Empowerment through technology: Gender dimensions of social capital build-up in Maharashtra, India

"This paper explores how and to what extent women and men have benefited from the build-up of social capital in technology uptake, and the role of women in this process. Using a case study on Groundnut Production Technology (GPT) in Maharashtra, India, a systematic documentation of the process by which farmers – both men and women - as well as the whole community became empowered through the build-up of social capital is presented. The focus of the paper is on collective action as a mechanism to stimulate gender-equitable change processes. Our evidence suggests that the technology uptake process was enhanced with the build up of social capital, whereby men and women from all class and caste groups came together for improving their livelihoods. Collective action was enhanced with the increased involvement and participation of women. Strong kinship ties were developed among diverse classes all over the village including landless tribal women, who formed the major labor force for this technology. The paper concludes that social networks played a crucial mediating role in the process of technology uptake. The build-up of social capital played an important role in influencing impacts from the technology because of the ways in which social networks and social relationships facilitated technology dissemination. Gender relations played a significant role in mediating the translation of economic benefits into well being of the individual, the family and community. Finally, it is suggested that further insights into the role of social networks and power relations in the village may be examined in greater detail by establishing the village network architecture, especially marginalized groups." Author's AbstractEmpowerment, Technology adoption, Agricultural growth, Agricultural technology, Gender, Social capital buildup, Social networks, Impact, Collective action,

A Prospective Analysis of Adverse Drug Reactions in a South Indian Hospital

Adverse drug reactions are a great cause of concern to the medical profession, the patients and the pharmaceutical industry. However ADR reporting and monitoring is yet to catch up in India. Hence we undertook a study to record and analyze adverse reactions among all patients admitted to the medical wards of a tertiary care. Centre patients admitted to all medical wards over one year were assessed for ADRs throughout their admission. Suspected ADRs were recorded and analyzed for i) the type of reaction ii) severity iii) Consequence on treatment that is if the drug was continued, or stopped, or needed to be treated with other drugs, iv) Physiological system involved and the v) group of the drugs associated with ADRs. Among 1250 patients admitted during the study period, 250 adverse events were observed. Majority (76.8%) were of mild type, 66% were severe requiring intensive care and 3 patients died. Antimicrobials were responsible for maximum (42.4%) ADRs followed by drugs acting on CNS (20%). When we analyzed the systems affected, CNS side effects were more common in our study. While in many other studies Cardiovascular and gastrointestinal side effects were the most common. Combination of drugs was responsible for a large percentage of ADRs. Inadvertent use of antipsychotics with sedatives led to respiratory failure in 4 patients of which 1 died. Contaminated IV fluids are suspected to be the cause of death in another fatal ADR. In conclusion there is a need for vigilant ADR monitoring to be done by all doctors to prevent morbidity and mortality from ADRs

Knowledge of Pharmacology of Analgesics Among Nurses in a Tertiary Centre

Objectives: To evaluate the knowledge of nurses about the analgesics they administer in our hospital. Methodology: A total of 102 nurses completed the questionnaire which included 20 multiple choice questions based on the dosage forms, mechanism of action, route of administration, adverse effects of the commonly administered analgesics, the nurses’ educational qualifications and their working experience. Frequency, percentage, mean, Kruskal Wallis test and Mann Whitneys test were used to analyse data. Answers were given a score out of 20(100%). Results: The sample comprised of 17(16.6%) senior staff nurses, 38(37%) junior staff nurses and 47(46%) student nurses. Of the staff, 10.8 % were BSc and MSc nurses, 43.1 were GNM staff. The mean knowledge score of BSc & MSc staff was 12.18, GNM staff was 11.7 and of student nurses was 13.38. None of the groups scored more than 15, suggesting their knowledge was inadequate. There was a correlation between knowledge and experience in the staff nurses. Conclusion: The result of this study suggests that the knowledge of pharmacology of analgesics among nurses is inadequate, and thus supports the need for supplementary pharmacology education for nurses in clinical settings, focusing on common drugs they administer and help prevent medical errors

