Modeling systems thinking in action among higher education leaders with fuzzy multi-criteria decision making

The college and university systems are more complex and required persistent approach towards adoption and transformation. Highly vulnerable environment portrays the need to visualize the regular and strategic issues with the larger perspectives as a whole and develop a model which is more focused towards sustainability and reformation. The current study has attempted to conceptualize systems thinking in action model which consists of four stages of action cycle; diagnosis and analysis, modeling, intervention and review and lessons learned. This is attempting to evaluate the systems thinking among the educational leaders in higher education in Thailand through the fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method. The study has found that leaders are adopting systems thinking in the moderate level, however, the first three stages are found less in practice and more in perceived importance. The study found that there is higher need of calling for collaborative, cooperative and participation of stakeholders’ involvement. The study has further given managerial implications

AUDIO WATERMARKING WITH ANGLE QUANTIZATION BASED ON DISCRETE WAVELET TRANSFORM AND SINGULAR VALUE DECOMPOSITION

An audio watermark is a unique electronic identifier embedded in an audio signal, typically used to identify ownership of copyright. Proposed work is a new method of audio watermark hiding inside another bigger cover standard audio cover. The method includes ‘harr’ wavelet based Discrete Wavelet Transform decomposition of frequencies hence the audio samples of watermark gets hidden only those parts of cover audio where human ears are less sensible according to Human Auditory System. Proposed method also includes the Singular Value Decomposition, which is required for making our method robust against the various communication of processing attacks like compression, filtering, fading or noise addition. Proposed work is also using the concept of angular modulation which initially modifies the audio watermark in to provide extra security and also extra robustness in communication. The design is been develop on MATLAB 2013b version and verification of design o the same.&nbsp

Student’s Perceived Level and Teachers’ Teaching Strategies of Higher Order Thinking Skills; A Study on Higher Educational Institutions in Thailand

Higher order thinking skills (HOTS) has portrayed immense industry demand and the major goal of educational institution in imparting education is to inculcate higher order thinking skills. This compiles and mandate the institutions and instructor to develop the higher order thinking skills among students in order to prepare them for effective performance and meet the employers’ expectations (Heong at all,2011). Role of teaching strategies plays vital role in such inculcation where students can analyze, interpret, reason out, synthesize, evaluate and create. The current study signifies the perceptual understanding of higher order thinking skills of the graduate passing through the higher educational institutions in Thailand. The study also contributes to the literature with bridging the conceptual gap with examining the relationship between Teachers’ professional components with teaching strategy of higher order thinking skills. The study has explored the perceived level of HOTS among students and its difference between genders. It has also attempted to know the teaching strategies for the inculcation of HOTS being practiced in Thailand and its relations with teachers’ professional component such as designation, educational qualifications, teaching experience, research experience and training and workshop exposure. The research participants into the study are 126 teachers and 659 students. This incorporates survey within various courses of leading International higher educational institutions and universities in Bangkok. Two survey instruments was employed; the first survey was administered on teachers intending to measure the teaching strategies to impart higher order thinking skills and teacher’s professional component. The second; instrument has undertaken the Mazaro’s rubric for specific task and situation to assess the perceived level of higher order thinking skills among students. The finding of the study revealed that students have shown medium level of higher order thinking skills. The teachers are using more knowledge development and application strategies. The teachers’ professional components such as designation, teaching experience and qualification are significantly correlated with strategies used for imparting higher order thinking skills. Based on the observation study has furnished suggested measures and future dimensions of the research. Key words: Higher order thinking skills, Teaching Strategies, Teacher’s Professional component

First Trimester Screening by Ultrasonographic Markers For Prediction of Preeclampsia

Aim- To correlate association of ultrasonographic markers in antenatal patients with subsequent development of preeclampsia Material Method - 131 pregnant women, in first trimester of pregnancy were investigated for their uterine artery Doppler and  placental volume. These patients were followed up till term for the development of preeclampsia. Results: Out of 131 antenatal cases 20.61% developed preeclampsia. Uterine artery Pulsatility index >95th percentile(>2.3) with mean 2.08±0.43(p value 0.0001) predicted pre eclampsia with sensitivity of 51.85% with specificity of 95.19%. Similarly Resistance index of Uterine artery >95th  percentile(>0.8) with mean 0.771±0.084(p value 0.018) predicted pre eclampsia with sensitivity of 48.15% and specificity of 87.50% . Placental Quotient <10th percentile (<0.81) with mean 0.89 (p value 0.0001)predicted pre eclampsia with sensitivity of 40.74% and specificity of 96%.On combining all three ultrasonographic parameters the sensitivity for prediction of preeclampsia was increased to 70.37% with specificity of 86.54%  with PPV of 36.74% % and NPV of 96.34% %. Conclusion: Maternal ultrasonographic markers like Uterine artery PI, RI, Placental Quotient levels vary between normal pregnancies and those that subsequently developed preeclampsia. Thus our study concludes that  first trimester screening with ultrasonographic markershave high sensitivity, specificity and negative predictive value in detection of preeclampsia

