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Does the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) lead to better and more inclusive women representation in the workforce? We explore this question for India- a developing economy characterized by strong patriarchal norms and gender-based discrimination in the workforce. Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey of 2014, we examine the effect of computerization, email usage and Internet services on three aspects of female representation- total female representation, representation across the hierarchy of workforce and quality of female representation. Using instrumental variable estimation models, we find that ICT adoption has a positive effect on the total share of women in the workforce. A deeper analysis reveals that the positive effect of ICTs on female employment is limited to the share of females in the highly skilled workforce. In contrast, it does not affect the female share in the low or unskilled workforce. This indicates that ICT adoption has a semi-polarization effect on women. We also find that ICT adoption is associated with better quality females in the workforce. Both rises in demand for skilled people and a women-friendly work environment drive these results. The overall findings establish the effective role of ICTs in enhancing women’s representation in the workforce.

Based on the resource-based view that identifies both CSR and innovation as resourceful and competitive advantage-generating activities, the current paper examines the effect of innovation spending...

The current study examines the effect of a set of Electricity Act, adopted by India in 2003, on the price gap between two specific consumer groups-industrial and commercial. Paying a higher tariff than the other consumer groups, these two groups have been referred to as the ‘subsidizing’ groups of consumers in the Indian context. While the effect of reforms between the ‘subsidizing; ’ and subsidized’ groups has received attention, research on the effect of reforms on the tariff gap within the ‘subsidizing’ sector has been under-addressed. Using data on all major states of the country spanning from 2004-2014, the study uses a graphical exposition, excerpts of policy document and panel econometric modelling technique. The study focuses on six aspects of the policy and emphasizes on adoption and implementation extent and finds that mere policy adoption has no strong effect on tariff gap. Instead, effective implementation may be beneficial in narrowing the tariff gap within the subsidizing sectors as well. Specifically, unbundling of the electricity sector into three different segments and establishment of an independent regulatory authority in the state may lead to narrowing tariff gap if implemented effectively.

Single-channel sleep EEG data from eight subjects have been analyzed using Lempel-Ziv complexity measure and alpha-delta and gamma-delta power ratios. Complexity values are consistently high during the waking state for all the subjects and low during the sleep state. Similarly, both the power ratios are high when the subjects are awake and become low during sleep. We have obtained an accuracy of 93.9% in classifying EEG epochs into data corresponding to sleep or awake states. The misclassification is mainly arising from the fact that both the complexity values and the power ratios during the REM sleep state are sometimes comparable to the waking state. By adding another signal such as electromyogram or electrooculogram, one maybe able to minimize the misclassification. The uniqueness of our work is that we have been able to achieve a good accuracy using only one EEG channel, two carefully chosen simple features and a linear classifier.

Features extracted from the electrooculogram (EOG) or electroencephalogram (EEG) are able to distinguish between waking and sleeping states of a person with 95.2% and 97.5% accuracy, respectively. Sleep EEG data of eight subjects from the Physionet database have been analyzed using 8th order autoregressive model and the model parameters have been used as features, along with Higuchi fractal dimension and sample entropy. Independently, features derived from EOG such as power in a particular band of frequencies and sum of absolute differences were also used. A combination of all these features obtains the maximum accuracy of 98% using 10-fold cross-validation, employing a support vector machine classifier with radial basis function as kernel. Knowing whether a person is awake or asleep is extremely important before presenting sensory stimuli to the patients with disorders of consciousness as a part of neurorehabilitation.

The outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus or the COVID-19 in various parts of the world has affected the world as a whole and caused millions of deaths. This remains an ominous warning to public health and will be marked as one of the greatest pandemics in world history. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of how various Machine Learning models can be implemented in real-world situations. Apart from the analysis done on the world figures, this paper also analyzes the current trend or pattern of Covid-19 transmission in India. With the help of datasets from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of India, this study puts forward various trends and patterns experienced in different parts of the world. The data to be studied has been obtained for 154 days i.e. from January 22, 2020, till June 24, 2020. For future references, the data can be further analyzed, and more results can be obtained.

