India and the agreement on agriculture : civil society and citizens' engagement

This paper explores civil society advocacy on the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and how it influences the trade policy process and facilitates citizen engagement in the Indian context. It uses the concepts of actornetworks, discourse and spaces and strategies, to analyse the role five civil society organisation’s (CSO) actor-networks play in advocacy on agriculture and trade policy. The empirical cases suggest that CSO advocacy in India has an indirect impact on the state’s trade policy process. The cases also indicate that informed citizen engagement on global trade policies is challenging given the process of global trade policymaking and the nature of long-term grassroots mobilisation. Issues of representation and mediation, global-local discourses on economic policies, long-term versus short-term advocacy concerns and capacity constraints shape the extent to which direct citizen engagement can occur on the AoA. The paper concludes with some challenges that CSOs must confront in order to address long-term citizen action on agriculture and trade issues in India. Keywords: trade, agriculture, policy, civil society, advocacy, India, participatio

Safety and Security Analysis of AEB for L4 Autonomous Vehicle Using STPA

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are coming to our streets. Due to the presence of highly complex software systems in AVs, there is a need for a new hazard analysis technique to meet stringent safety standards. System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), based on Systems Theoretic Accident Modeling and Processes (STAMP), is a powerful tool that can identify, define, analyze and mitigate hazards from the earliest conceptual stage deployment to the operation of a system. Applying STPA to autonomous vehicles demonstrates STPA\u27s applicability to preliminary hazard analysis, alternative available, developmental tests, organizational design, and functional design of each unique safety operation. This paper describes the STPA process used to generate system design requirements for an Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) system using a top-down analysis approach to system safety. The paper makes the following contributions to practicing STPA for safety and security: 1) It describes the incorporation of safety and security analysis in one process and discusses the benefits of this; 2) It provides an improved, structural approach for scenario analysis, concentrating on safety and security; 3) It demonstrates the utility of STPA for gap analysis of existing designs in the automotive domain; 4) It provides lessons learned throughout the process of applying STPA and STPA-Sec

China's Pork Miracle?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Agriculture has helped fuel the “China miracle.” Since 1978, agricultural and food output has soared, Chinese agribusiness firms have become key players in domestic and international markets, and by all accounts, China has been highly successful in overcoming land and resource constraints to feed its population of 1.3 billion people. The country is celebrated for its successes in reducing poverty and hunger over the last 30 years, and more recently, for creating an agrifood system that makes eating “high on the hog” a possibility and reality for many Chinese people. Pork is at the heart of this miracle. A hallmark of the post-1978 agricultural development model is ramping up the production, sale, and consumption of meat. Processed and packaged meats are the fastest growing market segments, reflecting the increasing influence and operation of pork processors, and the more general trend towards processed foods that can be shipped, stored, and sold with a longer shelf-life in super- and hyper-markets. These trends are also reflected in the Shuanghui (now called the WH Group to take on a more international identity) buyout of Smithfield Foods, a move that will increase China’s pork supplies, strengthen Shuanghui’s brand within China as “safer” meat with higher consumer status because of its US origin, and further generate and shape consumer demand for industrial pork. The Shuanghui-Smithfield deal is a matter of political and economic interest, but also signals a much more basic insight: pork, and the systems and actors that produce it, are central in China’s agrifood system with increasingly global inter-linkages and implications. etc. ..

Bicriteria in n x 2 Flow Shop Scheduling Problem under Specified Rental Policy, Processing Time, Setup Time Each Associated with Probabilities Including Job Block Criteria and Weightage of Jobs

This paper is an attempt to obtain an optimal solution for minimizing the bicriteria taken as minimization of the total rental cost of the machines subject to obtain the minimum makespan for n-jobs, 2-machine flow shop scheduling problem in which the processing times and independent set up times are associated with probabilities including job block criteria. Further jobs are attached with weights to indicate their relative importance. The proposed method is very simple and easy to understand and also provide an important tool for the decision makers. A computer programme followed by a numerical illustration is given to justify the algorithm. Keywords: Flowshop Scheduling, Heuristic, Processing Time, Setup Time, Job Block, Weighs of job

CONSIDERING SAFETY AND SECURITY IN AV FUNCTIONS

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are coming to our streets. Due to the presence of highly complex software systems in AVs, a new hazard analysis technique is needed to meet stringent safety standards. Also, safety and security are inter-dependent and inter-related aspects of AV. They are focused on shielding the vehicles from deliberate attacks (security issue) as well as accidental failures (safety concern), that might lead to loss of lives and injuries to the occupants. So, the current research work has two key components: functional safety and cybersecurity of the autonomous systems. For the safety analysis, we have applied System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), which is built on Systems Theoretic Accident Modeling and Processes (STAMP). STAMP is a powerful tool that can identify, define, analyze, and mitigate hazards from the earliest conceptual stage of development to the operation of a system. Applying STPA to autonomous vehicles demonstrates STPA's applicability to preliminary hazard analysis, alternative available, developmental tests, organizational design, and functional design of each unique safety operation. This thesis describes the STPA process used to generate system design requirements for an Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) system using a top-down analysis approach for the system safety. The research makes the following contributions to practicing STPA for safety and security: 1. It describes the incorporation of safety and security analysis in one process and discusses the benefits of this; 2. It provides an improved, structural approach for scenario analysis, concentrating on safety and security; 3. It demonstrates the utility of STPA for gap analysis of existing designs in the automotive domain; 4. It provides lessons learned throughout the process of applying STPA and STPA-Sec. Controlling a physical process is associated with dependability requirements in a cyber-physical system (CPS). Cyberattacks can lead to the dependability requirements not being in the acceptable range. Thus, monitoring of the cyber-physical system becomes inevitable for the detection of the deviations in the system from normal operation. One of the main issues is understanding the rationale behind these variations in a reliable manner. Understanding the reason for the variation is crucial in the execution of accurate and time-based control resolution, for mitigating the cyberattacks as well as other reasons of reduced dependability. Currently, we are using evidential networks to solve the reliability issue. In the present work, we are presenting a cyber-physical system analysis where the evidential networks are used for the detection of attacks. The results obtained from the STPA analysis, which provides the technical safety requirements, can be combined with the EN analysis, which can be used efficiently to detect the quality of the used sensor to justify whether the CPS is suitable for the safe and secure design

