The interdependence of coffee futures and spot markets - An econometric analysis

Coffee is an export-oriented commodity for producing countries, and it is actively traded at international commodity exchange platforms viz., Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), New York and ICE, Europe. This study examines the interdependence of futures and spot markets for coffee in the price discovery mechanism, particularly in the Indian context. The study has considered both the International Coffee Organization (ICO) indicator prices and producers’ prices in India’s spot prices. The study confirms the existence of a stable long-run relationship between ICE coffee futures and ICO spot prices, implying that both prices react to the same set of market information. While there is an indication of equilibrium or long-run relationship between ICE Coffee futures (New York) and Arabica producer prices (at farm gate level) in India, the same was not true for Robusta coffee. The absence of co-integration between ICE futures prices (London) and Robusta producer prices in India suggested only a short-run relationship between them. The findings of the study conclude with strong evidence that the farm gate prices in India have been caused by the ICE futures markets, declining the contrary

Evaluation of reasons for participation refusal among pregnant women in a perinatal outcome research

Background: The number of protocol-eligible patients, refusing to participate in a biomedical research is often not mentioned in the results of the studies. There are no studies that have looked at the data on willingness to participate in a research among pregnant women in India. The aim of this study is to report the number of pregnant women who refused to participate and to evaluate the reasons for not participating in a research that was concerned with swabbing of the genital tract for culture.Methods: A prospective research study was done among healthy pregnant women, that required collection of vaginal swabs for culture to study the vaginal flora. The women eligible to participate in the study were approached for their willingness to participate in the study. The details of women who refused to participate in the study and the various self-reported reasons for their refusal were documented and analysed.Results: A total 48.2% of the total protocol-eligible group refused to participate in the study and the refusal rate was alarmingly higher than expected. Some of the common responses for their refusal include reasons such as the study involved tests from their private parts, lack of interest to participate and the need to discuss with their partner or that their partner wound not allow them to participate in research.Conclusions: It is important for research studies to include data on the refusal to participate and also the reasons why people refuse to participate in research so as to formulate strategies to improve the acceptance rate for participation in research.

Antibiotic susceptibility pattern of group B streptococcal isolates from maternal genital tract

Background: Group B streptococcus (GBS) is one of the important cause of early onset neonatal sepsis in developed countries leading to increased neonatal morbidity and mortality. Penicillin and Ampicillin are the drugs of choice for prevention of GBS infections. Antibiotic resistance amongst GBS isolates is an emerging health problem affecting neonates. Hence, this study was performed to determine the antibiotic susceptibility pattern of Group B Streptococcus (GBS) in a population of pregnant women.Methods: A prospective study was done to screen pregnant women for vaginal and rectal GBS colonization during their regular visits to antenatal clinic. Todd-Hewitt broth, an enrichment medium for GBS was used for isolation. The antibiotic susceptibility pattern of the isolates were studied.  Results: A total of 300 pregnant women were screened for GBS colonization. GBS colonization rate in our study was 2.3%. The antibiotic susceptibility pattern of the isolates revealed that none of the isolates were resistant to penicillin or clindamycin, while resistance was noted to erythromycin (14.3%) and   tetracycline (71.4%).Conclusions: GBS continues to remain sensitive to Penicillin which is the drug of choice for prevention and treatment of GBS.  Consistent surveillance of antibiotic sensitivity pattern of GBS as well as for other organisms implicated in new born sepsis and maternal infections is required to formulate guidelines for prevention and treatment

Spontaneous membranous dysmenorrhea: a rare clinical entity

Membranous dysmenorrhea is a rare painful clinical condition associated with spontaneous expulsion of the endometrium as an entire piece, retaining the shape of the uterus. Authors report a case of membranous dysmenorrhea in a 36 year old multiparous woman, who was not on any hormonal therapy. She presented with history of menorrhagia for 20 days and severe dysmenorrhea for one day. During her second day of hospital admission, she expelled a fleshy mass resembling a decidual cast. Histopathological examination was consistent with diagnosis of membranous dysmenorrhea. The etiology of membranous dysmenorrhea is not very clear and hence reporting such rare cases may aid in understanding the etiology and pathophysiology of this rare condition

Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Driving Based on Time Scaled Collision Cone

In this paper, we present a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework based on path velocity decomposition paradigm for autonomous driving. The optimization underlying the MPC has a two layer structure wherein first, an appropriate path is computed for the vehicle followed by the computation of optimal forward velocity along it. The very nature of the proposed path velocity decomposition allows for seamless compatibility between the two layers of the optimization. A key feature of the proposed work is that it offloads most of the responsibility of collision avoidance to velocity optimization layer for which computationally efficient formulations can be derived. In particular, we extend our previously developed concept of time scaled collision cone (TSCC) constraints and formulate the forward velocity optimization layer as a convex quadratic programming problem. We perform validation on autonomous driving scenarios wherein proposed MPC repeatedly solves both the optimization layers in receding horizon manner to compute lane change, overtaking and merging maneuvers among multiple dynamic obstacles.Comment: 6 page

Prediction of Excess Air Requirement Using ANN for the Improvement of Boiler Efficiency

An improvement in the efficiency on converting fuel energy to useful thermal energy could result in significant fuel saving for industrial Sector. In this paper artificial intelligence concept using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is used to predict the optimized excess air requirement using real time and calculated data. This work determines the excess air requirement for complete combustion corresponding to theoretical CO2 in flue gases and real-time values obtained from remote measurements of CO

Impact of Employee’s Behavior and Culture on Organizations Productivity in Pharmaceutical Industries of Bangaluru

The study was conducted to test the hypothesis using stratified and simple random sampling survey with a questionnaire. Social and cultural traits of individuals have  to play strong role on the performance of job in industries. The present study reveals the impact of employee’s behavior and culture on job performance as well as organizational productivity in Bangalore pharmaceutical industry. On the basis of this scores of hypothesis were made: I. There is no positive relationship between employee behaviour and culture on the productivity. So it will not give any impact on the financial health of the organization. II. There is no positive relationship between employee’s behaviour and culture on employee performance.  90% of the employees strongly agree that there is a relationship between employee behaviour and culture on employee productivity and continuous performance in the organization. Survey findings made me to accept alternative hypotheses and reject null hypothesis. In both the cases calculated values of chi-square are higher than the tabulated values. The study helps to ascertain employee’s behavior and cultural effect on the productivity of the organization and helps to formulate recommendations to improve

Freestyle, a randomized version of ChaCha for resisting offline brute-force and dictionary attacks

This paper introduces Freestyle, a randomized and variable round version of the ChaCha cipher. Freestyle uses the concept of hash based halting condition where a decryption attempt with an incorrect key is likely to take longer time to halt. This makes Freestyle resistant to key-guessing attacks i.e. brute-force and dictionary based attacks. Freestyle demonstrates a novel approach for ciphertext randomization by using random number of rounds for each block, where the exact number of rounds are unknown to the receiver in advance. Freestyle provides the possibility of generating $2^{128}$ different ciphertexts for a given key, nonce, and message; thus resisting key and nonce reuse attacks. Due to its inherent random behavior, Freestyle makes cryptanalysis through known-plaintext, chosen-plaintext, and chosen-ciphertext attacks difficult in practice. On the other hand, Freestyle has costlier cipher initialization process, typically generates 3.125% larger ciphertext, and was found to be 1.6 to 3.2 times slower than ChaCha20. Freestyle is suitable for applications that favor ciphertext randomization and resistance to key-guessing and key reuse attacks over performance and ciphertext size. Freestyle is ideal for applications where ciphertext can be assumed to be in full control of an adversary, and an offline key-guessing attack can be carried out