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Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya was an eminent general relativist, gravitation theorist, physicist, mathematician, educationist and a follower of Gandhian philosophy in post-independence India. Apart from his scientific career, Vaidya is renowned for his Vaidya metric. Though he has contributed significantly to the scientific community, very few people are aware about him or his contributions. As 23 May 2019 was the 101st birth anniversary of Vaidya, here we present his contributions and their impact through a bibliometric study. This study presents an analysis of published research works of Vaidya. During his active career, he had contributed 102 publications, including 90 journal articles, 5 conference papers, 4 book chapters, 2 review articles and 1 report. His publications have received 2004 citations, h-index of 18 and i10-index of 29 from 1979 to 2018. We analysed Vaidya's publications by type, country, journals, publishers, citations, year-wise growth, collaborated authors, top cited papers, etc. This bibliometric study is an effort to draw the attention of the younger generation of scientists to Vaidya and his contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To design and develop a mobile application for pre-school readiness of children with autism and also to identify their learning pattern. Based on strong foundation of functional academics, we have developed a mobile application for providing an early educational intervention program to the children with autism. Three successive software trials have been conducted among 31 children with autism of age group of three to 10 years. The mobile app has been provided to educators and parents and they have been allowed to supervise the children during their learning phase for eight to 10 weeks. The imprint of learning pattern is recorded and learning progress profile is generated for individual child. Data analysis of learning progress profile shows that 90% of the participants preferred drag and drop or simple touch approach over conventional methods practised during classroom teachings. More than 84% of the children are found to adapt pre-requisite skills for writing like scribbling, tracing, dots joining, copying, etc. after using the app on their tablet who are reluctant to hold pencil and paper otherwise. Twenty-five percent of the participants are reported to reciprocate the greeting etiquettes in class such as greeting teachers and their peers. The mobile application made a valuable contribution to early intervention program for children with autism by imparting appropriate learning opportunities readily available to them. Performance metrics underlying each activity form a strong base of identification of learning patterns and formulation of revised individualized education plan (IEP). Children with autism need the mobile application as an educational intervention program for it is readily available and user friendly. Educators need the mobile application to quantify the performance parameters and there by monitor/evaluate the progress of the child. Overall, the present research has aimed to develop an easy reach app by which educating as well as handling challenging behaviour of the children with autism would be easier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voice of disabled students in higher education (HE) has been widely explored in the global North but relatively little is known about the experiences of their counterparts in the global South. The paper attempts to address this lacuna by focusing on disabled students in HE in India. A part of the author's doctoral study in 2013–14 explored the lived experiences and aspirations of 29 students with a visual impairment using phenomenological methodology. Their access to courses and subsequently, career opportunities were found to be restricted by an interplay of systemic exclusion, lack of information, internalised oppression, pedagogy, and employment opportunities. While disability legislation in India focuses on widening participation in HE, the issue of access to courses for students with a visual impairment has received little attention. This paper emphasises the importance of facilitating their access to their desired courses in HE and to this end, provision of support in school. This article highlights the experiences of students with a visual impairment regarding enrolling in different courses in higher education (HE) in India. The research found that four main factors prevented many students with a visual impairment from pursuing science-and mathematics-based courses in HE. These were i) exclusion from science and mathematics in early education, ii) inadequate support systems, iii) inaccessible teaching practices, and iv) limited work opportunities. Little or no support and motivation was available for them to study these subjects. The research recommended that HE authorities must recognise the ability of students with a visual impairment to learn visual-based subjects. It also highlighted the need to provide support for learning mathematics and science to these students in school so that they can study mathematics- and science-based courses in HE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present situation, the sustainable development goal on "Gender Equality" (SDG 5) is a challenging problem over the entire globe, also in India. In this paper, the fuzzy graph theory is used to analyse the overall performance of India for the SGD 5. To solve this problem, the new concept of pseudo-vertex-covering set of a fuzzy graph to make a well coverage of the entire fuzzy graph with the combined coverage of vertex-covering set and underlying edge-covering set of the fuzzy graph is defined. With this new covering concept of pseudo-vertex-covering set of fuzzy graphs, an analysis of the performance status of India for SDG 5 is made with the individual performance status of all the states/UTs of India. We show a nice covering of the whole country by some particular states/UTs which are actively helping to make the pseudo-vertex-covering of the transformed form of the graph of India as a fuzzy graph. At last, a comparison between the covering score and index score for SDG 5 is given. Here, covering score is a new term in fuzzy graph theory for coverage of a fuzzy graph by some vertices with underlying some edges. Also, an analysis is given which reflecting a clean idea of the methodology for the performance status of India and these help to find the self-governing states/UTs in India for a better performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changing population age structure has a significant influence on the economy, society, and numerous other aspects of a country. This paper has innovatively applied the method of compositional data forecasting for the prediction of population age changes of the young (aged 0–14), the middle-aged (aged 15–64), and the elderly (aged older than 65) in China, India, and Vietnam by 2030 based on data from 1960 to 2016. To select the best-suited forecasting model, an array of data transformation approaches and forecasting models have been extensively employed, and a large number of comparisons have been made between the aforementioned methods. The best-suited model for each country is identified considering the root mean squared error and mean absolute percent error values from the compositional data. As noted in this study, first and foremost, it is predicted that by the year 2030, China will witness the disappearance of population dividend and get mired in an aging problem far more severe than that of India