Agricultural Accidents and Ergonomic intervention in Agricultural Machinery Design in India

Accident is an unexpected event with negative consequences occurring unintentionally causes due to ignorance, lack of training and knowledge and unsuited design of implements. Ergonomics prioritizes design of safer machinery and tools for accident avoidance. To investigate about agricultural accidents surveys were conducted during the periods 2005-2007 and 2012-2014 throughout West Bengal to assess the magnitude, causes and severity of agricultural accidents through direct interviews of the victims and their related ones in case of fatal accidents with the help of developed questionnaire. Different ergonomic interventions were introduced to the agricultural workers to minimize the accidents. The total population in the periods 2005-2007 and 20 12-2014 of the selected districts was recorded as 189940 including 53.6% male and 46.3% female and 297347 with 52.4% male and 47.6% female, respectively with total growth of 36.1% since 2007. Highly accident prone agricultural machinery includes thresher, power tiller, rotavator, chaff cutter, tractor etc. Accidents due to agricultural machinery, hand tools and other sources like snake bite, thunder were found to be 14.8%, 54.8% and 30.4%, respectively in 2005-2007 and 44.1%, 27.5% and 28.4%, respectively. The accident incidence rates due to hand tools was found to be decreased from 1.51 to 1.127 per 1000 hand tools due to increase of awareness about use of hand tools. But in the contrary, the accident incidence rates due to agricultural machinery was found to be increased over two mentioned periods from 1.28 to 2.62 per 1000 farm machines due to increased mechanization over the years. More awareness about the safe operation of agricultural machinery will decrease the accident incidence rate

Unfair Promotion of Whitening Creams: Is Beauty No More Skin Deep?

Fairness industry is a multi-billion business endorsing the notion that being 'fair' is beautiful and being 'dusky' is always risky. This article explores how the advertising of fairness cream belittles the existence of women in India. Focusing on the promotion of whitening brands as a case study, the authors bring out the contradictions and unverifiable assertions in the marketing philosophy of beauty, the social obsession, the aspirations of young men and women, the Bollywood glamour, and the darker side of fairness. It is appalling to see the reckless promotional campaigns even when the tons of whitening tubes cannot change what is genetically determined by the amount of melanin in the skin. Such advertising campaigns of whitening creams and their strategies rob not only the consumers of their self-esteem but also infuse a false sense of inferiority and guilt. The article seeks to understand the marketing campaigns of whitening creams and suggests that their advertising appeals can be altered to salvage the image of Indian women whose survival is not just confined to the skin tone. It further urges the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI)1 to have stringent guidelines to check the representation of stereotypical assumptions of women and their social status in advertisements

Social Media Advertising and Public Awareness: Touching the LGBT Chord!

Advertising is a form of persuasive communication with an audience. It is a promotional tool that helps in selling new ideas, products, and services through print, electronic and digital media. Advertising as one of the most influential components of mass communication is also strongly associated with social issues. In recent times, social media has acquired massive influence, providing an attractive and universal platform to every domain of businesses. Social Media has become an instrument to accelerate the process of change where it promotes social awareness and advertising in the society. As advertising mirrors the society, it strongly captures the changing social mores and reflects them through various media. Currently, we see social issues like pollution, corruption, feticide, single parenting, and LGBT equality reverberate in social media. Under the existing circumstances, communicating social messages through advertising makes the brand more purposeful, memorable and emotional for consumers. This study examines the effects of social media on consumers with respect to an advertising campaign by Myntra, one of the India’s leading e-commerce fashion platforms. The advertising touched the LGBT chord, emphasizing how the modern Indian woman can voice herself, create her identity and have her own space in the society. The digital campaign titled ‘Bold Is Beautiful’ was launched to promote Myntra’s apparel brand Anouk with three woman-centric issues around which the society is not very comfortable–homosexuality, single-parenting and the joy of staying single. This article focuses on research around an advertisement highlighting homosexuality, titled ‘the visit’. According to the survey, the brands perceive making such advertisements a necessary step towards maintaining a healthy public image. A survey was distributed to management students of a premier educational institution, pursuing their Masters of Business Administration (MBA). The results indicated that a majority agreed that if these issues were addressed more openly, then it would create a sense of boldness and power among the LGBT community. They believe that advertisements portraying social issues should expand beyond typical advertisements of products to promote social change in the mindset of society towards these issues, in order to eradicate narrow-minded thought processes. The advertisements contribute toward achieving freedom of sexuality in society

A family of estimators of population mean using multi-auxiliary variate and post-stratification

