Industrial growth in Kerala : trends and explanations

The study traces the trends in industrial growth against the backdrop of the overall economic growth in Kerala under the influence of the ongoing economic reforms and evaluates it against the performance of Karnataka, Tamilnadu and all-India. The analysis reveals that a phase of growth revival has set in the overall economy since the late eighties. Though the manufacturing industry has improved its growth performance over time, the growth rates recorded during the nineties are not higher than the corresponding figures for the eighties. The relatively low growth profile of the manufacturing industry, when the general economy is growing remarkably well, appears a riddle of the recent growth trends under the reform process in Kerala. It is argued that inadequate growth of investment has constrained the pace of modernisation of old units and establishment of new units based on ‘state-of-art’ technology needed for the survival and growth of industries in a globally competitive environment. The study suggests that the lack of a clear and pragmatic approach of the state in its response to the reform process and a positive attitude in its own policies for encouraging private investment makes Kerala a less investor friendly location for manufacturing industry. It underlines the need for a new vision and strategy, which could fully utilise Kerala’s comparative advantage in human resources, and place greater emphasis on developing knowledge-based and service industries, for accelerating the growth of income and employment in industry. JEL Classification: R11, O47 Key words: India, Kerala economy, industrial stagnation, manufacturing growth, economic reforms, service industry

Assessing gender mainstreaming in the education sector: depoliticised technique or a step towards women's rights and gender equality?

In 1995 the Beijing Conference on Women identified gender mainstreaming as a key area for action. Policies to effect gender mainstreaming have since been widely adopted. This special issue of Compare looks at research on how gender mainstreaming has been used in government education departments, schools, higher education institutions, international agencies and NGOs .1 In this introduction we first provide a brief history of the emergence of gender mainstreaming and review changing definitions of the term. In the process we outline some policy initiatives that have attempted to mainstream gender and consider some difficulties with putting ideas into practice, particularly the tensions between a technical and transformative interpretations . Much of the literature about experiences with gender mainstreaming tends to look at organizational processes and not any specificities of a particular social sector. However, in our second section, we are concerned to explore whether institutional forms and particular actions associated with education give gender mainstreaming in education sites some distinctive features. In our last section we consider some of the debates about global and local negotiations in discussions of gender policy and education and the light this throws on gender mainstreaming. In so doing, we place the articles that follow in relation to contestations over ownership, political economy, the form and content of education practice and the social complexity of gender equality

On profiling bots in social media

Submit request for dataset at https://larc.smu.edu.sg/twitter-bot-profiling</p

The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News

In this paper we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the U.K. E.U. membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot deployment. Our results move forward the analysis of political bots by showing that Twitterbots can be effective at rapidly generating small to medium-sized cascades; that the retweeted content comprises user-generated hyperpartisan news, which is not strictly fake news, but whose shelf life is remarkably short; and, finally, that a botnet may be organized in specialized tiers or clusters dedicated to replicating either active users or content generated by other bots

Bilateral asynchronous acute epidural hematoma : a case report

BACKGROUND: Bilateral extradural hematomas have only rarely been reported in the literature. Even rarer are cases where the hematomas develop sequentially, one after removal of the other. Among 187 cases of operated epidural hematomas during past 4 years in our hospital, we found one case of sequentially developed bilateral epidural hematoma. CASE PRESENTATION: An 18-year-old conscious male worker was admitted to our hospital after a fall. After deterioration of his consciousness, an emergency brain CT scan showed a right temporoparietal epidural hematoma. The hematoma was evacuated, but the patient did not improve afterwards. Another CT scan showed contralateral epidural hematoma and the patient was reoperated. Postoperatively, the patient recovered completely. CONCLUSIONS: This case underlines the need for monitoring after an operation for an epidural hematoma and the need for repeat brain CT scans if the patient does not recover quickly after removal of the hematoma, especially if the first CT scan has been done less than 6 hours after the trauma. Intraoperative brain swelling can be considered as a clue for the development of contralateral hematoma