or Vietnam. Second, Vietnam’s trend of change in population age structure resembles that of China, but the country will sustain its good health as a whole. Finally, the working population of India demonstrates a strong rising trend, indicating that the age structure of the Indian population still remains relatively “young”. Meanwhile, the continuous rise in the proportion of elderly population and the gradual leveling off growth of the young population have nevertheless become serious problems in the world. The present paper attempts to offer crucial insights into the Asian population size, labor market and urbanization, and, moreover, provides suggestions for a sustainable global demographic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the problem of establishing a network among the stocks of a market at high frequency level and give an application to program trading. Our work uses high frequency data from the National Stock Exchange, India, for the year 2014. To begin, we analyse the spectrum of the correlation matrix to establish the presence of linear relations amongst the stock returns. A comparison of correlations with pairwise mutual information shows the further existence of non-linear relations which are not captured by correlation. We also see that the non-linear relations are more pronounced at the high frequency level in comparison to the daily returns used in earlier work. We provide two applications of this approach. First, we construct minimal spanning trees for the stock network based on mutual information and study their topology. The year 2014 saw the conduct of general elections in India and the data allows us to explore their impact on aspects of the network, such as the scale-free property and sectorial clusters. Second, having established the presence of non-linear relations, we would like to be able to exploit them. Previous authors have suggested that peripheral stocks in the network would make good proxies for the Markowitz portfolio but with a much smaller number of stocks. We show that peripheral stocks selected using mutual information perform significantly better than ones selected using correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty affects many people, but the ramifications and impacts affect all aspects of society. Information about the incidence of poverty is therefore an important parameter of the population for policy analysis and decision making. In order to provide specific, targeted solutions when addressing poverty disadvantage small area statistics are needed. Surveys are typically designed and planned to produce reliable estimates of population characteristics of interest mainly at higher geographic area such as national and state level. Sample sizes are usually not large enough to provide reliable estimates for disaggregated analysis. In many instances estimates are required for areas of the population for which the survey providing the data was unplanned. Then, for areas with small sample sizes, direct survey estimation of population characteristics based only on the data available from the particular area tends to be unreliable. This paper describes an application of small area estimation (SAE) approach to improve the precision of estimates of poverty incidence at district level in the State of Bihar in India by linking data from the Household Consumer Expenditure Survey 2011–12 of NSSO and the Population Census 2011. The results show that the district level estimates generated by SAE method are more precise and representative. In contrast, the direct survey estimates based on survey data alone are less stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Migrant labourers living in the slums of urban and industrial patches across India make up a key sub-population so far controlling Tuberculosis (TB) in the country is concerned. This is because many TB patients from these communities- remain under reached by the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP) of India. This marginalized community usually seeks early-stage healthcare from “friendly neighbourhood” non-formal health providers (NFHPs). Because, RNTCP has limited capacity to involve the NFHPs, an implementation research project was conceived, whereby an external partner would engage with the NFHPs to enable them to identify early TB symptomatics from this key sub-population who would be then tested using Xpert MTB/RIF technology. Diagnosed TB cases among them would be referred promptly to RNTCP for treatment. This paper aimed to describe the project and its impact. Methods: Adopting a quasi-experimental before-after design, four RNTCP units from two major urban-industrial areas of Odisha were selected for intervention, which spanned five quarters and covered 151,400 people, of which 30% were slum-dwelling migrants. Two similar units comprised the control population. The hypothesis was, reaching the under reached in the intervention area through NFHPs would increase TB notification from these traditionally under-notifying units. RNTCP notification data during intervention was compared with pre-intervention era, adjusted for contemporaneous changes in control population Results: The project detected 488 Xpert+ TB cases, of whom 466 were administered RNTCP treatment. This translated into notification of additional 198 new bacteriologically positive cases to RNTCP, a 30% notification surge, after adjustment for 2% decline in control. This meant an average quarterly increase in notification of 41.20(20.08, 62.31; p<0.001) cases. The increase was immediate, evident from the rise in level in the time series analysis by 50.42(10.28, 90.55; p = 0.02) cases. Conclusion: Engagement with NFHPs contributed to an increase in TB notification to RNTCP from key under reached, slum-dwelling migrant populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a unique hierarchical structure on various occupational health hazards including physical, chemical, biological, ergonomic and psychosocial hazards, and associated adverse consequences in relation to an underground coal mine. The study proposes a systematic health hazard risk assessment methodology for estimating extent of hazard risk using three important measuring parameters: consequence of exposure, period of exposure and probability of exposure. An improved decision making method using fuzzy set theory has been attempted herein for converting linguistic data into numeric risk ratings. The concept of ‘centre of area’ method for generalized triangular fuzzy numbers has been explored to quantify the ‘degree of hazard risk’ in terms of crisp ratings. Finally, a logical framework for categorizing health hazards into different risk levels has been constructed on the basis of distinguished ranges of evaluated risk ratings (crisp). Subsequently, an action requirement plan has been suggested, which could provide guideline to the managers for successfully managing health hazard risks in the context of underground coal mining exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper analysis 100 Indian high productivity organizations involved in mathematics research, using publications data indexed in Scopus database from 2005-14. It identified the overall strength and weakness of these 100 organizations, in terms of selective qualitative and quantitative indicators. The study concludes that institutes of national importance model of funding for research have shown comparatively better performance both in terms of qualitative and quantitative parameters. The publication also lists suggestions for growth and development of mathematics research in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]