Dynamics of socio-economic factors affecting climate vulnerability and technology adoption: Evidence from Jodhpur district of Rajasthan

192-196Climate change and extreme weather fluctuations are the most threatening challenges to the farming communities especially in semi-arid tropics. The paper investigates socio-economic factors affecting vulnerability and adoption of innovations using micro-level survey data of 100 systematically selected farmers in the Jodhpur district of Rajasthan, India. The results reveal that higher income, irrigation and provision of seeds reduce climate vulnerability to a great extent. Several farm level strategies have been adopted by the farmers against climate induced stress, including change in cropping pattern, reduction in irrigation usage, use of drips and sprinklers and water conservation. In case of pearl millet cropping system, we found that adoption of wide row spacing is significantly influenced by the level of the farmer’s education, land size category, climate awareness and trainings programs. The study suggests that diversified crop sequence involving pearl millet-wheat-cluster bean-barley-onion, farmers’ adoption of suitable adaptation strategies and climate resilient technologies will improve with better awareness, education and farm governance with regard to climate change. Moreover, technologies especially indigenous ones suitable to the local contextual needs must be developed or fine-tuned and disseminated for reducing climate-induced vulnerability

A Novel Three-Port Converters For Solar Power System

A Three Port Converter (TPC) can interface with storage elements,renwable energy sources and loads simultaneously, is a good candidate for the solar power systems. To produce constant output power is the main goal (day & night). So I used three port full bridgesConverters in solar electrical energy. A systematic method for generating Three Port Converter topologies from Full Bridge Converters are described here. By using this systematic method,we can devolaped a novel full-bridge TPC (FB-TPC)  for renewable power system applications which has simple topologies and control, a reduced number of devices and single-stage power conversion between any two of the three ports. This method splits the two switching legs of the FBC into two switching cells with different sources and allows a dc bias current in the transformer. The FB-TPC consists of two bidirectional ports and an isolated output port. The primary circuit of the converter functions as a buck-boost converter and provides a power flow path between the ports on the primary side, the power balance in the system ports will be provided by the third port. The full bridge three port converter is full bridge three port converter is designed and using simulated MATLAB/SIMULINK. The output parameters such as  output voltage, current and power were obtained.

Clinical presentation and predictors of outcome in patients with severe acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease requiring admission to intensive care unit

BACKGROUND: Severe acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AE-COPD) is a common reason for emergency room (ER) visit about which little has been documented from India. METHODS: Prospective study of the clinical presentation and predictors of outcome in 116 patients presenting with severe AE-COPD requiring admission to the medical intensive care unit between January 2000 and December 2004. RESULTS: Their mean age was 62.1 ± 9.8 years. There were 102 males. Mean duration of COPD was 7.2 ± 5.8 years. All males were smokers (22.3 ± 11.2 pack years); 35.2% smoked cigarettes and 64.8% smoked bidis. All women were exposed to domestic fuel. Associated co-morbid illnesses were present in 81 patients (69.8%); 53(45.7%) had one co-morbid illness and the remaining 28 (54.3%) had two or more co-morbid illnesses. Evidence of past pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) was present in 28.4% patients; 5 patients who also had type II diabetes mellitus had active PTB. Arterial blood gas analysis revealed respiratory failure in 40 (33.8%) patients (type I 17.5% and type II 82.5%). Invasive mechanical ventilation was required in 18 patients. Sixteen (13.7%) patients died. Stepwise multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed need for invasive ventilation (OR 45.809, 95%CI 607.46 to 3.009;p < 0.001); presence of co-morbid illness (OR 0.126, 95%CI 0.428 to 0.037;p < 0.01) and hypercapnia (OR 0.114, 95%CI 1.324 to 0.010;p < 0.05) were predictors of death. CONCLUSION: Co-morbid conditions and metabolic abnormalities render the diagnosis of AE-COPD difficult and also contribute to mortality. High prevalence of past PTB and active PTB in patients with AE-COPD suggests an intriguing relationship between smoking, PTB and COPD which merits further study

Genetic structure of Plasmodium falciparum field isolates in eastern and north-eastern India

