The Poetic Vision of Walden and the Idea of Human Freedom in the Bhagavadgita

In his seminal essay on Nature (1836) Emerson writes: In the woods, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. Thoreau\u27s Walden; Or, Life In The Woods (1854) is more than a tribute to Emersonian ideas; it is a forceful plea for the renewal and regeneration of the self. It is concerned with the deeper significance of reality as a whole

Review of social science literature on risk and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in fishing communities in Sub-Saharan Africa

The WorldFish Center and FAO are implementing a regional programme entitled "Fisheries and HIV/AIDS in Africa; investing in sustainable solutions", funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As part of this project, the Overseas Development Group/School of Development Studies was asked to produce a literature review on 'Fisheries and HIV/AIDS in Africa: evidence from social science, medical and policy research'. The task was to collate available data from socio-economic and medical research to identify trends in fishing communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper is the second of three parts of the literature review, which covers review of social science research on risk and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in the fisheries sector in Sub-Saharan AfricaFisheries, AIDS, Public health, HIV, Nutritive value

Quark and Leptonic Mixing Patterns from the Breakdown of a Common Discrete Flavor Symmetry

Assuming the Majorana nature of neutrinos, we recently performed a scan of leptonic mixing patterns derived from finite discrete groups of order less than 1536. Here we show that the 3 groups identified there as giving predictions close to experiment, also contain another class of abelian subgroups that predict an interesting leading order quark mixing pattern where only the Cabibbo angle is generated at leading order. We further broaden our study by assuming that neutrinos are Dirac particles and find 4 groups of order up to 200 that can predict acceptable quark and leptonic mixing angles. Since large flavor groups allow for a multitude of leading order mixing patterns, we define a measure that is suitable to compare the predictivity of a given flavor group taking this fact into account. We give the result of this measure for a wide range of discrete flavor groups and identify the group (Z_18 \times Z_6) \rtimes S_3 as being most predictive in the sense of this measure. We further discuss alternative measures and their implications.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Multiscale Morphological Filtering for Analysis of Noisy and Complex Images

Images acquired with passive sensing techniques suffer from illumination variations and poor local contrasts that create major difficulties in interpretation and identification tasks. On the other hand, images acquired with active sensing techniques based on monochromatic illumination are degraded with speckle noise. Mathematical morphology offers elegant techniques to handle a wide range of image degradation problems. Unlike linear filters, morphological filters do not blur the edges and hence maintain higher image resolution. Their rich mathematical framework facilitates the design and analysis of these filters as well as their hardware implementation. Morphological filters are easier to implement and are more cost effective and efficient than several conventional linear filters. Morphological filters to remove speckle noise while maintaining high resolution and preserving thin image regions that are particularly vulnerable to speckle noise were developed and applied to SAR imagery. These filters used combination of linear (one-dimensional) structuring elements in different (typically four) orientations. Although this approach preserves more details than the simple morphological filters using two-dimensional structuring elements, the limited orientations of one-dimensional elements approximate the fine details of the region boundaries. A more robust filter designed recently overcomes the limitation of the fixed orientations. This filter uses a combination of concave and convex structuring elements. Morphological operators are also useful in extracting features from visible and infrared imagery. A multiresolution image pyramid obtained with successive filtering and a subsampling process aids in the removal of the illumination variations and enhances local contrasts. A morphology-based interpolation scheme was also introduced to reduce intensity discontinuities created in any morphological filtering task. The generality of morphological filtering techniques in extracting information from a wide variety of images obtained with active and passive sensing techniques is discussed. Such techniques are particularly useful in obtaining more information from fusion of complex images by different sensors such as SAR, visible, and infrared

Electroweak Symmetry Breaking via QCD

We propose a new mechanism to generate the electroweak scale within the framework of QCD, which is extended to include conformally invariant scalar degrees of freedom belonging to a larger irreducible representation of $SU(3)_c$. The electroweak symmetry breaking is triggered dynamically via the Higgs portal by the condensation of the colored scalar field around 1 TeV. The mass of the colored boson is restricted to be 350 GeV $\lesssim m_S\lesssim$ 3 TeV, with the upper bound obtained from perturbative renormalization group evolution. This implies that the colored boson can be produced at LHC. If the colored boson is electrically charged, the branching fraction of the Higgs decaying into two photons can slightly increase, and moreover, it can be produced at future linear colliders. Our idea of non-perturbative EW scale generation can serve as a new starting point for more realistic model building in solving the hierarchy problem.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Title changed, references added, matches version published in PR

Lepton Mixing Patterns from a Scan of Finite Discrete Groups

The recent discovery of a non-zero value of the mixing angle theta_13 has ruled out tri-bimaximal mixing as the correct lepton mixing pattern generated by some discrete flavor symmetry (barring large next-to-leading order corrections in concrete models). In this work we assume that neutrinos are Majorana particles and perform a general scan of all finite discrete groups with order less than 1536 to obtain their predictions for lepton mixing angles. To our surprise, the scan of over one million groups only yields 3 interesting groups that give lepton mixing patterns which lie within 3-sigma of the current best global fit values. A systematic way to categorize such groups and the implications for flavor symmetry are discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, references added and minor improvements, matches version to be appeared in Physics Letters

Gamma-ray Line from Nambu-Goldstone Dark Matter in a Scale Invariant Extension of the Standard Model

A recently proposed scale invariant extension of the standard model is modified such that it includes a Dark Matter candidate which can annihilate into gamma-rays. For that a non-zero $U(1)_Y$ hypercharge $Q$ is assigned to the fermions in a QCD-like hidden sector. The Nambu-Goldstone bosons, that arise due to dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in the hidden sector, are cold Dark Matter candidates, and the extension allows them to annihilate into two photons, producing a gamma-ray line spectrum. We find that the gamma-ray line energy must be between 0.7 TeV and 0.9 TeV with the velocity-averaged annihilation cross section $10^{-30}\sim 10^{-26}$ cm^3/s for $Q=1/3$. With a non-zero hypercharge $Q$, the hidden sector is no longer completely dark and can be directly probed by collider experiments.Comment: 21 Pages, 8 Figures. Typos corrected, references added, the section about the properties of the dark matter in our model is extended. Result and conclusion unchanged. To appear in JHE

Acute Glomerular Diseases in Children

Glomerulonephritis [GN] is one of the common acquired pediatric renal disorders encountered in clinical practice. The clinical manifestations include gross or microscopic hematuria, proteinuria, and nephrotic syndrome. Renal dysfunction and hypertension may also be present in many patients. Etiopathogenesis of GN can be idiopathic in a large majority, while some may result from infections or known immune disorders. Several of these disorders are now believed to arise from dysfunctions of podocytes and are grouped under the heading of “podocytopathies”. This review focuses on the clinical manifestations and management of the common forms of acute GN encountered in children