Training and Employment of People with Disabilities: India 2002

[Excerpt] Training and Employment of People with Disabilities: India 2002 is descriptive in nature. When the ILO commissioned the researchers for the Country Study Series, each was asked to follow the comprehensive research protocol appended to this document. The resulting report therefore includes country background information, statistics about people with disabilities and their organizations, a description of relevant legislation and policies and their official implementing structures, as well as the education, training and employment options available to people with disabilities. While few countries have such information readily available, researchers were asked to note the existence or lack of specific data points and to report data when it did exist. Since the lack of information about people with disabilities contributes to their invisibility and social exclusion, the information itself is important. The protocol called for limited analysis and did not specifically ask for the researchers recommendations, however, researchers were asked to report on existing plans and recommendations of significant national stakeholders

Threshold-activated transport stabilizes chaotic populations to steady states

We explore Random Scale-Free networks of populations, modelled by chaotic Ricker maps, connected by transport that is triggered when population density in a patch is in excess of a critical threshold level. Our central result is that threshold-activated dispersal leads to stable fixed populations, for a wide range of threshold levels. Further, suppression of chaos is facilitated when the threshold-activated migration is more rapid than the intrinsic population dynamics of a patch. Additionally, networks with large number of nodes open to the environment, readily yield stable steady states. Lastly we demonstrate that in networks with very few open nodes, the degree and betweeness centrality of the node open to the environment has a pronounced influence on control. All qualitative trends are corroborated by quantitative measures, reflecting the efficiency of control, and the width of the steady state window

On two-distillable Werner states

We consider bipartite mixed states in a $d\otimes d$ quantum system. We say that $\rho$ is PPT if its partial transpose $1 \otimes T (\rho)$ is positive semidefinite, and otherwise $\rho$ is NPT. The well-known Werner states are divided into three types: (a) the separable states (the same as the PPT states); (b) the one-distillable states (necessarily NPT); and (c) the NPT states which are not one-distillable. We give several different formulations and provide further evidence for validity of the conjecture that the Werner states of type (c) are not two-distillable.Comment: 19 pages, expanded version containing new result

Detecion of Opinion Spam in Online Reviews

The rise of Internet has led to consumers constantly and increasingly review and research products and services online. Consequently, websites that garner such reviews become primary targets for opinion Spam, which essentially means to sway public opinion by posting deceptive reviews. In this work, we have worked on integrating linguistic features and N-gram modeling to develop a feature set that can be used to detect authentic sounding yet fake reviews. A data set of 1600 reviews from 20 dierent hotels is used for experimentation and results. From the findings, we also try to gure out what can possibly be the factors that help to detect the spammers, and, additionally, make suggestions that can be incorporated by websites to control Spam based on user informatio

Utilizing Copper(I) Catalyzed Azide-Alkyne Huisgen 1,3-Dipolar Cycloaddition for the Surface Modification of Colloidal Particles with Electroactive and Emissive Moieties

