Biligiri Tiger reserve: include Soligas in conservation plan

Protesting against the proposal of the Karnataka forest department to notify the Biligiri Hills as a Tiger Reserve, the resident Soliga adivasis have instead proposed a community-based tiger conservation model

A Study Paper on use of System Camera for System Mouse Control

Human Computer Interaction today significantly accentuates on growing more unconstrained and characteristic interfaces. The Graphical Client Interface (GUI) on Personal Computers (PCs) is calm grown, all around characterized and gives an productive interface for a client to collaborate with the PC and access the different applications easily with the assistance of mice, track cushion, and so on. In the present day situation the greater part of the cell telephones are utilizing touch screen innovation to collaborate with the client. At the same time this innovation is still not shabby to be utilized as a part of desktops and tablets As PC innovation keeps on developing, individuals have littler and littler electronic gadgets. Progressively we are perceiving the significance of human figuring communication (HCI), and specifically vision-based motion and item acknowledgment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that uses a feature gadget to control the mouse framework (Mouse tasks).We concentrated on a few picture transforming calculations of diverse papers to actualize this work. The PC cooperation is finished by utilizing finger, mouse cursor development with the assistance of picture acknowledgment and shading acknowledgment process. Here picture preparing is done through .net (Microsoft) for shading and picture acknowledgment process. Keeping in mind the end goal to show the capacity of the mouse development larger part shading is distinguished in a feature and a relating feature is played from the database. There are the heaps of papers accessible for this kind of study however there is not in any case one fruitful usage of this sort of framework. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.16048

EgoTV: Egocentric Task Verification from Natural Language Task Descriptions

To enable progress towards egocentric agents capable of understanding everyday tasks specified in natural language, we propose a benchmark and a synthetic dataset called Egocentric Task Verification (EgoTV). EgoTV contains multi-step tasks with multiple sub-task decompositions, state changes, object interactions, and sub-task ordering constraints, in addition to abstracted task descriptions that contain only partial details about ways to accomplish a task. We also propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Grounding (NSG) approach to enable the causal, temporal, and compositional reasoning of such tasks. We demonstrate NSG's capability towards task tracking and verification on our EgoTV dataset and a real-world dataset derived from CrossTask (CTV). Our contributions include the release of the EgoTV and CTV datasets, and the NSG model for future research on egocentric assistive agents

Competing Visions: Domestic Forests, Politics and Forest Policy in the Central Western Ghats of South India

International audienceRural people in developing countries including India continue to access a number of types of 'forests' to meet specific needs such as fuelwood, fodder, food, non-timber forest produce and timber for both subsistence and income generation. While a plethora of terms exist to describe the types of forests that rural people use—such as farm forests, social forests, community forests and small-scale for-ests—the expression domestic forest has recently been proposed. Domestic forest is a term aimed at capturing the diversity of forests transformed and managed by rural communities and a way to introduce a new scientific domain that recognises that production and conservation can be reconciled and that local communities can be effective managers. This paper argues in the context of the central Western Ghats of south India that while the domestic forest concept is a useful umbrella term to capture the diversity of forests used by rural people, these domestic forests are often not autonomous local forests but sites of contestation between local actors and the state forest bureaucracy. Hence, a paradigm shift within the forest bureaucracy will only occur if the scientific forestry community questions its own normative views on forest management and sees forest policy as a means to recognise local claims and support existing practices of forest dependent communities

Awareness of consequences of obesity on reproductive health problems among women in an urban area in South India

Background: Obesity is a well-known risk factor for number of non-communicable diseases. There is paucity of data however with regard to awareness of its consequences on reproductive health hazards.Methods: Data was collected from 208 women aged ≥18 years from households chosen by systematic random sampling in an urban area.Results: The mean age of participants was 41.4±14.2 years. Majority of them completed their graduation [109(52.4%)] and were housewives [80(38.5%)]. Most of them were married [167(80.3%)]. Out of 208 study participants, 166(79.8%) knew that obesity adversely affects reproductive health causing problems like PIH [156(75.0%)], GDM [150(72.1%)], menstrual irregularities [130(62.5%)], infertility [117(56.2%)], decreased efficacy of hormonal contraception [84(40.4%)], premature delivery [67(32.2%)], miscarriages [66(31.7%)] and fetal malformations [55(26.4%)] during pregnancy. Difficulties during delivery [137(65.9%)], higher chances of caesarean section [130(62.4%)], infections [36(17.3%)] and PPH [33(15.9%)] in the intra and post natal period were also known to participants. Majority of women [158(76%)] had average awareness level regarding consequences of obesity on their reproductive health. Only 21(10.1%) had good awareness. Source of information among majority of participants was media [116(55.8%)]. Good awareness level was significantly more among those aged ≤ 25 years (p=0.03), with higher level of education (p=0.038), nulligravida (p=0.037) and professionals (p=0.02).Conclusions: Awareness generation on consequences of obesity on reproductive health is required to bring about behavioral change regarding obesity prevention among women in the setting.

