Geographies that Make Resistance”: Remapping the Politics of Gender and Place in Uttarakhand, India

By examining women’s active participation in a range of social movements over many decades in Uttarakhand Himalayas, the paper first explores what is it about this place that has produced such vibrant interventions from rural women and produced a gendered geography of resistance. It then focuses on the regional autonomy movement that shook the region in the nineties. Taking women’s participation seriously, the paper argues that the demand for a separate state and assertion of a regional identity even though was enmeshed in the messy electoral and reservation politics of caste, women’s large-scale participation and shifting support suggests that women protestors were critical in connecting the dots of their marginalization and helped broaden the scope of the movement by incorporating wide range of issues fueled not by any traditional values but by aspirations and political claims to modernity and regional identity. In moving away from stagnant and narrow reading of women’s participation in social movements, the paper argues that it is important to recognize women’s actions, like all actions, are not pre-constituted or fixed but they are contingent upon and guided by a range of impulses, sometimes contradictory and conservative, but nonetheless historically and spatially constituted

Community Effort for Drinking Water Management near India- China border at Jamak Village district Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand, India

In Uttarakhand, drinking water is a major problem and a burning issue for the last decade. Many natural springs that dotted the hillside have been damaged due to the climate conditions and other unplanned or illegal activities such as deforestation and human-made forest fires have affected spring catchments, resulting in reduced discharge from springs. To tackle this major problem of drinking water security, the community of mountain village Jamak, district Uttarkashi came together for community-led drinking water supply by adopting participatory planning and ownership. The village community’s participation and ownership improved the village’s drinking water situation, and villagers are now getting 70 liter of water per person per day. The supplied water is safe for drinking; this has reduced women’s struggle, minimized water-borne diseases, and increased the village community’s level of attention to revive mountain water spring. The genuine participation in critical stages of water supply and ownership of the Water Management Committee in the management of water supply is most significant, and this is also gaining pace for proper functioning of the water supply system

Plant RNA-binding proteins as key players in abiotic stress physiology

Abiotic stress has a major effect on global crop production. Hence, plants have evolved and developed several response mechanisms to survive and grow under abiotic stresses. Plant cells can sense and respond to changes in different environmental stresses due to the specific modifications observed in gene expression, metabolism, and physiology. Only a few recognized sensors have been found due to the difficulty of functional redundancy in genes that code for sensor proteins. A defect in one gene causes no remarkable phenotypic changes in stress responses. Recent research has identified crucial RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) important for stimulus-specific responses. RBPs play a crucial part in plants’ growth and development, post-transcriptional gene regulation, and RNA metabolism induced during stress responses. Among the currently identified over 200 different RBPs, the majority of which are plant-specific and carry out plant-specific functions. As an essential component of plants’ adaptive process in different environmental conditions, RBPs regulate the following processes: RNA stability, RNA export, pre-mRNA splicing, polyadenylation, and chromatin modification. Plants have also developed different defense responses or molecular mechanisms to combat stress via genotypic and phenotypic expressions. With a unique understanding of RBPs in other organisms, RBPs functions in a plant are still limited. Hence, this review discusses the latest developments in RBPs function during the development and growth of plants, primarily under abiotic stress circumstances

Augmentation Methods on Monophonic Audio for Instrument Classification in Polyphonic Music

Instrument classification is one of the fields in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) that has attracted a lot of research interest. However, the majority of that is dealing with monophonic music, while efforts on polyphonic material mainly focus on predominant instrument recognition. In this paper, we propose an approach for instrument classification in polyphonic music from purely monophonic data, that involves performing data augmentation by mixing different audio segments. A variety of data augmentation techniques focusing on different sonic aspects, such as overlaying audio segments of the same genre, as well as pitch and tempo-based synchronization, are explored. We utilize Convolutional Neural Networks for the classification task, comparing shallow to deep network architectures. We further investigate the usage of a combination of the above classifiers, each trained on a single augmented dataset. An ensemble of VGG-like classifiers, trained on non-augmented, pitch-synchronized, tempo-synchronized and genre-similar excerpts, respectively, yields the best results, achieving slightly above 80% in terms of label ranking average precision (LRAP) in the IRMAS test set.ruments in over 2300 testing tracks

Testosterone as the marker of severity of CAD in middle aged Males

OBJECTIVES : 1. To correlate serum testosterone levels in middle aged males with angiographic severity and extent of coronary artery disease. 2. To correlate serum testosterone witha) Flow mediated dilation of brachial artery (BAFMD) b) Clinical profile and risk factors of CAD. METHODS : This prospective cross sectional study included 92 consecutive middle aged male patients admitted for coronary angiogram, in our Department. History and physical examination pertaining to cardiovascular risk factors and cardiovascular system was performed. Patients underwent blood tests, ECG, chest x-ray and echocardiography. Serum total testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin, free and bioavailable testosterone levels were determined. Coronary angiography was done. Severity of CAD was scored according to GENSINI angiographic score. Additionally BAFMD was determined. The analysis was done on the total population as a single group and also after the division of the population into two groups: Normal CAG (controls) and CAD (cases). Then the patients with CAD were further divided into 3 subgroups according to the Gensini scores (Low score : 54) and analysed. RESULTS : This study demonstrated a statistically significant negative correlation between severity of CAD and serum total, free and bioavailable testosterone levels. This study also showed that levels of total, free and bioavailable testosterone correlated positively with BAFMD % in a strong and statistically significant manner. The correlation between testosterone levels and traditional coronary risk factors was also negative but statistically insignificant except for fasting and post prandial sugars. In the CAD group, levels of total, free and bioavailable testosterone varied significantly in the 3 subgroups. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that even after adjusting for traditional risk factors, low serum testosterone was independently associated with severity of CAD. Also after adjusting for all coronary risk factors, low serum testosterone was associated with BAFMD % i.e. endothelial function independently. CONCLUSION : This study showed that there is a statistically significant negative correlation between low serum total, free and bioavailable testosterone and severity of coronary artery disease. There is also a positive correlation between the testosterone levels and BAFMD %- a marker of endothelial function. The correlation between various coronary risk factors and serum testosterone was also found out to be negative. This study showed that serum testosterone is independent risk factor for CAD. It has also shown that testosterone is positively associated with endothelial function independently

Patterns of lipid profile abnormalities in hypertensive patients and normotensive subjects: a cross-sectional observational study

Background: It is a well-known fact that hypertension and altered lipid profile or dyslipidaemia are leading risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. The coexistence of these two conditions has remained an interesting matter, among cardiologists and researchers alike. In this study, we analysed the serum lipid patterns of hypertensive patients and normotensive control subjects.Methods: This cross-sectional observational study was conducted in a tertiary healthcare and teaching center of Northwestern India during the period of 2010 and 2011. The study comprised of 100 hypertensive patients and 100 normotensive control subjects. Data were collected regarding demographic details, past medical/drug history and lipid profile including total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), low density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL).Results: A total of 200 subjects with the age above 20 years were enrolled in the study. The mean BMI in hypertensive patients (24.14±2.15 kg/m2) was significantly higher than normotensive subjects (22.60±2.62 kg/m2) (p<0.05). When we compared the mean of TC and TG among the hypertensive patients and normotensive subjects, highly significant differences were obtained (p<0.001). The significant decline in mean HDL level was observed in hypertensive patients than normotensive subjects (40.41±4.57 versus 44.64±5.97, p<0.005).Conclusions: The dyslipidaemia has been more evident among hypertensive patients. Hence, the measurement of blood pressure and lipid profile are of great importance to prevent cardiovascular diseases, stroke and other comorbidities