Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli: Geeta’s Journey from Bondage to Liberation

Since ancient time, women have been placed at the secondary role by the patriarchs in our society. They are given less important as compared to men. Our society always keeps women under their pressure because they have to do all the household chores, take care of the cattle, children and the other members of the family. Even the responsibility of the kitchen is given to them. In the modern context, women are doing jobs also but they have to do all the kitchen work of their homes apart from other duties. Men are generally given only one responsibility i.e. to earn bread for the family. Apart from that they usually play no significant role in the family. The present paper analyses the character of Geeta in Rama Mehta’s feminist novel Inside the Haveli in which Geeta faces many problems in her life in Udaipur city but finally she wins in her attempts

A.K. Ramanujan’s Select Poems: A Humanistic Approach

Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (1929-1993), needs no introduction in the word of Indian English Poetry. His poems are liked by every person because his poems are either replete with the humanistic approach or his poem have autobiographical elements. He was a poet, translator, playwright and folklorist. He belonged to a Hindu family. He was a trilingual writer who wrote in English, Tamil and Kannada. He has interpreted some works written in Sanskrit and Tamil bases on some classical and modern variants. He had four poetry collections to his credit: The Striders (1966), Relations (1971), Second Sight (1986), and The Black Hen (1995). Ramanujan’s poems are so easy and personal that these poems touch the heart of reader

Electromyography study on lower limb muscle synchronizations strategies during walking and sit-to-stand tasks on high-heeled shoes

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.High-heeled shoes as accessories are prominent in today’s society. They are worn on special occasions as well as with casual outfits. Specific muscle activation and synchronization changes occur when performing Sit-to-stand and walking tasks in shoes with high heels vs. lower heels. The reformed demands on muscles mostly accompanying the muscle synchronization changes have not been well documented. As walking and sit-to-stand while wearing HHS in the work environment is very common for professional women, it is essential to understand the health implications. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to identify changes in muscle activation and synchronization patterns when Sit-to-stand and walking are executed in high-heeled vs. low-heeled shoes. Between 10 and 15 Healthy young women participated in the study. Participants performed two tasks - sit to stand and walking. Both these tasks were performed in different experiment sessions, where each participant was made to wear heeled shoes of different heights (4cm, 6cm, 8cm and 10cm for walking task and 4cm, 6cm and 10cm for STS task). Muscle activities from the dominant leg were recorded. The investigated muscles were: Rectus Femoris (RF), Vastus Lateralis (VL), Vastus Medialis (VL), Semitendinosus (ST), Tibialis Anterior(TA) and Gastrocnemius (GA). RMS analysis of all muscles, Co-contraction analysis of RF – ST, VL – ST and VM – ST and combinations and coherence analysis of RF-VL, RF-VM, and RF-ST combinations were carried out. When comparing parameters relevant to different heel heights, a significant increase in muscle activity was perceived in all muscles involved in the two tasks. Co-contraction and Coherence parameters were increased in all three muscle pairs in both tasks. An interesting observation made was that irrespective of heel heights, the percentage contribution of muscle activation and percentage contribution of muscle pair synchronization remain same in sit-to-stand and walking task. These results reflect greater alteration demands for joint stability, balance and avoid from falling during sit-to-stand and walking in shoes with increased heel height

Changes in lower limb muscle synchronisation during walking on high-heeled shoes

© 2018 Institution of Engineering and Technology.All right reserved. The goal of this research was to investigate the effect of wearing high-heeled shoes (HHS) on lower limb muscle synchronisation during walking, using beta band (15–30 Hz) coherence analysis. Fifteen females with no previous neuromuscular disorders volunteered in this study. Surface electromyography in frequency domain was studied from rectus femoris (RF), vastus lateralis (VL), vastus medialis (VM) and semitendinosus (ST) muscles during walking by subjects wearing HHS of three different heel heights (low – 4 cm, medium – 6 cm and high – 10 cm). Average coherence values were calculated for RF-VL, RF-VM and RF-ST muscles in beta band to analyse muscle pair synchronisation. In this study, significant increase in beta band coherence was found in all three muscle pairs during walking on HHS of different heel heights (p<0.05). Increased beta band coherence obtained from this study suggested that walking on HHS demands higher muscle pair synchronisation, to maintain stability around the knee joint