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Molecular techniques have facilitated the studies on genetic diversity of <it>Plasmodium </it>species particularly from field isolates collected directly from patients. The <it>msp-1 </it>and <it>msp-2 </it>are highly polymorphic markers and the large allelic polymorphism has been reported in the block 2 of the <it>msp-1 </it>gene and the central repetitive domain (block3) of the <it>msp-2 </it>gene. Families differing in nucleotide sequences and in number of repetitive sequences (length variation) were used for genotyping purposes. As limited reports are available on the genetic diversity existing among <it>Plasmodium falciparum </it>population of India, this report evaluates the extent of genetic diversity in the field isolates of <it>P. falciparum </it>in eastern and north-eastern regions of India.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A study was designed to assess the diversity of <it>msp-1 </it>and <it>msp-2 </it>among the field isolates from India using allele specific nested PCR assays and sequence analysis. Field isolates were collected from five sites distributed in three states namely, Assam, West Bengal and Orissa.</p> <p>Results</p> <p><it>P. falciparum </it>isolates of the study sites are highly diverse in respect of length as well as sequence motifs with prevalence of all the reported allelic families of <it>msp-1 </it>and <it>msp-2</it>. Prevalence of identical allelic composition as well as high level of sequence identity of alleles suggest a considerable amount of gene flow between the <it>P. falciparum </it>populations of different states. A comparatively higher proportion of multiclonal isolates as well as multiplicity of infection (MOI) was observed among isolates of highly malarious districts Karbi Anglong (Assam) and Sundergarh (Orissa). In all the five sites, R033 family of <it>msp-1 </it>was observed to be monomorphic with an allele size of 150/160 bp. The observed 80–90% sequence identity of Indian isolates with data of other regions suggests that Indian <it>P. falciparum </it>population is a mixture of different strains.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The present study shows that the field isolates of eastern and north-eastern regions of India are highly diverse in respect of <it>msp-1 </it>(block 2) and <it>msp-2 </it>(central repeat region, block 3). As expected Indian isolates present a picture of diversity closer to southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea and Latin American countries, regions with low to meso-endemicity of malaria in comparison to African regions of hyper- to holo-endemicity.</p

Gene Expression Profiling of Human Decidual Macrophages: Evidence for Immunosuppressive Phenotype

Background: Although uterine macrophages are thought to play an important regulatory role at the maternal-fetal interface, their global gene expression profile is not known. Methodology/Principal Findings: Using micro-array comprising approximately 14,000 genes, the gene expression pattern of human first trimester decidual CD14+ monocytes/macrophages was characterized and compared with the expression profile of the corresponding cells in blood. Some of the key findings were confirmed by real time PCR or by secreted protein. A unique gene expression pattern intrinsic of first trimester decidual CD14+ cells was demonstrated. A large number of regulated genes were functionally related to immunomodulation and tissue remodelling, corroborating polarization patterns of differentiated macrophages mainly of the alternatively activated M2 phenotype. These include known M2 markers such as CCL-18, CD209, insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-1, mannose receptor c type (MRC)-1 and fibronectin-1. Further, the selective up-regulation of triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells (TREM)-2, alpha-2-macroglobulin (A2M) and prostaglandin D2 synthase (PGDS) provides new insights into the regulatory function of decidual macrophages in pregnancy that may have implications in pregnancy complications. Conclusions/Significance: The molecular characterization of decidual macrophages presents a unique transcriptional profile replete with important components for fetal immunoprotection and provides several clues for further studies of these cells.Original Publication:Charlotte Gustafsson (Lidström), Jenny Mjösberg, Andreas Matussek, Robert Geffers, Leif Matthiesen, Göran Berg, Surendra Sharma, Jan Buer and Jan Ernerudh, Gene expression profiling of human decidual macrophages: Evidence for immunosuppressive phenotype, 2008, PLoS ONE, (3), 4, e2078.http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0002078Copyright: Public Library of Science (PLoS)http://www.plos.org

Exploiting the Behavior of Ready Instructions for Power Benefits in a Dynamically Scheduled Embedded Processor

Many instructions in a dynamically scheduled superscalar processor spend a significant time in the instruction window (IW) waiting to be selected even though their dependencies are satisfied. These "delays" are due to resource constraints and the oldest first selection policy used in many processors that gives a higher priority to older ready instructions than younger ones. In this paper, we study the "delay" and criticality characteristics of instructions based on their readiness during dispatch. We observe that most ready-on-dispatch (ROD) instructions are non critical and show that 57% of these instructions spend more than 1 cycle in the IW. We analyze the impact of: (i) steering ROD instructions to slow low power functional units; and (ii) early issue of ROD instructions, on power and performance. We find that the "early issue and slow execution" of ROD instructions reduces power consumption by 4-12% while degrading performance by about 5%. On the other hand, "early issue normal execution" of ROD instructions results in 3.5% power savings with less than 1% performance loss. Further, we find that the above policies reduce the energy expended in executing wrong path instructions by about 2%

