How Vulnerable are Bangladesh’s Indigenous People to Climate Change?

This paper compares the vulnerabilities to climate change and climate variability of the indigenous people with the Bengali population of Bangladesh. It distinguishes between (a) individual vulnerabilities that are related to an individual’s capability to adapt to climate change and; (b) spatial vulnerabilities, that is, vulnerabilities that are related to the location of a person (like the exposure to climate change-induced disasters). While an individual’s capability to adapt to climate change is determined by many factors, some relatively simple approximation is to look at poverty, landlessness, and illiteracy. Spatial vulnerabilities are reviewed by looking at drought hazard maps, flood hazard maps, landslide hazard maps, and cyclone hazard maps. Hence, the paper compares levels of poverty, landlessness, illiteracy, and the more direct though also more subjective exposures to increased droughts, floods, landslides, and cyclones across the two population groups. The paper concludes with some broad suggestions on adaptation strategies of indigenous people as well as suggestions for policy interventions to reduce climate change-induced vulnerabilities for indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT).Bangladesh, climate change, vulnerability

Antimicrobial Diterpenes: Recent Development From Natural Sources

Antimicrobial resistance has been posing an alarming threat to the treatment of infectious diseases over the years. Ineffectiveness of the currently available synthetic and semisynthetic antibiotics has led the researchers to discover new molecules with potent antimicrobial activities. To overcome the emerging antimicrobial resistance, new antimicrobial compounds from natural sources might be appropriate. Secondary metabolites from natural sources could be prospective candidates in the development of new antimicrobial agents with high efficacy and less side effects. Among the natural secondary metabolites, diterpenoids are of crucial importance because of their broad spectrum of antimicrobial activity, which has put it in the center of research interest in recent years. The present work is aimed at reviewing recent literature regarding different classes of natural diterpenes and diterpenoids with significant antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, and antiprotozoal activities along with their reported structure–activity relationships. This review has been carried out with a focus on relevant literature published in the last 5 years following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. A total of 229 diterpenoids from various sources like plants, marine species, and fungi are summarized in this systematic review, including their chemical structures, classification, and significant antimicrobial activities together with their reported mechanism of action and structure–activity relationships. The outcomes herein would provide researchers with new insights to find new credible leads and to work on their synthetic and semisynthetic derivatives to develop new antimicrobial agents

Analyzing Bangladesh’s Debt Sustainability Using SimSIP Debt

The ability to pay for a government-led investment strategy to achieve the millennium development goals (MDGs) is determined by the resources available to the government through economic growth, taxation, loans, and grants. Unsustainable public debts increase poverty directly through negative impacts on economic growth as well as indirectly through cuts in spending. Hence, the issue of fiscal debt sustainability is critical for achieving the MDGs. In this paper, we use the debt projection module of SimSIP Debt to project the evolution of Bangladesh’s public debt over a 15-year horizon (from fiscal year 2006 to fiscal year 2021) under three different macroeconomic scenarios and two different financing scenarios of an ambitious government-led investment strategy.Bangladesh, debt sustainability, aid

Attention-Based Models for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

Attention-based models have recently shown great performance on a range of tasks, such as speech recognition, machine translation, and image captioning due to their ability to summarize relevant information that expands through the entire length of an input sequence. In this paper, we analyze the usage of attention mechanisms to the problem of sequence summarization in our end-to-end text-dependent speaker recognition system. We explore different topologies and their variants of the attention layer, and compare different pooling methods on the attention weights. Ultimately, we show that attention-based models can improves the Equal Error Rate (EER) of our speaker verification system by relatively 14% compared to our non-attention LSTM baseline model.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 201

Thin shell wormhole due to dyadosphere of a charged black hole

To explain Gamma Ray Bursts, Ruffini argued that the event horizon of a charged black hole is surrounded by a special region called, the Dyadosphere where electric field exceeds the critical value for $e^+$ $e^-$ pair production. In the present work, we construct a thin shell wormhole by performing a thought surgery between two dadospheres. Several physical properties of this thin shell wormhole have been analyzed.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Accepted in Mod.Phys.Lett.

DEVELOPMENT OF INTEGRATED GAS INSTRUMENTATION SYSTEM IN DIRECT REDUCTION PLANT

Direct reduction is the removal of oxygen from iron without melting process. In direct reduction process, the presence of mixture gas in accordance levels largely determines the performance of the iron produced. Therefore, it needs gas sensors system which has high accuracy and reliability in this process. Unfortunately, there are some things that cause decreasing in the accuracy and reliability of the gas sensor in this process. This paper aims to offer a system that can preserve the accuracy and reliability of the gas measurement system called as Integrated Gas Instrumentation System. The system tends to integrate gas sensor component using Specific Gravity (SG) with other components, such as water trap, filter regulator and monitor gas flow rate. The values of Specific Gravity Meter based on process that display in DCS system are compared with lab results for three type of experiments. Based on experiment results it can be said that the proposed system is able to improve the accuracy and reliability of direct reduction process