Developing teachers as researchers: A teacher preparation endeavor

Instructional process is aimed at accomplishing the desired learning outcomes. But some times teachers may fail to achieve the instructional objectives. In such instances teachers attempt to find out reasons that come in way of achieving the instructional goals. The reasons may pertain to student behavior, curriculum or teacher behavior. In order to improve their classroom practices for initiating desired learning outcomes, teachers often encountered with such question as why expected outcomes are not achieved, what are the impediments that caused non accomplishment of learning outcomes, how to improve instruction for better learning and so on. One of the major reasons for such situation may be due to gap between what teacher planned to do and what has been done in the actual classroom instruction. Teachers are expected to identify these gaps between their thought and action. Consequently, they should attempt to mitigate this gap to improve quality of instruction. In order to undertake this task, teachers need to play the role of a researcher. Teacher preparation programs should equip teachers with necessary skills of conducting classroom research. This helps teachers in improving their classroom practices. Teacher educators working in District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET) have to play an important role in equipping the teachers with the skills of conducting classroom research. Hence there is a need to improve the capabilities of DIET faculty to train primary teachers in conducting classroom research

Adaptive Demodulation in Differentially Coherent Phase Systems: Design and Performance Analysis

Adaptive Demodulation (ADM) is a newly proposed rate-adaptive system which operates without requiring Channel State Information (CSI) at the transmitter (unlike adaptive modulation) by using adaptive decision region boundaries at the receiver and encoding the data with a rateless code. This paper addresses the design and performance of an ADM scheme for two common differentially coherent schemes: M-DPSK (M-ary Differential Phase Shift Keying) and M-DAPSK (M-ary Differential Amplitude and Phase Shift Keying) operating over AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. The optimal method for determining the most reliable bits for a given differential detection scheme is presented. In addition, simple (near-optimal) implementations are provided for recovering the most reliable bits from a received pair of differentially encoded symbols for systems using 16-DPSK and 16- DAPSK. The new receivers offer the advantages of a rate-adaptive system, without requiring CSI at the transmitter and a coherent phase reference at the receiver. Bit error analysis for the ADM system in both cases is presented along with numerical results of the spectral efficiency for the rate-adaptive systems operating over a Rayleigh fading channel.Comment: 25 pages, 11 Figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, June 1, 201

On the Energy Efficiency of LT Codes in Proactive Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents an in-depth analysis on the energy efficiency of Luby Transform (LT) codes with Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) modulation in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) over Rayleigh fading channels with pathloss. We describe a proactive system model according to a flexible duty-cycling mechanism utilized in practical sensor apparatus. The present analysis is based on realistic parameters including the effect of channel bandwidth used in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, active mode duration and computation energy. A comprehensive analysis, supported by some simulation studies on the probability mass function of the LT code rate and coding gain, shows that among uncoded FSK and various classical channel coding schemes, the optimized LT coded FSK is the most energy-efficient scheme for distance d greater than the pre-determined threshold level d_T , where the optimization is performed over coding and modulation parameters. In addition, although the optimized uncoded FSK outperforms coded schemes for d < d_T , the energy gap between LT coded and uncoded FSK is negligible for d < d_T compared to the other coded schemes. These results come from the flexibility of the LT code to adjust its rate to suit instantaneous channel conditions, and suggest that LT codes are beneficial in practical low-power WSNs with dynamic position sensor nodes.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Some properties of Eulerian lattices

summary:In this paper, we prove that Eulerian lattices satisfying some weaker conditions for lattices or some weaker conditions for 0-distributive lattices become Boolean

A Study on Emotional Maturity of College Students

The Emotional maturity becomes important in the behaviour of individuals. As the students are the pillars of the future generations their Emotional maturity is vital one. So the present study intends to measure the Emotional Maturity of college students. Normative survey method and random sampling technique has been used in the present study. The “Emotional Maturity Scale†standardized by K.M.Roma Pal [5] was used for this study. The result of the study shows that the emotional maturity of college students is extremely unstable

