Response to increasingcompetition by business organizations in India: Voluntary Retirement Schemesand their Outcomes

Companies in India have responded to the challenges of globalization in various ways. One of the strategies to survive in the market was to reduce the cost by reduction in the number of employees with the help of Voluntary Retirement Schemes (VRS). This paper examines different types of VRS offered by the companies in the year 1999-2000 in India. It also examines the effect of VRS on the profitability of companies. Findings are based on the VRS of 30 companies from diverse sectors. Findings indicate that there is no fixed pattern of VRS among companies in India. Different companies adopt different forms of VRS. The implementation of VRS also differs significantly between companies. The results indicate that framing an attractive VRS by offering high compensation to employees is not important. The success of VRS depends on how the scheme is implemented and the perception of the persons opting of VRS and the survivors. The key concerns for the successes of VRS are effective communication, building trust among employees about procedural justice and involvement of multiple stakeholders.

Targeting of Flavobacterium Johnsoniae Proteins for Secretion By the Type IX Secretion System

Flavobacterium johnsoniae and many related bacteria secrete proteins across the outer membrane using the type IX secretion system (T9SS). Proteins secreted by T9SSs have amino-terminal signal peptides for export across the cytoplasmic membrane by the Sec system and carboxy-terminal domains (CTDs) targeting them for secretion across the outer membrane by the T9SS. Most but not all T9SS CTDs belong to family TIGR04183 (type A CTDs). This thesis focuses on the functional characterization of diverse CTDs for secretion by the F. johnsoniae T9SS. Fusion of the CTDs from F. johnsoniae RemA, AmyB, and ChiA to the foreign protein sfGFP that had a signal peptide at the amino terminus (SP-sfGFP) resulted in secretion across the outer membrane. In each case approximately 80 to 100 amino acids from the extreme carboxy-terminus was needed for efficient secretion. Several type A CTDs from distantly related members of the phylum Bacteroidetes functioned in F. johnsoniae, supporting secretion of sfGFP by the F. johnsoniae T9SS. The F. johnsoniae adhesin SprB is propelled rapidly along the cell surface resulting in gliding motility. F. johnsoniae SprB requires the T9SS for secretion but lacks a type A CTD. It has a conserved C-terminal domain belonging to family TIGR04131, which we refer to as a type B CTD. Type B CTDs are common in the Bacteroidetes but little is known regarding their roles in secretion. The secretion of the foreign protein sfGFP fused to an N-terminal SP and to C-terminal regions of SprB (SP-sfGFP-CTDSprB) was analyzed. CTDs of 218 AAs or longer resulted in secretion whereas a CTD of 149 AAs did not. sprF, which lies downstream of sprB, is known to be required for SprB secretion. SP-sfGFP-CTDSprB also required SprF for secretion. Efficient secretion only occurred when SP-sfGFP-CTDSprB and SprF were expressed together. Under these conditions CTDs of 218 AAs and 448 AAs resulted in secretion of soluble sfGFP, whereas longer CTDs (663 and 1182 AAs) resulted in attachment of sfGFP to the cell surface. Most F. johnsoniae genes encoding proteins with type B CTDs lie immediately upstream of sprF-like genes. The CTD from one such protein, Fjoh_3952, facilitated secretion of sfGFP only when it was coexpressed with its cognate SprF-like protein, Fjoh_3951. Secretion did not occur when SP-sfGFP-CTDFjoh_3952 was expressed with SprF, or when SP-sfGFP-CTDSprB was expressed with Fjoh_3951. The results highlight the need for extended regions of type B CTDs for secretion and cell-surface localization, and the requirement for the appropriate SprF-like protein for secretion. Since type B CTD-containing proteins and associated SprF-like proteins are common among members of the phylum Bacteroidetes the unique features required for secretion of these proteins may have broad implications

Studies, Efforts and Investigations on Various Aspects of Solid Waste Management with Emphasis on Developing Countries

