TRENDS IN DIVERSION OF PDS GRAIN

This article estimates the proportion of grain "diverted" from the Public Distribution System (PDS) to the open market for several years in the past decade, by matching state offtake figures published by the government, with household purchase reported by the National Sample Survey (NSS). The limitations of this methodology are discussed, and alternative estimates are presented to crosscheck estimates obtained by using the conventional method. Though the alternative estimates are not very different, the discussion here indicates that estimates of diversion must be treated as an upper-bound. At the all-India level diversion of grain remains a serious issue, however, state-level trends reveal interesting contrasts. Based on contrasting trends in monthly PDS purchase (per capita) and estimated diversion, states are categorized into three groups - "functioning", "reforming" and "languishing" states. The paper also discusses possible reasons for the improvement in the PDS in the reforming states.

“Group Measurement” of NREGA work-- The Jalore Experiment

Rajasthan is seen as the forerunner with respect to the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), both in terms of scale of works and transparency safeguards. This combination has meant that large numbers of people have benefited from the NREGA in the state. The scale of NREGA works in Rajasthan is impressive -- according to official statistics, in 2006-7 and 2007-8 Rajasthan generated 77 days and 68 days, respectively, of employment per rural household (in the districts where NREGA was in force), the highest in the country. More recently, there have been positive reports of Rajasthan’s efforts to improve worksite management. Proper worksite management is essential for at least three purpose -- ensuring good working conditions and the provision of mandatory worksite facilities ; implementing the transparency safeguards; providing technical supervision to ensure satisfactory labour productivity and asset creation. Related to effective worksite management, an important issue that has not been resolved yet is that often NREGA labourers in Rajasthan are not paid the statutory minimum wage. Low wages are commonly attributed to low productivity on worksites. This means that labourers do not (or are unable to) perform the “task” required to earn the minimum wage. There could be several reasons for this -- excessive productivity norms, confusion or lack of awareness regarding the task that must be performed to earn the minimum wage, poor worksite supervision arrangements, and poor work incentives related to the system of wage calculation. This brief note takes a closer look at an experiment of training mates (worksite supervisors) in Rajasthan to improve worksite management. It is based on a four-day field visit (11-14 February, 2008) to Jalore district where this experiment is said to have been a success. A team of three researchers visited nine ongoing worksites from two blocks of Jalore (Raniwara and Jalore) and two completed worksites. The Gram Panchayats (GPs) visited include Bakra Road (one worksite), Leta (two worksites), Oon (one worksite) and Sankarna (three worksites) in Jalore Block. For this Block we got a list of Gram Panchayats with ongoing works. From this list, we selected Bakra Road and Sankarna because they were served by buses and Leta and Oon because these were accessible by bicycle. The closest Gram Panchayat was Leta (6 km from Jalore district headquarters) and the furthest was Bakra Road (about 25 km away). We also visited two GPs in Raniwara Block on the recommendation of the District Collector and Block Development Officer.