This paper suggests a family of estimators of population mean using multiauxiliary variate based on post-stratified sampling and its properties are studied under large sample approximation. Asymptotically optimum estimator in the class is identified alongwith its approximate variance formulae. The proposed class of estimators is also compared with corresponding unstratified class of estimators based on estimated optimum value. At the end, an empirical study has been carried out to support the proposed methodology

An Optimum Allocation with a Family of Estimators Using Auxiliary Information in Sample Survey

The problem of obtaining optimum allocation using auxiliary information in stratified random sampling. An optimum allocation with a family of estimators is obtained and its efficiency is compared with that of Neyman allocation based on Srivastava (1971) class of estimators and the optimum allocation suggested by Zaidi et al., (1989). It is shown that the proposed allocation is better in the sense having smaller variance compared to other optimum allocation

Between self and soldier: indian sipahis and their testimony during the two world wars

This project started as an attempt to understand rank-and-file resistance within the colonial Indian army. My reasons for doing so were quite simple. Colonial Indian soldiers were situated in the divide between the colonizers and the colonized. As a result, they rarely entered colonialist narratives written by and of the British officer or nationalist accounts of the colonial military. The writers of contemporary post-colonial histories have been content to maintain this lacuna, partly because colonial soldiers are seen as not sufficiently ‘subaltern’ to be the subjects of their studies. The more I investigated the matter, the more I realized how important it was to move beyond ideas of resistance and collaboration. If sipahis (or sepoys) were between the two poles of colonizer and colonized, so their day-to-day existence fell between notions of resistance or collaboration. The problem I still had was finding a means by which I could recover the voice of the colonial soldier. Locating the testimony of Indian sipahis was not as difficult as I first feared. Thousands of censored 'Indian Mails' from the two World Wars were stored by the India Office at Whitehall and are now within the archived records of the British Library. A similar number of interrogation reports of Indian military personnel who defected to the Indian National Army during the Second World War, and subsequently fought for the independence of India, have recently been declassified by the Indian Ministry of Defence and handed to the National Archives of India. Finally, depositions given by soldiers during courts martial in the early part of the twentieth century have survived in several archives. But none of these sources offered a holistic glimpse of what soldiers thought and felt. The presence of the censor, interrogator and the courtroom was literally written across the page and conditioned the voice of the sipahi contained therein. The solution I have adopted in this thesis is to treat the heteroglot nature of these forms of testimony as reflective of Indian soldiers' own heteroglossia. Even though the spaces in which soldiers could speak were compromised, they could nonetheless provide opportunities for soldiers to push the boundaries of what was permissible and what was not. The form of the letter was used to further illicit activities and pass on news of discontent or trouble at home. The space of the colonial courtroom was reappropriated by sipahis in order to thwart the prosecution of their peers. The interrogation chamber was a forum for many soldiers to demonstrate that they no longer considered themselves subject to the rigours of British military discipline. In each example, however, it was not only the boundaries of sipahis' testimony that were being distended, but the boundaries of their own identities. Thus the nature of my thesis is to demonstrate how soldiers could re-read and re-write their own roles within the colonial Indian Army

EGPred: prediction of eukaryotic genes using Ab initio methods after combining with sequence similarity approaches

EGPred is a Web-based server that combines ab initio methods and similarity searches to predict genes, particularly exon regions, with high accuracy. The EGPred program proceeds in the following steps: (1) an initial BLASTX search of genomic sequence against the RefSeq database is used to identify protein hits with an E-value <1; (2) a second BLASTX search of genomic sequence against the hits from the previous run with relaxed parameters (E-values <10) helps to retrieve all probable coding exon regions; (3) a BLASTN search of genomic sequence against the intron database is then used to detect probable intron regions; (4) the probable intron and exon regions are compared to filter/remove wrong exons; (5) the NNSPLICE program is then used to reassign splicing signal site positions in the remaining probable coding exons; and (6) finally ab initio predictions are combined with exons derived from the fifth step based on the relative strength of start/stop and splice signal sites as obtained from ab initio and similarity search. The combination method increases the exon level performance of five different ab initio programs by 4%-10% when evaluated on the HMR195 data set. Similar improvement is observed when ab initio programs are evaluated on the Burset/Guigo data set. Finally, EGPred is demonstrated on an ~95-Mbp fragment of human chromosome 13. The list of predicted genes from this analysis are available in the supplementary material. The EGPred program is computationally intensive due to multiple BLAST runs during each analysis. The EGPred server is available at http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/egpred/