333 research outputs found

    Informal Housing, Inadequate Property Rights: Understanding the Needs of India's Informal Housing Dwellers

    Get PDF
    In India, as in many other developing countries, urban population growth and the shortage of planned affordable housing have led to 26–37 million households (33–47 percent of the urban population) living in informal housing (slums and unauthorised housing). Slum dwellers often live in poor conditions and face the threat of eviction or demolition. Unauthorised housing dwellers usually have some basic services (such as electricity and water). However, they may lack proper roads, sewage, or drainage, and they also face the potential threat of demolition.The Indian government has tried many different approaches to help improve living conditions for informal housing dwellers, but without sizeable impact. Redeveloping and relocating slums has not scaled, improving service provision has been slow, and "legalising" unauthorised housing has been limited. Unfortunately, informal housing is going to exist for the foreseeable future in India, and there is an urgent need to improve the lives of people who are living in such sub-optimal conditions.This report applies a property rights lens to segment the different types of informal housing, to understand the size and the needs of these segments, and to identify potential solutions to meet these needs. The research focuses specifically on owner-occupants, since they are most likely to invest in improving their housing as they will benefit from these improvements—both as residents and as owners of the asset.Research for the report involved reviewing 40 reports, speaking to 56 experts, conducting around 200 qualitative interviews of informal housing dwellers in 90 settlements, conducting quantitative interviews of 517 informal housing dwellers in 40 settlements in four cities (Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, and Cuttack), gathering feedback on the findings in a workshop with 10 experts, and feedback on a draft report from 21 experts

    Controlling Federated Learning for Covertness

    Full text link
    A learner aims to minimize a function ff by repeatedly querying a distributed oracle that provides noisy gradient evaluations. At the same time, the learner seeks to hide argminf\arg\min f from a malicious eavesdropper that observes the learner's queries. This paper considers the problem of \textit{covert} or \textit{learner-private} optimization, where the learner has to dynamically choose between learning and obfuscation by exploiting the stochasticity. The problem of controlling the stochastic gradient algorithm for covert optimization is modeled as a Markov decision process, and we show that the dynamic programming operator has a supermodular structure implying that the optimal policy has a monotone threshold structure. A computationally efficient policy gradient algorithm is proposed to search for the optimal querying policy without knowledge of the transition probabilities. As a practical application, our methods are demonstrated on a hate speech classification task in a federated setting where an eavesdropper can use the optimal weights to generate toxic content, which is more easily misclassified. Numerical results show that when the learner uses the optimal policy, an eavesdropper can only achieve a validation accuracy of 52%52\% with no information and 69%69\% when it has a public dataset with 10\% positive samples compared to 83%83\% when the learner employs a greedy policy

    Genetic analysis of japonica x indica recombinant inbred lines and characterization of major fragrance gene by microsatellite markers

    Get PDF
    Traditional basmati rice varieties are very low yielding due to their tendency to lodging and increasing susceptibility to diseases. To improve the characters of basmati rice variety and study the inheritance of various physio-morphological and quality characters, F5 population comprising of 204 lines from the cross between NPT II (non-aromatic, japonica) and Taraori Basmati or HBC19 (aromatic, indica), were evaluated. Ample amount of genetic variability was observed for the characters plant height, tillers per plant, kernel length, kernel breath and L/B ratio. The grain yield/plant showed positive correlation with productive tiller/plant and test weight. Path coefficient analysis showed that the productive tiller/plant and test weight contribute to grain yield/ plant through direct effect. The parent off-spring regression was high for all the characters under study suggesting improvement of these characters by mere selection. Based on divergence study, 204 lines were categorized in seven clusters whereas parents were grouped in different clusters. Molecular restricted selection using specific SSR markers with depicting high correlation with aroma could offer great promise to select high yielding rice among high aroma lines. A total of 54 randomly selected F5 plants were subjected to SSR marker analysis using SSR markers. The F5 plants had an allele from either of the two parental lines (homozygous condition) or alleles from both the parental rice varieties (heterozygous condition). At some SSR loci, new/recombinant alleles were observed, which indicate the active recombination between genomes of two rice varieties and can be used for linkage mapping once complete homozygosity is achieved. SSR allelic profile based on two dimensional principal component analysis demonstrated high level of diversity among parents and F5 plants spread between them.Keywords: Oryza sativa L., basmati, microsatellite, phenotyping, rice, recombinant inbred lines (RILs)African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(32), pp. 5022-502