Skin prick testing (SPT) is one of the most extensively used screening and diagnostic tool in contemporary allergy practice. It plays a vital role in diagnosis of type 1 hypersensitivity reaction in patients with rhinoconjunctivitis, asthma, urticaria, anapylaxis, atopic eczema and suspected food and drug allergy. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the pattern of allergenicity of aero-allergens and mites in the rural part of Eastern India using SPT. A total of 50 subjects (25 males and 25 females) were selected for the present study. Complete history and clinical symptoms were recorded according to ARIA guidelines. All the patients were subjected to SPT using 35 allergens. Positive sensitization was recorded in terms of frequency and measured in terms of maximum wheal diameter. The most common allergens observed were Gynandropsis gynandra (positive sensitization in 33 cases with wheal of 4.18 mm diameter) followed by Dermatophagoides farinae (25 cases, 6.12 mm diameter), Ageratum conyzoides (19 cases, 3.36 mm diameter), Cannabis sativa (17 cases, 3.52 mm diameter) and Cassia occidentalis (17 cases, 3.58 mm diameter). When the sensitivity was being compared between the most common allergens, statistical significance was obtained for Ageratum conyzoides and Cannabis sativa with Dermatophagoides farina (p value-0.0001). SPT is a reliable, minimally invasive procedure with immediate results useful in detection and promoting health of patients suffering from allergic rhinitis.

PURPOSE To assess the efficacy of two experimental denture adhesive gels (adhesives 1 and 2) compared to a commercially available denture adhesive cream (positive control) and no adhesive (negative control). MATERIALS AND METHODS This was a single-center, randomized, four-treatment, examiner-blind, crossover study in participants with well-made and at least moderately well-fitting maxillary complete dentures. Incisal bite force until denture dislodgment was measured before application (baseline) and over the following 12 hours for each of the treatments. Between-treatment differences in the area over baseline (AOB) for the bite force at each time point were analyzed using an analysis of covariance model. RESULTS The efficacy and safety analyses were based on results from 48 participants. Compared to the negative control, adhesive 1 showed a statistically significantly higher bite force AOB over 12 hours (AOB0-12h; primary endpoint), as well as for AOB0-6h and AOB0-9h (all P < .05), but not for AOB0-1h or AOB0-3h. Adhesive 2 was not significantly different from the negative control or from adhesive 1 for any measure of AOB. The positive control was associated with a significantly higher bite force AOB than either of the experimental adhesives for all time points (P < .05). Although the positive control was well tolerated, both experimental adhesives were associated with a larger number of oral adverse events. CONCLUSION Only adhesive 1 was significantly better than the negative control, and its performance did not match that of the positive control. Adhesives 1 and 2 showed the largest number of oral adverse events.

The current study examines the effect of disinvestment (dilution of state ownership) and local political corruption on R&D spending in enterprises owned by the central government of India. Based on certain characteristic features of innovation as a strategy available to state-owned enterprises, I build two sets of hypotheses formalising the channels of how these variables may affect the possibility and amount of R&D. Data is drawn from multiple sources to compile a dataset that covers all manufacturing central government-owned enterprises in India over a period of ten years from 2007 to 2016. The study employs an instrumental variable technique to reduce the endogeneity between disinvestment and R&D decisions. We find that, while disinvestment and local political corruption have strong negative effects on whether a firm invests in R&D or not, it has no effect on the amount of R&D. In fact, the amount is driven by a host of firm-specific factors such as size, profit and proficiency of the share of skilled labor, managerial strength and non-unionisation of labor. We also find that the effects are strongly driven by the size of firms, special status awarded to firms and the ideology of the state where the enterprise operates.

Extensive experiments have been carried out in this study to classify sleep EEG from three different standard databases – Sleep EDF, DREAMS and Expanded sleep EDF databases. Both two-class (sleep-awake) and multiclass classifications have been performed using a fusion of various EEG features and an ensemble classifier called random undersampling with boosting technique (RUSBoost). The results achieved using a single channel EEG are comparable or better than the state-of-the-art methods in the literature for both types of classification, on all the databases. Two-class classification is useful to determine the preferred timings for sensory stimulation of patients with disorders of consciousness. 10-fold cross-validation accuracies of 92.6% and 97.9% have been obtained on Sleep EDF database for 6-class and 2-class problems, respectively. Using Expanded Sleep-EDF dataset, the accuracies improved to 96.3% for 6-state and 99.8% for 2-state classification. For DREAMS dataset, we achieved an accuracy of 96.6% for 2-state classification. Unlike most research in the literature where performance on unseen subjects is not considered, we report classification results on the data from unseen test subjects using both 50%-holdout and leave-one-out cross-validation approaches. Similar results were achieved using both validation techniques for different datasets emphasizing the reliability of our method. These results are very crucial for the method to be applicable for clinical use.

