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Intensifying the social performance and sustainability of microfinance institutions to address the social challenge of sanitation: An Indian case study
The microfinance model has helped to address the world's social challenges to some extent. Sanitation is one of the world's social challenges and microfinance can be used as an intervention tool to address this. Worldwide 1.04 billion people still practise open defecation, accounting for 15 per cent of the world population, and of which 594 million are Indians. To address this sanitation problem, Bharathi Women Development Centre (Bharathi), a Tamil Nadu-based non-government organization, used its microfinance programme and group network to educate about the need for toilets, and provided the resources and technical know - how to construct latrines in individual households. So far they have successfully constructed 14,609 toilets by providing microcredit and have experienced no difficulties in repayments of loans, by which it is proved to be a sustainable programme. Bharathi has faced many challenges while implementing this project, such as raising debt fund for on-lending to its sanitation portfolio; shifting the culture of open defecation after construction of toilets, especially with male members of the family; establishing a technical know - how workforce to construct the toilets in rural areas; helping the poorest of the poor to not be burdened by the sanitation loan because of its non-income generating nature; and maintaining the low-cost construction of toilets. This study illustrates how a relatively small NGO microfinance institution was able to create a niche market and implement a sustainable sanitation programme along with its routine microfinance programme by providing awareness, technical assistance, and credit to construct toilets. Practical Action Publishing, 2015. -
A reverse logistics model for optimization in waste collection
Sustainability has become a major concern in the development of human society. This requires solution of certain issues and involves social, technical, legislative, and other factors. An important concern is to minimize the generation of wastes, prevent environmental deterioration caused by the generation of wastes, and to enhance the value of recovery from the wastes. The reverse logistics network is helpful in this regard as its mission is to collect and transport used products and packages based on the balance of cost and environment. A good reverse logistics network is important for firms to gain more profits. This paper proposed a linear programming model for reverse logistics in which collection is done when the recyclables bin is half full. This limit can be varied from place to place, depending on the collection of recyclables. The model aimed to reduce transportation cost by setting up a schedule for collection and took into account the profit obtained by recycling. It also considered a penalty for late collection so that there is no piling up of waste, thus reducing the probability of items deteriorating due to weather or moisture content. 2015. -
Load shedding using GA and ACO in smart gird environment
Increasing pressure on the utilities to accommodate energy efficiency, load management and progress in advanced technology has led to transformations for existing grid into a smarter grid. Creating awareness among the end-users to participate in load management programs instead of capacity addition is the best solution for maintaining the stability in the grid. Load shedding is a strategy under load management in which load connected to the smart grid is individually controlled via two- way communication. In this paper, a Smart Load shedding approach is developed based on load prioritization. The required amount of load to be shed under lack of sufficient generation level is optimized by Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms. The proposed approach is implemented using a real time feeder data from the substation, India. The results reflect the effectiveness of proposed algorithms taken into practical applications. -
Congestion management approaches in deregulated power system an illustrative approach
In deregulated power system with competitive electricity market environment, the provision of strategic bidding option to the market participants and its consequences are open up new challenging tasks to the system operator. The market economic efficiency is mainly dependent on transmission system support. The inability of transmission system support to drive market cleared schedule is known as congestion and which is not desirable. The remedial actions to relieve congestion in the transmission system known as congestion relief approaches and are differ in various markets around the world. The objective of this paper is to illustrate some of the technical and non-technical approaches using simple case studies. 2016 SERSC. -
Post-formalist explanation of academic achievement: Exploring the contribution of John Ogbu and Joe Kincheloe
The present paper attempts to interrogate the existing approach to understand academic achievement in the mainstream educational psychology. The paper explores the persistent question of "why academic achievement gap" in the modern society from the cultural ecological and postformalist framework of John Ogbu and Joe Kincheloe respectively. As mainstream educational psychology limits its scope in the narrowed individualistic lens, paper suggests that dominant identity based curriculum, pedagogy and knowledge may concretize the psychological categories unless revolutionary efforts are made to transcend the boundaries. Thus, paper adopts critical interdisciplinary framework, rejecting positivistic metatheory as an only relevant approach in educational psychology. 2016, De Gruyter Open Ltd. All rights reserved. -
Graphitization of coal by bio-solubilization: Structure probe by Raman spectroscopy