Notes from the Other Side of a Forest Fire

Although widely used as a tool in forest management across the world, causing fires is illegal in Indian forests. This article points out that the present understanding of fire as essentially disruptive has its antecedents in a colonial perspective that came from seeing the forest primarily as a source of timber. However, the practices of indigenous communities as well as the insights of ecological studies point to the importance of using fire in controlled ways to manage dry and deciduous forest ecosystems

Not Available

Not AvailableSample survey is a cost effective mean to collect reliable information about a finite population. There are various sampling methodologies, among them two-phase sampling is generally used for estimating population mean or total under the two different situations. First, when the information of the auxiliary variable is not readily available and the other condition is when it is vey expensive to gather information on characteristic under study y, but it is comparatively cheaper to gather information on the variables which are highly correlated with the characteristic under study. In large scale surveys, two-phase sampling approach is proposed in order to reduce the number of sampled units which require the more expensive objective methods. Prediction approach is applied to predict the non-sampled units in surveys. In the large preliminary sample (first phase sample) of two-phase sampling, there are total n'- n non-sampled units having auxiliary information, so there is a need to develop an estimator based on prediction approach under finite population. In the present study, we have proposed a new estimator of finite population total based on prediction approach in the context of two-phase sampling.Not Availabl

Machining performance enhancement of EN-31 diesteel using MWCNT mixed rotary EDM

The present study investigates the influence of adding multi-wall carbon nanotube (MWCNT) into the dielectric fluid of electric discharge machining (EDM) in terms of material removal rate (MRR), surface roughness (SR) and surface topology of EN-31 die steel using Cu electrode. A customized rotary electrode set-up has been developed to compare the performance improvement of powder mixed rotary electrical discharge machining (PMREDM) as compared to powder mixed electrical discharge machining (PMEDM) and conventional EDM. The present study attempts to investigate the optimization of process parameters of MWCNT mixed rotary EDM of EN-31 die steel using response surface methodology (RSM) and genetic algorithm (GA) in terms of MRR and SR. The optimization results show that MWCNT mixed rotary EDM shows highest value of MRR (9.72 mm3/min) and lowest value of SR (Ra = 2.03 μm), which are approximately 46.17% higher and 45.43% lower than conventional EDM values respectively. Further, various combinations of optimal values of MRR and SR and their corresponding input parameters setting have been shown in pareto table created by multi-objective optimization GA technique available in MATLAB. Finally, field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) analysis of MWCNT mixed rotary EDM and EDM surfaces is carried out which revealsthat MWCNT mixed rotary EDM shows better surface topography as compared to EDM process

Machining performance enhancement of EN-31 diesteel using MWCNT mixed rotary EDM

309-319The present study investigates the influence of adding multi-wall carbon nanotube (MWCNT) into the dielectric fluid of  electric discharge machining (EDM) in terms of material removal rate (MRR), surface roughness (SR) and surface topology of EN-31 die steel using Cu electrode. A customized rotary electrode set-up has been developed to compare the performance improvement of powder mixed rotary electrical discharge machining (PMREDM) as compared to powder mixed electrical discharge machining (PMEDM) and conventional EDM. The present study attempts to investigate the optimization of process parameters of MWCNT mixed rotary EDM of EN-31 die steel using response surface methodology (RSM) and genetic algorithm (GA) in terms of MRR and SR. The optimization results show that MWCNT mixed rotary EDM shows highest value of MRR (9.72 mm3/min) and lowest value of SR (Ra = 2.03 µm), which are approximately 46.17% higher and 45.43% lower than conventional EDM values respectively. Further, various combinations of optimal values of MRR and SR and their corresponding input parameters setting have been shown in pareto table created by multi-objective optimization GA technique available in MATLAB. Finally, field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) analysis of MWCNT mixed rotary EDM and EDM surfaces is carried out which revealsthat MWCNT mixed rotary EDM shows better surface topography as compared to EDM process

Filling in the (forest) blanks: the past, present and future of India’s savanna grasslands

For most people, savannas conjure up iconic images of vast open African landscapes, with giraffes, elephants, and large herds of wildebeest, zebras, and other herbivores. In reality, savannas are a pan-tropical vegetation formation, from the pampas and cerrados of Latin America, to the plains of northern Australia