Application of mobile devices for community based forest monitoring

The bacterial flagellar motor is a reversible rotary nano-machine, about 45 nm in diameter, embedded in the bacterial cell envelope. It is powered by the flux of H+ or Na+ ions across the cytoplasmic membrane driven by an electrochemical gradient, the proton-motive force or the sodium-motive force. Each motor rotates a helical filament at several hundreds of revolutions per second (hertz). In many species, the motor switches direction stochastically, with the switching rates controlled by a network of sensory and signalling proteins. The bacterial flagellar motor was confirmed as a rotary motor in the early 1970s, the first direct observation of the function of a single molecular motor. However, because of the large size and complexity of the motor, much remains to be discovered, in particular, the structural details of the torque-generating mechanism. This review outlines what has been learned about the structure and function of the motor using a combination of genetics, single-molecule and biophysical techniques, with a focus on recent results and single-molecule techniques

Mobile devices for community-based REDD+ monitoring: A case study for Central Vietnam

Monitoring tropical deforestation and forest degradation is one of the central elements for the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries (REDD+) scheme. Current arrangements for monitoring are based on remote sensing and field measurements. Since monitoring is the periodic process of assessing forest stands properties with respect to reference data, adopting the current REDD+ requirements for implementing monitoring at national levels is a challenging task. Recently, the advancement in Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and mobile devices has enabled local communities to monitor their forest in a basic resource setting such as no or slow internet connection link, limited power supply, etc. Despite the potential, the use of mobile device system for community based monitoring (CBM) is still exceptional and faces implementation challenges. This paper presents an integrated data collection system based on mobile devices that streamlines the community-based forest monitoring data collection, transmission and visualization process. This paper also assesses the accuracy and reliability of CBM data and proposes a way to fit them into national REDD+ Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) scheme. The system performance is evaluated at Tra Bui commune, Quang Nam province, Central Vietnam, where forest carbon and change activities were tracked. The results show that the local community is able to provide data with accuracy comparable to expert measurements (index of agreement greater than 0.88), but against lower costs. Furthermore, the results confirm that communities are more effective to monitor small scale forest degradation due to subsistence fuel wood collection and selective logging, than high resolution remote sensing SPOT imagery

Building a community-based open harmonised reference data repository for global crop mapping

Reference data is key to produce reliable crop type and cropland maps. Although research projects, national and international programs as well as local initiatives constantly gather crop related reference data, finding, collecting, and harmonizing data from different sources is a challenging task. Furthermore, ethical, legal, and consent-related restrictions associated with data sharing represent a common dilemma faced by international research projects. We address these dilemmas by building a community-based, open, harmonised reference data repository at global extent, ready for model training or product validation. Our repository contains data from different sources such as the Group on Earth Observations Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative (GEOGLAM) Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) sites, the Radiant MLHub, the Future Harvest (CGIAR) centers, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Food Security and Agriculture Program (NASA Harvest), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) citizen science platforms (LACO-Wiki and Geo-Wiki), as well as from individual project contributions. Data of 2016 onwards were collected, harmonised, and annotated. The data sets spatial, temporal, and thematic quality were assessed applying rules developed in this research. Currently, the repository holds around 75 million harmonised observations with standardized metadata of which a large share is available to the public. The repository, funded by ESA through the WorldCereal project, can be used for either the calibration of image classification deep learning algorithms or the validation of Earth Observation generated products, such as global cropland extent and maize and wheat maps. We recommend continuing and institutionalizing this reference data initiative e.g. through GEOGLAM, and encouraging the community to publish land cover and crop type data following the open science and open data principles

Combining satellite data and community-based observations for forest monitoring

Within the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) framework, the involvement of local communities in national forest monitoring activities has the potential to enhance monitoring efficiency at lower costs while simultaneously promoting transparency and better forest management. We assessed the consistency of forest monitoring data (mostly activity data related to forest change) collected by local experts in the UNESCO Kafa Biosphere Reserve, Ethiopia. Professional ground measurements and high resolution satellite images were used as validation data to assess over 700 forest change observations collected by the local experts. Furthermore, we examined the complementary use of local datasets and remote sensing by assessing spatial, temporal and thematic data quality factors. Based on this complementarity, we propose a framework to integrate local expert monitoring data with satellite-based monitoring data into a National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS) in support of REDD+ Measuring, Reporting and Verifying (MRV) and near real-time forest change monitoring