Investing in Livestock Development in Water-Scarce Semi-Arid Watersheds: Technological, Institutional and Policy Dimensions

Watershed Development Programmes (WDPs) in India were conceived as tools for correcting the regional imbalances in agricultural development created by Green Revolution, through investments in soil and water conservation (SWC) and natural resource management (NRM) in rainfed areas. Though the overall impact of WDPs has been positive and significant, with increase in physical and economic access to groundwater, landless and marginal households hardly benefited from watershed development. Recent evidence points out that in many watersheds inequities increased, since for non-land owning and -well owning households access to drinking water, grazing lands and other natural resources decreased. This paper is based on a research project carried out by the International water Management Institute, South Asia in India during 2002-2005, which attempted to document and understand the livestock-environment-livelihood interactions in watersheds in semi-arid India. This paper elucidates the important role of livestock in livelihoods of communities in water-scarce watersheds and demonstrates that unless livestock interventions are consciously and astutely planned, with due consideration to protecting livelihoods and environment, WDPs might not result in equitable benefits. Limited access to livestock-related institutional services and social organization does not contribute to sustainable livestock-livelihood-environment interactions. The paper highlights the major role that technological and institutional factors play in bringing about the livestock development that would impact positively on livelihoods and the accompanying policy changes that are necessary.watersheds, livestock, environment, livelihoods, markets, services, Livestock Production/Industries, O13, Q56, Z13,

Cramer Rao-Type Bounds for Sparse Bayesian Learning

In this paper, we derive Hybrid, Bayesian and Marginalized Cram\'{e}r-Rao lower bounds (HCRB, BCRB and MCRB) for the single and multiple measurement vector Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) problem of estimating compressible vectors and their prior distribution parameters. We assume the unknown vector to be drawn from a compressible Student-t prior distribution. We derive CRBs that encompass the deterministic or random nature of the unknown parameters of the prior distribution and the regression noise variance. We extend the MCRB to the case where the compressible vector is distributed according to a general compressible prior distribution, of which the generalized Pareto distribution is a special case. We use the derived bounds to uncover the relationship between the compressibility and Mean Square Error (MSE) in the estimates. Further, we illustrate the tightness and utility of the bounds through simulations, by comparing them with the MSE performance of two popular SBL-based estimators. It is found that the MCRB is generally the tightest among the bounds derived and that the MSE performance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm coincides with the MCRB for the compressible vector. Through simulations, we demonstrate the dependence of the MSE performance of SBL based estimators on the compressibility of the vector for several values of the number of observations and at different signal powers.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 11 pages, 10 figure

Is Stack Overflow Overflowing With Questions and Tags

Programming question and answer (Q & A) websites, such as Quora, Stack Overflow, and Yahoo! Answer etc. helps us to understand the programming concepts easily and quickly in a way that has been tested and applied by many software developers. Stack Overflow is one of the most frequently used programming Q\&A website where the questions and answers posted are presently analyzed manually, which requires a huge amount of time and resource. To save the effort, we present a topic modeling based technique to analyze the words of the original texts to discover the themes that run through them. We also propose a method to automate the process of reviewing the quality of questions on Stack Overflow dataset in order to avoid ballooning the stack overflow with insignificant questions. The proposed method also recommends the appropriate tags for the new post, which averts the creation of unnecessary tags on Stack Overflow.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables Presented at Third International Symposium on Women in Computing and Informatics (WCI-2015

Gender and innovation processes in rice-based systems

This GRiSP report is based on the perspectives of women and men from three rice-growing villages in the Nueva Ecija province of the Philippines

Streaming Analytics Over Real-Time Big Data

A portal is developed using open source tool called Liferay for water management and city management using data acquired from sensors deployed in overhead water tanks and across the city at different locations The parameters captured from sensors are water level and parameters captured sensors deployed across the city include dust UV temperature light humidity sound and air quality Data generated by these sensors amounts nearly megabytes of data per day and gigabytes on an annual rate Real time analytics help in monitoring and management of water resources and rate of pollution across the city Visualizations are provided in the form of a time series graph The visual representations are plotted using d3 js graphs in real-time hence allowing the users to take corrective decisions with respect to water usage and managing pollution across the cit

STCP: A New Transport Protocol for High-Speed Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol today and likely to be adopted in future high‐speed and optical networks. A number of literature works have been done to modify or tune the Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) principle in TCP to enhance the network performance. In this work, to efficiently take advantage of the available high bandwidth from the high‐speed and optical infrastructures, we propose a Stratified TCP (STCP) employing parallel virtual transmission layers in high‐speed networks. In this technique, the AIMD principle of TCP is modified to make more aggressive and efficient probing of the available link bandwidth, which in turn increases the performance. Simulation results show that STCP offers a considerable improvement in performance when compared with other TCP variants such as the conventional TCP protocol and Layered TCP (LTCP)

Conformational search of Proteins and Protein Loops

This thesis focuses on understanding the structure and dynamics of proteins using simulations. The main system of interest in our case was cytochrome b5, an electron transport protein, which exists in both Microsomal and Outer Mitochondrial isoforms. We conducted 20 ns Molecular Dynamics simulations of apocytochrome b5 (protein without the heme group). The apocytochrome b5 proteins were more flexible than the holo proteins and the effect of heme removal was mostly confined to the heme-binding (core 1) region.The second part of my thesis consisted of performing replica exchange simulations of the holo proteins. About 4.4 ns simulations of the proteins were conducted with 12 replicas spanning 320 K-450 K using the GB/SA implicit solvent model. The rat Microsomal protein exhibited larger RMS Deviations from the starting structure as compared to the rat OM protei