MARKETING MIX STRATEGIES OF SMALL MANUFACTURERS OF INDIA: PUNJAB EXPERIENCE

The aim of the paper is to study the product planning and positioning, factors influencing their price decision, selection of distribution and media channels by the Small-Scale manufactures in the leading industrial state of Punjab. In the era of globalization Small manufacturers are facing lot of problems in areas of marketing mix such as product planning and positioning, pricing and distribution issues. The entrepreneur’s perception relating to these various issues have been highlighted in this paper. Total 173 units manufacturing textiles, bicycle and bicycle parts, food products and beverages and leather and leather products have been surveyed. A number of statements indicating the marketing mix issues have been developed and the respondents were asked to express their level of agreement/disagreement with these statements on five-point Likert scale. Kruskal-Wallis test has been applied to know the significant differences among the respondents relating to different industries, age and turnover groups with respect to these statements. The test has been applied at assumed p-value =0.05. The statements with less than 0.05 p-value are considered significant and those with p-value more than the assumed value are considered to be insignificant. The major finding reveals that small manufacturers are not using well versed with the marketing mix techniques and do not use latest marketing tool such as e-marketing or web marketing. The promotion of the products by advertising is not prevalent among these units.Small manufacturers, product planning, pricing, distribution channels, promotional strategies

Deviations in Tribimaximal Mixing From Sterile Neutrino Sector

We explore the possibility of generating a non-zero $U_{e3}$ element of the neutrino mixing matrix from tribimaximal neutrino mixing by adding a light sterile neutrino to the active neutrinos. Small active-sterile mixing can provide the necessary deviation from tribimaximal mixing to generate a non-zero $\theta_{13}$ and atmospheric mixing $\theta_{23}$ different from maximal. Assuming no CP-violation, we study the phenomenological impact of sterile neutrinos in the context of current neutrino oscillation data. The tribimaximal pattern is broken in such a manner that the second column of tribimaximal mixing remains intact in the neutrino mixing matrix.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

a case study of Nepal

Thesis(Master) -- KDI School: Master of Public Policy, 2020This study aims to identify the relationship between wage and education, training, and experience among employed workers in Nepal. The study used the cross sectional data of 2017 Nepal Labor Force Survey. A total of 6264 employed workers between the ages of 25 to 65 were studied in the survey. The labor market of Nepal was found dominated by less educated workers with a high drop out from school education. We employed Mincer earning function with dummies of interest to explore the relationship. Rate of return to additional year of schooling was found lower than the South Asian average. We also found the average returns and return to schooling to vary across demographics. These results suggest that our National concern have to direct to ensure the quality of education and reduce drop out from school education.Abstract Introduction Data and Methodology Result and Discussion Conclusion ReferencesmasterpublishedKamal Raj GAUTA

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationIn this work, we focused on the magnetic field effect in organic films and devices, including organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells. We measured magnetic field effect (MFE) such as magnetoconductance (MC) and magneto-electroluminescence (MEL) in OLEDs based on several π-conjugated polymers and small molecules for fields B∼2mT. Magnetic field effect (MFE) measured on three isotopes of Poly (dioctyloxy) phenylenevinylene (DOO-PPV) showed that both regular and ultra-small effects are isotope dependent. This indicates that MFE response in OLED is mainly due to the hyperfine interaction (HFI). We also performed spectroscopy of the MFE including magneto-photoinduced absorption (MPA) and magneto-photoluminescence (MPL) at steady state conditions in several systems. This includes pristine Poly[2-methoxy-5-(2-ethylhexyl-oxy)-1,4-phenylene-vinylene] (MEH-PPV) films, MEH-PPV films subjected to prolonged illumination, and MEH-PPV/[6,6]-Phenyl C61 butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) blend, as well as annealed and pristine C60 thin films. For comparison, we also measured MC and MEL in organic diodes based on the same materials. By directly comparing the MPA and MPL responses in films to MC and MEL in organic diodes based on the same active layers, we are able to relate the MFE in organic diodes to the spin densities of the excitations formed in the device, regardless of whether they are formed by photon absorption or carrier injection from the electrodes. We also studied magneto-photocurrent (MPC) and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of a 'standard' Poly (3-hexylthiophene)/PCBM device at various Galvinoxyl radical wt%. We found that the MPC reduction with Galvinoxyl wt% follows the same trend as that of the PCE enhancement. In addition, we also measured the MPC response of a series of OPV cells. We attribute the observed broad MPC to short-lived charge transfer complex species, where spin mixing is caused by the difference, Δg of the donor/acceptor g factors; whereas narrow MPC is due to HFI within long-lived polaron-pairs

Factors Affecting Application of New Public Management Oriented Reforms for Reforming Nepalese Public Administration

