Insecurities and Human Rights Issues of People Affected by Development-Induced Displacement

Development and displacement seem to be directly related to each other. As India is a densely populated country, any development project leads to the displacement of lakhs of people. Displacement is not just the physical relocation of displaced people but is also associated with social and economic consequences that disrupt the lives of people. The insecurities resulting from the same are manifold. They include human insecurity, social insecurity, economic insecurity, food insecurity, health insecurity, and gender-based insecurity. This paper briefly analyses the situation of displacement in India and reflects on the insecurities faced by the people displaced due to development projects

Housing Affordability in Toronto: Low-Income Earners and Recent Immigrants

This paper analyses different phenomena, initiatives, and policies to determine whether they inhibit or promote affordable housing for recent immigrants in Toronto CMA, Ontario. New immigrants tend to live in the largest cities and thereby create extra demand for housing stock. Toronto does not currently have the capacity to supply affordable housing units for its domestic and immigrant populations. This is exacerbated by the fact that the provincial government has removed rent control for newly built or vacant housing units, a decision that encouraged developers and landlords to increase rents. The price determination through the process of supply and demand does not help low-income earners and immigrants’ secure affordable housing because excessive demand for housing units has given developers and landlords significant bargaining power. The municipal government has taken steps, such as the Inclusionary Zoning Policy, to make affordable housing more accessible to low-to-moderate income households in the Toronto CMA. The policy, though, is still in the discussion phase and the municipal government is weighing the concerns of various stakeholders. However, without implementing the Inclusionary Zoning Policy, it was not rational for the provincial government to withdraw rent control policy. To mitigate the affordability problem, Toronto’s municipal government should follow the example of other major cities in North America and implement the Inclusionary Zoning Policy as soon as possible

INVESTIGATING SCHOOL EFFECTIVENESS IN RURAL SETSOTO MUNICIPALITY AREA: A STRATEGY FOR SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

Published ThesisThe purpose of this study was to investigate how the schools in rural context in the Setsoto Municipality Area in the Free State Province can improve and maintain their effectiveness. Trends in rural education in developing and developed countries are looked at. Challenges of Principals and teachers most whom have or no training in managing multi-grade teaching in rural context are also explored. The main challenge is that Principals of rural schools have to manage rural schools offering multi-grade teaching and learning despite that few of them have not been trained to manage rural schools, even though rural schools has set of challenges. Despite efforts by Department of Education to improve rural schools effectiveness, rural schools have persistently presented a different set of challenges. This study was aimed at answering the following overarching question: How can schools in rural context improve and maintain their effectiveness? The major findings of this study indicate that there is need for Principals to be trained on how to manage rural schools. After the literature study, empirical research was conducted to investigate good practices and challenges faced by Rural schools principals. Data was collected by means of open and close -ended questionnaire and interviews with five Principals managing rural schools in context. Collected data was analysed using the content analysis framework. However, it was evident through empirical research that some principals are able to manage and improve rural school in context through the consultation and networking with other performing rural schools principals.This study proposes valuable information for rural schools principals ,departmental officials and policy makes and rural schools management: Furthermore, the study will also benefit rural schools teachers in the Setsoto Municipality Area and the whole Country, in terms of school improvement and effectiveness in relation to effective curriculum delivery, teaching and learnin

The Occult Feminine: Ecofeminist Renderings in Fact and Fiction

Discrimination, Oppression, Exploitation are the expressions that we encounter repeatedly in the present milieu. In the patriarchal society that we live in, we witness the Macho Man subduing and exploiting Woman and Nature alike, for the gratification of his Need and Greed. Women and Nature are both creators and nurturers. The inherent feminity in a Woman is as much mirrored in Nature. It is this ethereal connection that a Woman and Nature share that Ecofeminists have seeked to establish and popularize. Ecofeminism originated from the idea that various forms of repression are interlinked, they follow the same pattern and hierarchy be it the human world or the natural world. Ecofeminists believe that until and unless Man unlearns this habit, the exploitation of women and destruction of nature won’t cease. Environmental Degradation leads to the erosion of Human Rights as well because we need a healthy environment to survive and realize our potential. Devastation of the ecology and economic iniquity go hand in hand. We have had forest land, tribal reserves being usurped by the powers that be, in the name of development and progress. There are many accounts of strife and revolt against the repressive tendencies of the state and private organizations. Women have been invariably in the forefront of such struggles, for the preservation of their own identity as well as the conservation of Nature. The human tendency to ignore the rights of other constituents that make up this natural world is the root cause of the conundrum mankind is in today. Literature, be it fiction or non-fiction mirrors life in myriad ways. This paper intends to collate Ecofeminist excerpts from literary works and real life struggles to conjure up a montage that reinforces womankind’s intimate bond with nature

An Overview of Genetic Algorithm Based Information Retrieval

As the information grows rapidly, searching relevant and up to date information has become a crucial issue. The amount of information and the pages that are similar to each other are also increasing. Information retrieval is a process or method whereby a prospective user of information is able to transform his need for information into an actual list of documents in storage containing information useful to him. An Information Retrieval System (IRS) Can be defined as a system which interprets the contents of the information items and generate a ranking which reflect relevance and retrieves the information more efficiently. This paper intends the study of genetic algorithm based information retrieval using similarity measures like cosine coefficient, jaccard coefficient, dice coefficient. The genetic algorithm aims to optimize the overall relevance estimate by applying a customized fitness function which will make use of local as well as global factors to have the evaluation function distributed over the search space

Audio-Visual Automatic Speech Recognition Using PZM, MFCC and Statistical Analysis