India instituted a program of state enterprise disinvestment in 1991 as part of a sweeping reform initiative. This study analyses the effect of disinvestment on enterprise performance, conditioned on political context as characterized by the ideological leanings of the parties in power at state and central levels. Using stochastic frontier analysis, measures of firm efficiency are generated for 238 central public sector enterprises for the period 1991–1992 to 2010–2011. The relationship between efficiency so measured and disinvestment is then estimated using a two-stage instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity between firm efficiency and selection for disinvestment. Initial disinvestment is associated with substantial efficiency gains, but subsequent disinvestment much less so and the proportion of shares disinvested only loosely so. This may be explained by the transformative effect of initial stock market listing on accountability and profit orientation that is not repeated with further rounds of disinvestment. The effect of disinvestment on performance is stronger if the enterprise is located in a state governed by a right leaning party or one that is ideologically aligned with the party in power at the centre.

Regular payments or contributions to states’ exchequer funds are mandated for state level public sector enterprises (SLPEs) in most states in India. However, in the absence of a regular mechanism to ensure timely payments, the contributions are abysmally poor. In most SLPEs, the situation is driven by the presence of soft budget constraints and strong financial support from the state governments. The current study analyses the effect of political factors on the contribution that SLPEs make to the state governments’ exchequer funds. Using different econometric methods, the study finds that SLPEs located in assembly constituencies that are politically aligned with the state government, make frequent and larger contributions to the exchequer funds. Surprisingly, the subsidies provided to the SLPEs by state governments are not driven by political alignment between the state government and the constituency where the enterprise is located. In fact, subsidies compensate for the contributions to the extent that there is no effect of political alignment on net contributions (contributions–subsidies) by SLPEs to state governments. Finally, political alignment has a strong influence on the relative share of contributions made by SLPEs to state governments vis-a-vis the centre. These results are robust across different model specifications.

Quantum Dot Cellular automata employs the transistor less technology which overcomes the constraint of Moore’s Law i.e. in forthcoming time the number of transistor affixed on a single chip cannot be increased further as it will reduce the performance of any circuit. A Reversible logic can contribute to the designing as it has many advantages over conventional circuits such as no forfeit of profitable information, low power utilization designs, win back of input from the output. In today’s world each Nano-meter matters for the betterment of designs. In this paper, the improvement in the area of Reversible gates has been proposed so that the circuit could be more compact and efficient.

This paper examines the impact of electricity tariff on electricity consumption pattern and performance of Indian firms. The question is addressed against the backdrop of the Electricity Act of 2003 which was implemented with varying degrees across different states. The paper uses the 2013–14 World Bank Enterprise Survey data for India and builds three sets of hypotheses- first, high tariffs lead to electricity consumption pattern shifting towards self-generation, a decline in total electricity used, substitution of capital with labor and eventually deterioration in the performance of firms. Second, the negative effect of tariff on the performance of firms is more pronounced in states that haven't implemented the Electricity Act effectively. Third, the effect will be stronger for firms that face relatively higher tariff as compared to other comparable consumer categories. Taking account of the endogeneity between a firm's performance outcomes and location choices, the paper uses appropriate econometric models and finds strong evidence for each of the hypotheses. High tariffs hamper the profitability and productivity of firms only in those states which have not implemented the Electricity Act effectively. Moreover, the above evidence only exists if there are high tariff differences between different consumer groups. Finally, we do not find evidence for performance impairment in large firms.

