Energy use in Indian household sector - An actor-oriented approach

Over the years, significant changes have taken place with regard to the type as well the quantity of energy used in Indian households. Many factors have contributed in bringing these changes. These include availability of energy, security of supplies, efficiency of use, cost of device, price of energy carriers, ease of use, and external factors like technological development, introduction of subsidies, and environmental considerations. The present paper presents the pattern of energy consumption in the household sector and analyses the causalities underlying the present usage patterns. It identifies specific (groups of) actors, study their specific situations, analyse the constraints and discusses opportunities for improvement. This can be referred to ``actor-oriented'' analysis in which we understand how various actors of the energy system are making the system work, and what incentives and constraints each of these actors is experiencing. It analyses actor linkages and their impact on the fuel choice mechanism. The study shows that the role of actors in household fuel choice is significant and depends on the level of factors - micro, meso and macro. It is recommended that the development interventions should include actor-oriented tools in energy planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The analysis is based on the data from the national sample survey (NSS), India. This approach provides a spatial viewpoint which permits a clear assessment of the energy carrier choice by the households and the influence of various actors. The scope of the paper is motivated and limited by suggesting and formulating a powerful analytical technique to analyse the problem involving the role of actors in the Indian household sector.

Capability approach-based evaluation of a biomass cook-stove design

What is the scope and responsibilities of design? This work partially answers this by employing a normative approach to design of a biomass cook stove. This study debates on the sufficiency of existing design methodologies in the light of a capability approach. A case study of a biomass cook stove Astra Ole has elaborated the theoretical constructs of capability approach, which, in turn, has structured insights from field to evaluate the product. Capability approach based methodology is also prescriptively used to design the mould for rapid dissemination of the Astra Ole.

A CAPABILITY APPROACH BASED STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS FOR THE BASE OF THE PYRAMID: A CASE STUDY OF THE FIREWOOD BASED COOK-STOVES

People living under $2 income per day, referred as Base of the Pyramid (BoP), face undesired situations like lack of nutrition, health, education etc. Design as a process of changing current undesired situation to a desired situation has failed. A crucial reason behind these failures is lack of normative basis to identify and understand the absent or unsatisfied stakeholder. Currently stakeholder analysis in the design is heuristic. This paper uses a normative framework of Capability Approach (CA) for the stakeholder analysis. A brief discussion on stakeholder theory and analysis is used to identify gaps in the literature. The constructs of the CA are discussed for its suitability to the purpose. Along with methodological details, data generated from the stakeholder interviews, focus groups in a case study of dissemination of improved cook-stoves is used to interlink the theory with the practice. The scope of this work is in identifying and investigating the motives of the stakeholders in the involvement in the product. Though a lot of insights to discern and manage crucial stakeholders is inbuilt in the methodology, this work does not claim explicit coverage of these aspects.

Design of multiunit electronic exchanges through decomposition

In this paper, we exploit the idea of decomposition to match buyers and sellers in an electronic exchange for trading large volumes of homogeneous goods, where the buyers and sellers specify marginal-decreasing piecewise constant price curves to capture volume discounts. Such exchanges are relevant for automated trading in many e-business applications. The problem of determining winners and Vickrey prices in such exchanges is known to have a worst-case complexity equal to that of as many as (1 + m + n) NP-hard problems, where m is the number of buyers and n is the number of sellers. Our method proposes the overall exchange problem to be solved as two separate and simpler problems: 1) forward auction and 2) reverse auction, which turns out to be generalized knapsack problems. In the proposed approach, we first determine the quantity of units to be traded between the sellers and the buyers using fast heuristics developed by us. Next, we solve a forward auction and a reverse auction using fully polynomial time approximation schemes available in the literature. The proposed approach has worst-case polynomial time complexity. and our experimentation shows that the approach produces good quality solutions to the problem. Note to Practitioners- In recent times, electronic marketplaces have provided an efficient way for businesses and consumers to trade goods and services. The use of innovative mechanisms and algorithms has made it possible to improve the efficiency of electronic marketplaces by enabling optimization of revenues for the marketplace and of utilities for the buyers and sellers. In this paper, we look at single-item, multiunit electronic exchanges. These are electronic marketplaces where buyers submit bids and sellers ask for multiple units of a single item. We allow buyers and sellers to specify volume discounts using suitable functions. Such exchanges are relevant for high-volume business-to-business trading of standard products, such as silicon wafers, very large-scale integrated chips, desktops, telecommunications equipment, commoditized goods, etc. The problem of determining winners and prices in such exchanges is known to involve solving many NP-hard problems. Our paper exploits the familiar idea of decomposition, uses certain algorithms from the literature, and develops two fast heuristics to solve the problem in a near optimal way in worst-case polynomial time.

