Formally Verified Verifiable Electronic Voting Scheme

Since the introduction of secret ballots in Victoria, Australia in 1855, paper (ballots) are widely used around the world to record the preferences of eligible voters. Paper ballots provide three important ingredients: correctness, privacy, and verifiability. However, the paper ballot election brings various other challenges, e.g. it is slow for large democracies like India, error prone for complex voting method like single transferable vote, and poses operational challenges for large countries like Australia. In order to solve these problems and various others, many countries are adopting electronic voting. However, electronic voting has a whole new set of problems. In most cases, the software programs used to conduct the election have numerous problems, including, but not limited to, counting bugs, ballot identification, etc. Moreover, these software programs are treated as commercial in confidence and are not allowed to be inspected by members of the public. As a consequence, the result produced by these software programs can not be substantiated. In this thesis, we address the three main concerns posed by electronic voting, i.e. correctness, privacy, and verifiability. We address the correctness concern by using theorem prover to implement the vote counting algorithm, privacy concern by using cryptography, and verifiability concern by generating a independently checkable scrutiny sheet (certificate). Our work has been carried out in the Coq theorem prover

Effectiveness of supportive educational intervention on knowledge, self-care behavior, disease activity and health status among arthritis patients

Background: Arthritis is the group of conditions affecting the joints and typically causes swelling, pain and stiffness. Osteoarthritis & rheumatoid arthritis are the most common type of arthritis. Patient education should lead not only to changes in knowledge, but also to changes in behavior and in health status. Objective of the study was to assess effectiveness of supportive educational intervention on knowledge, self-care behaviour, disease activity and health status among arthritis patients.Methods: Pre-experimental, one group pre-test post-test research design (O1 × O2) was used. Total 20 patients of osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis were selected for the study by purposive sampling technique.Results: There was very high statistical significant difference in the mean pre-test and post test score of knowledge, self-care behavior, disease activity and health status among arthritis patients at p value was 0.001 level of significance. The study found significant fair correlation between knowledge gain score and self-care behaviour gain score, self-care behaviour gain score and reduction of disease activity and self-care behaviour gain score and health status at p value was 0.01 level of significance.Conclusions: Study concludes that supportive educational intervention is effective to enhance knowledge, self-care behaviour & health status among arthritis patients

Replacement of concentrate mixture with different levels of water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) in basal diet on feed intake and production performance of piglets

An experiment was conducted on weaned piglets at Piggery Research Unit of Regional Agricultural Research Station (RARS), Tarahara, Sunsari from 12 September to 4 December 2019 for 84 days after adjustment period of seven days. Twenty piglets after weaning of 4-6 months age were allocated into four treatments each with 5 replications by using Completely Randomized Design. Four type of experimental diets were composed for experimental piglets. Piglets of T1 (control) group were provided adlib concentrate mixture, 95% concentrate feed + 5% water hyacinth (WH) were given to T2 group, 90% concentrate feed + 10 WH were offered to T3 group and piglets of T4 group were fed 85% concentrate feed + 15% WH as per their daily requirement. Feed and water hyacinth intake were recorded daily and body weight gain was measured once a week. Experiment revealed that feed and WH intake was highly significant (p<0.001) among treatment groups. Highest total body weight gain was obtained in control group (T1) (37.66 kg) followed by T3 (34.91 kg) and T2 (34.25 kg) which was non-significant among diet groups. Similarly, highest average daily gain was observed higher for T1 (control) group (448 g /day) followed by T3 and T2 group (415.59 and 407.73 g/day, respectively). Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) was observed almost similar in all treatment groups (1:2 kg). Experiment suggested that concentrate mixture can be safely replaced with WH up to 15% without any adverse effect on body weight gain

Acceptance of COVID-19 Vaccination Among Health Care Workers in India

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 has been spread almost all over the world in the last two years, including in India. Vaccines are a critical tool in the battle against COVID-19, and India has flagged the largest vaccination drive on 16 January 2021. Although public acceptance was varying, which can lead to non-acceptance. Aim & Objective: To estimate an acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine and its associated factors. Settings and Design: An analytical cross-sectional study among health care workers in India   Methods & Material: It was conducted using a validated, self-administrated online survey questionnaire, and data were analyzed using SPSS 23 version. The outcome variable was healthcare workers’ acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccine. Results: A total of 450 HCWs participated, including 205(45.6%) women and 245(54.4%) men. A total of 270 (60%) subjects will accept vaccines, while 33.3% were unwilling to accept and wait for vaccines. Male gender (OR=3.14), being married and experienced (OR=11.49), vaccine effectiveness (OR=6.4), vaccine safety (OR=3.4), and past history (OR=2.28) were significantly associated. On applying logistic regression for associated factors, gender (B= -1.145, S.E.= 0.200, Wald 32.748), being married (B= -1.482, S.E.= 0.216, Wald 46.937), for experienced (B= -0.865, S.E.= 0.200, effectiveness (B= -1.856, S.E.= 0.245, Wald 57.431), Safety (B= -1.224, S.E.= 0.202, Wald 36.633) and past history (B= -0.357, S.E.= 0.248, Wald 2.071) found significant. Recommendation: Proper information is crucial and healthcare workers’ attitudes about vaccines are an important factor for acceptance and recommendation of the vaccine to the public for population-wide coverage

Voltage stability index and APFC for performance improvement of modern power systems with intense renewables

In this study, a newly developed amalgam power flow controller (APFC) is used for better controllability and voltage stability enhancement of modern power system with deep renewable penetration. A new voltage stability index is proposed to determine the potential site of APFC and then Grey Wolf optimisation based on fuzzy logic is adopted to determine the optimal parameter settings of the APFC. A quarter cosine and exponential fuzzy membership function have been used to find out membership value of diverse objectives. The multi-objective problem is formulated considering three different objectives of conflicting nature. The proposed optimisation framework is implemented on an IEEE benchmark system of 30 buses for different cases. The comparison of simulation results reveals the effectiveness of the proposed model