Bicriteria in n x 2 Flow Shop Scheduling Under Specified Rental Policy, Processing Time and Setup Time Each Associated with probabilities Including Job Block

This paper is an attempt to obtains an optimal solution for minimizing the bicriteria taken as minimizing thetotal rental cost of the machines subject to obtain the minimum makespan for n jobs 2 machines flowshopproblem in which the processing times and independent set up times are associated with probabilitiesincluding the job block concept. A heuristic approach method to find optimal or near optimal sequence hasbeen discussed. The proposed method is very simple and easy to understand and also provide an importanttool for the decision makers. A computer programme followed by a numerical illustration is give to clarifythe algorithm.Keywords: Flowshop Scheduling, Heuristic, Processing Time, Set Up Time, Rental Cost and Job Block

Cryptanalytic Attacks on IDEA Block Cipher

International data encryption algorithm (IDEA) is a secret key or symmetric key block cipher. The purpose of IDEA was to replace data encryption standard (DES) cipher, which became practically insecure due to its small key size of 56 bits and increase in computational power of systems. IDEA cipher mainly to provide data confidentiality in variety of applications such as commercial and financial application e.g. pretty good privacy (PGP) protocol. Till 2015, no successful linear or algebraic weaknesses IDEA of have been reported. In this paper, author explained IDEA cipher, its application in PGP and did a systematic survey of various attacks attempted on IDEA cipher. The best cryptanalysis result which applied to all keys could break IDEA up to 6 rounds out of 8.5 rounds of the full IDEA cipher1. But the attack requires 264 known plaintexts and 2126.8 operations for reduced round version. This attack is practically not feasible due to above mention mammoth data and time requirements. So IDEA cipher is still completely secure for practical usage. PGP v2.0 uses IDEA cipher in place of BassOmatic which was found to be insecure for providing data confidentiality

VARIED PRESENTATION OF PLASMACYTOSIS SEEN IN BONE MARROW AT A TERTIARY CARE SET-UP

Bone marrow plasmacytosis can have many causes ranging from non neoplastic to neoplastic conditions. The clinical presentations and the percentage of plasma cells may vary from one disease to the other. In the given case series, we have compiled the similar cases received at our tertiary care center and found interesting clinical presentations. Through this case series, we emphasise upon the utility of bone marrow aspiration in patients of Pyrexia of unknown origin to refractory anemias and/or lymphadenopathy

Prevalence of Smartphone Addiction and its Relation with Depression among School-going Adolescents

Background: Smartphone addiction among adolescents is an increasingly recognized problem worldwide. It affects the psychological well-being of an individual. Aim and objective: The current study aimed to assess smartphone addiction’s prevalence and its relation to depression among adolescents. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 400 school-going adolescents. Smartphone Addiction Scale - Short version (SAS-SV) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) were used to assess the prevalence of smartphone addiction and depression. Data were analyzed using Epi info software for windows (CDC, Atlanta). Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05. Results: The mean age of study participants was 14.4 years (SD=1.5 years). The prevalence of smartphone addiction was 23%, while depression was present among 45% of the study participants. Comparatively higher duration of smartphone use was significantly associated with smartphone addiction. Depression was significantly higher among smartphone addicts (77.2%) as compared to their counterparts (35.4%). Conclusion and Recommendation: The smartphone usage of adolescents, if not monitored, could lead to its addiction and thus increase the risk of depression among them. To prevent smartphone addiction, limiting children’s screen time is recommended. In this regard, parents can play a pivotal role by becoming responsible digital role models for their children

Matching Disparate Image Pairs Using Shape-Aware ConvNets

An end-to-end trainable ConvNet architecture, that learns to harness the power of shape representation for matching disparate image pairs, is proposed. Disparate image pairs are deemed those that exhibit strong affine variations in scale, viewpoint and projection parameters accompanied by the presence of partial or complete occlusion of objects and extreme variations in ambient illumination. Under these challenging conditions, neither local nor global feature-based image matching methods, when used in isolation, have been observed to be effective. The proposed correspondence determination scheme for matching disparate images exploits high-level shape cues that are derived from low-level local feature descriptors, thus combining the best of both worlds. A graph-based representation for the disparate image pair is generated by constructing an affinity matrix that embeds the distances between feature points in two images, thus modeling the correspondence determination problem as one of graph matching. The eigenspectrum of the affinity matrix, i.e., the learned global shape representation, is then used to further regress the transformation or homography that defines the correspondence between the source image and target image. The proposed scheme is shown to yield state-of-the-art results for both, coarse-level shape matching as well as fine point-wise correspondence determination.Comment: First two authors contributed equally, to Appear in the IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 201