Raman spectra of two coal samples of different rank have been examined with Raman spectrometer operating at an excitation wavelength of 514.5 nm. Raman studies manifested the presence of G band conforming the first order scattering of E2g mode. The sp3 domains at about 1355 cm-1 (D band) is an evidence to edge planes and disordered structures. Analysis by curve fitting the first order spectrum justified the presence of G, D1, D2, D3 and D4 bands. The integrated intensity ratio IG/ID? is found to be 3.66 and 5.8 while the ID/ID? ratio is estimated to be about 3 and 4.9 for bituminous and sub-bituminous coal, respectively indicating on-site and hopping defect in the graphene layers. The 2D band is fitted with multiple Lorentian profile has 4 peaks, the intense G?, G?, D + D? and 2D? band at 2445, 2690, 2925 and 3160 cm-1. From the second order spectrum, formation of about 6-8 stacked graphene layers is observed in sub-bitumionus coal. -
A study on factors impeding online buying of household items in Bangalore city
The tremendous growth of the Internet in India has fuelled the growth of e-commerce in the country. The retail business has been affected like all other businesses. This research paper attempted to study the factors responsible for impeding the online buying of household items by customers. The study was limited to Bangalore city only. The study was conducted during June 2013 and December 2014. The data was collected through questionnaires which were distributed among 500 respondents. Among these, 25 questionnaires were partially filled, and were not included as final responses; 280 completely filled questionnaires were utilized for this study. The non online respondents' profile and descriptive statistics were analyzed. Factor analysis was carried out to find the important factors involved in the non online buying decisions of customers. Some recommendations have been made on the strategies which online retailers can adopt to convert non - online buyers to online buyers of household items by addressing some of their concerns. 2016. -
Effect of nonlinear thermal radiation on MHD boundary layer flow and melting heat transfer of micro-polar fluid over a stretching surface with fluid particles suspension
A comprehensive numerical study is conducted to investigate effect of nonlinear thermal radiation on MHD boundary layer flow and melting heat transfer of micro-polar fluid over a stretching surface with fluid particles suspension. Using suitable transformations, the governing equations of the problem are transformed in to a set of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations and then they are solved numerically using the Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg method with the help of shooting technique. Authentication of the current method is proved by having compared with established results with limiting solution. The impact of the various stimulating parameters on the flow and heat transfer is analyzed and deliberated through plotted graphs in detail. We found that the velocity, angular velocity and temperature fields increase with an increase in the melting process of the stretching sheet. Also it is visualize that the shear stress factor is lower for micropolar fluids as compared to Newtonian fluids, which may be beneficial in flow and heat control of polymeric processing. 2017 Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland. -
Exploration of carbon nano dots in hydro carbon soot and carbon black
Hydrocarbon soot, a prime component of particulate matter pollution, poses a great threat to the environment. In this study, we put forth a novel way of harnessing carbon nanodots from the soot particulates thereby converting an environmentally perilous component to an innocuous entity suitable for many applications such as biomedical tracers, gas detectors etc. Large scale production of pure carbon nanodots (PCN) was achieved via direct catalyst free thermal decomposition of kerosene and diesel. Nanostructure of carbon black and graphite is also investigated for comparative studies. In UV-Vis spectra, absorptions at 233, 232 and 229 nm are attributed to ?-?? transition of the C=C bonding. XRD of the samples shows a highly intense peak at ?24 and a slightly broadened peak around 42 due to (002) and (010) reflections of graphitic planes respectively. In IR spectra, peaks at 3431 and 1047 cm-1 were assigned to O-H and C-O stretching vibrations respectively. The band observed at 1619 cm-1 manifests the skeletal vibrations from graphitic domains and hence indicates the presence of crystalline graphitic carbon. The absorption bands at 2920 and 2850 cm-1 arise because of the existence of aliphatic groups in the soot sample. 2017, International Congress of Chemistry and Environment. All rights reserved. -
Does the nifty sectoral indices shake hands with nifty?: A time series analysis
Capital market in absolute sense is regarded as the mirror of the economy. Economy is a combination of various sectors. A sectoral index acts as barometer for the performance of that sector. As sectors are interrelated, this calls for studying the vulnerability of the each sector with the market as a whole .With an attempt to contribute to the meager amount of research on the sectoral indices of Indian capital market, this study aims to analyze the dependence of Nifty on its sectoral variants. This research will help in identifying the sector that has been the cause of movement in the market which can be beneficial in understanding and predicting the potential movement in the market by giving an inside of the vicious circle. The study include unit root test, co-integration and Granger causality test. The results of unit root test reveal that all the indices are non-stationary. It was observed that there are no co-integrating equations which was also discovered in the previous papers. The granger casualty test reveal that Auto, Bank, Energy and pharma are the sectors that have causal relation with the Nifty and Financial services, FMCG and IT sectors are the ones that do not have any causal relation with the Nifty. Serials Publications Pvt. Ltd. -
Including category information as supplements in latent semantic analysis of Hindi documents