Magnetism in Transition metal doped Cubic SiC

We report here our study on SiC doped with transition metals using first principle density functional theory calculations. We have considered cubic SiC with 3d transition metals as substitutional impurities for Si and C site separately. Cubic SiC doped with Cr, Mn, show ferromagnetism whereas with Sc, Ti, V and Co show site dependency of magnetic properties. Rests of the impurities are found to be non-magnetic.Comment: Presented in the 55th DAE-Solid State Physics Symposium, 26th to 30th December, 2010, Manipal University, Manipal, India; AIP Conf. Proc. 1349, 1087-1088 (2011

Measuring Child Health Status Using Alternative Wealth Indices in India

Disparities in child health between and within countries have persisted and augmented impressively amid the most recent couple of decades. The reduction of these disparities is a key objective of most developing countries’ public health policies, as illustrated in the MDGs 2015. Research on the impacts of socio-economic well being on health is essential for policy makers in developing countries, where limited resources make it critical to utilize existing health care resources to the best preference. The two direct economic measures have been used, namely household income and consumption expenditure. The wealth index is taken as a proxy for consumption expenditure, which tends to have an urban bias. The objective of this paper is to develop and test the need of alternative wealth indices for predicting child health status in India, a developing economy, with assistance of data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) fielded in India. It will underline the importance of going beyond the purely economic view of Socio-Economic Status to cover the multidimensional as well as multilevel concept of economic and social inequality. This study will demonstrate the need for using alternative wealth indices for rural and urban areas. Also, the objective of the paper is to examine whether child health estimates differ with the use of two alternative wealth indices, that is, a single wealth index for the total population at national level and two separate wealth indices for rural and urban areas

Design and Implementation of a High Performance Network Processor with Dynamic Workload Management

Internet plays a crucial part in today\u27s world. Be it personal communication, business transactions or social networking, internet is used everywhere and hence the speed of the communication infrastructure plays an important role. As the number of users increase the network usage increases i.e., the network data rates ramped up from a few Mb/s to Gb/s in less than a decade. Hence the network infrastructure needed a major upgrade to be able to support such high data rates. Technological advancements have enabled the communication links like optical fibres to support these high bandwidths, but the processing speed at the nodes remained constant. This created a need for specialised devices for packet processing in order to match the increasing line rates which led to emergence of network processors. Network processors were both programmable and flexible. To support the growing number of internet applications, a single core network processor has transformed into a multi/many core network processor with multiple cores on a single chip rather than just one core. This improved the packet processing speeds and hence the performance of a network node. Multi-core network processors catered to the needs of a high bandwidth networks by exploiting the inherent packet-level parallelism in a network. But these processors still had intrinsic challenges like load balancing. In order to maximise throughput of these multi-core network processors, it is important to distribute the traffic evenly across all the cores. This thesis describes a multi-core network processor with dynamic workload management. A multi-core network processor, which performs multiple applications is designed to act as a test bed for an effective workload management algorithm. An effective workload management algorithm is designed in order to distribute the workload evenly across all the available cores and hence maximise the performance of the network processor. Runtime statistics of all the cores were collected and updated at run time to aid in deciding the application to be performed on a core to to enable even distribution of workload among the cores. Hence, when an overloading of a core is detected, the applications to be performed on the cores are re-assigned. For testing purposes, we built a flexible and a reusable platform on NetFPGA 10G board which uses a FPGA-based approach to prototyping network devices. The performance of the designed workload management algorithm is tested by measuring the throughput of the system for varying workloads

Hyperandrogenism due to ovarian tumour mimicking PCOS: a case report

Hyperandrogenism is the most common endocrine disorder in reproductive age group. While 82% of the cases are due to PCOS, steroid cell tumours account for less than 1% of cases. These tumours are mostly seen in perimenopausal women and 25-30% of these tumours show malignant potential. Hysterectomy with bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy is the recommended treatment. In a young patient unilateral salpingo-oophorectomy and subsequent follow up can be offered. We present one such rare case of a young patient coming with menstrual irregularities, virilising symptoms and infertility, all features mimicking PCOS. She was diagnosed with a steroid cell tumour and successfully treated