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How do borderland dwellers living along militarised frontiers negotiate regimes of state security and their geopolitical location in everyday life? What might 'freedom' mean to those who do not resist captivity engendered by borders? Focusing on the predicaments of a double-minority, Freedom in Captivity examines the affective attachments, political imaginaries, and ethical claims-making among the Shia Muslims of Kargil. In contrast to calls for freedom in the Kashmir Valley, Shias on the frontiers of Kashmir have sought belonging to India. Yet they do not entirely succumb to its hegemonic ideological boundaries. Departing from the dominant focus on physical cross-border mobility, this book is an invitation to reimagine borderlands as cartographies of ideas, cutting across spatial scales. Based on original ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2021, this monograph offers a unique long durée insight into the lives of people residing at the intersections of the biggest states in Asia.
Reproductive Biology of Angiosperms: Concepts and Laboratory Methods will cater to the needs of undergraduate and graduate students pursuing core and elective courses in life sciences, botany, and plant sciences. The book is designed according to the syllabi followed in major Indian universities. It provides the latest and detailed description of structures and processes involved in reproduction in higher plants. The inclusion of colour photographs and illustrations will be an effective visual aid to help readers. Interesting and significant findings of the latest research taking place in the field of reproductive biology are also provided in boxes. At the end of each chapter, the methodology of hands-on exercises is presented for the implementation and practice of theoretical concepts.
Accompanying the announcement of the largest-ever round of auctioning of coal blocks in India in June 2020 were stories of resistance from a relatively nondescript region of central India: the Hasdeo Aranya forests. The media outlets – regional, national, and even global – were replete with news of letters from sarpanchs (Alam, 2020; Kaiser, 2020), petitions from the gram sabhas (Mishra, 2020b), reports of organized community resistance (Dasgupta, 2020; MS, 2020), and even interventions from the state government of Chhattisgarh (Drolia and John, 2020; P. Singh, 2020) and the political elites like the former Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh (The Wire, 2020). The community resistance of 20 villages of one of the most impoverished states of India threatened to put a spanner into the prime minister's plans of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (a self-reliant India) and dreams of becoming the world's largest exporter of coal (Gupta and Regan, 2020; PTI, 2020). The Guardian characterized Hasdeo Aranya as the ‘battleground’ where the ‘war’ for coal pitted ‘indigenous people, ancient trees, elephants and sloth bears against the might of bulldozers, trucks and hydraulic jacks’ (Ellis-Petersen, 2020).
However, descriptors such as war, battleground, and conflict are perhaps the least likely to be associated with the area based on traveller accounts. As one travels on NH130 around 300 kilometres from the state capital of Raipur, one is greeted by the relative calm and the resplendent beauty of the expansive Hasdeo-Bango reservoir (one of the longest, widest, and oldest multipurpose irrigation projects in Chhattisgarh, irrigating approximately 300,000 hectares of agricultural farms downstream) at the beginning of Hasdeo Aranya forests. For another ∼40 kilometres on the highway that skirts the Hasdeo Aranya forests’ periphery, the dense forest canopy that almost entirely blocks sunlight appears as a welcome relief to weary travellers. However, regular signboards indicating the need to be careful of ‘elephants’ and ‘sloth bears’ discourage casual tourists from stepping out to bask in the beauty of the surroundings. It is almost entirely possible to miss any signs of habitation at the first visit beyond the occasional wooden huts by the roadside, a couple of teashops, and the forest range office with its green signboards camouflaged with the surroundings.
This Element looks at the relationship between heritage and design by way of a case study approach. It offers up ten distinct portraits of a range of heritage makers located in Goa, a place that has been predicated on its difference, both historical and cultural, from the rest of India. A former Portuguese colonial enclave (1510–1961) surrounded by what was formerly British India (1776–1947), the author attempts to read Goa's heritage as a form of place-ness, a source of inspiration for further design work that taps into the Goa of the twenty-first century. The series of portraits are visual, literary, and sensorial, and take the reader on a heritage tour through a design landscape of villages, markets, photography festivals, tailors and clothing, books, architecture, painting, and decorative museums. They do so in order to explore heritage futures as increasingly dependent on innovation, design, and the role of the individual.
The COVID-19 second wave badly affected India. This study assessed public preparedness and attitude towards a new lockdown in the state of West Bengal (WB) along with perception about the COVID pandemic situation.
Methods:
An anonymous questionnaire was administered to all willing adult attendees of a COVID vaccination centre in Kolkata, capital city of WB. Logistic regression was applied to find the relationship between attitude towards lockdown and other selected independent variables.
