowledge, 30(30.0%) had moderately adequate knowledge and 57(57%) had adequate knowledge regarding the ill effects of tobacco. Analysis of the post test level of attitude of the tobacco users revealed that, 3(3.0%) had unfavorable attitude, 27(27.0%) had moderately favourable attitude and 70(70%) had favourable attitude regarding the ill effects of tobacco. The fourth objective was to assess the effectiveness of public awareness programme on knowledge and attitude regarding the ill effects of tobacco among tobacco users. When comparing the pre and post test level of knowledge regarding the ill effects of tobacco, the pre-test mean score was 11.07 with S.D 2.96. The post test mean score was 19.19 with S.D 3.34. The mean difference was 8.12 and the calculated‘t’ value was 56.489, which was statistically highly significant at P <0.05 level. This finding was suggestive of effectiveness of public awareness programme. When comparing the pre and post test level of attitude regarding the ill effects of tobacco, the pre-test mean score was 29.07 with S.D 5.52. The post test mean score was 39.81 with S.D 5.91. The mean difference was 10.74 and the calculated ‘t’ value was 40.645, which was statistically highly significant at P<0.001. This finding was suggestive of effectiveness of public awareness programme. Hence the null hypotheses NH1 stated in the present study that “there is no significant difference in pre and post test level of knowledge and attitude regarding the ill effects of tobacco use at p<0.05 level” was rejected. The fifth objective was to correlate the mean differed knowledge score with attitude score regarding the ill effects of tobacco among tobacco users. While analyzing the level of knowledge and attitude of tobacco users, the mean knowledge score was 8.12 with S.D of 1.44 and the mean attitude score was 10.74 with S.D of 2.64. The calculated ‘r’ value was 0.126 at p<0.05, which showed that there was a moderate positive correlation indicating that as knowledge improves there was enhancement in favourable attitude also. Hence the null hypotheses NH2 stated in the present study that “there is no significant relationship between the mean differed knowledge score with attitude score regarding the ill effects of tobacco at p<0.05 level” was rejected. The sixth objective was to associate the mean differed knowledge and attitude score with their selected demographic variables. The study result revealed that none of the demographic variables had shown a statistical significant association with the mean differed knowledge score and attitude score regarding the ill effects of tobacco. Hence the null hypotheses NH3 stated in the present study that “there is no significant association between the mean differed knowledge score and attitude scores and selected demographic variables at p<0.05 level” was accepted

Ethnobotanical study of Penchalakona forest area of Nellore District, Andhra Pradesh, India.

An ethno botanical survey was undertaken to collect information from yanadi tribe of penchalakona forest area, Rapur mandal, Nellore district, Andhra Pradesh, India.  The indigenous knowledge of traditional healers of this ethnic group has been disappearing due to lack of ancestors as well as followers. Only few people are practicing with little knowledge which was transmitted orally from their elders. The native plants used for medicinal purposes by few people were collected through questionnaire and personally interviewed during field trips. An aboriginal tribe called “Yanadi”, of this area has authentic information on medicinal values of different plant species.  Yanadi tribal community being drifted from their natural way of life due to agro rural development activities, a few aged persons are still able to furnish very little traditional ethno botanical data and continue to depend on medicinal plants atleast for the treatment of primary healthcare.  Because the area is located near the forest and 70 Kms from Nellore town.The study revealed that, the Yanadi tribe used 20 plants species belonging to 20 families to treat various diseases like worm infestations, scorpion stinge, headache, body pains, fevers, swelling of foots, skin diseases, heart diseases, stomach ulcers, diuretic, dysentery, snake bites, nerve disorders, rheumatic pains, antiseptic, helmentic disease, diabetes, cold and dental problems.These plants represents the major source for the pharmaceutical industries in view of their raw material. The information requires validation for further clinical usage

Solving Markov decision processes for network-level post-hazard recovery via simulation optimization and rollout

Computation of optimal recovery decisions for community resilience assurance post-hazard is a combinatorial decision-making problem under uncertainty. It involves solving a large-scale optimization problem, which is significantly aggravated by the introduction of uncertainty. In this paper, we draw upon established tools from multiple research communities to provide an effective solution to this challenging problem. We provide a stochastic model of damage to the water network (WN) within a testbed community following a severe earthquake and compute near-optimal recovery actions for restoration of the water network. We formulate this stochastic decision-making problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and solve it using a popular class of heuristic algorithms known as rollout. A simulation-based representation of MDPs is utilized in conjunction with rollout and the Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (OCBA) algorithm to address the resulting stochastic simulation optimization problem. Our method employs non-myopic planning with efficient use of simulation budget. We show, through simulation results, that rollout fused with OCBA performs competitively with respect to rollout with total equal allocation (TEA) at a meagre simulation budget of 5-10% of rollout with TEA, which is a crucial step towards addressing large-scale community recovery problems following natural disasters.Comment: Submitted to Simulation Optimization for Cyber Physical Energy Systems (Special Session) in 14th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineerin

Influence of plant growth regulators on growth, seed yield, quality and economics of coriander (Coriandrum sativum L.) cv. Sudha

A field experiment was conducted to study the effect of plant growth regulators (PGRs) on growth, seed yield, quality and economics of coriander (Coriandrum sativum L.) cv. Sudha. The seven treatments included in the experiment are two concentrations each of GA3 (50 and 75 ppm), NAA (10 and 25 ppm), Cycocel (100 and 250 ppm) and control (water spray), as presoaking, foliar spray at 30 and 60 DAS. Among different PGRs applied, spray of 75 ppm GA3 resulted in significant maximum plant height. However, maximum number of primary branches and secondary branches plant-1, number of umbels plant-1, number of umbellets umbel-1, number of seeds umbel-1, seed yield and B:C ratio was maximum with 250 ppm Cycocel. Minimum number of days to 50% flowering and maturity and maximum carbohydrate content and protein content were noticed with 75 ppm GA3. Similarly, lowest moisture content in seeds was also observed with 75 ppm GA3, while, the essential oil content in seeds was maximum with 50 ppm GA3. &nbsp