New Public Management (NPM) has become a dominant model of administrative reforms since 1980s. The basic principle of NPM is based on economic and managerial theories. Application of economic theories in the public sector allows to introduce competition in the public service delivery system, to contract out functions of the government, and to privatize state owned agencies. Application of managerial theories in the public sector gives an opportunity to provide flexibility in managing the functions of government where public managers have been given more autonomy to manage their jobs. Primarily, NPM based reforms applied in developed nations namely Britain, New Zealand, Australia and USA. Since 1990s NPM has been applied in developing countries too. In Nepal, various efforts for reforming public administration have taken place since early 1960s. However, reform efforts after 1990 have introduced some reforms ideas related to the NPM model for making pubic sector more effective and result oriented. Among them redefining the role of the State, privatization of State owned enterprise, delegation of administrative power and authority, procedural simplification, application of NPM work culture, and use of citizen charter are the major reform components. However, NPM based reform initiatives have not been effective to bring positive changes in Nepalese public administration as per their objectives. The study mainly find outs the policy process of reform, political situation of the country, path dependency characteristics and bureaucratic behaviour that exist in the Nepalese public administration have affected the application of NPM oriented reforms

Adversarial robustness of deep learning enabled industry 4.0 prognostics

The advent of Industry 4.0 in automation and data exchange leads us toward a constant evolution in smart manufacturing environments, including extensive utilization of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Deep Learning (DL). Specifically, the state-of-the-art Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) has shown great success in achieving a competitive edge in Industry 4.0 by reducing maintenance cost, downtime, and increasing productivity by making data-driven informed decisions. These state-of-the-art PHM systems employ IoT device data and DL algorithms to make informed decisions/predictions of Remaining Useful Life (RUL). Unfortunately, IoT sensors and DL algorithms, both are prone to cyber-attacks. For instance, deep learning algorithms are known for their susceptibility to adversarial examples. Such adversarial attacks have been extensively studied in the computer vision domain. However, it is surprising that their impact on the PHM domain is yet not explored. Thus, modern data-driven intelligent PHM systems pose a significant threat to safety- and cost-critical applications. Towards this, in this thesis, we propose a methodology to design adversarially robust PHM systems by analyzing the effect of different types of adversarial attacks on several DL enabled PHM models. More specifically, we craft adversarial attacks using Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Basic Iterative Method (BIM) and evaluate their impact on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bi-directional LSTM, and Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) based PHM models using the proposed methodology. The obtained results using NASA's turbofan engine, and a well-known battery PHM dataset show that these systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks and can cause a serious defect in the RUL prediction. We also analyze the impact of adversarial training using the proposed methodology to enhance the adversarial robustness of the PHM systems. The obtained results show that adversarial training is successful in significantly improvising the robustness of these PHM models.Includes bibliographical references (pages 80-98)

Formulación y evaluación de vesículas de liposomas de baclofeno usando lecitina

I express my sincere regards and respect to RIC and Pharmaceutical Sciences of IKG Punjab Technical University, Jalandhar, for their support and kind cooperationIntroducción: El objetivo principal del presente estudio fue preparar y caracterizar la formulación liposomal de baclofeno para mejorar la efectividad de la formulación aplicada tópicamente. Método: Para la preparación de liposomas, se tomaron diferentes proporciones de lecitina, colesterol y etanol, pero la proporción de fármaco y ácido esteárico se mantuvo constante y se preparó mediante el método de inyección de etanol. Los liposomas se caracterizaron por tamaño de vesícula, forma de vesícula, eficacia de atrapamiento, estudios in vitro, estudios de estabilidad y estudios in vivo. Resultados: El tamaño promedio de partícula del liposoma formulado estuvo en el rango de 3.98 ± 0,45-4,24 ± 0,65 µm y se observaron pequeñas vesículas unilamelares con forma esférica. La eficiencia de atrapamiento de la formulación optimizada fue de 58,67 ± 0,81%. El % máximo de comportamientos acumulativos de liberación de drogas fue 67,66 ± 5,32% después de 10 h. la formulación almacenada a una temperatura de 4 ± 2 ° C muestra una mejor estabilidad (64,19±0,26) en comparación con la temperatura elevada. Se usaron ratones albinos suizos para el estudio in vivo y exhiben actividad relajante muscular en términos de no. de caídas del aparato de varilla giratoria (valor p = 0,001). Conclusiones: la formulación liposomal cargada de baclofeno ha mostrado actividad relajante del músculo esquelético en ratones, lo que sugiere la administración de baclofeno desde los liposomas en el rango terapéutico.Introduction: The main aim of present study was to prepare and characterize liposomal formulation of baclofen to improve the effectiveness of the topically applied formulation. Method: For the preparation of liposomes, different ratio of lecithin, cholesterol and ethanol were taken but ratio of drug and stearic acid were kept constant and prepared by ethanol injection method. Liposomes were characterized for vesicle size, vesicle shape, entrapment efficiency, in vitro studies, stability studies and in vivo studies. Results: The average particle size of formulated liposome was in the range of 3.98±0.45-4.24±0.65 µm and small unilamellar vesicles with spherical in shape observed. Entrapment efficiency of optimized formulation was 58.67±0.81 %. The maximum % cumulative drug release behaviours were 67.66±5.32 % after 10 h. formulation stored in 4±2 °C temperature shows better stability (64.19±0.26) compared to elevated temperature. Swiss albino mice were used for the in vivo study and exhibit muscle relaxant activity in terms of no. of falls from rota rod apparatus (p value =0.001). Conclusions: Baclofen loaded liposomal formulation have shown skeletal muscle relaxant activity in mice suggesting delivery of baclofen from liposomes in the therapeutic range