Traditional TCP/IP network model needs an end-to-end connection for data transmission. With this traditional network, it is difficult to communicate in those areas where intermittent connectivity exists. Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) offers an alternate solution for these challenged areas. In the DTN, end-to-end path between the starting and end node may not be available all the time, but the transfer of data takes place using store-carry-forward technique in which node can depot the data, hold it until another node comes in contact and then deliver it to the destination. DTN with vehicular nodes called Vehicular Delay Tolerant network (VDTN). Here, a comprehensive study of VDTN and comparative study of VDTN routing protocol’s performance is done to analyze the effect of size of buffer. The simulation experiment is carried out using ONE simulator with Synthetic Traces and Real Contact Traces.

Allergic Rhinitis is a chronic, inflammatory disease induced by an IgE-mediated reaction and identified clinically by the presence of symptoms of nasal discharge, itching, sneezing and nasal congestion. The aim and objectives of the study was to determine serum IgE and eosinophil levels in patients with allergic rhinitis and healthy controls, men and women, different age groups and to establish a correlation between serum IgE and eosinophil. A retrospective study was conducted in the outpatient department of ENT in ICARE institute of medical sciences and research, Haldia during the time span of March 2016 to February 2017. A total of 155 subjects (113 cases and 42 controls, 74 men and 81 women) of age 1 month—75 years were selected for the study. Blood samples obtained were analyzed to determine serum IgE and eosinophil levels and the results were subjected to statistical analysis using STATA 12 software. The mean values and standard deviation of the serum log IgE and eosinophil levels in cases and healthy controls, men and women, various age groups were obtained and tabulated using paired t test and MV test. Pearson’s correlation was performed to establish a relationship between serum log IgE and eosinophil levels. The mean values of serum log IgE and eosinophil levels were found to be higher in cases (log IgE—5.65, IgE—814.36 IU/ml, eosinophil—4.49%) when compared to controls (log IgE—4.43, IgE—96.62 IU/ml, eosinophil—2.36%). Men predominance was seen in mean serum log IgE levels (IgE—1018.5 IU/ml, log IgE—5.92) whereas women predominance in mean eosinophil counts (4.96%) in allergic rhinitis. A weakly positive correlation of 0.194 was established between serum log IgE and eosinophil levels. Estimation of serum IgE and eosinophil can serve as a simple, non-invasive and reliable investigative tool in the diagnosis of allergic rhinitis.

In this research work, the transistor level implementation and QCA implementation of TR reversible gate are performed and a comparison between both techniques on the ground of Area is executed. In the later section, a new-fangled design of the reversible adder and subtractor RSG gate is presented. This novel architecture can perform addition and subtraction operation simultaneously, which was never performed before using any of the existing reversible circuits. The proposed novel reversible gate, which uses 2X2 quantum gates and has a quantum cost of five, can be operated as Reversible Half Adder as well as Half Subtractor concurrently. The reversible gate proposed in this research will find numerous applicability in several DSP applications where half adder and half subtractor operates simultaneously.

With aging population, neurodegenerative disorder is becoming health issue and hence early screening tools to prevent adverse effects are critical. Early screening may help to detect such disorder at a nascent stage which can be clinically addressed thereby delaying its progression. With technological progress, brain scanning can identify such disorders. However, access to such tools are restricted due to high cost and necessity of technical skills to operate that are limited to specialized health centers. Tracking one's eye movement in response to a visual task can be cost-effective alternative for developing screening platform. Motivated by this, we have designed computer-based visual tasks and exposed participants to these tasks. Our system captured one's eye movement to quantify gaze in terms of reaction time and % correct fixations in response to visual stimuli presented on computer monitor. The preliminary results of our experimental study with 10 healthy participants are promising.

Reversible logic is one of the flourishing importance to many futuristic technologies. A reversible circuit maps each input vector into a unique output vector. There should not be any information loss in the circuit, because it is proved that each irreversible bit operation dissipate kTln2 amount of energy, but there are so many fields such as cryptography, optical computing, DNA computing etc., where such kind of information loss augments the heat dissipation. As the circuits are getting more compact, soon a limitation to Moore’s Law will be reached hence further no more transistors can be mounted on a single chip. Therefore the next era of technology is transistor less circuit, in which the same operations which are performed now using transistors will be processed at atomic or molecular level using transistor less technique i.e. Quantum Dot Cellular Automata. A novel Reversible Gate RSG is proposed which is designed using QCA. RSG gate outperforms existing reversible gates in terms of garbage outputs and multi functionality. General Terms Reversible Computing, Quantum Computing, QCADesigner 2.0.3