Secure Concurrency Control in Firm Real-Time Database Systems

Many real-time database applications arise in electronic financial services, safety-critical installations and military systems where enforcing security is crucial to the success of the enterprise. For real-time database systems supporting applications with firm deadlines, we investigate here the performance implications, in terms of killed transactions, of guaranteeing multilevel secrecy. In particular, we focus on the concurrency control (CC) aspects of this issue. Our main contributions are the following: First, we identify which among the previously proposed real-time CC protocols are capable of providing covert-channel-free security. Second, using a detailed simulation model, we profile the real-time performance of a representative set of these secure CC protocols for a variety of security-classified workloads and system configurations. Our experiments show that a prioritized optimistic CC protocol, OPT-WAIT, provides the best overall performance. Third, we propose and evaluate a novel "dual-CC" approach that allows the real-time database system to simultaneously use different CC mechanisms for guaranteeing security and for improving real-time performance. By appropriately choosing these different mechanisms, concurrency control protocols that provide even better performance than OPT-WAIT are designed. Finally, we propose and evaluate GUARD, an adaptive admission-control policy designed to provide fairness with respect to the distribution of killed transactions across security levels. Our experiments show that GUARD efficiently provides close to ideal fairness for real-time applications that can tolerate covert channel bandwidths of upto one bit per second.

Greening the IP Over Optical Backbone Network

In this paper we examine the energy consumption of IP Over Optical WDM Networks. As the number of Internet users increases the Internet expands in reach and capacity. This results in increased energy consumption of the network. Minimizing the power consumption, termed as ``Greening the Internet'', is desirable to help service providers (SP) operate their networks and provide services more efficiently in terms of power consumption. Minimizing the operational power typically depends on the strategy (e. g., lightpath bypass, lightpath non-bypass and traffic grooming) and operations (e. g., electronic domain versus optical domain). We consider a typical optical backbone network model, and develop a model which minimizes the power consumption. Performance calculation shows that our method consumes less power compared to traffic grooming approach.

Past Queue Length Based Low-Overhead Link Scheduling in Multi-beam Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks with multi-beam capability at each node through the use of multi-antenna beamforming are becoming practical and attracting increased research attention. Increased capacity due to spatial reuse and increased transmission range are potential benefits in using multiple directional beams in each node. In this paper, we are interested in low-complexity scheduling algorithms in such multi-beam wireless networks. In particular, we present a scheduling algorithm based on queue length information of the past slots in multi-beam networks, and prove its stability. We present a distributed implementation of this proposed algorithm. Numerical results show that significant improvement in delay performance is achieved using the proposed multi-beam scheduling compared to omni-beam scheduling. In addition, the proposed algorithm is shown to achieve a significant reduction in the signaling overhead compared to a current slot queue length approach.