The development of charge–transporting and fluorescing colloidal particles that can be directly printed into electroluminescent devices may result in a broad impact on the use of electrical energy for illumination. The objective of this work was to design and synthesize electroactive & fluorescing colloidal particles; establish their optical, electronic, and thermodynamic properties; and transition them into a device format for potential applications. The original intended application of this work was to build “better” colloidally–based organic light emitting devices (OLEDs) by creating functional particles with superior electrical and optical performance relative to commercially available technologies, but through the course of the research, the particles that were developed were found to be better suited for medical applications. Nonetheless, the global objective envisioned at the onset of this research was consistent with its final outcomes. The research tasks pursued to accomplish this global objective included: (1) The design and synthesis of electroactive moieties and their conversion into organic light emitting devices; An electron–transporting monomer was synthesized that was structurally & energetically similar to the small molecule 2–biphenyl–4–yl–5–(4–tert–butylphenyl)–1,3,4–oxadiazole (tBu–PBD). The monomer was copolymerized with 2–(9H–carbazol–9–yl)ethyl 2–methylacrylate (CE) and the resulting copolymer was utilized in OLEDs which employed fluorescent coumarin 6 (C6) or phosphorescent tris(2–phenylpyridine)iridium(III) [Ir(ppy)3] emitters. The copolymer devices exhibited a mean luminance of ca. 400 and 3,552 cd/m2 with the C6 and Ir(ppy)3 emitters, that were stable with thermal aging at temperatures ranging from 23 °C to 130 °C. Comparable poly(9–vinyl–9H–carbazole)/tBu–PBD blend devices exhibited more pronounced variations in performance with thermal aging. (2) The surface–modication of colloids with electroactive & fluorescing moieties via “click” chemistry; Aqueous–phase 83 nm poly(propargyl acrylate) (PA) nanoparticles were surface–functionalized with sparingly water soluble fluorescent moieties through a copper(I)–catalyzed azide–alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) (i.e., “click” transformation) to produce fluoroprobes with a large Stokes shift. For moieties which could not achieve extensive surface coverage on the particles utilizing a standard click transformation procedure, the presence of β–cyclodextrin (β–CD) during the transformation enhanced the grafting density onto the particles. For an oxadiazole containing molecule (AO), an azide–modified coumarin 6 (AD1) and a polyethylene glycol modied naphthalimide–based emitter (AD2), respectively, an 84%, 17% and 5% increase in the grafting densities were observed, when the transformation was performed in the presence of β–CD. In contrast, a carbazolyl–containing moiety (AC) exhibited a slight retardation in the final grafting density when β–CD was employed. Photoluminescence studies indicated that AC & AO when attached to the particles form an exciplex. An efficient energy transfer from the exciplex to the surface attached AD2 resulted in a total Stokes shift of 180 nm for the modified particles. (3) The synthesis and characterization of near–infrared (NIR) emitting particles for potential applications in cancer therapy. PA particles were surface modified through the “click” transformation of an azide–terminated indocyanine green (azICG), an NIR emitter, and poly(ethylene glycol) (azPEG) chains of various molecular weights. The placement of azICG onto the surface of the particles allowed for the chromophores to complex with bovine serum albumin (BSA) when dispersed in PBS that resulted in an enhancement of the dye emission. In addition, the inclusion of azPEG with the chromophores onto the particle surface resulted in a synergistic nine–fold enhancement of the fluorescence intensity, with azPEGs of increasing molecular weight amplifying the response. Preliminary photodynamic therapy (PDT) studies with human liver carcinoma cells (HepG2) combined with the modified particles indicated that a minor exposure of 780 nm radiation resulted in a statistically signicant reduction in cell growth

Perceptually Driven Interactive Sound Propagation for Virtual Environments

Sound simulation and rendering can significantly augment a user‘s sense of presence in virtual environments. Many techniques for sound propagation have been proposed that predict the behavior of sound as it interacts with the environment and is received by the user. At a broad level, the propagation algorithms can be classified into reverberation filters, geometric methods, and wave-based methods. In practice, heuristic methods based on reverberation filters are simple to implement and have a low computational overhead, while wave-based algorithms are limited to static scenes and involve extensive precomputation. However, relatively little work has been done on the psychoacoustic characterization of different propagation algorithms, and evaluating the relationship between scientific accuracy and perceptual benefits.In this dissertation, we present perceptual evaluations of sound propagation methods and their ability to model complex acoustic effects for virtual environments. Our results indicate that scientifically accurate methods for reverberation and diffraction do result in increased perceptual differentiation. Based on these evaluations, we present two novel hybrid sound propagation methods that combine the accuracy of wave-based methods with the speed of geometric methods for interactive sound propagation in dynamic scenes.Our first algorithm couples modal sound synthesis with geometric sound propagation using wave-based sound radiation to perform mode-aware sound propagation. We introduce diffraction kernels of rigid objects,which encapsulate the sound diffraction behaviors of individual objects in the free space and are then used to simulate plausible diffraction effects using an interactive path tracing algorithm. Finally, we present a novel perceptual driven metric that can be used to accelerate the computation of late reverberation to enable plausible simulation of reverberation with a low runtime overhead. We highlight the benefits of our novel propagation algorithms in different scenarios.Doctor of Philosoph