Urbanization and urban transport in india: the search for a policy

Urban population in India has increased significantly from 62 million in 1951 to 285 million in 2001 and is estimated to be around 540 million by the year 2021. In terms of percentage of total population, the urban population has gone up from 17% in 1951 to 29% in 2001 and is expected to increase up to around 37% by the year 2021. Consequently, the number and size of cities have also increased significantly. Although circumstances differ considerably across cities in India, certain basic trends which determine transport demand (such as substantial increase in urban population, household incomes, and industrial and commercial activities) are the same. These changes have placed heavy demands on urban transport systems, demand that many Indian cities have been unable to meet. This paper attempts to highlight the need for a cogent urban transport policy without which there will be ad hoc interventions. Such interventions, apart from not adding up to a comprehensive approach, will result in greater confusion. Furthermore, it emphasizes that if there is no worthwhile public transport, it will still need to be reinvented to promote a better quality of life. The need of the hour is formulation of an urban transport strategy that is both pragmatic and holistic in its approach

A Study on Surgical Site Infections in Emergency Non-Traumatic Abdominal Operations

SUMMARY: Surgical Site Infections (SSIs), previously called post operative wound infections, result from bacterial contamination during or after a surgical procedure. The risk of infection is greater in all categories if surgery is performed as an emergency. Surgical site infection causes considerable morbidity, mortality and high cost to the health care system and is becoming increasingly important in medicolegal aspects. A few studies were conducted in our country on such an important topic. Further research is necessary to identify the important factors responsible for high infection rate following emergency nontraumatic abdominal operations in our country. In this study it had been tried to find out the common organisms responsible for surgical site infections following emergency nontraumatic abdominal operations. In addition, the sensitivity patterns of the microorganisms were ascertained. Further, factors responsible for infection were determined, that will be helpful to prevent infection in future during the similar types of surgery. General objective of the study was to determine the factors responsible for surgical site infections following emergency nontraumatic abdominal operations, which will be helpful in reducing the rate of surgical site infection. This descriptive type of study was conducted in Surgery dept, Madras Medical College and Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, chennai, from 1 may, 2014 to 30 september, 2014. However, 140 cases having emergency nontraumatic abdominal operations were selected purposively. Patients with trauma were excluded from the study. Out of 140 abdominal operations 60 (42.86 %) were for acute appendicitis, while 30 (21.43%) for small intestinal obstruction, 19 (13.57%) for ileal perforation, 15 (10.71%) for duodenal ulcer perforation, 12 (8.57%) for gangrenous and / ruptured appendix and 2 (1.43%) each for volvulus of sigmoid colon and obstructed inguinal hernia. It was revealed that, overall surgical site infection rate was 17.14 per cent. It was observed that among the various host factors studied role played by age, sex, and educational status of the patients were not statistically significant, but presence of co-morbidity played a significant role in causing SSI. Among the perioperative / environmental factors category of operations, types of incisions, experience of surgeons and delay to initiate operation did not played significant role, but duration of operation and degree of wound contamination played statistically significant role. In respect of post operative wound discharge and incriminated organisms it was found that most of the SSIs (11, 45.83 %) were due to Escherischia Coli, while 9 (37.50 %) infections were due to Staph. Aureus and 2 (8.33 %) each were due to Klebsiella Pneumonae and Pseudomonus Aeruginosa. It was revealed that multiple host factors (e.g. presence of co-morbidity including jaundice, diabetes, COPD, malnutrition, obesity etc.), environmental factors (e.g. duration of exposure of the wounds to the environment and degree of wound contamination) and various micro-organisms (including E. Coli, S. Aureus, Klebsiella and pseudomonus) were responsible for surgical site infections. So, to prevent SSI emphasis should be given to all the important factors responsible for infection. CONCLUSION: This descriptive type of study was conducted in Institute of General Surgery, Madras Medical College and Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, chennai, from 1 may, 2014 to 30 september, 2014. It can be concluded from the findings of the study that micro-organisms that are normal inhabitants of our body are mainly responsible for surgical site infection (SSI). Various host factors like malnutrition, obesity, patients knowledge about hygiene, presence of co-morbidity etc. coupled with environmental factors such as condition of the wounds, delay to initiate operation, duration of operation, prolonged exposure of peritoneal cavity to environment, prophylactic use of antibiotics and factors associated with surgery like type of incision, type of operation and experience of operating surgeon greatly contribute to occurrences of SSI. So, quality of surgical care including immediate assessment of patients, resuscitative measures, adequate preparation of patients and aseptic environment are important for control of SSI. Moreover in absence of highly advanced surgical amenities, preoperative resuscitative units, modern operation theatre facilities and sophisticated sterilization procedure it is necessary to use prophylactic antibiotics to encounter the various types of micro-organisms responsible for surgical site infection, particularly E. Coli and Staph. Aureus