Dysregulation of Sodium Channels in a Rat Model of Absence Epilepsy

Absence epilepsy is a generalized form of epilepsy where spike-wave discharges (SWDs) involve both hemispheres of the brain and thereby alter consciousness. Recent evidence by Meeren et al (2002) in the WAG/Rij rat model of absence epilepsy points to a cortical focus of SWDs before rapid generalization of the SWDs. This focus belongs in the peri-oral area of the somatosensory cortex, and it was found to consistently lead SWDs in other cortical and subcortical areas. With this recent finding, it seems plausible that a defect lies in this focal region of the cortex, leading to SWD in the WAG/Rij model. It is likely that an alteration of one or more ion channels leads to seizure generation in this rat model, as ion channels are what produce the hyperexcitability of seizures. In this study, our laboratory performed three consecutive days of scalp EEG recordings on WAG/Rij animals at different ages and compared this to control rat EEGs. As has been found before, we saw an increase in time spent in SWDs as the WAG/Rij animals aged. After completing EEG recordings, the animals were sacrificed and quantitative PCR and immunocytochemistry was performed on six regions of the cortex. In comparison to control animals, WAG/Rij rats had an increase in sodium channel subunits Nav1.1 and Nav1.6 in the region corresponding to the seizure focus identified by Meeren et al. In addition, as WAG/Rij rats aged, the amount of Nav1.1 and Nav1.6 also steadily increased in the peri-oral region of the somatosensory cortex. These findings suggest that specific sodium channelopathies may initiate SWD generation in this rodent model. The results of our study have many implications. Perhaps many, if not all, forms of human absence epilepsy are rooted in ion channelopathies which could be limited to specific regions of the brain. If this is so, and if the specific channelopathies are identified, it is also possible that very targeted therapies could be devised either medically or surgically to treat both benign and refractory absence epilepsies. Future studies are needed to determine whether the sodium channel dysregulation found in this rodent model is the cause or effect of SWDs and whether other channelopathies or dysregulation of channels exists. Our lab is currently looking at what effects ethosuximide, an anti-absence drug, has on sodium channel composition in the cortex of the WAG/Rij rat

A study of cybersecurity for telecommunication services concerning smartphone users in Thailand

Smartphones are powerful handheld computers that allow users to connect in real-time with others around the globe through high quality phone calls, and data exchange. They are 2.1 billion smartphones users worldwide in 2016 with this number expected to grow to almost 3 billion by the end of 2020 (www.statista.com). This enormous uptake together with valuable information contained in smart phones makes them an attractive target for attackers to exploit. This study was conducted to indicate the abilities and behaviours of Thai smartphone users in protecting their smartphones from cyber threats. The objectives of this study are: (1) to investigate cyber threats on smartphones and trends; (2) to investigate cybersecurity handlings for smartphone users in Thailand; (3) to investigate general behaviours and protection behaviours of Thai smartphone users; and (4) to analyse causal relationship among constructs of the proposed protection behaviour model. This study utilizes mixed methods research, qualitative and quantitative studies, to collect and analyze the data. Document research was performed in the qualitative part. For the quantitative study, a total of 720 samples from smartphone users were collected with cluster sampling technique from main regions of Thailand. Data were then analyzed with descriptive statistic, T-Test, and ANOVA to create a model, based on Roger, R.W. (1983)’s Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), with the Structural Equation Modeling (S.E.M.) technique to find the factors that affect behaviour of Thai in protecting their smartphones from cyber threats. Based on the collected data, the main findings of this study show that: (1) threats on smartphones that can be caused by attackers - malware attacks, wireless network attacks, denial of service attacks, break-in attacks, and threats due to unawareness of users themselves such as malfunctions, phishing, phone thefts/loses, and platform alterations; (2) identification of the agent responsible for providing incident response to computer security threats, the Thailand Computer Emergency Response Team or ThaiCERT, and their services should be extended to the whole of Thailand; (3) the overall protection behaviours of Thai people were in good level; (4) females had less degree in protecting themselves from mobile threats than males; (5) people whose ages between 41 – 60 had less degree in protecting themselves from mobile threats than the other age-groups; (6) people who have never experienced with phone virus/malware infection, who have never used public Wi-Fi, and who have never transferred money using Internet banking on their phones had less degree in protecting themselves from mobile threats than the other groups; and (7) the protection behaviour model of Thai smartphone users consisted of the following variables: Perceived Vulnerability, Self-efficacy, Social Influence, Threat Appraisal, Coping Appraisal, and Protection Motivation and Protection Behaviours. Among these, only variables that had impacts on Protection Behaviour of Thai smartphone users are: Self-efficacy, Social Influence, Coping Appraisal, and Protection Motivation. The findings provide strategic directions for the education and raising of awareness among smartphone users in Thailand so as to strengthen their protection against potential threats

