Evolving Role of Women in Terror Groups: Progression or Regression?

Historically, women have been victims to a much greater degree than perpetrators of violence. However, the 1970s witnessed the emergence of women as important protagonists in the conflicts across the world. Recent years have witnessed suicide attacks perpetrated by women suicide bombers. This growing trend of women bombers has the general public and counterterrorism specialists concerned because of its implication that women will be key players in future terrorist attacks. Women’s role in terrorist organisations have also transformed since 1970s.Women across the ideological spectrum played different roles at different times. The use of women for “soft tasks” like logistics and recruitment gradually started to change in the mid-1980s when they started playing a much more visible frontline role. A woman taking up a suicide bombing role diverges significantly and is far more dangerous than their traditional activity of playing logisticians, recruiters or even a frontline role. This paper scrutinizes this change. There are multi causal issues which drive women to join terrorism and more so as suicide bombers. Psychological, economic, political, religious and sociological factors can act as contributors to understanding the causes that drive women towards terrorism. This paper attempts to highlight the role played by women in various terrorist organisations around the world. It also tries to bring out the factors which influence women to participate in terrorist acts. It aims to bring out the above facts by analysing various groups which have women cadre. Previous studies in the same realm have focused on a particular group or a conflict whereas this paper attempts to examine female participation across multiple conflicts in different groups driven by different ideology, which provides a clear insight into the multi causal factors which are responsible for this trend. The methodology followed is a descriptive one wherein the analysis is conducted on information derived from published secondary data

On the Mass Eigenstate Composition of the 8B Neutrinos from the Sun

The present data of gallium experiments provide indirectly the only experimental limit on the fraction of $\nu_2$ mass eigenstate for the $^8$B neutrinos from the Sun. However, if to use the experimental data alone, the fraction of $\nu_2$ and, consequently, $sin^2\theta_{sol}$ still is allowed to be varied within a rather broad range. The further experimental efforts are needed to clear this point.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Corrected version, published in JCAP04(2007)00

Quantum versus Semiclassical Description of Selftrapping: Anharmonic Effects

Selftrapping has been traditionally studied on the assumption that quasiparticles interact with harmonic phonons and that this interaction is linear in the displacement of the phonon. To complement recent semiclassical studies of anharmonicity and nonlinearity in this context, we present below a fully quantum mechanical analysis of a two-site system, where the oscillator is described by a tunably anharmonic potential, with a square well with infinite walls and the harmonic potential as its extreme limits, and wherein the interaction is nonlinear in the oscillator displacement. We find that even highly anharmonic polarons behave similar to their harmonic counterparts in that selftrapping is preserved for long times in the limit of strong coupling, and that the polaronic tunneling time scale depends exponentially on the polaron binding energy. Further, in agreement, with earlier results related to harmonic polarons, the semiclassical approximation agrees with the full quantum result in the massive oscillator limit of small oscillator frequency and strong quasiparticle-oscillator coupling.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

SWAT use of gridded observations for simulating runoff – a Vietnam river basin study

Many research studies that focus on basin hydrology have applied the SWAT model using station data to simulate runoff. But over regions lacking robust station data, there is a problem of applying the model to study the hydrological responses. For some countries and remote areas, the rainfall data availability might be a constraint due to many different reasons such as lacking of technology, war time and financial limitation that lead to difficulty in constructing the runoff data. To overcome such a limitation, this research study uses some of the available globally gridded high resolution precipitation datasets to simulate runoff. Five popular gridded observation precipitation datasets: (1) Asian Precipitation Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards the Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE), (2) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), (3) Precipitation Estimation from Remote Sensing Information using Artificial Neural Network (PERSIANN), (4) Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP), (5) a modified version of Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN2) and one reanalysis dataset, National Centers for Environment Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) are used to simulate runoff over the Dak Bla river (a small tributary of the Mekong River) in Vietnam. Wherever possible, available station data are also used for comparison. Bilinear interpolation of these gridded datasets is used to input the precipitation data at the closest grid points to the station locations. Sensitivity Analysis and Auto-calibration are performed for the SWAT model. The Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) and Coefficient of Determination (<i>R</i><sup>2</sup>) indices are used to benchmark the model performance. Results indicate that the APHRODITE dataset performed very well on a daily scale simulation of discharge having a good NSE of 0.54 and <i>R</i><sup>2</sup> of 0.55, when compared to the discharge simulation using station data (0.68 and 0.71). The GPCP proved to be the next best dataset that was applied to the runoff modelling, with NSE and <i>R</i><sup>2</sup> of 0.46 and 0.51, respectively. The PERSIANN and TRMM rainfall data driven runoff did not show good agreement compared to the station data as both the NSE and <i>R</i><sup>2</sup> indices showed a low value of 0.3. GHCN2 and NCEP also did not show good correlations. The varied results by using these datasets indicate that although the gauge based and satellite-gauge merged products use some ground truth data, the different interpolation techniques and merging algorithms could also be a source of uncertainties. This entails a good understanding of the response of the hydrological model to different datasets and a quantification of the uncertainties in these datasets. Such a methodology is also useful for planning on Rainfall-runoff and even reservoir/river management both at rural and urban scales

Possibility of Recoating of Impurities on Product Kaolin during Froth Flotation - HRTEM-EDS Study

Attempts were made to remove the Fe, Ti minerals from Gujarat kaolin by SC-HGMS and ultraflotation to improve the optical properties. The removal of Fe was higher by SC-HGMS, but that of Ti was almost the same by both techni-ques. The Fe content of the products was relatively low, but the brightness was lower than the expected. A drastic improvement in brightness was observed for the SC-HGMS product compared to the ultra flotation product. One of the probable reasons for the low enhancement in brightness by flotation was thought to be recoating of the impurities on the clay surface during flotation. XPS study conducted on the flotation product ruled out the possibility of such a coating. HRTEM-EDS analyses showed that most of the titania is present in the form of anatase particles of very small size. A part of the Fe forms independent parti-cles of goethite /hematite having nano size. Rest of the Fe is found to be closer to anatase or kaolinite particles either as a part of the structure or nano sized independ-ent particles adhering to the surface and hence is not easily separated. The ultra fine grains of Fe stained ana-tase remaining in the kaolinite surface after flotation is found to have a strong pigment effect. During flotation, high shear energy is given for dispersion and conditioning which is possibly reducing the particle size to sub-micron / nano level. The dissatisfying brightness of the flotation product is attributed to the presence of these fine / colloidal impurities. Fe content in the product samples is relatively low and its influence on brightness is probably smaller than that of the Fe stained anatase. The organic matter and ferriferous smectite identified in the sample even at small percentages may also have a pig-ment effect due to their dark color and colloidal distri-bution

A diagrammatic treatment of neutrino oscillations

We present a covariant wave-packet approach to neutrino flavor transitions in vacuum. The approach is based on the technique of macroscopic Feynman diagrams describing the lepton number violating processes of production and absorption of virtual massive neutrinos at the macroscopically separated space-time regions ("source" and "detector"). Accordingly, the flavor transitions are a result of interference of the diagrams with neutrinos of different masses in the intermediate states. The statistically averaged probability of the process is representable as a multidimensional integral of the product of the factors which describe the differential flux density of massless neutrinos from the source, differential cross section of the neutrino interaction with the detector and a dimensionless factor responsible for the flavor transition. The conditions are analyzed under which the last factor can be treated as the flavor transition probability in the usual quantum-mechanical sense.Comment: 27 pages,7 figures, iopart class. Includes minor corrections made in proofs. References update