Genetic recombination is an essential event during the process of meiosis resulting in an exchange of segments between paired chromosomes. Estimating recombination rate is crucial for understanding evolution. Experimental methods are normally difficult and limited to small scale estimations. Thus statistical methods using population genetic data are important for large-scale analysis. LDhat is an extensively used statistical method using rjMCMC algorithm to predict recombination rates. Due to the complexity of rjMCMC scheme, LDhat may take a long time to generate results for large SNP data. In addition, rjMCMC parameters should be manually defined in the original program that directly impact results. To address these issues, we designed an improved algorithm based on LDhat implementing MCMC convergence diagnostic algorithms to automatically predict values of parameters and monitor the mixing process. Then parallel computation methods were employed to further accelerate the new program. The new algorithms have been tested on ten samples from HapMap phase 2 datasets. The results were compared with previous code and showed nearly identical outputs, however our new methods achieved significant acceleration proving that they are more efficient and reliable for the estimation of recombination rates. The stand-alone package is freely available for download at the link below. MOE (Min. of Education, S’pore) Accepted version

Purpose. Radiography is important in forensic odontology for the identification of humans. The maxillary sinus is the largest of the paranasal sinuses and first to develop. Sinus radiography has been used for identification of skeletal remains and determination of gender. Hence, the aim and objectives of the present study were to establish a new method for gender determination using maxillary sinus index from lateral cephalometric radiographs and to establish the reliability of maxillary sinus for gender determination. Methods. A total of 50 adult digital lateral cephalometric radiographs (25 males and 25 females) were included in the study. The maxillary sinus analysis was performed on these radiographs using the height and width measurement tools of Sidexis XG software. Maxillary sinus index was calculated, discriminant function analysis performed, and discriminant equation derived for determination of gender. Results. The mean maxillary sinus height and width were found to be higher in males, whereas the maxillary sinus index was greater in females. The discriminant function analysis derived in the study was able to differentiate the sex groups with sensitivity of 68% and specificity of 76%. Conclusions. From the results of the present study, it may be concluded that morphometric analysis of maxillary sinus can be used as a reliable tool in gender determination.

The Department of Public Enterprises had made submissions of Self Evaluation Reports, for the purpose of corporate governance, mandatory for all central government owned enterprises. Despite this, an alarming 40% of the enterprises did not do so. This study examines the impact of external policy tools and internal firm specific factors on corporate governance of central public sector enterprises (CPSEs). We use a dataset of all manufacturing and non-financial services owned by the central government of India for the year 2010-11. Using probit, ordered logit and Heckman’s sample selection models, the study finds that the probability and quality of corporate governance is positively influenced by the CPSE getting into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the central government of India, and hence, enjoying more autonomy in terms of day to day operations. Besides these, internal factors, including bigger size and lower debt size contribute significantly to better corporate governance.

State owned enterprises (SOEs) act as economic units when they operate in industries alongside private firms. These enterprises have social objectives since they are owned by the government and economic objectives since they operate in industries. Research and development (R&D) is one of the strategies available to SOEs which is a public good. Thus, against the multidimensional redistributive objective function of the government, R&D acts as a bridge between social and economic objectives of SOEs. The current study focuses on this particular feature for Indian public and private firms. Specifically, R&D expenditure by public sector enterprises and private sector enterprises listed on the National Stock Exchange is compared for 2015. The study employs propensity score matching and regression methods and finds that listed public sector enterprises spend more than the listed private sector enterprises in India. The study also suggests that external borrowing acts as a stronger tool to increase R&D spending for private firms more than the state owned ones..