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a mathematical model that is used to capture the semantic structure of documents by using the correlations between the textual elements in them. LSA captures the semantic structure very well being independent of external sources of semantics. However, the model's performance increases when it is supplemented with extra information. The work presented in this paper is to modify the model to analyse word correlations in documents by considering the document category information as supplements in the process. This enhancement is called supplemented latent semantic analysis (SLSA). SLSA's performance is empirically evaluated in a document classification application by comparing the accuracies of classification against plain LSA for various term weighting schemes. An increment of 1.14%, 1.30% and 1.63% is observed in the classification accuracies when SLSA is compared with plain LSA for tf, idf and tfidf respectively in the initial term-bydocument matrix. Copyright 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. -
Suitability of natural rubber latex and waste foundry sand in cement concrete
Suitability of Natural Rubber Latex (NRL) as an additive and Waste Foundry Sand (WFS) as partial replacement to river sand, in cement concrete was investigated. Experimental study was performed with concrete mixtures containing 1% latex to water ratio, along with 5% and 10% replacement of river sand by WFS. Properties of concrete were studied in both fresh and hardened state. The results of laboratory tests indicate that WFS and NRL reduces the workability of concrete. Slight reduction in splitting tensile strength was observed for mixtures containing NRL and WFS, in comparison to conventional mix. No specific trend was observed for flexural strength at 7 days, but at 28 days the difference was within 3%, when compared to conventional mix. Strength development for mixtures containing NRL and WFS was slightly lower than conventional mix. The limited results of this study show that concrete containing NRL and WFS do have potential for use as non-structural concrete. -
A study of factors affecting consumer behavioural intentions towards adoption of gamification
Advanced technology with a high degree of accessibility of the Internet across countries has led to the emergence of e-commerce and m-commerce. The global brands and the start-ups are equally attracted to this change in the way the goods and services can be marketed, making market access through the Internet a core part of the strategy for marketers. The same has led to various digital promotional techniques for customer engagement. Among various digital promotional techniques, gamification is one technique where customers are expected to play online games to win the reward points for getting discounts for their purchases. An attempt was made to identify various factors influencing the consumer behavioural intentions towards adoption of gamification as one of the means to get products at discounted prices. In this study, factor analysis was used to find the major factors that influence the consumer behavioural intentions to adopt gamification as one of the digital promotional techniques. The study found eight major factors that influence the adoption of gamification, they are Personal Perspective, Usefulness, Easy to Use, Price Consciousness, Perceived Critical Mass, Flow Experience, Awareness, and Personal Innovativeness. This study brought in a different perspective by exploring the role of possible factors influencing gamification adoption in the Indian market, helping marketers, the major factors, and their influence on the consumer's behavioural intentions of adoption of gamification as one of the digital promotion techniques. -
A hybrid scheme of image compression employing wavelets and 2D-PCA
In this paper, we have presented a method of compressing 2D grey-scale images employing wavelets and two-dimensional principal component analysis (2D-PCA). Principal component analysis (PCA) is an already established technique for image compression which primarily aims at exploiting inter pixel redundancies present in the image, while wavelet is a tool widely used in multi-resolution image processing. In the proposed method the image is subjected to a multi-resolution decomposition using wavelet. Subsequently, 2D-PCA is applied on the set of detail images at each level of resolution. The compressed form of the image is constituted by representative pairs of principal components and projection vectors from each level of resolution along with the approximate image at the coarsest resolution. The proposed method requires relatively few number of principal components (of varied dimension) to produce improved compression ratio with acceptable peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The method has been implemented and tested on a set of real 2D grey-scale images and the results have been assessed on both qualitative and quantitative basis by measuring parameters like compression ratio (CR), PSNR, structural similarity index measurement (SSIM) and the overall performance is found to be satisfactory. Copyright 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. -
A novel automated method for coconut grading based on audioception
The quality of the coconuts used for various purposes is of utmost importance. Demand for better quality products is constantly on the rise due to the improvements in the standard of living of people. There is a possibility that a bad coconut goes unnoticed by the traders, as it is hard to decide if a coconut is good or bad by relying only on its external appearance. Traditionally, quality assessment is carried out manually with the help of three senses; sight, hearing and smell. In the proposed work, a sound processing technique is used in an attempt to automate this process which overcomes the drawbacks of manual processing, which can be used in large godowns and warehouses. This proposed method provides the quality assessment of the coconut purely based on audioception. While creating the database, coconuts varying in size, shape, color and water content were taken from several places as a source for the dataset. Features are extracted from the sound pattern produced by the dropped coconut, which forms the basis for classification. Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Dagging and Naive Bayes classifiers were used and the results obtained were found to be encouraging. 2005 ongoing JATIT & LLS. -