    Variable-Rate FEC Decoder VLSI Architecture for 400G Rate-Adaptive Optical Communication

    Get PDF
    Optical communication systems rely on forward error correction (FEC) to decrease the error rate of the received data. Since the properties of the optical channel will vary over time, a variable FEC coding gain would be useful. For example, if the channel conditions are benign, lower code overhead can be used, effectively increasing the code rate. We introduce a variable-rate FEC decoder architecture that can operate in several different modes, where each mode is linked to code rate and decoding iterations. We demonstrate a decoder implementation that provides a net coding gain range of 9.96–10.38 dB at a post-FEC bit-error rate of 10^-15. For this range, a decoder implemented in a 28-nm process technology offers throughputs in excess of 400 Gbps, decoding latencies below 53 ns and a power dissipation of less than 0.95 W (or 1.3 pJ/information bit)

    Variable-Rate VLSI Architecture for 400-Gb/s Hard-Decision Product Decoder

    Get PDF
    Variable-rate transceivers, which adapt to the conditions, will be central to energy-efficient communication. However, fiber-optic communication systems with high bit-rate requirements make design of flexible transceivers challenging, since additional circuits needed to orchestrate the flexibility will increase area and degrade speed. We propose a variable-rate VLSI architecture of a forward error correction (FEC) decoder based on hard-decision product codes. Variable shortening of component codes provides a mechanism by which code rate can be varied, the number of iterations offers a knob to control the coding gain, while a key-equation solver module that can swap between error-locator polynomial coefficients provides a means to change error correction capability. Our evaluations based on 28-nm netlists show that a variable-rate decoder implementation can offer a net coding gain (NCG) range of 9.96-10.38 dB at a post-FEC bit-error rate of 10^-15. The decoder achieves throughputs in excess of 400 Gb/s, latencies below 53 ns, and energy efficiencies of 1.14 pJ/bit or less. While the area of the variable-rate decoder is 31% larger than a decoder with a fixed rate, the power dissipation is a mere 5% higher. The variable error correction capability feature increases the NCG range further, to above 10.5 dB, but at a significant area cost

    A high resolution map of a cyanobacterial transcriptome

    Get PDF
    Background: Previous molecular and mechanistic studies have identified several principles of prokaryotic transcription, but less is known about the global transcriptional architecture of bacterial genomes. Here we perform a comprehensive study of a cyanobacterial transcriptome, that of Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942, generated by combining three high-resolution data sets: RNA sequencing, tiling expression microarrays, and RNA polymerase chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing. Results: We report absolute transcript levels, operon identification, and high-resolution mapping of 5' and 3' ends of transcripts. We identify several interesting features at promoters, within transcripts and in terminators relating to transcription initiation, elongation, and termination. Furthermore, we identify many putative non-coding transcripts. Conclusions: We provide a global analysis of a cyanobacterial transcriptome. Our results uncover insights that reinforce and extend the current views of bacterial transcription.Molecular and Cellular Biolog

    Astrophysical Tests of Modified Gravity: A Screening Map of the Nearby Universe

    Get PDF
    Astrophysical tests of modified modified gravity theories in the nearby universe have been emphasized recently by Hui, Nicolis and Stubbs (2009) and Jain and VanderPlas (2011). A key element of such tests is the screening mechanism whereby general relativity is restored in massive halos or high density environments like the Milky Way. In chameleon theories of gravity, including all f(R) models, field dwarf galaxies may be unscreened and therefore feel an extra force, as opposed to screened galaxies. The first step to study differences between screened and unscreened galaxies is to create a 3D screening map. We use N-body simulations to test and calibrate simple approximations to determine the level of screening in galaxy catalogs. Sources of systematic errors in the screening map due to observational inaccuracies are modeled and their contamination is estimated. We then apply our methods to create a map out to 200 Mpc in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey footprint using data from the Sloan survey and other sources. In two companion papers this map will be used to carry out new tests of gravity using distance indicators and the disks of dwarf galaxies. We also make our screening map publicly available.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure
    corecore