Household level assessment, participatory learning for rural water safety and security planning

Household water safety & security planning approaches as outlined in national rural drinking water programme guidelines were piloted using participatory methodologies in one block of West Bengal State in India. The assessment of water quality was done by collecting water samples from existing drinking water sources including from point of use and were analyzed for critical water quality parameters. The household survey was done through purposive random sampling method (10,094 households) in the study area. The result of the study indicates that the present water supply in the block is inadequate vis-a-vis the perceived demand of the consumer. More than two-thirds of the water sources are unsafe on one or multiple accounts. Very low level water safety awareness and poor hygienic practices are the realities. The study attempted to correlate the poor sanitation, water quality both at source and user end with disease burden

A Fragment of the LG3 Peptide of Endorepellin Is Present in the Urine of Physically Active Mining Workers: A Potential Marker of Physical Activity

Biomarker analysis has been implemented in sports research in an attempt to monitor the effects of exertion and fatigue in athletes. This study proposed that while such biomarkers may be useful for monitoring injury risk in workers, proteomic approaches might also be utilised to identify novel exertion or injury markers. We found that urinary urea and cortisol levels were significantly elevated in mining workers following a 12 hour overnight shift. These levels failed to return to baseline over 24 h in the more active maintenance crew compared to truck drivers (operators) suggesting a lack of recovery between shifts. Use of a SELDI-TOF MS approach to detect novel exertion or injury markers revealed a spectral feature which was associated with workers in both work categories who were engaged in higher levels of physical activity. This feature was identified as the LG3 peptide, a C-terminal fragment of the anti-angiogenic/anti-tumourigenic protein endorepellin. This finding suggests that urinary LG3 peptide may be a biomarker of physical activity. It is also possible that the activity mediated release of LG3/endorepellin into the circulation may represent a biological mechanism for the known inverse association between physical activity and cancer risk/survival

The rank reversal problem in multi-criteria decision making : a literature review

Despite the importance of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques for constructing effective decision models, there are many criticisms due to the occurrence of a problem called rank reversal. Nevertheless, there is a lack of a systematic literature review on this important subject which involves different methods. This study reviews the pertinent literature on rank reversal, based on 130 related articles published from 1980 to 2015 in international journals, which were gathered and analyzed according to the following perspectives: multicriteria technique, year and journal in which the papers were published, co-authorship network, rank reversal types, and research goal. Thus our survey provides recommendations for future research, besides useful information and knowledge regarding rank reversal in the MCDM field

Immunohistochemical analysis of unsutured and sutured corneal wound healing

Contains fulltext : 22259.PDF (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Ant System for the k-Cardinality Tree Problem

Abstract. This paper gives an algorithm for finding the minimum weight tree having k edges in an edge weighted graph. The algorithm combines a search and optimization technique based on pheromone with a weight based greedy local optimization. Experimental results on a large set of problem instances show that this algorithm matches or surpasses other algorithms including an ant colony optimization algorithm, a tabu search algorithm, an evolutionary algorithm and a greedy-based algo-rithm on all but one of the 138 tested instances.