On the effectiveness of phase based regression models to trade power and performance using dynamic processor adaptation

Microarchitecture optimizations, in general, exploit the gross program behavior for performance improvement. Programs may be viewed as consisting of different "phases" which are characterized by variation in a number of processor performance metrics. Previous studies have shown that many of the performance metrics remain nearly constant within a "phase". Thus, the change in program "phases" may be identified by observing the change in the values of these metrics. This paper aims to exploit the time varying behavior of programs for processor adaptation. Since the resource usage is not uniform across all program "phases", the processor operates at varying levels of underutilization. During phases of low available Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP), resources may not be fully utilized while in other phases, more resources may be required to exploit all the available ILP. Thus, dynamically scaling the resources based on program behavior is an attractive mechanism for power–performance trade-off. In this paper we develop per-phase regression models to exploit the phase behavior of programs and adequately allocate resources for a target power–performance trade-off. Modeling processor performance–power using such a regression model is an efficient method to evaluate an architectural optimization quickly and accurately. We also show that the per-phase regression model is better suited than an "unified" regression model that does not use phase information. Further, we describe a methodology to allocate processor resources dynamically by using regression models which are developed at runtime. Our simulation results indicate that average energy savings of 20% can be achieved with respect to a maximally configured system with negligible impact on performance for most of the SPEC-CPU and MEDIA benchmarks

Enhancing Speedup in Network Processing Applications by Exploiting Instruction Reuse with Flow Aggregation

Instruction reuse is a microarchitectural technique that improves the execution time of a program by removing redundant computations at run-time. Although this is the job of an optimizing compiler, they do not succeed many a time due to limited knowledge of run-time data. In this paper we examine instruction reuse of integer ALU and load instructions in network processing applications. Specifically, this paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How much of instruction reuse is inherent in network processing applications?, (2) Can reuse be improved by reducing interference in the reuse buffer?, (3) What characteristics of network applications can be exploited to improve reuse?, and (4) What is the effect of reuse on resource contention and memory accesses? We propose an aggregation scheme that combines the high-level concept of network traffic i.e. "flows" with a low level microarchitectural feature of programs i.e. repetition of instructions and data along with an architecture that exploits temporal locality in incoming packet data to improve reuse. We find that for the benchmarks considered, 1% to 50% of instructions are reused while the speedup achieved varies between 1% and 24%. As a side effect, instruction reuse reduces memory traffic and can therefore be considered as a scheme for low power

Exploiting Program Execution Phases to Trade Power and Performance for Media Workload

Processing streaming media comprises several program phases (often distinct) that are periodic and independent of application data. Here we characterize execution of such programs into execution phases based on their dynamic IPC (instruction per cycle) profile. We show that program execution of selected phases can be dynamically boosted by activating additional standby functional units which are otherwise powered down for saving energy. Through simulation we show that speedup ranging from 1.1 to 1.25 can be achieved while reducing the energy-delay product (EDP) for most of the media benchmarks evaluated. Additionally we show that artificially introduced stalls during phases of processor underutilization reduces power by around 2 to 4%

ReDeEm_RTL: A Software Tool for Customizing Soft Cells for Embedded Applications

Significant reduction in design time for system on chip (SoC) applications can be achieved through IP reuse. Such a design methodology encourages designers to develop IP blocks that add to a library of soft cells in anticipation of the market trends and meet stringent time to market constraints. However for application specific ICs all the hardware in each IP block may not be used. This gives rise to an opportunity to reduce the number of hardware components in such blocks depending on the application and customizing the IP or soft cell for the application context. In this paper we present a method to automatically detect and remove logic in RTL blocks (soft cells) that are not used by the embedded application thereby reducing area and power. A prototype tool ReDeEm_RTL (ReDesign in Embedded RTL, read as Redeem RTL) has been implemented to remove all redundant logic and its performance although dependent on the type of application, shows that sizable reduction in logic can be obtained