Inter- District Disparity in Health Care Facility and Education: A Case of Uttar Pradesh

Economic and Human development in any society are prerequisites for a better quality of human life. The present paper attempts to measure inter-district disparity in education and health attainment in UP at two time periods 1990-91 and 2007-08. It uses Maher’s methodology (subsequently used by a number of others) to standardise 8 indicators for the health attainment and 13 for educational attainment and then applies principal component analysis to compute the composite indices. The results show that apart from existence of wide disparity there are sufficient proof to say that there are regions/districts that have done well in educational attainment but are poorly placed in terms of health attainment and vice-versa. The paper offers some suggestions to reduce the glaring disparity.   Keywords: Disparity, health and education, Composite Indices, district-level,

Crisis of Agricultural in Uttar Pradesh: From Apprehension to Actuality

The Indian countryside where the large majority of its people reside is in the grip of a severe crisis relating to agriculture. The rural India is in acute distress- there is not enough work, not enough food to eat and not enough water to drink for the rural population.Dipankar Gupta (2005) seems brutally correct when he writes, “Agriculture (in India) today is an economic residue that generously accommodates non-achievers resigned to a life of sad satisfaction. The villager is as bloodless as the rural economy is lifeless. From rich to poor the trend is to leave the village…..”The situation looks extremely grim as we are in a situation where painkillers are adding to the pains and the medicines are aggravating the disease.  Government’s efforts of coming out of the quagmire are actually pushing agriculture further dipper and dipper into it.Manifestations of agrarian distress in contemporary India is not confined to the pockets of backwardness; even the regions having a high degree of commercial agriculture, using relatively better technology and having a relatively diversified cropping pattern have reported high indebtedness and distress of various kinds. While the perilous form of the crisis as reflected in form of farmer’s distress and suicide is visible at present mainly in states like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra (especially Vidarbha) and Kerala etc.; the preliminary signs of a brewing crisis is discernible also in the North Indian states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The crisis of agriculture in Uttar Pradesh has not reached an acute stage but it is a lingering crisis of low intensity reflected in stagnation in production, farmer’s indebtedness, poor returns to cultivation, and growing discontent of the farmers and alienation The literature on the nature and magnitude of crisis of agriculture of the type Uttar Pradesh is in, is rather sparse; while policy makers are not keen to even accept that something is wrong with agriculture in UP, the economists are too obsessed and occupied with the severe form of crisis existing elsewhere to pay any heed to it. The primary contention of the present write up is twofold- first, to conceptualise crisis of agriculture in order to see whether it is crisis of the agricultural sector or that of the agriculturists and second, to draw forth the point that the apprehension of a brewing crisis in UP is not false. If corrective measures are not taken at the earliest there is every likelihood that the apprehension of a major crisis of agriculture in the state would turn into actuality. The paper is organized in three sections. Section-I explicates the concept of the crisis taking help of relevant literature, Section-II briefly discusses the methodology of measurement of crisis of agriculture. Section-III presents a summary picture of UP agriculture and develops a composite index of crisis of agriculture for UP and some other states and the final section i.e. Section-IV suggests some interventions required to put the cart on track

Design Fatigue Lives of Polypropylene Fibre Reinforced Polymer Concrete Composites

Flexural fatigue behavior of Poly-propylene fibre reinforced polymer concrete composites (PFRPCC) has been investigated at various stress levels and the statistical analysis of the data thus obtained has been carried out. Polymer Concrete Composite (PCC) samples without addition of any type of fibres were also tested for flexural fatigue.  Forty specimens of PCC and One hundred and Forty One specimens of PFRPCC containing 0.5%, 1.0% and 2.0% polypropylene fibres were tested in fatigue using a MTS servo controlled test system. Fatigue life distributions of PCC as well as PFRPCC are observed to approximately follow a two parameter Weibull distribution with correlation coefficient exceeding 0.9. The parameters of the Weibull distribution have been obtained by various methods. Failure probability, which is an important parameter in the fatigue design of materials, has been used to obtain the design fatigue lives for the material. Comparison of design fatigue life of PCC and PFRPCC has been carried out and it is observed that addition of fibres enhances the design fatigue life of PCC

An analysis of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome-related awareness among masses

Background: Prevention is better than cure. This age-old phrase holds very true in the case of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS). So, adequate HIV and AIDS related education for young people is considered as an important prevention strategy. The main aim of the study was to analyze the awareness regarding HIV/AIDS among masses. The other objectives were to review and analyze the existing awareness campaigns regarding the need for establishment of new awareness campaigns.Methods: The study was conducted among a total of 80 subjects through a questionnaire comprising of questions about HIV/AIDS.Results: It was observed that the awareness among subjects with the non-scientific educational background was less than those with the scientific educational background. The analysis of attempted questionnaires showed that the knowledge of Indian subjects lacked considerably in certain basic areas related to HIV/AIDS. This indicates that the awareness measures and strategies running in India are ineffective and inadequate. Furthermore, it was observed that counseling by teachers, friends, and parents/families in Indians was lesser than that of subjects from the USA.Conclusion: Lack of awareness among masses has pointed toward the need to promote more awareness campaigns. It has been concluded that there is a need of providing comprehensive and detailed information regarding the preventive measures to masses, especially young people not only through educational institutions but also through families and friends