Maternal and perinatal outcomes in women with first trimester vaginal bleeding

Background: First trimester bleeding is one of the common complications during pregnancy which affects almost 16-25% of all pregnancies. To evaluate and ascertain the adverse maternal and perinatal outcomes in pregnant women presenting with first trimester vaginal bleeding.Methods: Prospective case-control study. A case control study involving 60 pregnant women with vaginal bleeding in the first 13 weeks + 6 days of gestational age with 60 matched controls. The study period was from March 2015 to March 2016 and conducted at PSG Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.Results: The complications seen in the study group were: first trimester abortion (16.7%), second trimester abortion (6.7%), preterm labour (25%), abruption (6.7%), neonatal intensive care admission (25%), ectopic (6.7%), IUGR (10%), IUD (1.7%) and PROM (8.3%). When compared with the parity matched controls there was statistically significant increase in first and second trimester abortions, preterm labour, abruption, NICU admission and ectopic pregnancy whereas there was no significant difference between the two groups with regard to intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) and intrauterine death (IUD).Conclusions: Women with first trimester vaginal bleeding had several adverse outcomes in both the mother and the fetus, and it is very important to explain about the possibility of these outcomes and ensure proper follow up with close antenatal surveillance

An Evaluation of Pareto, Lognormal and PPS Distributions: The Size Distribution of Cities in Kerala, India

The Pareto-Positive Stable (PPS) distribution is introduced as a new model for describing city size data of a region in a country. The PPS distribution provides a flexible model for fitting the entire range of a set of city size data and the classical Pareto and Zipf distributions are included as a particular case

Land fragmentation and its implications for productivity: evidence from Southern India

In developing economies land reform, in particular land redistribution has occupied a central role in debates about poverty — particularly chronic poverty — alleviation in rural areas. Even if it were accepted that land redistribution could alleviate poverty the enthusiasm for such redistribution needs to be tempered with consideration of the potential efficiency effects of land fragmentation. The fragmentation of land holdings could rise with land fragmentation. In turn, land fragmentation could lead to sub-optimal usage of factor inputs and thus to lower overall returns to land. The factors contributing to this could be losses due to extra travel time, wasted space along borders, inadequate monitoring, and the inability to use certain types of machinery such as harvesters. Fragmentation of land is widespread in India and it is believed that fragmented nature of land holdings may play a major role in explaining low levels of agricultural productivity. Despite substantial rise in yields India ranks 34th in yields for sugarcane, 57th for cotton, 118th for pulses, and, 51st for rice although India is a leading producer of each of these crops in aggregate terms. Further, there is evidence of inefficient use of resources in agriculture and the resulting increases in costs, e.g., 25 times more water/tonne of output is being used to irrigate Cotton in India than in Egypt. In response to the perceived adverse effects of land fragmentation the then Finance Minister allocated Rs. 5 million over a period of five years, as an incentive for land consolidation, in his 2000 budget speech. However, the Planning Commission of India has indicated a near complete failure on this front. To date, however, there has been no systematic attempt at quantifying the effects of land fragmentation and understanding the channels through which these effects operate. The present paper attempts to fill this void. In this paper, we undertake a detailed assessment of the consequences of land fragmentation using a unique panel data set from Southern India, with comprehensive information on all landholding households in two contiguous villages over a five-year period. In particular, we examine whether technical efficiency of farm production is significantly related to farm size, whether yield is importantly impacted by the degree of fragmentation as measured by the number of plots, average plot size, and an index of fragmentation,2 and whether such fragmentation impacts upon labor allocations. We then use stochastic production function methods to measure the degree of technical efficiency and relate this to the degree of land fragmentation. Our results show clearly that land fragmentation has a significant adverse effect on land productivity. The plan of this paper is a follows. In section II we review the literature on this issue whereas section III discusses the data asset. Section IV details the methodology and estimation procedure, section V presents the results and section VI concludes