An Exploratory Study of Factors affecting MBA Students Attitude towards Learning via Case Study Pedagogy: Insights from Advertising Literature

Case based pedagogy has become popular in most business schools today, since the pioneering efforts made by Harvard Business School, several decades ago. Although the case method approach stands firmly on grounds its effectiveness in ‘simulating reality of the business world’ in the classroom, yet it has its own limitations and cannot be used in all learning situations This article delves into both sides of the debate on the efficacy of case method for learning and through an exploratory study, models the attitude of MBA students towards the perceived learning aspects of the pedagogy. The premise of our beliefs-only attitude model rests on the conceptual analogy between a case study and an advertisement message as two similar forms of communication technology. Drawing heavily from the insights available in the advertising literature, the article suggests several hypotheses for future empirical validation.

Impact of Merger of Housing Development Finance Corporation Bank and Centurion Bank of Punjab on Shareholder Value Management

This study analyzes the impact of merger on the shareholder’s wealth through Economic Value Added (EVA) and Market Value Added (MVA) in Indian Banking Industry. The paper explains the major strategic reasons and various challenges of the high profile mergers of Indian Banking Industry. The paper has attempted to find out the impact of the merger on the acquirer bank’s profitability ratio, on its different variables like EVA, MVA, etc. This study also explores the fact that there is very little impact of the sub- prime crisis on the merger outcomes. Key Words: EVA (Economic Value Added), MVA (Market Value Added), Profitability Ratios, Sub Prime Crisi

Measuring Technical Efficiency of Indian Banking Sector in Post Subprime Crises Scenario: A Non Parametric Frontier Based Approach

This study gives a comparative analysis of the technical efficiency of top Indian banks during 2007-2011. This period is characterized by far reaching experience of sub-prime crisis (2008-2009) and its impact on Indian banking sector. Efficiency assessment of Indian banking sector has become highly imperative now a days because of intense competition, changing reforms, and instability in banking environment. This study uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a non parametric linear programming based technique, for evaluating the relative efficiency of top public, private and foreign banks in India. The present paper, based on empirical analysis, shows that the levels of input and output variables in efficiency measurement have changed significantly during this period and banks have improved their relative efficiency score over the period of time. Results support the fact that after sub-prime crisis, Advances (A) and Investments (I) are getting importance as output variables, while Operating Costs (OC), Fixed Assets (FA) and Capital (C) are considered as important input variables. This study also recommends that Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) could be a suitable tool for measuring relative efficiency score of Indian banking sector. Key words: Technical Efficiency, Sub Prime Crisis Period, Non Parametric Approach, Data Envelopment Analysis

The Basic Cardiovascular Responses to Postural Changes, Exercise, and Cold Pressor Test: Do They Vary in Accordance with the Dual Constitutional Types of Ayurveda?

According to Ayurveda, the native Indian system of healthcare, three Doshas, namely, Vata, Pitta, and Kapha, are the basic mutually reciprocal mechanisms that are responsible for the maintenance of homeostasis in human beings. Ayurveda classifies entire human population into seven constitutional types (Prakriti), based on the dominance of any single or a combination of two or three Doshas. Considering the fact that, in the recent past there have been several studies that have proposed some important genetic, biochemical and haematological bases for Prakriti, we conducted the present study in 90 randomly selected clinically healthy volunteers belonging to dual constitutional types (Dvandvaja Prakriti) to evaluate the variability of heart rate and arterial blood pressure in response to specific postural changes, exercise, and cold pressor test. The results of this study, in general, suggest that these basic cardiovascular responses do not vary significantly as per the dual constitutional types. However, we noted a significant fall in the diastolic blood pressure immediately after performing the isotonic exercise for five minutes, in Vata-Kapha individuals in comparison to the other two groups, namely, Pitta-Kapha and Vata-Pitta

Acceptance of non-invasive prenatal testing by cell free foetal DNA for foetal aneuploidy in a developing country: experience at a tertiary care centre in India

Background: Non-invasive prenatal testing is a new technique which is deepening its root all over the world. Its tremendous potential lies in its ability of using cell free fetal DNA from the plasma of pregnant women. However, to what extent the technology has reached to a common person is also to be given a thought. hence the study was planned to assess the acceptability of non-invasive prenatal testing in Indian settings, to study about the awareness and baseline knowledge about Down’s syndrome, to study the correlation between various indications of prenatal testing for aneuploidy and results of noninvasive prenatal testing.Methods: Noninvasive cell free fetal NA testing for aneuploidy was an informed patient choice after pre-test counseling. Patients with a positive test result were offered invasive prenatal diagnosis for confirmation of test results.Results: The diagnostic potential of cell free DNA for fetal aneuploidy matched equally with invasive tests avoiding slight but yet considerable risk of invasive tests. However, we found that, 90 % of patients in a tertiary centre hospital in India were not aware of trisomy 21 and various options available for prenatal screening for aneuploidy.Conclusions: Newer genomic technology involving cell free maternal DNA is a new storm in prenatal diagnosis. Its application in clinical practice is the need of the hour, however, the lack of awareness, high cost and unavailability of the test in the country appears to be a major limiting factor for its poor acceptability

Play and Prune:Adaptive filter pruning for deep model compression

While convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved impressive performance on various classification/recognition tasks, they typically consist of a massive number of parameters. This results in significant memory requirement as well as computational overheads. Consequently, there is a growing need for filter-level pruning approaches for compressing CNN based models that not only reduce the total number of parameters but reduce the overall computation as well. We present a new min-max framework for filter-level pruning of CNNs. Our framework, called Play and Prune (PP), jointly prunes and fine-tunes CNN model parameters, with an adaptive pruning rate, while maintaining the model's predictive performance. Our framework consists of two modules: (1) An adaptive filter pruning (AFP) module, which minimizes the number of filters in the model; and (2) A pruning rate controller (PRC) module, which maximizes the accuracy during pruning. Moreover, unlike most previous approaches, our approach allows directly specifying the desired error tolerance instead of pruning level. Our compressed models can be deployed at run-time, without requiring any special libraries or hardware. Our approach reduces the number of parameters of VGG-16 by an impressive factor of 17.5X, and number of FLOPS by 6.43X, with no loss of accuracy, significantly outperforming other state-of-the-art filter pruning methods.Comment: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2019