Geographies that Make Resistance”: Remapping the Politics of Gender and Place in Uttarakhand, India

By examining women’s active participation in a range of social movements over many decades in Uttarakhand Himalayas, the paper first explores what is it about this place that has produced such vibrant interventions from rural women and produced a gendered geography of resistance. It then focuses on the regional autonomy movement that shook the region in the nineties. Taking women’s participation seriously, the paper argues that the demand for a separate state and assertion of a regional identity even though was enmeshed in the messy electoral and reservation politics of caste, women’s large-scale participation and shifting support suggests that women protestors were critical in connecting the dots of their marginalization and helped broaden the scope of the movement by incorporating wide range of issues fueled not by any traditional values but by aspirations and political claims to modernity and regional identity. In moving away from stagnant and narrow reading of women’s participation in social movements, the paper argues that it is important to recognize women’s actions, like all actions, are not pre-constituted or fixed but they are contingent upon and guided by a range of impulses, sometimes contradictory and conservative, but nonetheless historically and spatially constituted

Growth and characterization of zinc oxide nanostructures by local heating method

In the present work 1D Zinc Oxide nanostructures were synthesized sucesfuly by local heating method at various concentration and temperature. Crystaline nature of ZnO nanostructures was confirmed by the apearance of high intensity peak at (0 0 2) in X-ray difraction analysis of diferent samples. FESEM analysis confirmed the formation of long 1D ZnO nanostructures of about 4.5µm in length.The efective synthesis of ZnO nanostructures from the oxidation of Zn was also confirmed by FTIR analyses.The UV detection characteristics of the ZnO/Si nanostructures were studied by measuring curent- voltage I-V relationships with and without UV-B light (310-370) nm. UV detection was studied and shows the time evolution of curent of the nanorods under UV ilumination for surface with modification by coating Poly Styrene Sulfonate (PS)

Effects of Climate Change on Soil Embankments

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported that the climate change process will continue over the next century. The changes in climate variables can make the currently stable embankments unstable. It is therefore imperative that we understand how climate change will affect embankments. This research focuses on understanding and quantifying the effects of climate change on the stability of soil embankments in Ontario, Canada. The stability of embankments was analyzed for the current and future climates using numerical modeling technique. The effects of future climate were then quantified by comparing the future stability of embankments with its historical stability. The results of this research show that the effects of climate change also depend on the hydraulic properties of the fill materials. Embankments with sand fill withstand the adverse effects of climate change, and showed better performance over the embankments with silt fill

Exploring corporate social responsibilty initiatives in Western Cape: the case of Sanlam Foundation

A research report presented to The Department of Social Work School of Human and Community Development Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand In partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Social Development March, 2016Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is now moving beyond being peripheral to business to becoming an integral part of it. Although there is a sizeable amount of literature on CSR, there is still no standard and agreed definition of CSR. The way CSR must be implemented and evaluated also remains a topic of debate. This gap is problematic as increasingly governments are involving corporations to address the inequalities that exist in society. At the same time several studies suggest that organizations struggle to have robust and effective CSR practices within their organizations. In South Africa, several legislations have been put in place to indirectly involve the private sector to address the inequalities arising out of the Apartheid and the BBBEE Act of 2003 has been instrumental in shaping the developmental path of post-apartheid South Africa, thus making implementation and reporting of CSI initiatives more important than ever before. The study sought to explore the nature of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of the Sanlam Foundation in the Western Cape, South Africa. The study adopted a qualitative case study design and the study population consisted of officials drawn from Sanlam Foundation and its implementing organizations. Participants were drawn from Sanlam Foundation’s implementing partners and key informants who are senior officials of the Sanlam Foundation also participated in the study. A sample of eight participants and two key informants and were drawn using purposive sampling. Semi structured interview schedules were used to collect data using face to face interviews with both participants and key informants. The findings revealed that monitoring, evaluation and reporting of CSR initiatives remain the biggest challenge in implementing of CSR initiatives. The findings also establish that there remains a gap in the NGOs’ and funder’s understanding of the reporting content. Measuring and expressing qualitative impact is a challenge for NGOs. The report recommends that both funders and partners must understand the implications of monitoring and evaluation of programmes. It also emphasizes the need to have simplified discussions with partners at inception to understand their views and develop project specific reporting templates that justify project specific impact. It is anticipated that the research findings will enable Sanlam Foundation and other companies to strengthen their CSR activities

Object Counting with Deep Learning

This thesis explores various empirical aspects of deep learning or convolutional network based models for efficient object counting. First, we train moderately large convolutional networks on comparatively smaller datasets containing few hundred samples from scratch with conventional image processing based data augmentation. Then, we extend this approach for unconstrained, outdoor images using more advanced architectural concepts. Additionally, we propose an efficient, randomized data augmentation strategy based on sub-regional pixel distribution for low-resolution images. Next, the effectiveness of depth-to-space shuffling of feature elements for efficient segmentation is investigated for simpler problems like binary segmentation -- often required in the counting framework. This depth-to-space operation violates the basic assumption of encoder-decoder type of segmentation architectures. Consequently, it helps to train the encoder model as a sparsely connected graph. Nonetheless, we have found comparable accuracy to that of the standard encoder-decoder architectures with our depth-to-space models. After that, the subtleties regarding the lack of localization information in the conventional scalar count loss for one-look models are illustrated. At this point, without using additional annotations, a possible solution is proposed based on the regulation of a network-generated heatmap in the form of a weak, subsidiary loss. The models trained with this auxiliary loss alongside the conventional loss perform much better compared to their baseline counterparts, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Lastly, the intricacies of tiled prediction for high-resolution images are studied in detail, and a simple and effective trick of eliminating the normalization factor in an existing computational block is demonstrated. All of the approaches employed here are thoroughly benchmarked across multiple heterogeneous datasets for object counting against previous, state-of-the-art approaches