Effect of soil on microbial diversity of flora and fauna in ecosystem

Soil is a complex and dynamic biological system. We are limited in the determination of microbial mediated reactions because present assays for determining the overall rate of entire metabolic processes (such as respiration) or specific enzyme activities (such as urease, protease and phosphomonoesterase activity) do not allow any identification of the microbial species directly involved in the measured processes. The central problem posed by the link between microbial diversity and soil function is to understand the relations between genetic diversity and community structure and between community structure and function. Soil seems to be characterized by a redundancy of functions; for example, no relationship has been shown to exist between microbial diversity and decomposition of organic matter. Generally, a reduction in any group of species has little effect on overall processes in soil because other microorganisms can take on its function

SALAD: Source-free Active Label-Agnostic Domain Adaptation for Classification, Segmentation and Detection

We present a novel method, SALAD, for the challenging vision task of adapting a pre-trained "source" domain network to a "target" domain, with a small budget for annotation in the "target" domain and a shift in the label space. Further, the task assumes that the source data is not available for adaptation, due to privacy concerns or otherwise. We postulate that such systems need to jointly optimize the dual task of (i) selecting fixed number of samples from the target domain for annotation and (ii) transfer of knowledge from the pre-trained network to the target domain. To do this, SALAD consists of a novel Guided Attention Transfer Network (GATN) and an active learning function, HAL. The GATN enables feature distillation from pre-trained network to the target network, complemented with the target samples mined by HAL using transfer-ability and uncertainty criteria. SALAD has three key benefits: (i) it is task-agnostic, and can be applied across various visual tasks such as classification, segmentation and detection; (ii) it can handle shifts in output label space from the pre-trained source network to the target domain; (iii) it does not require access to source data for adaptation. We conduct extensive experiments across 3 visual tasks, viz. digits classification (MNIST, SVHN, VISDA), synthetic (GTA5) to real (CityScapes) image segmentation, and document layout detection (PubLayNet to DSSE). We show that our source-free approach, SALAD, results in an improvement of 0.5%-31.3%(across datasets and tasks) over prior adaptation methods that assume access to large amounts of annotated source data for adaptation

Caste, courts and business

This study illustrates how quality of contract enforcement institutions affects decision-making of entrepreneurs. Business enterprises are enabled to flourish through improvements in the role of legal institutions in contract writing. The paper focuses on the impact of the judiciary in India in facilitating new small and medium entrepreneurs especially those from disadvantaged sections of the society. In 2013 approximately 30 million cases were pending in different courts in India. On average it takes 15 years for a civil case to be resolved. Reforms in civil court procedure can lead to lower breach of contract, higher access to capital and building of new capacity

A prospective randomized controlled trial to study the effect of prenatal yoga on maternal weight gain and psychological stress in pregnancy and its association with pregnancy outcomes

Background: Objective of study was to evaluate the effect of prenatal yoga on maternal gestational weight gain (GWG) and psychological stress in pregnancy (PSS) and to evaluate the effect of prenatal yoga on labour outcomes. Methods: Prospective randomized controlled trial conducted at AIIMS, New Delhi between May 2020-December 2021. Sixty women each were recruited in the yoga and control group. Women in the yoga group attended 60 minutes supervised yoga sessions followed by self-sessions. Women in the control group received routine antenatal care along with 30 minutes per day of walking and dietary counselling. The assessment was done for the weight(WT), dietary intake (D) and perceived stress score (PSS) at the time of recruitment (WT1, D1, PSS1), 28 weeks (WT2, D2, PSS2) and 36 weeks (WT3, D3, PSS3) and the results were then compared. Results: At recruitment all the parameters in both groups were comparable. The difference in mean and difference in percentage in terms of gestational weight gain (GWG) at recruitment and at 36 weeks was statistically significant (p-value=0.027). The per cent weight gain in the Yoga group was significantly low (p value=0.048). The control group experienced more amount of stress both at 28 weeks (p-value = 0.021) and 36 weeks (p-value <0.0001). The difference in mean and difference in percentage in terms of PSS1 and PSS2 (p-value=0.011), PSS2 and PSS3 (p-value=0.0001) PSS1 and PSS 3 (p-value=0.0001). Labour outcomes were comparable between both groups. Conclusions: Yoga helps in controlling excessive GWG and helps prevent many adverse feto-maternal outcomes associated with obesity