Attitudes Towards and Prevalence of Son Preference and Sex Selection in South Asian American Communities in the United States

This report summarizes research conducted by Generations Ahead, a social justice non-profit in the United States, within the South Asian American community. This research examines attitudes towards and prevalence of son preference and sex selective practices through focus groups and interviews with and a survey of South Asian Americans

Symbolic-Connectionist Representational Model for Optimizing Decision Making Behavior in Intelligent Systems

Modeling higher order cognitive processes like human decision making come in three representational approaches namely symbolic, connectionist and symbolic-connectionist. Many connectionist neural network models are evolved over the decades for optimizing decision making behaviors and their agents are also in place. There had been attempts to implement symbolic structures within connectionist architectures with distributed representations. Our work was aimed at proposing an enhanced connectionist approach of optimizing the decisions within the framework of a symbolic cognitive model. The action selection module of this framework is forefront in evolving intelligent agents through a variety of soft computing models. As a continous effort, a Connectionist Cognitive Model (CCN) had been evolved by bringing a traditional symbolic cognitive process model proposed by LIDA as an inspiration to a feed forward neural network model for optimizing decion making behaviours in intelligent agents. Significanct progress was observed while comparing its performance with other varients

Impacts Of Urbanization On Environment

Urbanization refers to general increase in population and the amount of industrialization of a settlement. It includes increase in the number and extent of cities. It symbolizes the movement of people from rural to urban areas. Urbanization happens because of the increase in the extent and density of urban areas. Due to uncontrolled urbanization in India, environmental degradation has been occurring very rapidly and causing many problems like land insecurity, worsening water quality, excessive air pollution, noise and the problems of waste disposal. This paper emphasizes on the effect of urbanization on environmental components mainly climate, biosphere, land and water resources. A case study of urbanization in India and metropolitan cities have been carried out leading to conclude on the existing causes of damage to the environment due to urbanization and preventive measures to keep a check on them. Although it is impossible to restrict urbanization it has to be ensured that urbanization proceeds in the right path causing minimum impact on environment

Birational motives, II: Triangulated birational motives

We develop birational versions of Voevodsky's triangulated categories of motives over a field, and relate them with the pure birational motives studied in arXiv:0902.4902 [math.AG]. We also get an interpretation of unramified cohomology in this framework, leading to "higher derived functors of unramified cohomology".Comment: Compared to the initial version: previous Subsection 4.2 has been upgraded to Section 5; previous Lemmas 5.2.5 and 5.2.6 have been corrected to Proposition 6.2.5 and Lemma 6.2.6; at the referee's request, previous Appendix B and the proof of previous Proposition C.1.1 (now A.4.1) have been removed (please consult the initial version for them

GALEX Observations of Diffuse UV Radiation at High Spatial Resolution from the Sandage Nebulosity

Using the GALEX ultraviolet imagers we have observed a region of nebulosity first identified as starlight scattered by interstellar dust by Sandage (1976). Apart from airglow and zodiacal emission, we have found a diffuse UV background of between 500 and 800 \phunit in both the \galex FUV (1350 -- 1750 \AA) and NUV (1750 -- 2850 \AA). Of this emission, up to 250 \phunit is due to \htwo fluorescent emission in the FUV band; the remainder is consistent with scattering from interstellar dust. We have estimated the optical constants to be $a = 0.3; g = 0.7$ in the FUV and $a = 0.5; g = 0.7$ in the NUV, implying highly forward scattering grains, plus an extragalactic contribution of as much as 150 \phunit. These are the highest spatial resolution observations of the diffuse UV background to date and show an intrinsic scatter beyond that expected from instrumental noise alone. Further modeling is required to understand the nature of this scatter and its implications for the ISM.Comment: Total 20 pages, Figures 9, Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journa

A few localisation theorems

Given a functor $T:C \to D$ carrying a class of morphisms $S\subset C$ into a class $S'\subset D$, we give sufficient conditions in order that $T$ induces an equivalence on the localised categories. These conditions are in the spirit of Quillen's theorem A. We give some applications in algebaic and birational geometry.Comment: File mistake in Version 2 To appear in Homology, Homotopy and Application

Bubbling and bistability in two parameter discrete systems

We present a graphical analysis of the mechanisms underlying the occurrences of bubbling sequences and bistability regions in the bifurcation scenario of a special class of one dimensional two parameter maps. The main result of the analysis is that whether it is bubbling or bistability is decided by the sign of the third derivative at the inflection point of the map function.Comment: LaTeX v2.09, 14 pages with 4 PNG figure