Multidimensional Poverty and Child Survival in India

Background: Though the concept of multidimensional poverty has been acknowledged cutting across the disciplines (among economists, public health professionals, development thinkers, social scientists, policy makers and international organizations) and included in the development agenda, its measurement and application are still limited. Objectives and Methodology: Using unit data from the National Family and Health Survey 3, India, this paper measures poverty in multidimensional space and examine the linkages of multidimensional poverty with child survival. The multidimensional poverty is measured in the dimension of knowledge, health and wealth and the child survival is measured with respect to infant mortality and under-five mortality. Descriptive statistics, principal component analyses and the life table methods are used in the analyses. Results: The estimates of multidimensional poverty are robust and the inter-state differentials are large. While infant mortality rate and under-five mortality rate are disproportionately higher among the abject poor compared to the nonpoor, there are no significant differences in child survival among educationally, economically and health poor at the national level. State pattern in child survival among the education, economical and health poor are mixed. Conclusion: Use of multidimensional poverty measures help to identify abject poor who are unlikely to come out of poverty trap. The child survival is significantly lower among abject poor compared to moderate poor and non-poor. We urge t

Role of H- and D- MATE-Type Transporters from Multidrug Resistant Clinical Isolates of Vibrio fluvialis in Conferring Fluoroquinolone Resistance

Background: The study seeks to understand the role of efflux pumps in multidrug resistance displayed by the clinical isolates of Vibrio fluvialis, a pathogen known to cause cholera-like diarrhoea. Methodology: Two putative MATE family efflux pumps (H- and D-type) were PCR amplified from clinical isolates of V. fluvialis obtained from Kolkata, India, in 2006 and sequenced. Bioinformatic analysis of these proteins was done to predict protein structures. Subsequently, the genes were cloned and expressed in a drug hypersusceptible Escherichia coli strain KAM32 using the vector pBR322. The recombinant clones were tested for the functionality of the efflux pump proteins by MIC determination and drug transport assays using fluorimeter. Results: The sequences of the genes were found to be around 99 % identical to their counterparts in V. cholerae. Protein structure predicting servers TMHMM and I-TASSER depicted ten-twelve membrane helical structures for both type of pumps. Real time PCR showed that these genes were expressed in the native V. fluvialis isolates. In the drug transport assays, the V. fluvialis clinical isolates as well as recombinant E. coli harbouring the efflux pump genes showed the energydependent and sodium ion-dependent drug transport activity. KAM32 cells harbouring the recombinant plasmids showed elevated MIC to the fluoroquinolones, norfloxacin and ciprofloxacin but H-type pumps VCH and VFH from V. cholerae and V. fluvialis respectively, showed decreased MIC to aminoglycosides like gentamicin, kanamycin and streptomycin. Decrease i

Minimization of phonon-tunneling dissipation in mechanical resonators

Micro- and nanoscale mechanical resonators have recently emerged as ubiquitous devices for use in advanced technological applications, for example in mobile communications and inertial sensors, and as novel tools for fundamental scientific endeavors. Their performance is in many cases limited by the deleterious effects of mechanical damping. Here, we report a significant advancement towards understanding and controlling support-induced losses in generic mechanical resonators. We begin by introducing an efficient numerical solver, based on the "phonon-tunneling" approach, capable of predicting the design-limited damping of high-quality mechanical resonators. Further, through careful device engineering, we isolate support-induced losses and perform the first rigorous experimental test of the strong geometric dependence of this loss mechanism. Our results are in excellent agreement with theory, demonstrating the predictive power of our approach. In combination with recent progress on complementary dissipation mechanisms, our phonon-tunneling solver represents a major step towards accurate prediction of the mechanical quality factor.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Neural processing of criticism and positive comments from relatives in individuals with schizotypal personality traits

Objectives. High negative expressed emotion by family members towards schizophrenia patients increases the risk of subsequent relapse. The study aimed to determine whether individuals with high schizotypy (HS) and low schizotypy (LS) would differ in activation of brain areas involved in cognitive control when listening to relative criticism

Web-based monitoring tools for Resistive Plate Chambers in the CMS experiment at CERN

The Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC) are used in the CMS experiment at the trigger level and also in the standard offline muon reconstruction. In order to guarantee the quality of the data collected and to monitor online the detector performance, a set of tools has been developed in CMS which is heavily used in the RPC system. The Web-based monitoring (WBM) is a set of java servlets that allows users to check the performance of the hardware during data taking, providing distributions and history plots of all the parameters. The functionalities of the RPC WBM monitoring tools are presented along with studies of the detector performance as a function of growing luminosity and environmental conditions that are tracked over time

Radiation background with the CMS RPCs at the LHC

The Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) are employed in the CMS Experiment at the LHC as dedicated trigger system both in the barrel and in the endcap. This article presents results of the radiation background measurements performed with the 2011 and 2012 proton-proton collision data collected by CMS. Emphasis is given to the measurements of the background distribution inside the RPCs. The expected background rates during the future running of the LHC are estimated both from extrapolated measurements and from simulation