DWT based Compression of X-Ray Images using Fuzzy C - Means

People, Hospitals and many other organizations manage to store a large amount of files inside their storage devices. Once the storage reaches its limit then the organizations try to minimize the files size by using different compression techniques. In this paper, we focus on lossless image compression for DICOM images using clustering approach. Cluster of data point is formed by Fuzzy C-mean clustering approach. An automatic threshold is selected by this clustering approach and the data point whose pixel intensity is greater than threshold is grouped into one cluster and the data point whose pixel intensity is less than threshold is grouped into another cluster. Hence we obtain region of interest (ROI) and Non-region of interest (N-ROI). Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is used to compress the image and inverse DWT is used to regenerate the image

Medical Management of Renal Cell Cancer

In 2018, there were an estimated 400,000 new cases of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) worldwide—with 64,000 cases in the United States and 12,600 in the United Kingdom (UK). The medical management of RCC is an integral part of treatment as between one-quarter and one-third of patients will present with metastatic disease. There has been a rapid evolution of targeted and novel treatments for RCC over the last two decades. This chapter explores the biology of renal cell carcinoma and current treatment strategies

Spectral Norm Regularization of Orthonormal Representations for Graph Transduction

International audienceRecent literature [1] suggests that embedding a graph on an unit sphere leads to better generalization for graph transduction. However, the choice of optimal embedding and an efficient algorithm to compute the same remains open. In this paper, we show that orthonormal representations, a class of unit-sphere graph em-beddings are PAC learnable. Existing PAC-based analysis do not apply as the VC dimension of the function class is infinite. We propose an alternative PAC-based bound, which do not depend on the VC dimension of the underlying function class, but is related to the famous Lovász ϑ function. The main contribution of the paper is SPORE, a SPectral regularized ORthonormal Embedding for graph trans-duction, derived from the PAC bound. SPORE is posed as a non-smooth convex function over an elliptope. These problems are usually solved as semi-definite programs (SDPs) with time complexity O(n^6). We present, Infeasible Inexact prox-imal (IIP): an Inexact proximal method which performs subgradient procedure on an approximate projection, not necessarily feasible. IIP is more scalable than SDP, has an O(1 √ T) convergence, and is generally applicable whenever a suitable approximate projection is available. We use IIP to compute SPORE where the approximate projection step is computed by FISTA, an accelerated gradient descent procedure. We show that the method has a convergence rate of O(1 √ T). The proposed algorithm easily scales to 1000's of vertices, while the standard SDP computation does not scale beyond few hundred vertices. Furthermore, the analysis presented here easily extends to the multiple graph setting

Role of Apoptotic Proteins in REC-2006 Mediated Radiation Protection in Hepatoma Cell Lines

The present study was carried out to evaluate the role of apoptotic proteins in REC-2006-mediated radiation protection in hepatoma cell lines. REC-2006 treatment 2 h before irradiation strongly inhibited the cleavage of ATM and PARP-1 in HepG2 cells. The expression of nuclear apoptosis inducing factor (AIF) was found to be more inhibited (~17%) in HepG2 cells in REC-2006 + radiation-treated group. More inhibition (~33%) of cytochrome c was observed in HepG2 cells upon REC-2006 treatment 2 h prior irradiation. Similarly, significantly more (P<.05) inhibition of Apaf-1, caspase-9 and caspase-3 was observed in REC-2006 + radition-treated group in HepG2 cells. REC-2006 treatment restored the expression of ICAD in HepG2 cells; however, no restoration was observed in Hep3B cells. Lower nuclear to cytoplasmic CAD ratio was observed in HepG2 cells (~0.6) as compared with Hep3B cells (~1.2) in REC-2006 + radiation-treated group. In conclusion, REC-2006 rendered higher protection in HepG2 cells by inhibiting the expression and translocation of AIF, inhibiting the cleavage of ATM and PARP-1, restoring the expression of ICAD, inhibiting the release of cytochrome c and thus modulating the expression of Apaf-1 caspase-9 and activity of caspase-3

Comparative study of dexmedetomidine and tramadol for control of post-spinal anesthesia shivering

Background and Aim: Dexmedetomidine, a congener of clonidine is an α2 adrenoceptor agonist, commonly used for sedation, alsoknown to have antishivering potential. Its use as an agent to treat and control post-spinal anesthesia shivering has been inadequatelystudied. This study is thus aimed to evaluate the efficacy, hemodynamic changes and side effects of dexmedetomidine in comparisonto tramadol when used to control post-spinal anesthesia shivering. Materials and Methods: A prospective randomized, and doubleblindstudy was conducted in 60 ASA Grade I and II patients of either gender, aged between 18 and 60 years, undergoing varioussurgical procedure under spinal-anesthesia and developing shivering. The patients were randomized into two groups of n = 30each to receive either dexmedetomidine - 0.5 μg/kg (Group D) or tramadol - 0.5 mg/kg (Group T) as an intravenous infusion onappearance of shivering. The time of onset, grade of shivering, time taken for cessation of shivering, response rate, and adverseeffect were observed at scheduled intervals. SPSS-20 was used for statistical analysis, unpaired t-test for numerical data andchi-square test for categorical data. Results: Both the drugs effectively controlled shivering, taking almost the same time for itscessation. It was observed that patients in Group D were found to have a greater sedation score, whereas the side effects such asnausea and vomiting requiring treatment was more in Group T. The incidence of recurrence of shivering was higher in Group T.Conclusions: Dexmedetomidine effectively controls shivering taking almost the same time for cessation as that of tramadol. Itprovides an additional benefit of intraoperative sedation