Results:
Of 839 persons analysed, 72.0% were non-health workers; 55.4% thought that available vaccines reduce COVID-19 risk. Among them, 54.4% wanted stricter guidelines for imposition. For preparedness, 42.6% and 28.8% said they would stock additional food and medicines respectively. On multiple logistic regression, being female, having elderly family members, perceiving the second wave as worse and favouring stricter restrictions all had odds of favourable attitude towards the new, proposed lockdown.
Conclusions:
A new lockdown was favoured by the majority. However, a well-planned and phased approach for this is needed in the light of many concerns about the previous lockdown. Mental health issues, financial security, medical help at hand and ease of travel to workplace are important issues that need to be addressed in case of future lockdown(s).
Both inhibitory control and typological similarity between two languages feature frequently in current research on multilingual cognitive processing mechanisms. Yet, the modulatory effect of speaking two typologically highly similar languages on inhibitory control performance remains largely unexplored. However, this is a critical issue because it speaks directly to the organisation of the multilingual's cognitive architecture. In this study, we examined the influence of typological similarity on inhibitory control performance via a spatial Stroop paradigm in native Italian and native Dutch late learners of Spanish. Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find evidence for a differential Stroop effect size for the typologically similar group (Italian–Spanish) compared to the typologically dissimilar group (Dutch–Spanish). Our results therefore suggest a limited influence of typological similarity on inhibitory control performance. The study has critical implications for characterising inhibitory control processes in multilinguals.
Literature investigating the change in psychological problems of the healthcare workers (HCWs) throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is lacking. We aimed at comparing the psychological problems and attitudes towards work among them over two waves of the COVID 19 pandemic in India.
Methods:
A survey was conducted involving HCWs (n=305, first-wave, 2020; n=325, second wave, 2021). Participants’ demographic- and professional- and psychological characteristics (using attitude towards COVID-19 questionnaire [ATCQ]; Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale – 21 Items and impact of event scale-22) were recorded. The unpaired ‘t-test/chi-square test was used for comparison.
Results:
A significant improvement in level of depression (42.2% vs 9.6%), anxiety (41.3% vs 16.3%), stress (30.1% vs 6.7%), event-related stress symptoms (31.2% vs 27%), work-related stress (89.8% vs 76.8%), and stigma (25.9% vs 22.8, though marginally significant) (χ2(1) =7.3 to 45.6, p<0.05) were found among the participants of the second wave (vs. first wave). However, on subgroup analysis, allied-HCWs (housekeeping staff, and security personnel) reported lesser concerns over the domains of the KAQ vis-a-viz frontline-HCWs [doctors and nurses].
Conclusion:
This improvement could be attributed to greater awareness about the illness, better coping skills, vaccination, etc, however, more research is warranted to investigate these determinants.
Aging leads to progressive deterioration of physiological function and predisposes to pathological processes. Common geriatric syndromes (such as depression, dementia, falls, mobility impairment, delirium, and osteoporosis), along with age-related impairment in appetite, absorption, and food intake, affect nutrition, symptom presentation, and response to therapy of common gastrointestinal (GI) disorders in the elderly. Age-associated changes in drug metabolism and polypharmacy can result in potential interactions and side effects of drugs used in the treatment of GI diseases, which in turn complicates their management. Polypharmacy, which is common in the elderly, can also exacerbate digestive symptoms. Elderly patients with neurocognitive decline often have atypical presentation of their GI disorders. These factors can make the diagnosis of GI diseases in the elderly more challenging, as they may require different management approaches. In this chapter, we discuss the common GI disorders that affect the elderly with special focus on age-related pathophysiology and clinical implications.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) produces three-dimensional object-oriented models of buildings combining the geometrical information with a wide range of properties about materials, products, safety, to name just a few. BIM is slowly but inevitably revolutionizing the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. Buildings need to be compliant with regulations about stability, safety, and environmental impact. Manual compliance checking is tedious and error-prone, and amending flaws discovered only at construction time causes huge additional costs and delays. Several tools can check BIM models for conformance with rules/guidelines. For example, Singapore’s CORENET e-Submission System checks fire safety. But since the current BIM exchange format only contains basic information about building objects, a separate, ad-hoc model pre-processing is required to determine, for example, evacuation routes. Moreover, they face difficulties in adapting existing built-in rules and/or adding new ones (to cater for building regulations, that can vary not only among countries but also among parts of the same city), if at all possible. We propose the use of logic-based executable formalisms (CLP and Constraint ASP) to couple BIM models with advanced knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities. Previous experience shows that such formalisms can be used to uniformly capture and reason with knowledge (including ambiguity) in a large variety of domains. Additionally, incorporating checking within design tools makes it possible to ensure that models are rule-compliant at every step. This also prevents erroneous designs from having to be (partially) redone, which is also costly and burdensome. To validate our proposal, we implemented a preliminary reasoner under CLP(Q/R) and ASP with constraints and evaluated it with several BIM models.
Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, which use multiple antennas to deliver faster data rates, are one of the promising methods in 5G services. 5G is a popular issue among the world's main telecom firms currently. The sub-6 GHz band for 5G applications in various countries lies between 3 and 5 GHz. The sub-6 GHz 5G bands are 3.4–3.8 GHz in Europe, 3.1–3.55 GHz in the USA, and 3.3–3.6 GHz and 4.8–4.99 GHz in China. This paper presents a two-element slotted octagon-shaped antenna operating in the sub-6 GHz band (3.1–4.5 GHz) for 5G applications. A T-formed isolation structure is placed at a ground plane to minimize mutual coupling between MIMO antennas. The proposed MIMO antenna has physical dimensions of 55 × 38 mm2 and an envelope correlation coefficient or correlation of 0.0004 over the entire operating band. The antenna operates at 3.6 GHz, with a return loss of 40.8 dB at the resonance. An antenna prototype has been investigated and proven to be of excellent quality in terms of performance like isolation >20 dB, efficiency >80%, and mean effective gain <−3 dB over the full operating band.
Mung bean is highly susceptible to insect attack during storage. Hermetic storage is an effective technique to control insect damage. This study investigated the potential of the hermetic SuperGrain bag (SGB) for controlling bruchids during storage. The dry samples were packed in SGB infested with adult bruchids (SGB-I), SGB natural field infested (SGB-N), woven polypropylene bags (WPP-I and WPP-N) and kept at room temperature for 180 days. Oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations were measured at 15 days intervals. Moisture content, infestation level, seed damage and weight loss were determined at 60 days intervals. Seed colour, hardness, crude protein and fat contents were analysed before and after storage. The O2 level decreased to 10.09%, whereas the CO2 level increased to 8.87% in both SGB-I and SGB-N treatments. The moisture content of mung bean was maintained as onset storage in both SGB-N and SGB-I treatments, whereas reduced in WPP-N (9.26% db) and WPP-I (9.21% db). In SGB treatments, no significant bruchids were detected, but they increased drastically in WPP-N (52 ± 9) and WPP-I (377 ± 14). Seed damage (2–3%) and weight loss (0.8–1.0%) were recorded in both SGB-N and SGB-I. Conversely, seed damage reached 26.67 and 54.17%, corresponding to weight losses of 12.33 and 20.82% in WPP-N and WPP-I, respectively. Seed colour, hardness, crude protein and fat contents in SGBs showed no significant changes than in the WPP bags. The study illustrated that the SGB is an efficient hermetic device in protecting mung beans against bruchids attacks compared to the WPP bags.
COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve and new variants like Delta and Omicron have been discovered. REGEN-COV is a recombinant human monoclonal antibody to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 which received emergency use authorisation for treatment and post-exposure prophylaxis in patients with high risk of progression to severe disease. We review our experience with use of REGEN-COV in paediatric heart transplant patients.
FOLD-RM is an automated inductive learning algorithm for learning default rules for mixed (numerical and categorical) data. It generates an (explainable) answer set programming (ASP) rule set for multi-category classification tasks while maintaining efficiency and scalability. The FOLD-RM algorithm is competitive in performance with the widely used, state-of-the-art algorithms such as XGBoost and multi-layer perceptrons, however, unlike these algorithms, the FOLD-RM algorithm produces an explainable model. FOLD-RM outperforms XGBoost on some datasets, particularly large ones. FOLD-RM also provides human-friendly explanations for predictions.
In the Singhbhum Craton of the Indian shield, the Remal granite-gneiss preserves felsic magmatic fabrics onto which a low-temperature segregation layering has been superposed. Planar, sub-horizontal to gently dipping layers (Sign1) comprise K-feldspar megacrysts, plagioclase and quartz, with the base of each layer defined by segregations of biotite. Sign2 consists of trough cross-bedded layers composed of K-feldspar phenocrysts, plagioclase and quartz with biotite schlieren defining the base of each layer. Microstructural features such as concentrically arranged mineral inclusions in K-feldspar phenocrysts and graphic intergrowth textures testify to the magmatic origin of these fabrics, with insignificant subsequent metamorphic reconstitution. The tectonic fabric S1 has developed sub-parallel to localized greenschist-facies mylonite bands, and is defined by weakly aligned flakes of biotite. Crystallographic preferred orientations away from the mylonitized domains show a strong alignment of K-feldspar, quartz and biotite parallel to the magmatic fabric due to efficient segregation during magmatic flow. Quartz crystallographic preferred orientations within the mylonitized domains show a strong preferred orientation and dextral asymmetry. Temperature constraints from synkinematic chlorites along with estimates of deformation temperature from quartz crystallographic preferred orientations indicate that mylonitization occurred at the lower limits of quartz crystal plasticity. The results of combined thermodynamic and multiphysics modelling studies show that felsic magmas can undergo significant convective motion for a wide range of crystallinities and water contents before solidification. Additionally, segregation layering resembling a gneissosity can develop at low temperatures owing to localized mylonitization and concomitant dissolution–precipitation of biotite.