Economical Task Scheduling Algorithm for Grid Computing Systems

Task duplication is an effective scheduling technique for reducing the response time of workflow applications in dynamic grid computing systems. Task duplication based scheduling algorithms generate shorter schedules without sacrificing efficiency but leave the computing resources over consumed due to the heavily duplications. In this paper, we try to minimize the duplications of tasks from the schedule obtained using an effective duplication based scheduling heuristic without affecting the overall schedule length (makespan) of grid application. Here, we suggested an economical duplication based intelligent scheduling heuristic called economical duplication scheduling in grid (EDS-G). The simulation results show that EDS-G algorithm generates better schedule with lesser number of duplications and remarkably less resource consumption as compared with HLD, LDBS in the simulated heterogeneous grid computing environments

Motion Detection in Low Resolution Grayscale Videos Using Fast Normalized Cross Correrelation on GP-GPU

Motion estimation (ME) has been widely used in many computer vision applications, such as object tracking, object detection, pattern recognition and video compression. The most popular block based similarity measures are the sum of absolute differences (SAD), the sum of squared differences (SSD) and the normalized cross correlation (NCC). Similarity measure obtained using NCC is more robust under varying illumination changes as compared to SAD and SSD. However NCC is computationally expensive and application of NCC using full or exhaustive search method further increases required computational time. Relatively efficient way of calculating the NCC is to pre-compute sum-tables to perform the normalization referred to as fast NCC (FCC). In this paper we propose real time implementation of full search FCC algorithm applied to gray scale videos using NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). We present fine-grained optimization techniques for fully exploiting computational capacity of CUDA. Novel parallelization strategies adopted for extracting data parallelism substantially reduce computational time of exhaustive FCC. We show that by efficient utilization of global, shared and texture memories available on CUDA, we can obtain the speedup of the order of 10x as compared to the sequential implementation of FCC

Determination of Copper, Total Chromium and Silver in Impregnated Carbon

Carbon samples were impregnated with ammonical solutions of silver salt alone and in combination with Cu and Cr salts. The impregnated samples were characterised for Cu, total Cr and Ag. Copper was extracted as CuCl/sub 2/ using concentrated HCl and Cr with NaOH. Silver was extracted from impregnated carbon using HNO3 and sodium thiosulphate (Na/sub 2/S/sub 2/O/sub 3/-5H/sub 2/0) and ashed impregnated carbons using aqua regia. The extracted metals in their solutions were quantitatively determined by titrimetric method and atomic absorption spectroscopy. The results were within acceptable limits of error. Sodium thiosulphate is recommended for extraction of Ag, as it accomplishes complete leaching of Ag faster than the other extracting agents

Analysis on DV-Hop Algorithm and its variants by considering threshold

Wireless Sensor networks is a network of lowpriced, small sized and energy constraint sensor nodes where each sensor node is programmed to sense the events and send it to the Base station using multi-hop communication. In almost all applications of Wireless Sensor Networks, event detection information is required along with the location of the event. Thus, to find the location of event, node localization plays an important role. Many researchers have put tremendous efforts in designing localization algorithms. In the literature, it is confirmed that DV-Hop algorithm and its variants are the most suitable range-free based algorithms for node localization, due to its cost effectiveness, simplicity and feasibility for medium to large scale networks, but these algorithms consume very high energy. The DV-Hop algorithm works in three phases. The first phase allows all the nodes to get their distance from few localized nodes called anchors in terms of hop. The hop is the count of neighboring nodes between two nodes. Then in second phase, the anchor nodes find out their approximate distances from every node. The third phase computes the location of node using the information obtained from first two phases and by applying trilateration method. The high energy is consumed due to transmission of large number of packets in the first two phases by anchor nodes. In order to reduce communication overhead of the first two phase of DV-Hop, an improved DV-Hop is proposed that considers only k-hop transmission of the anchor packet which reduces the communication overheads to the large extent. Simulation experiments and results prove that the proposed method reduces the energy consumption by approximately 50% compare to the traditional DV-Hop algorithm