EACOF: A Framework for Providing Energy Transparency to enable Energy-Aware Software Development

Making energy consumption data accessible to software developers is an essential step towards energy efficient software engineering. The presence of various different, bespoke and incompatible, methods of instrumentation to obtain energy readings is currently limiting the widespread use of energy data in software development. This paper presents EACOF, a modular Energy-Aware Computing Framework that provides a layer of abstraction between sources of energy data and the applications that exploit them. EACOF replaces platform specific instrumentation through two APIs - one accepts input to the framework while the other provides access to application software. This allows developers to profile their code for energy consumption in an easy and portable manner using simple API calls. We outline the design of our framework and provide details of the API functionality. In a use case, where we investigate the impact of data bit width on the energy consumption of various sorting algorithms, we demonstrate that the data obtained using EACOF provides interesting, sometimes counter-intuitive, insights. All the code is available online under an open source license. http://github.com/eaco

Impact of Rural-urban Labour Migration on Education of Children: A Case Study of Left behind and Accompanied Migrant Children in India

In developing countries, seasonal labour migration from rural to urban or from backward to developed region is a household livelihood strategy to cope with poverty. In this process, the children of those migrants are the worst affected whether they accompany their parents or are left behind in the villages. The present paper explores the impact of temporary labour migration of parent(s) on school attendance of the children between 6–14 years and their dropping out from the school through an analysis of the cases from both the ends of migration stream in India. Data was collected from thirteen construction sites of Varanasi Uttar Pradesh and nine villages of Bihar by applying both qualitative and quantitative techniques. It is evident from the study that the migrants through remittances improve school accessibility for the left behind children and bridge gender gap in primary school education. However, among the accompanying migrant children of construction workers, many remain out of school and many are forced to drop out and some of them become vulnerable to work as child labour due to seasonal mobility of their parents. Thus, mainstreaming these children in development process is a big challenge in attaining the goal of universal primary education and inclusive growth in the country like India

Soliton response to transient trap variations

The response of bright and dark solitons to rapid variations in an expulsive longitudinal trap is investigated. We concentrate on the effect of transient changes in the trap frequency in the form of temporal delta kicks and the hyperbolic cotangent functions. Exact expressions are obtained for the soliton profiles. This is accomplished using the fact that a suitable linear Schrodinger stationary state solution in time can be effectively combined with the solutions of non-linear Schrodinger equation, for obtaining solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation with time dependent scattering length in a harmonic trap. Interestingly, there is rapid pulse amplification in certain scenarios

Strengthening of heat damaged reinforced concrete cylinders

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of various strengthening techniques in restoring heat damaged reinforced concrete. A series of 40 reinforced concrete cylinders were tested under concentric compression after being jacketed externally with high strength fiber reinforced concrete (HSFRC), Ferrocement (FC) and Glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) jackets. Concrete specimens were exposed to elevated temperatures ranging from room temperature to 900 ºC. The overall response of strengthened specimens was investigated vis-à-vis un-strengthened specimens in terms of axial compression, axial displacement and axial stress strain behaviour. The results indicate that important gains in strength and ductility can be achieved by strengthening heat – damaged R.C cylinders by HSFRC, FC and GFRP external Jacketing. GFRP jacketing was found to be the most effective method of strengthening fire or heat damaged concrete structures

One-loop contribution to the neutrino mass matrix in NMSSM with right-handed neutrinos and tri-bimaximal mixing

Neutrino mass patterns and mixing have been studied in the context of next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model (NMSSM) with three gauge singlet neutrino superfields. We consider the case with the assumption of R-parity conservation. The vacuum expectation value of the singlet scalar field $S$ of NMSSM induces the Majorana masses for the right-handed neutrinos as well as the usual $\mu$-term. The contributions to the light neutrino mass matrix at the tree level as well as one-loop level are considered, consistent with the tri-bimaximal pattern of neutrino mixing. Light neutrino masses arise at the tree level through a TeV scale seesaw mechanism involving the right-handed neutrinos. Although all the three light neutrinos acquire non-zero masses at the tree-level, we show that the one-loop contributions can be comparable in size under certain conditions.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Antifertility effect of curcumin, an indigenous medicine in rats

Background: Curcumin is an active constituent, obtained from rhizome of Curcuma longa linn, known to have broad medicinal properties, was studied for its effect on fertility in female rats. Curcumin has anti-ovulatory effect probably by its antiestrogenic activity through suppression of negative feedback of estrogen on pituitary.Methods: Inbred Charles Foster female albino rats (150-180 gm) were used for study. They were divided into different groups and treated with curcumin (25 mg/kg. and 50 mg/kg body weight) as per schedule. The antigonadotropic, antiestrogenic, anti-implantation and abortifacient effect on curcumin treated albino rats were demonstrated.Results: The results showed significant reduction in the number of implants and size of litters in curcumin treated rats compared to normal control group. The results were compared with Tamoxifen (10mg/ kg bodyweight) a known antifertility drug, which further substantiated the antifertility effects of curcumin.Conclusions: The results indicated the ways in which curcumin exerts antifertility effects and thus can play a vital role in fertility control

Domain closure and action of uracil DNA glycosylase (UDG): structures of new crystal forms containing the Escherichia coli enzyme and a comparative study of the known structures involving UDG

The structures of a new crystal form of free Escherichia coli uracil DNA glycosylase (UDG), containing four molecules in the asymmetric unit, and two forms of its complex with the proteinaceous inhibitor Ugi, containing two and four crystallographically independent complexes, have been determined. A comparison of these structures and the already known crystal structures containing UDG shows that the enzyme can be considered to be made up of two independently moving structural entities or domains. A detailed study of free and DNA-bound human enzyme strengthens this conclusion. The domains close upon binding to uracil-containing DNA, whereas they do not appear to do so upon binding to Ugi. The comparative study also shows that the mobility of the molecule involves the rigid-body movement of the domains superposed on flexibility within domains

eXtended Color Cell Compression -- A Runtime-efficient Compression Scheme for Software Video

Multimedia applications require a compression and decompression scheme for digital video. The standardized and widely used techniques JPEG and MPEG provide very good compression ratios, but are computationally quite complex and demanding. We propose to use an extension to the much simpler Color Cell Compression scheme as an alternative. Our extension includes the use of variable block sizes, the reuse of color index values from previously encoded blocks, and Huffman encoding of the stream of blocks. We present experimental results showing that our scheme provides much better runtime performance than MPEG, at the cost of a slightly inferior compression ratio. It is thus especially suited for software videos in high-speed networks

Omega meson as a chronometer and thermometer in hot-dense hadronic matter

Changes in the properties of the vector mesons in hot and dense hadronic matter, as produced in heavy ion collisions, lead to the intriguing possibility of the opening of the decay channel \omega \ra \rho \pi, for the omega meson, which is impossible in free space. This along with the channel \omega \pi \ra \pi \pi would result in a decrease in its effective life-time enabling it to decay within the hot zone and act as a chronometer in contradiction to the commonly held opinion and would have implications vis a vis determination of the size of the region through pion interferometry. A new peak and a radically altered shape of the low invariant mass dilepton spectra appears due to different shift in the masses of $\rho$ and $\omega$ mesons. The Walecka model is used for the underlying calculation for the sake of illustration.Comment: To appear in Phys. ReV.