Solid waste can be broadly classified as putrescible and non-putrescible based on its biodegradability. Municipal solid waste contains food waste, papers, plastic, paints, heavy metals and rubber. Industrial solid waste may contain waste adsorbent, waste catalyst sludge, solid residue of by-product, residue of reactions and hazardous materials also. Dewatering, centrifugal filtration, drying and incineration are usual steps used for solid waste treatment in industries. Biodegradable solid waste, being rich in organic content, can be used to synthesize various useful organic compounds. Vermicomposting is an effective method for converting organic waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer. Food and vegetable waste can be processed to obtain useful products. Inorganic domestic waste and electronic waste may contain valuable heavy metals like gold and platinum. E-waste and industrial waste containing hazardous waste need to be classified and treated carefully. Non-biodegradable waste like plastic and rubber can be reused or recycled. Non-government organizations in developing countries are playing key role in creating awareness among people about solid waste. Recycling in industries is promoted by government through various schemes and initiatives. This chapter briefly explains initiatives and investigations aimed at increasing adoptability and efficiency of various solid minimizations, reuse, recycle methods and technologies used for synthesis of value-added products

Nasal In Situ Gel: Novel Approach for Nasal Drug Delivery

Nasal delivery is an alternative to oral or parenteral administration due to certain limitations such as absorption of the drug, drug targeting to particular organs can cause a problem for administration through oral route.  The nasal route has also been successfully used for bypassing the blood-brain barrier and afterword delivering drug molecules to the central nervous system. Also, lag time related to oral drug delivery is reduces by this route and offers noninvasiveness, self-medication, patient comfort, and patient compliance. Extend drug delivery can be attained by different new dosage forms like in situ gel. In situ formulations are drug delivery systems. The in-situ gelling system is a process in which the solution forms of a gel before administration in the body, but once administrated, it undergoes gelation in-situ, to form a gel. In situ gelling system becomes very popular nowadays because of their several advantages over conventional drug delivery systems like a sustained and prolonged release of a drug, reduced Frequency of administration, improved patient compliance and comfort. Approaches towards the various formulation of in-situ gel concerning temperature, pH, and physicochemical conditions. The in situ gel-forming polymeric formulations offer several advantages like sustained and prolonged action reduced Frequency of administration, in comparison to conventional drug delivery systems.  From a manufacturing point of view, the production of such systems is less complex and thus lowers the investment and manufacturing cost. Various evaluation parameters are considered during the preparation of In-Situ gel. Keywords: Nasal Drug Delivery, In Situ gel, gelation, polymers, et

Harmonic distortion analysis of a 200-MW notional solar farm using IEEE standard 519-2014

Solar farms are highly concentrated photovoltaic generation units located at the utility level. In this study, the impacts of harmonic distortions of a 200-MW notional solar farm were studied. A point of common coupling (PCC) is a common interface point between the utility and solar farm. Inverters are the primary component in solar farms injecting harmonic currents at PCC. The level of distortion is affected by various weather conditions. This study primarily investigated irradiation impacts due to cloud coverage on the harmonic distortion. These variations were classified as a clear, cloudy, and very cloudy week for analysis. A clear week means all clear days, a cloudy week means all cloudy days with good irradiance, and a very cloudy week means all cloudy days with low irradiance. IEEE standard 519-2014 version was used to analyze this impact by solar farms on the main grid. This standard requires conducting studies with stochastic nature of harmonic distortion, over at least one week, with different limits for various data percentiles. A 200-MW notional solar farm inspired by real solar farms worldwide was modeled in OpenDSS. Inverters were modeled as current sources, injecting currents into transformers followed by collector circuits. Current injected by PV source was calculated from solar irradiation using an interpolation algorithm. Time-series simulations were performed using Python, with communication between OpenDSS and Python to analyze the impacts by the solar farm over a period. A simulation environment in Python was set up to perform the required functions for this study. Observations reveal the dependency of distortion on irradiation and cloud cover. An increase in cloud cover means a reduction in irradiance. Validation of results was performed using few scenarios. Violations are defined as increases of voltage or current beyond the level specified by the standard. Odd order harmonics made voltage violations. Current violations were made by even order harmonics only. Inverters were observed to inject a high proportion of harmonic current at lower irradiance. In conclusion, the studied 200-MW notional solar farm was observed to cause violations in a grid, with the nature of violations depending on irradiation and cloud coverElectrical and Computer Engineerin

