Reforms, Growth and Persistence of Gender Gap: Recent Evidence from Private School Enrolment in India

This paper examines the extent of gender gap in private school enrolment in India, an issue that has not been adequately addressed previously. Results based on individual level unit record data shows that a girl is less likely to be sent to private schools holding other factors constant and controlling for selection into school enrollment, and this disadvantage is particularly higher for younger girls in the family. The extent of gender bias in private school enrolment is double that of overall enrollment. Additionally, irrespective of policy reforms and overall economic growth, female disadvantage in rural private school enrolment appears to have increased over the decade 1993-94 to 2004-05. This can partly be attributed to the declining agricultural output as well as labour force participation rates among rural women over much of this period. Our results have important policy implications at a time when policy makers are eager to explore a potential role for private sector in delivering basic education.policy reforms, economic growth, private school choice, gender gap, India

An Empirical Evaluation of Visual Question Answering for Novel Objects

We study the problem of answering questions about images in the harder setting, where the test questions and corresponding images contain novel objects, which were not queried about in the training data. Such setting is inevitable in real world-owing to the heavy tailed distribution of the visual categories, there would be some objects which would not be annotated in the train set. We show that the performance of two popular existing methods drop significantly (up to 28%) when evaluated on novel objects cf. known objects. We propose methods which use large existing external corpora of (i) unlabeled text, i.e. books, and (ii) images tagged with classes, to achieve novel object based visual question answering. We do systematic empirical studies, for both an oracle case where the novel objects are known textually, as well as a fully automatic case without any explicit knowledge of the novel objects, but with the minimal assumption that the novel objects are semantically related to the existing objects in training. The proposed methods for novel object based visual question answering are modular and can potentially be used with many visual question answering architectures. We show consistent improvements with the two popular architectures and give qualitative analysis of the cases where the model does well and of those where it fails to bring improvements.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted in CVPR 2017 (poster

Noise Compression of ECG Signal for Epic Cardio Signal

The electrical activity of the heart called Electrocardiagram (ECG) is a very important diagnostic parameter for the measurement of the heart activity and the health condition of the patient for the treatment purpose, The advance Non- Contact technique for the measure of the cardio ECG signal is EPIC (Electric Potential Integrated Circuit), so for the long term monitoring and analysis of the ECG data, compression techniques are very much important and necessary for the record of large data signals in a space, as small as possible for the storage with the high accuracy while retaining the important diagnostic clinical parameters in case of reconstruction of the original compressed signal. In this paper the results are complied with the compression techniques using Frequency Transformation DCT 2, are proposed for achieving these required conditions based on MATLAB Programming for Standard MIT-BIH Database Record Signal No 100 in association with reference of the work proposed of proposed data in the paper for better results for EPIC ECG signal[1]

Congestion Control in Mobile Ad Hoc Network using modified acknowledgement with secure channel

The mobile ad hoc network is self-configuring and dynamic in nature. Due to its dynamic topology node can join or leave any time and each node behaves as router or host which can deliver the packets from source to destination. Due to the heavy traffic load over network congestion occur. To avoid the congestion on network various congestion control mechanism has been developed but in this we use modified-ACK based scheme for node authentication in AODV protocol. The simulation of our proposed work is done on network simulator NS-2.34 and comparative analysis of our proposed methodology is done using performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, throughput, end-end delay average jitter and routing load.   Keywords MANET, Congestion Control, AODV, ACK, PDR, Network Simulato

An Analysis of the Survival of Gall Bladder Patients in a Tertiary Cancer Center in India using Accelerated Failure Time Models

Objective: Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) models are an useful alternative of Cox- PH model to determine the significant predictors affecting the survival of the patients. This article aims to determine the significant prognostic factors of hospitalized Gall Bladder Cancer patients in Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Center, New Delhi, India by applying AFT Models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to be carried out in India identifying the factors of Gall bladder patients using AFTM. Materials and Methods: The data are taken from original proformae of 652 hospital admitted Gall Bladder patients from a tertiary care hospital from Delhi from the period January 2012 to December 2016. These models take the logarithm of survival time, S(t) as dependent variable and prognostic factors as independent variables. Thereby, effect of these prognostic factors is multiplicative and therefore these models can be easily interpreted. AFTM demonstrates the predictor’s effect in terms of time ratio (TR). Analysis was implemented on R software version 3.5.1. Results and Conclusions: In the Gall Bladder data considered in this article, shape of hazard function, H(t) and the exploratory data analysis falls in line with the Lognormal AFT model. AFT models give an estimate of Time Ratio which helps doctors, clinicians, epidemiologists etc. to determine the effect of treatment in terms of an increasing/decreasing survival time

Learning from ‘the Outsider Within’: The Sociological Significance of Dalit Women’s Life Narratives

Dalit women have long occupied marginal positions and been excluded from two major Indian social movements: The Feminist Movement and the Dalit Movement. The researcher examines how Dalit women have made creative use of their marginality—their ‘outsider-within\u27 status—and have represented their lived experiences. The study scrutinizes select life narratives of Dalit women writers: Bama\u27s Sangati: Events (2005), Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life (2015), and Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke (2008) to discuss and explore the sociological significance of three characteristic themes in these narratives: (1) the interlocking nature of Dalit women’s oppression, (2) endurance and resilience, (3) their role in the transformation of the Dalit community. Thus, the perspectives of Dalit women writers create new knowledge about their lives, families, and communities. Their perspectives may well provide a preparatory point for the development of the Dalit Feminist Standpoint. This study may help other marginalized sections or social scientists by putting greater trust in the creative potential of their narratives and cultural biographies

“Calling the Question” The Politics of Time in a Time of Polarized Politics

In this paper, we examine the role of time in shaping decision-making processes in a town meeting, a type of legislative body common in many New England towns. Town meetings are one of the oldest and most democratic institutions of local governance in the United States, and they provide a rich arena in which to investigate how large groups of people convene and make decisions together. A mixed-methods approach enabled our team of researchers to gain insight into the processes and dynamics that played out in one town meeting. We analyze the tensions between democratic values of “taking time” vs. “being efficient.” The dynamics are particularly compelling because of an absence of the typical two parties that dominate U.S. political culture. Attitudes toward time closely aligned with voting behaviors. Our study concludes that, even in the context of a culturally and economically homogenous New England town-meeting membership, orientations to temporality are contested and meaningful. Situated historically, these orientations reflect citizens’ embrace or rejection of “timethrift” and suggest implications for participatory democracy