Audio-Visual Automatic Speech Recognition (AV-ASR) has become the most promising research area when the audio signal gets corrupted by noise. The main objective of this paper is to select the important and discriminative audio and visual speech features to recognize audio-visual speech. This paper proposes Pseudo Zernike Moment (PZM) and feature selection method for audio-visual speech recognition. Visual information is captured from the lip contour and computes the moments for lip reading. We have extracted 19th order of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) as speech features from audio. Since all the 19 speech features are not equally important, therefore, feature selection algorithms are used to select the most efficient features. The various statistical algorithm such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Kruskal-wallis, and Friedman test are employed to analyze the significance of features along with Incremental Feature Selection (IFS) technique. Statistical analysis is used to analyze the statistical significance of the speech features and after that IFS is used to select the speech feature subset. Furthermore, multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Naive Bayes (NB) machine learning techniques are used to recognize the speech for both the audio and visual modalities. Based on the recognition rate combined decision is taken from the two individual recognition systems. This paper compares the result achieved by the proposed model and the existing model for both audio and visual speech recognition. Zernike Moment (ZM) is compared with PZM and shows that our proposed model using PZM extracts better discriminative features for visual speech recognition. This study also proves that audio feature selection using statistical analysis outperforms methods without any feature selection technique

GREEN SYNTHESIS, CHARACTERIZATION, AND IN VITRO ANTIMICROBIAL EFFICACY OF SILVER NANOPARTICLES SYNTHESIZED FROM TECTONA GRANDIS WOOD FLOUR

Objective: Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) are widely used as an antimicrobial agent. Due to the toxicity concerns related to the synthesis of the AgNPs, there is an urgent need of the novel green techniques to synthesis the AgNPs. In the light of the above, we had synthesized the AgNPs with the help of the Tectona grandis commonly known as teak wood.Methods: The aqueous wood floor extract of the T. grandis was used as a reducing agent in the synthesis of the AgNPs. The NPs were synthesized and characterized using different techniques such as ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, Dynamic light scattering (DLS), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The synthesized NPs were then evaluated for their antimicrobial efficacy against the Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria and antifungal activity. Further, in vitro antioxidant efficacy of the AgNPs was calculated using 2,2'-azino-bis(3- ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic) acid and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl assay.Results: From the above analyses, the formation of spherical NPs with an average size of 100 nm was confirmed. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimal biocidal concentration (MBC) of the AgNPs were calculated, MIC and MBC values ranged from 0.50 to 1.8 μg/mL and 0.91 to 3.6 μg/mL, respectively.Conclusion: The prepared NPs were found to be uniform in size with smooth topography. The antibacterial and antifungal efficacy of the NPs was found to be effective on the broad spectrum of microbes. The antioxidant activity of AgNPs was comparable to ascorbic acid

Rare case report of mermaid baby: sirenomelia

Sirenomelia or mermaid baby is a rare and fatal congenital anomaly. It is characterized by varying degrees of fusion of lower limbs, thoracolumbar spinal anomalies, sacrococcygeal agenesis, genitourinary malformations, lower gastrointestinal tracts anomalies (e.g. renal agenesis, absent bladder, anorectal atresia) and absent internal genitalia. Most of the cases are associated with Potter’s facies and pulmonary hypoplasia. The incidence of the disease was 0.8-1 case/1,00,000 births and male to female ratio being 3:1. We reported a case of 19 years old primi at 35 weeks 3 days of gestation with history of tobacco intake during pregnancy who delivered a 1.24 kg baby with single fused lower limbs with a rudimentary tail and multiple congenital anomalies .There was also evidence of Potter’s facies .The baby died within 20 mins after birth. Sirenomelia is a rare but lethal congenital anomaly. Prevention is possible and when diagnosed antenatally, termination should be offered

PERANAN LURAH DALAM MENDISTRIBUSIKAN BANTUAN SOSIAL TERHADAP MASYARAKAT TERDAMPAK COVID-19 (STUDI KASUS DI KELURAHAN PAYO LEBAR KECAMATAN JELUTUNG KOTA JAMBI)

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui bagaimana peranan lurah dalam mendistribusikan bantuan social terhadap masyarakat terdampak covid-19 di kelurahan payo lebar kecamatan jelutung kota jambi. Adapun rumusan masalah yang diangkat dalam penelitian ini adalah Bagaimana Peranan Lurah Dalam Mendistribusikan Bantuan Sosial Terhadap Masyarakat Terdampak Covid-19 dan Kendala Apa Saja Yang di Hadapi Pemerintah Kelurahan Dalam Penyaluran Bantuan Sosial pada masa Pandemi Covid-19 di Kelurahan Payo Lebar Kecamatan Jelutung Kota Jambi. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah penelitian hukum empiris. Hasil penelitian ini menunnjukkan bahwa Peran Lurah dalam mendistribusikan bantuan sosial paket sembako sudah bagus dalam hal ini Lurah berusaha adil semaksimal mungkin dan memprioritaskan masyarakat yang kurang mampu, hal ini dibuktikan dari hasil wawancara dengan Lurah yaitu “masyarakat yang kurang mampu karena melihat dari sisi kehidupannya bergantung mungkin hanya berjualan pecal, jual gorengan, supir angkot, kuli bangunan sebatas itu saja yang kita anggap kurang mampu padahal banyak juga masyarakat yang dirumahkan dari perusahaan, pemutusan hubungan kerja ini juga termasuk masyarakat yang terdampak covid-19 tetapi prioritas utama itu masyarakat yang kurang mampu dan berusaha adil semaksimal mungkin