Online Recommendation System

The vast amount of data available on the Internet has led to the development of recommendation systems. This project proposes the use of soft computing techniques to develop recommendation systems. It addresses the limitations of current algorithms used to implement recommendation systems, evaluation of experimental results, and conclusion. This report provides a detailed summary of the project “Online Recommendation System” as part of fulfillment of the Master\u27s Writing Project, Computer Science Department, San Jose State University’s. The report includes a description of the topic, system architecture, and provides a detailed description of the work done till point. Included in the report are the detailed descriptions of the work done: snapshots of the implementations, various approaches, and tools used so far. The report also includes the project schedule and deliverables

Picturing India's "Land of Kings" Between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and its Environs

Eighteenth-century paintings depicting the courtly culture of Udaipur have been widely described as iconic images representing the decadent "voluptuous inactivity" of Indian princes within idyllic palaces. More recently, scholars have interpreted such paintings as royal portraits constituting meaningful assertions of political and cultural power. Yet scholars have overlooked a topographical genre of painting in which Udaipur artists not only portrayed the ruler's face but also captured the charisma of Udaipur's urban space. This dissertation examines the means by which artists pictured Udaipur and its environs for multiple patrons and mixed audiences, thereby constructing the city's memory and mapping diverse territorial claims of regional kings, courtly elites, and merchants, as well as religious institutions and the emergent British Empire. Central to this account is a corpus of large-scale paintings, scrolls, drawings, and maps made in a time period of transitions in northwestern India, marked by several new courtly and non-courtly alliances, between the decentralization of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700s and the proclamation of British rule at the Ajmer Durbar in 1832. I argue that itinerant artists practiced their arts literally and metaphorically in between empires, and thus formulated their subjective, and, at times, subversive interpretations of urbanity, territoriality, and history as they circulated among various domains. By tracing the critical role played by artistic practices in the British Political Agent James Tod's political and historical creation of "Rajasthan"--the land of kings--this dissertation challenges the dominant narrative that has mediated this region's architecture, landscape, and history. Separate chapters are devoted to shifts in artistic practice, from the painting of genealogical and poetic manuscripts to large-scale topographical paintings, relating them to tropes of praise, pleasure, and commemoration in the court's literary culture, mediation of urban memory, emergent forms of mapping, and spatial practices of processions. Udaipur's artists like Ghasi, who was also a "native" artist-assistant to Tod, the region's first British colonial agent, rendered Tod's explorations in the form of courtly processions while also adapting drafted architectural drawings for the depiction of Udaipur's princely domains. I compare the works of Ghasi and Tod, among several others, with those of artists working for the Jain religious and mercantile community. These little-studied paintings suggest the paradigmatic ways in which local artists reevaluated established pictorial genres and tropes for the purpose of mapping environs in relation to the emerging presence of the British Empire and reconfiguration of regional polities, religious sects, and mercantile communities. The visualization of South Asia's urban environs has largely been understood through the lens of the nineteenth-century British colonial archive of images and maps. Systematic studies of alternate imaginings found in contemporaneous pre-colonial Indian art have been all but absent. Addressing this lacuna, this dissertation cumulatively highlights a largely unknown visual archive of images of pre-colonial Indian cities to examine how both Indian and British artists imagined their urban environs for varied patrons. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the importance of affect in understanding epistemic practices and the nature of political, cultural, and artistic transitions in the long eighteenth century in the Indian subcontinent

Extraction of contact resistance in carbon nanofiber via interconnects with varying lengths

A method to extract the contact resistance and bulk resistivity of vertically grown carbon nanofibers (CNFs) or similar one-dimensional nanostructures is described. Using a silicon-compatible process to fabricate a terrace test structure needed for the CNF length variation, the contact resistance is extracted by measuring in situ the resistances of individual CNFs with different lengths and within a small range of diameters using a nanoprober inside a scanning electron microscope. Accurate determination of contact resistances for various combinations of catalysts and underlayer metals can lead to eventual optimization of materials’ growth and device fabrication processes for CNF via interconnects