Estimation and Determinants of Chronic Poverty in India : An Alternative Approach

The paper conceptualizes chronic poverty by using the spaces of income and nutrition and estimates its incidence among states and social groups. It also aims to improve our understanding of the determinant of chronic poverty by considering economic, demographic and social factors. It attempts to answer the following questions : How important a determinant of chronic poverty is household income? What factors inhibit escape from chronic poverty? How different are the other poor from chronic poor? The analysis uses the unit level NSS and NFHS data.Chrinic Poverty, India

Estimation and determinants of chronic poverty in India: An Alternative approach

The paper conceptualizes chronic poverty by using the spaces of income and nutrition and estimates its incidence among states and social groups. It also aims to improve our understanding of the determinant of chronic poverty by considering economic, demographic and social factors. It attempts to answer the following questions: How important a determinant of chronic poverty is household income? What factors inhibit escape from chronic poverty? How different are the other poor from chronic poor? The analysis uses the unit level NSS and NFHS data.

Integrated Assessment of Shallow-Aquifer Vulnerability to Multiple Contaminants and Drinking-Water Exposure Pathways in Holliston, Massachusetts

Half of U.S. drinking water comes from aquifers, and very shallow ones (table) are especially vulnerable to anthropogenic contamination. We present the case of Holliston, a Boston, Massachusetts suburb that draws its drinking water from very shallow aquifers, and where metals and solvents have been reported in groundwater. Community concerns focus on water discolored by naturally occurring manganese (Mn), despite reports stating regulatory aesthetic compliance. Epidemiologic studies suggest Mn is a potentially toxic element (PTE) for children exposed by the drinking-water pathway at levels near the regulatory aesthetic level. We designed an integrated, community-based project: five sites were profiled for contaminant releases; service areas for wells were modeled; and the capture zone for one vulnerable well was estimated. Manganese, mercury, and trichloroethylene are among 20 contaminants of interest. Findings show that past and/or current exposures to multiple contaminants in drinking water are plausible, satisfying the criteria for complete exposure pathways. This case questions the adequacy of aquifer protection and monitoring regulations, and highlights the need for integrated assessment of multiple contaminants, associated exposures and health risks. It posits that community-researcher partnerships are essential for understanding and solving complex problems

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Identification of Groundwater Potential Recharge and Recharge Zones of Tumakuru District Using GIS

Groundwater is essential for human activity in regions lacking surface water sources. As such one of the rain deficit regions in south central part of India is Tumakuru. The study area comprising the watershed regions of Tumakuru district was identified and a first-order water balance was performed for 1992–2020 and projections for 2050 based on the SSP 245 and SSP 585 climate change scenarios. The land cover has undergone significant changes in the impervious area, increasing over 10%, This increasing trend is seen beyond 2020, and these gains have largely impacted grasslands. With the advent of the proposed economic development projects, the region may project increased changes in its land cover type than the modeled data for the year 2050. With changes in land cover and precipitation patterns, the region will see increased runoff by 12%, thus resulting in a reduction in groundwater recharge, leading to widespread water availability issues beyond 2020 and into the future. The analysis was done from 1992 to 2020 in intervals of 4 years to understand the historical water availability trends and the year 2050 as projected in the CMIP6 climate change scenarios. Based on the results, there is a projection of a reduction in groundwater recharge and eventually exerting stress on the water resources in the study area. To alleviate these stresses, we have identified suitable recharge areas based on the runoff coefficients and recommend adopting artificial recharge efforts to increase the recharge and also potential ways to reduce the exploitation of groundwater resources. © 2023, The Institution of Engineers (India)

Illustrating climate-change resilience engineering: Conceptual design of water supply and wastewater/stormwater system for the México-Lerma-Cutzamala hydrological region

Conventional engineering education, research, and practice need to be transformed in the face of growing, complex climate-change impacts to populations and landscapes.New approaches that integrate diverse types of knowledge–engineering, natural science, social science, humanities, professional, Indigenous, and lived experience -- need to be mobilized in collaborative ways. Volume 1 in the series Integrated Global STEM

Land-Cover Change and Urban Growth in the Mexico-Lerma-Cutzamala Hydrological Region, 1993–2018

The Mexico-Lerma-Cutzamala Hydrological Region (MLCHR) encompasses all areas serving water needs of Mexico City Metropolitan Area and is home to 26.8 million people. Historically, this region has experienced extensive environmental and land cover changes due to urbanization, agricultural expansion, deforestation, growing population, floods and droughts. The main objectives of the study are to quantify the land cover changes and to identify spatial/temporal patterns of urban growth during 1993–2018. The results revealed that within the MLCHR over 25 years, urban land cover grew by 82% from its original extent in 1993. Shrubland and cropland contributed the most to the new urban land. The rate of change to urban has been increasing, from 38 km2/year in 1993–2004 to 53 km2/year in 2004–2018. Additionally, the spatial pattern of urbanization has become more dispersed over time, as new transitions to urban are happening farther away from existing urban land. This study is the first to quantify and locate urbanization within the entire hydrological region that serves the water and sanitation needs of the megalopolis. Its results will support future modeling efforts to understand the impacts of climate change on surface water bodies and aquifers within the MLCHR under different climate-change scenarios and to identify populations most vulnerable to projected water stress

Integrative collaborative design of research-based, climate-change resilience engineering education: Insights from México-Lerma-Cutzamala hydrological region

The goal of this chapter is to constructively challenge conventional engineering education models, arguing for a transformative approach that centers on the cocreation of knowledge and capacity with diverse stakeholders: a social–technical enterprise(STE). In 1.0, we build on the education-research synergy work of Boyer [1, 2] and knowledge coproduction literature, summarized by [3], and our own foundational work in Mexico [4]. In 2.0, we lay out the practical integrative domains that STE work pays attention to and recognizes the typical operational stages of a development project that will be influenced by the approach. Section 7.3 begins with the goals of the case study and then describes the context and the project