A node deployment mechanism for energy-efficient routing in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks
Military applications are the primary concern of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Efficient target object/event monitoring is a primary goal of military systems in unattended and unmanned areas. Heterogeneous wireless sensor network (HTWSN) is an emerging network for efficient enemy object monitoring in sensitive areas of low cost. The performance of HTWSN is mainly depends on the quality of data transmission and better network lifetime. However, after deployment of HTWSN, the network can experience a serious problem known as path failure. Path failure occurs due to high route overhead, which result poor-quality data transmission and increase the node energy consumption. Path failure results route rediscovery and data packet retransmission. The proposed node deployment mechanism for HTWSN has been minimized the route overhead and improved the path quality, quality data packet transmission by avoid the path failure. The proposed node deployment strategy has given better results in terms of 20 % low node energy consumption, 56 % lower route overhead, 22 % higher network lifetime and 17 % higher data packet delivery ratio than the existing node deployment mechanism of IMCC protocol. 2005 - 2016 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved. -
A comprehensive analysis of various structural parameters of Indian coals with the aid of advanced analytical tools
An exhaustive structural analysis was carried out on three Indian coals (ranging from sub-bituminous to high volatile bituminous coal) using a range of advanced characterization tools. Detailed investigations were carried out using UVVisible spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy coupled energy dispersive spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The X-ray and Raman peaks were deconvoluted and analyzed in details. Coal crystallites possess turbostratic structure, whose crystallite diameter and height increase with rank. The H/C ratio plotted against aromaticity exhibited a decreasing trend, confirming the graphitization of coal upon leaching. It is also found that, with the increase of coal rank, the dependency of I20/I26 on La is saturated, due to the increase in average size of sp2 nanoclusters. In Raman spectra, the observed G peak (1585cm?1) and the D2 band arises from graphitic lattices. In IR spectrum, two distinct peaks at 2850 and 2920cm?1 are attributed to the symmetric and asymmetric CH2 stretching vibrations. The intense peak at ~1620cm?1, is either attributed to the aromatic ring stretching of C=C nucleus. 2016, The Author(s). -
Wrinkled graphene: Synthesis and characterization of few layer graphene-like nanocarbons from kerosene
Wrinkled graphene, derived from a facile thermal decomposition and chemical method, was subjected to various analysis techniques and the results have been reported here. Raman studies revealed the presence of highly graphitized amorphous carbon, which was evident by the appearance of five peaks in the deconvoluted first order spectrum. This result was very well corroborated by the XRD analysis. XPS and FT-IR spectra confirmed the incorporation of oxygen functionalities into the carbon backbone. AFM and SEM images of the sample disclosed a cluster of few-layer wrinkled graphene fragments. TEM images displayed a chain of nearly spherical aggregates of graphene, resembling nanohorns. The resistivity and sheet resistance of the sample were found to be low, making the obtained material a promising candidate for various device applications. Hence, kerosene soot proved to be an efficient precursor for facile synthesis of few layer graphene-like nanocarbon. 2016 Wroclaw University of Technology. -
Bob Dylan: Poet of disruption, dissonance and an aesthetic of dissent
This paper is a brief study of the pivotal figure of folk rock, Bob Dylan. Acclaimed as a songwriter and singer, he was also the poetic voice of the counter culture of the nineteen sixties in America. The counter culture sought to unseat the mainstream establishment that seemed obsessed with war, conservative ideals and religious nationalism. Dylan burst onto this scene 'already a legend' and 'the unwashed phenomenon' (Baez, 1975) projecting the image of the original vagabond and troubadour. A glance at a selection of some of his best known lyrics disabuses one of the notions of his being uninitiated into the discourse of philosophy and literature. He draws freely on and engages with ideas from texts that are sometimes even obscure. The Nobel he was awarded in October 2016 recognized his art for evolving new modes of poetic expression. This paper studies Dylan, the performer and the writer who has masterfully disrupted most accepted literary modes using the dissonance-rich space of Rock music while retaining some of the traditional forms of poetic utterance. AesthetixMS 2016. -
E-governance diffusion in the telecenters of Karnataka-a gender analysis
E-governance is the interaction between a government and its citizens to deliver services in an efficient manner by means of information technology and telecommunication. The current study takes into account three aspects namely-economical, governance and services that impact the e-governance diffusion in the telecenters set up at the hobli level of Karnataka state. A framework is created with these aspects and validated through the present study. The study explores whether gender differentials exist in the e-governance diffusion process. The research adds up to the literature in establishing that gender differentials disappear when the e-governance is in the stage of maturity. One-way ANOVA is used to identify the gender differentials in e-governance diffusion through the NadaKacheri centres of Karnataka. The study proposes policy changes by the government to render better services and governance to the citizens. 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.