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Informal sector and informal employment have not only persisted over the years, but have also witnessed growth, particularly during the phase of globalisation. The Indian labour market is characterised by the presence of a large informal economy, which provides livelihood to numerous workers accounting for around 90% of the workforce. Evidence of the rise in contractualisation, outsourcing and flexibility of jobs in modern services and industries suggests a process of increasing informalisation of formal sector and deterioration of job quality particularly in urban areas. This paper reveals the existence of poor employment conditions of workers engaged in urban informal sector with precariously low incomes and without social security. The probit regression results indicate that affirmative policy has helped the marginalised group in accessing formal sector employment, particularly highly educated individuals have benefited more than others. Several initiatives have been taken to improve the labour and employment conditions in both formal and informal sector. The Ministry of Labour and Employment has notified four labour codes and is expected to bring informal sector workers under the social security net and will have positive and farreaching effect on workers’ well-being. ‘E-Shramik’ portal has also been launched to create a centralised database of unorganised sector workers which will help to implement the social security services. It is persuasively argued in the paper that the minimum social security and social protection is inevitable to mitigate the hardships of vulnerable urban informal sector workers especially those belonging to lower income groups and with lower educational levels.

Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel front-end speech parameterization technique for automatic speech recognition (ASR) that is less sensitive towards ambient noise and pitch variations. First, using variational mode decomposition (VMD), we break up the short-time magnitude spectrum obtained by discrete Fourier transform into several components. In order to suppress the ill-effects of noise and pitch variations, the spectrum is then sufficiently smoothed. The desired spectral smoothing is achieved by discarding the higher-order variational mode functions and reconstructing the spectrum using the first-two modes only. As a result, the smoothed spectrum closely resembles the spectral envelope. Next, the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are extracted using the VMD-based smoothed spectra. The proposed front-end acoustic features are observed to be more robust towards ambient noise and pitch variations than the conventional MFCC features as demonstrated by the experimental evaluations presented in this study. For this purpose, we developed an ASR system using speech data from adult speakers collected under relatively clean recording conditions. State-of-the-art acoustic modeling techniques based on deep neural networks (DNN) and long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM-RNN) were employed. The ASR systems were then evaluated under noisy test conditions for assessing the noise robustness of the proposed features. To assess robustness towards pitch variations, experimental evaluations were performed on another test set consisting of speech data from child speakers. Transcribing children's speech helps in simulating an ASR task where pitch differences between training and test data are significantly large. The signal domain analyses as well as the experimental evaluations presented in this paper support our claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jobless growth turning into job-loss growth and the recent evidence suggest that unemployment rate has shot off multiple times and the situation for educated youth, in particular, has become more severe. The situation is likely to worsen with emerging industry 4.0 technologies which are more skill-based and capital intensive in nature. The challenge is further compounded in the light of growing additions to labour force and inability to provide them suitable jobs. The inevitability of job losses with onslaught industry 4.0 technologies is likely to have big impact but much larger in the longer term. The evidences shows that pace of replacement of existing technologies is slower and selective in India and therefore the impact will be discernible in select sectors but it is going to proliferate in near future and that will demand new forms of knowledge, skills and competencies. In the emerging scenario, some occupation will die and others will emerge in newer forms. Clearly, this paper suggest that threatening of jobs is inescapable but this will require training-retraining of people in the newer forms of skills that is critical policy challenge to the government and other stakeholders such as companies and other employers.

This study is designed to find out the etiology, clinical presentations and management of tinnitus in children.

Ramsay Hunt syndrome (RHS), also known as herpes zoster oticus as well as shingles of the geniculate ganglion, occurs due to reactivation of varicella zoster virus (VZV) within the geniculate ganglion and associated sensory nerves. Immunocompromised individuals like those with HIV infections are prone to RHS. HIV infections with RHS are at increased risk for disseminated infections, postherpetic neuralgia, neurological complications and recurrence of infections. Rapid diagnosis and treatment of this type of neurodermatologic condition is very crucial to avoid permanent complications. HIV patients with RHS have a poor prognosis if not treated early and adequately.

In the present paper we have reported a simple and convenient titrimetric method for determination of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) e.g. aceclofenac, diclofenac sodium, ibuprofen, mefenamic acid and nimesulide in pure form and in their pharmaceutical preparations such as acecloren (Tab), aclofen (Tab), voveran (Tab), diclomax (Inj), brufen (Tab), norswell (Tab), meftal (Tab), mef-T (Tab), nicip-DT (Tab) and dolamide (Tab) with ammonium hexanitratocerate (AHC) reagent. It is a versatile oxidizing agent of cerium (IV) and is being widely used as an oxidant for several classes of organic compounds. During estimation it was noted that the excipients present in pharmaceutical preparations do not interfere. The value of percentage error, coefficient of variation (CV) and standard deviation (SD) prove the method to be precise and reproducible. To establish authenticity of the method, recovery experiments were also carried out by standard drug addition method.

Within 48 hours after surgery, disease assessment in glioblastoma is a challenge for both the clinician and the radiologist. Certain technical and logistical issues prevail in this period. 68Ga–prostate-specific membrane antigen PET/CT is a known molecular imaging marker in prostate cancer. Its role in high-grade gliomas has been recently discussed. We present a case of a 39-year-old man with recurrence glioblastoma of the right frontal lobe and underwent resurgery. After surgery, 68Ga–prostate-specific membrane antigen PET/CT showed residual disease along the posterior and inferior margin of the postoperative cavity.

A new sesquiterpene ketone (C15H22O; 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazone, m.p. 227.5°) was isolated from the essential oil of Cyperus scarosiusR.Br. On hydrogenation it gave a dihydro compound, and on deoxidation it yielded the tricyclic hydrocarbon cyperene. The ketone was synthesized from cyperene by chromic acid oxidation. It is assigned structure I and named cyperenone in view of its relationship to cyperene.