Collective bargaining alternative: A case of strategic industrial relations initiative

India’s Industrial relation scenario has been undergoing a paradigm shift.The role of trade unions is changing from firefighting to the business partner role.The trade unions need to align their activities with business goals in this changing scenario.For the trade unions, collective bargaining remained one of the oldest techniques for wage determination.With changing scenario, the usefulness and effectiveness of collective bargaining for the purpose of wage fixation is being questioned.This case has provided insights into a unique model of wage fixation, which was successfully implemented in the Biwadi Plant of Indian Tractor Limited (ITL)*.It highlights the challenges ITL faced in the process and the critical factors, which helped in successful implementation of the new model of wage fixation.Primary Data has been collected through in-depth interviews and focused group interviews with workers, trade unions members and management representatives.ITL is one of the rare examples where the company took up an unprecedented step by offering a proposal and working jointly with the union to make it happen, which we call as an alternative method of wage fixation

FRAND Licensing and Standards-Essential Patents: Concocting for Impending Technologies

Engineering of innumerable advancement in telecommunications placed India at a plinth of one of the largest telecommunication markets. In essence, most of these ingenuities pivot around a strong information, communication technology (“ITC”) platform; therefore, at the juncture of business and innovation Intellectual Property Rights (“IPR”) has a perilous role to play. Specifically, the success of India’s national development aspirations will depend on a court system and the competition Commission of India (“CCI”) to set enforcement standards and guidelines across the Intellectual Property Rights (“IPR”) regime associated with those initiatives. In this section we review decisions by Indian courts to explore emergence of any trends or standards of review.  Specifically, this paper explores how Indian courts have approached the Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (“FRAND”) terms to adjudicate disputes arising from standard-essential patents (“SEPs”). Further, the paper compares and contrasts court decisions on disputes arising from SEP licensing under FRAND terms across various international jurisdictions to set a benchmark for considerations by Indian legal experts. The work outlines the multidimensional nature of IPR in relation to licensing SEPs which presents not only legal issues but also business, technology and associated government policy issues

Clinical profile of diabetic ketoacidosis in type 2 diabetes patients at a tertiary care centre

Background: The present study was undertaken to analyse the clinical profile of type 2 diabetes patients presenting with diabetic ketoacidosis at the time of presentation, owing to dearth of scientific enquiry into this research query. Methods: The present study was an analytical, cross-sectional study conducted over the period of two years. All the type 2 diabetes patients with diabetic ketoacidosis admitted during the study period constituted the study population, after being subjected to prefixed selection criteria. Detailed clinical history was recorded and thorough physical examination was conducted of all the participants, along with basic relevant blood parameters. Results: Out of the total 60 type 2 DM patients with DKA studied, 53.3% patients belonged to 51 to 60 years age group and 55% were males. All the patients had fruity breath odour at the presentation. Obesity was present in 48.3% and Kussmaul breathing observed in 90% of patients. Poor compliance to treatment (51.7%) was the biggest precipitating factor of DKA in type 2 DM patients. Around 2/3rd (68.3%) was on oral hypoglycemic agents (OHA), 10% were on OHA and insulin, while 21.7% were newly diagnosed at the time of presentation. Mean RBS in type 2 DM patients with DKA was 510.8±153.5 mg/dl and mean HbA1C was 9.15±0.78%. Conclusions: Stricter compliance to the treatment will go a long way in avoiding occurrence of the dreaded complication in type 2 diabetes patients

Solar Photovoltaic panels utilization to extract clean and green energy for utility application using PVsyst software: A Bibliometric Review

This paper presents a survey on educational documents in the field of solar photovoltaic (PV) utilization to extract clean and green energy. The main purpose of this bibliometric analysis is to understand the size of the available documents for the research of PV solar panel utilization using PVsyst. This detailed review was conducted in the PV research, literature considering all subjects from the Scopus database. The pattern for the specific arrangement of keywords was separated with the recovered results from the Scopus database, publication type, year of publication, distribution conveyance by nations, subject classes, association, authors, and financing organizations. It was discovered from the close examination that mainly conferences, articles, and review papers from the United States of America, India, and Spain have significant contributions in publication. The time series dataset started in 1999 till date. Major contributions are from the branches of Engineering and Energy, Material Science, Physics, and Astronomy

DESIGN OF LOW CARBON HIGH PERFORMANCE CONCRETE INCORPORATING ULTRAFINE MATERIALS

In general, high performance concrete (HPC) is associated with high strength and improved durability in comparison to normal strength concrete. However, HPC invariably involves high binder content at low water/binder ratio and its application has been limited to specialised concrete works. In this study, an attempt was made to design high performance concrete, at high water/binder ratio made with OPC content varying from 40%-80% in concrete mixes with low binder content of 280 kg/m3. Binary and quaternary, low carbon mixes were prepared by incorporating  Supplementary Cementitious Materials (SCM) and Ultrafine (UF) materials (silica fume, ultrafine GGBS, ultrafine fly ash and metakaolin) and were characterised for strength and durability parameters such as charge passed using RCPT, electrical resistivity and carbonation depth. Findings of the study shows that with appropriate choice and combination of SCM and ultrafine materials, low carbon high performance concrete mixes can be designed for strength up to 50 MPa with improved durability performance even at 45% OPC content. Overall, performance of low carbon high performance concrete mixes depends on the type and extent of SCM as well ultrafine materials such as metakaolin, ultrafine GGBS, ultrafine fly ash and silica fume use along with their compatibility