Clinical observations and subjective judgements have traditionally been used to evaluate patients with muscular and neurological disorders. As a result, identifying and analyzing functional improvements are difficult, especially in the absence of expertise. Quantitative assessment, which serves as the motivation for this study, is an essential prerequisite to forecast the task of the rehabilitation device in order to develop rehabilitation training. This work provides a quantitative assessment tool for muscle weakness in the human upper limbs for robotic-assisted rehabilitation. The goal is to map the assessment metrics to the recommended rehabilitation exercises. Measurable interaction forces and muscle correlation factors are the selected parameters to design a framework for muscular nerve cell condition detection and appropriate limb trajectory selection. In this work, a data collection setup is intended for extracting muscle intervention and assessment using MyoMeter, Goniometer and surface electromyography data for upper limbs. Force signals and human physiological response data are evaluated and categorized to infer the relevant progress. Based upon the most influencing muscles, curve fitting is performed. Trajectory-based data points are collected through a scaled geometric Open-Sim musculoskeletal model that fits the subject’s anthropometric data. These data are found to be most suitable to prescribe relevant exercise and to design customized robotic assistance. Case studies demonstrate the approach’s efficacy, including optimally synthesized automated configuration for the desired trajectory.
Prostate cancer (PC) presents great challenges in early diagnosis and often leads to unnecessary invasive procedures as well as over diagnosis and treatment, thus highlighting the need for promising early diagnostic biomarkers. The aim of this review is to provide an up-to-date summary of chronologically existing metabolomics PC biomarkers, their potential to improve clinical PC diagnosis and to reduce the proliferation and monitoring of PC. The systematic research was conducted on PubMed in accordance with PRISMA guidelines to report PC biomarkers. The majority of the studies distinguished malignant from benign prostate and few explored the biomarkers associated with the progression of PC. The present review summarises the primary outcomes of most significant studies to extend our knowledge of PC metabolomics biomarkers. We observed divergent inter-laboratory technical procedures employing different statistical approaches produced abundant information regarding PC metabolites perturbation. Since PC metabolomics is still in its early phase, it is vital that we dig out the most specific, sensitive and accurate metabolic signatures and conduct more studies with milestone findings with comparable sample sizes to validate and corroborate the findings.
To assess the job and training satisfaction of junior doctors working in Mental Health placements in Derbyshire; to highlight areas of good practice and identify areas that need improvement to enhance their working experience.
Methods
This is an ongoing Cycle of Quality Improvement to address Juniors Doctors enjoyment of work and job satisfaction. On a 25 point questionnaire we sought feedback as open response, graded response and free text. Questions were formulated using suggestions from Royal College of Psychiatrists Supported and Valued Review and BMA Fatigue and Facilities Charter. Advised areas of improvement from the previous 2017 Quality Improvement project were also reviewed and incorporated into the questionnaire design.
All junior trainees (including Core Psychiatry trainees, Foundation trainees, GP trainees and junior trust grade doctors) working between December 2020 to April 2021 in Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust were sent the questionnaire.
Official end of placement feedback from January-December 2020 was also compared to our findings.
Results
15 doctors completed the questionnaire.
Areas of trainee-reported satisfaction included training on management of common psychiatric conditions (73%), weekly teaching sessions (100%), ability to organise leave (100%).
Areas of dissatisfaction included training on management of psychiatric emergencies (40%), poor regularity of supervision (53%), inadequate access to phlebotomy services (66%), ability to take adequate breaks (66%) and ability to fulfil training requirements (40%).
Discrepancies were noted in responses to similar questions in our questionnaire compared to the official end of placement feedback, with greater trainees answering with negative responses in this project.
Conclusion
This project highlighted areas of high satisfaction for trainees and showed specific areas for improvement. Trainees responses have been reviewed with Educators and Trust Management for collaborative solutions, pilot schemes and future QI projects identified.
Observer bias was noted, with greater numbers of doctors answering similar questions negatively when feedback was anonymous, suggesting that they may be giving more honest answers when their identity is concealed.