20W Output Broadband Amplifier with Automatic Gain Control and Thermal Protection

The requirement is to explore concept, design, fabrication and testing of a common source class B, cwrf amplifier by using readily available MOSFET that can withstand a load mismatch at all phase angles with more than a VSWR of 20:1. This amplifier must give an output of more than 20W with 13dB gain in the frequency range of 28 to 46MHz i.e. 37 ± 9MHz. This module will make one of the stages for a multistage cascaded high power cwrf solid state amplifier. The amplifier must be over current and over voltage protected by using external self-regulated dc power supply at the drain. The amplifier MOSFET device is presently to be biased at the gate with a variable dc supply. This arrangement will make it gain controlled. This will be feed backed from the cwrf output so as to make it automatic gain controlled in future. Various techniques of sampling forward and reflected power at the output must also be explored. A thermoswitch at the heat sink of MOSFET is to be added along with necessary circuitry to regulate the operating temperature, thereby protecting the device from overheating

Large Scale Generative Multimodal Attribute Extraction for E-commerce Attributes

E-commerce websites (e.g. Amazon) have a plethora of structured and unstructured information (text and images) present on the product pages. Sellers often either don't label or mislabel values of the attributes (e.g. color, size etc.) for their products. Automatically identifying these attribute values from an eCommerce product page that contains both text and images is a challenging task, especially when the attribute value is not explicitly mentioned in the catalog. In this paper, we present a scalable solution for this problem where we pose attribute extraction problem as a question-answering task, which we solve using \textbf{MXT}, consisting of three key components: (i) \textbf{M}AG (Multimodal Adaptation Gate), (ii) \textbf{X}ception network, and (iii) \textbf{T}5 encoder-decoder. Our system consists of a generative model that \emph{generates} attribute-values for a given product by using both textual and visual characteristics (e.g. images) of the product. We show that our system is capable of handling zero-shot attribute prediction (when attribute value is not seen in training data) and value-absent prediction (when attribute value is not mentioned in the text) which are missing in traditional classification-based and NER-based models respectively. We have trained our models using distant supervision, removing dependency on human labeling, thus making them practical for real-world applications. With this framework, we are able to train a single model for 1000s of (product-type, attribute) pairs, thus reducing the overhead of training and maintaining separate models. Extensive experiments on two real world datasets show that our framework improves the absolute recall@90P by 10.16\% and 6.9\% from the existing state of the art models. In a popular e-commerce store, we have deployed our models for 1000s of (product-type, attribute) pairs.Comment: ACL 2023 Industry Track, 8 Page

Ayurvedic interventional management of Manyagatavata w.s.r. to Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy (CSM) - A Case Study

Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy (CSM) is a degenerative spinal disease which may lead to significant clinical morbidity. The onset of symptoms is usually insidious, with long periods of fixed disability and episodic worsening events. Regarding the pathophysiology of CSM, the repeated injuries to the spinal cord are caused by both static and dynamic mechanical factors. Only limited surgical procedures, neuroplasticity and other medical interventions are employed in modern medicine.  The standard treatment for moderate to severe CSM is operative procedures which are least preferred by the elderly patients. Hence there is a need to search for effective treatment in alternative medicine. According to Ayurveda, cervical spondylosis can be co-related with Manyagatavata, a type of Vataja Vyadhi. A 48 years old male patient presented with Neck pain, neck stiffness, and back pain since 4 years. Here, we are presenting a case of Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy (CSM) which was treated with Ayurvedic Panchakarma procedures such as Virechana with Mahatikta Ghruta, Tiktaksheera Basti, Greeva Basti, Nasya Karma with Vacha Taila along with Ayurvedic oral drugs like Tab Brihatvata Chintamani Rasa, Ashvagandha Churna with Kavacha Beeja Churna, Amruta Guggula, Ekangaveera Rasa and Chaturbhurja Rasa. These entire drugs were prescribed for twice a day after meals. This case report revealed usefulness of Panchakarma procedures and Ayurveda oral medicines in the management of Manyagatavata w.s.r. to Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy (CSM)