Adverse drug reaction monitoring on antiretroviral therapy in human immunodeficiency virus patients in a tertiary care hospital

Background: The aim of current study was to assess the pattern of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in patients receiving antiretroviral (ARV) therapy.Methods: A prospective, observational study was carried out for duration of 15 months. Clinical and treatment data were collected from patients, who underwent ARV therapy during the study period. CDSCO forms were used to record the ADRs. Causality, severity and preventability were assessed by suitable scales.Result: Out of 216 patients 165 (76%) patients develop ADRs. Total of 274 ADRs were noted among 165 patients (1.66 ADR/patient). Out of them 100 (60.60%) were males and 65 (39.39%) were females. The most common ADR was gastrointestinal disorders (83, 30.29%). The most numbers of ADRs were observed in ZLN (Zidovudine + Lamivudine + Nevirapine) regimen (54%) followed by SLN (Stavudine + Lamivudine + Nevirapine) regimen (26%). According to WHO causality assessment scale most ADRs were possible (236, 86.13%). Hartwig and Siegel severity scale show 243 (88.69%) ADRs were moderate. Schumock and Thornton scale show all, ADRs were “not preventable.”Conclusion: Early detection of drug toxicity helps to treat the patient and modify the drug regimen to minimize toxic effects

Text-to-Sticker: Style Tailoring Latent Diffusion Models for Human Expression

We introduce Style Tailoring, a recipe to finetune Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in a distinct domain with high visual quality, prompt alignment and scene diversity. We choose sticker image generation as the target domain, as the images significantly differ from photorealistic samples typically generated by large-scale LDMs. We start with a competent text-to-image model, like Emu, and show that relying on prompt engineering with a photorealistic model to generate stickers leads to poor prompt alignment and scene diversity. To overcome these drawbacks, we first finetune Emu on millions of sticker-like images collected using weak supervision to elicit diversity. Next, we curate human-in-the-loop (HITL) Alignment and Style datasets from model generations, and finetune to improve prompt alignment and style alignment respectively. Sequential finetuning on these datasets poses a tradeoff between better style alignment and prompt alignment gains. To address this tradeoff, we propose a novel fine-tuning method called Style Tailoring, which jointly fits the content and style distribution and achieves best tradeoff. Evaluation results show our method improves visual quality by 14%, prompt alignment by 16.2% and scene diversity by 15.3%, compared to prompt engineering the base Emu model for stickers generation.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Population Pharmacokinetic Modeling of Dolutegravir to Optimize Pediatric Dosing in HIV-1-Infected Infants, Children, and Adolescents

Background and Objective: HIV treatment options remain limited in children. Dolutegravir is a potent and well-tolerated, once-daily HIV-1 integrase inhibitor recommended for HIV-1 infection in both adults and children down to 4 weeks of age. To support pediatric dosing of dolutegravir in children, we used a population pharmacokinetic model with dolutegravir data from the P1093 and ODYSSEY clinical trials. The relationship between dolutegravir exposure and selected safety endpoints was also evaluated. // Methods: A population pharmacokinetic model was developed with data from P1093 and ODYSSEY to characterize the pharmacokinetics and associated variability and to evaluate the impact of pharmacokinetic covariates. The final population pharmacokinetic model simulated exposures across weight bands, doses, and formulations that were compared with established adult reference data. Exploratory exposure–safety analyses evaluated the relationship between dolutegravir pharmacokinetic parameters and selected clinical laboratory parameters and adverse events. // Results: A total of N = 239 participants were included, baseline age ranged from 0.1 to 17.5 years, weight ranged from 3.9 to 91 kg, 50% were male, and 80% were black. The final population pharmacokinetic model was a one-compartment model with first-order absorption and elimination, enabling predictions of dolutegravir concentrations in the pediatric population across weight bands and doses/formulations. The predicted geometric mean trough concentration was comparable to the adult value following a 50-mg daily dose of dolutegravir for all weight bands at recommended doses. Body weight, age, and formulation were significant predictors of dolutegravir pharmacokinetics in pediatrics. Additionally, during an exploratory exposure–safety analysis, no correlation was found between dolutegravir exposure and selected safety endpoints or adverse events. // Conclusions: The dolutegravir dosing in children ≥ 4 weeks of age on an age/weight-band basis provides comparable exposures to those historically observed in adults. Observed pharmacokinetic variability was higher in this pediatric population and no additional safety concerns were observed. These results support the weight-banded dosing of dolutegravir in pediatric participants currently recommended by the World Health Organization