User requirement specification (URS) documents written in the form of free-form natural language text contain system use-case descriptions as one of the elements in the URS. For a few application domains, some of the system use-cases in SRS define services and functionality which needs to comply with law, rules and regulations pertaining to the application domain. In this paper, we present a multi-step approach to automatically extract system use-cases from URS and construct traceability links between system-uses and appropriate regulations in the regulatory documents. We define lexicon-based, syntactic and semantic features to discriminate system use-cases from other elements in the SRS. We investigate the application of five semantic similarity methods implemented in the SEMILAR semantic similarity toolkit to compute similarity between a given system use-case with regulations in a regulatory document. We conduct a series of experiments on real-world data obtained from software projects of a large global Information Technology (IT) services company to validate the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness (accuracy of 83.3% for system use-case extraction and 72% for constructing traceability links) and limitations of the proposed approach.

India had adopted disinvestment, as part of broader reforms, in 1991 to improve performance of public sector enterprises (PSEs) owned by the Central government of India. The current study captures the effect of disinvestment policy on the performance of PSEs with special emphasis on the local political and economic environments in which these enterprises operate. Using firm efficiency to capture performance of all PSEs owned by the central government between 1991-92-2010-11, the study employs panel data fixed effects and two stage least square estimation. The results suggest that performance of PSEs is driven by a harmonious union of internal (firm specific) and external factors. Among external factors, disinvestment, as a policy intervention, has a limited impact on performance where as state specific political and economic factors affect firm performance strongly. Finally, the effect of disinvestment on firm performance is conditioned by the political factors in the state where the PSE is located.

Research has reported seasonal peaks in asthma in school age asthmatic children. The study aimed to assess if hospital admissions could be predicted from the possible environmental triggers using data from two British cities: Aberdeen and Doncaster. However, there were no consistent patterns across the two cities with no clear evidence that hospital admissions could be predicted from environmental data.

Performance measurement systems play a key role in evaluating the strategic performance of an organiza- tion, but many managers agree that their evaluation systems do not adequately fulfil this function. Hence, in recent years a shift towards the Balanced Scorecard has emerged as a managerial approach to evaluate the strategic performance of an organization. Balanced Scorecard translates an organization's mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures and provides the framework for strategic management. The concept of the Balanced Scorecard is discussed very often con- cerning its potential to use it as management tool for Corporate Social Responsibility. Although the existing approaches emphasise primarily the financial dimension, the tool can integrate other social and environmental aspects also. BSC can be used to align CSR to create competitive advantage by connecting strategy to performance leading to greater accountability of goals. By developing linkage between CSR and BSC, CSR can become a potent tool for the company to realize enhanced reputation, increased operational efficiency, improved customer and workforce loyalty. This paper explores the relation between CSR and BSC and suggests how linkage can be developed between two in banking industry.

After industrial robots came into existence during 1960, the technology of robotics with the design and analysis of robots in various forms in industries as well as in domestic applications were developed. Nowadays, along with the automotive sector the robots are producing a great impact in the form of quality and production rate to register their existence reliable in various other sectors also. Robotic technology has undergone various phase translations from being tortured as humanoids to the present day manipulators. Depending upon the various forms of its existence, robot manipulators are designed as serial manipulators and parallel manipulators. Individually both types can be proved effective though both have various drawbacks in design and the kinematic analysis. The versatility of robots can be increased by making them work in an environment where the same work volume is shared by more than one manipulator. This work volume can be identified as co-operative work volume of those manipulators. Here the interference of manipulators in the work volume of other manipulators is possible and is made obstacle free. The main advantage of co-operative manipulators is that when a number of independent manipulators are put together in a cooperative work envelope the efficiency and ability to perform tasks is greatly enhanced. The main disadvantage of the co-operative manipulators lies in the complication of its design even for a simple application, in almost all fields. In this paper, a cooperative design of robot manipulators to work in co-operative work environment is done and analysed for its efficacy. In the industrial applications when robotic manipulators are put together in more numbers, the trajectory planning becomes the tough task in the work cell. Proper design can remove the design defects of the cooperative manipulators and can be utilized in a more efficient way. In the proposed research paper an analysis is made on such a type of cooperative manipulator used for climbing stairs with three leg design and anlaysis were also done on the mechanism integrated to the system. Kinematics of the legs are analysed separately and the legs are designed to carry a maximum of 175kgs, which is sustained by the center leg and shared by the dual wing legs equally during the walking phase. In the proposed design, screwjack mechanism is used as the central leg to share the load and thus the analysis on the load sharing capability of the whole system is analysed and concluded in terms of failure modes.