Conserving Biodiversity as If People Matter: A Case Study from India

India has rich traditions of nature conservation as well as a vigorous official program of protection of nature reserves developed over the last 40 years. However, the officialp rograms uffers fromt otal relianceo n authoritarianm anagement arrangements in which decisions are made centrally and coercion is used to implement them. At the same time, the state apparatus organises subsidized resource flows to the urbanindustrial- intensivea griculturalc omplex which promote inefficient,n on-sustainable resource-use patterns that are inimical to conservation of biodiversity. These processes are illustrated within the concrete setting of the district of Uttara Kannada in southern India. It is suggested that the interests of conservation would be served far better by an approach that withdraws the subsidies to the elite so that a much more efficient, sustainable and equitable pattern of resource use, compatible with conservation of biodiversity, can be instituted. In conjunction with this, the larger society should involve local people in working out detailed plans for conservation of biodiversity and offer them adequate authority as well as appropriate financial incentives to implement these plans. The paper goes on to illustrate how such an approach may be implemented in the case of Uttara Kannada.

Novel flutamide regulated genes in the rat ventral prostate: differential modulation of their expression by castration and flutamide treatments

Aim: To identify flutamide regulated genes in the rat ventral prostate. Methods: Total RNA from ventral prostates control and flutamide treated rats were isolated. Differentially expressed transcripts were identified using display reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction. The effect of castration on the expression of regulated transcripts was studied. Results: We have identified beta 2-microglobulin, cytoplasmic FMR1 protein 2 and pumilio 1 as flutamide induced and spermine binding protein and ribophorin II as flutamide targets in the rat ventral prostate. Although flutamide treatment caused an induction of pumilio I mRNA, had no effect. Conclusion: Castration and flutamide treatments exert differential effects on gene expression. might also have direct AR independent effects, which might have implications in the emergence of androgen dent prostate cancer and the failure of flutamide therapy.

Impact of riparian land use on stream insects of Kudremukh National Park, Karnataka state, India

The impact of riparian land use on the stream insect communities was studied at Kudremukh National Park located within Western Ghats, a tropical biodiversity hotspot in India. The diversity and community composition of stream insects varied across streams with different riparian land use types. The rarefied family and generic richness was highest in streams with natural semi evergreen forests as riparian vegetation. However, when the streams had human habitations and areca nut plantations as riparian land use type, the rarefied richness was higher than that of streams with natural evergreen forests and grasslands. The streams with scrub lands and iron ore mining as the riparian land use had the lowest rarefied richness. Within a landscape, the streams with the natural riparian vegetation had similar community composition. However, streams with natural grasslands as the riparian vegetation, had low diversity and the community composition was similar to those of paddy fields. We discuss how stream insect assemblages differ due to varied riparian land use patterns, reflecting fundamental alterations in the functioning of stream ecosystems. This understanding is vital to conserve, manage and restore tropical riverine ecosystems.

Numerical Study Of Heat Transfer From Pin Fin Heat Sink Using Steady And Pulsated Impinging Jets

The work reported in this thesis is an attempt to enhance heat transfer in electronic devices with the use of impinging air jets on pin-finned heat sinks. The cooling per-formance of electronic devices has attracted increased attention owing to the demand of compact size, higher power densities and demands on system performance and re-liability. Although the technology of cooling has greatly advanced, the main cause of malfunction of the electronic devices remains overheating. The problem arises due to restriction of space and also due to high heat dissipation rates, which have increased from a fraction of a W/cm2to 100s of W /cm2. Although several researchers have at-tempted to address this at the design stage, unfortunately the speed of invention of cooling mechanism has not kept pace with the ever-increasing requirement of heat re- moval from electronic chips. As a result, efficient cooling of electronic chip remains a challenge in thermal engineering. Heat transfer can be enhanced by several ways like air cooling, liquid cooling, phase change cooling etc. However, in certain applications due to limitations on cost and weight, eg. air borne application, air cooling is imperative. The heat transfer can be increased by two ways. First, increasing the heat transfer coefficient (forced convec- tion), and second, increasing the surface area of heat transfer (finned heat sinks). From previous literature it was established that for a given volumetric air flow rate, jet im-pingement is the best option for enhancing heat transfer coefficient and for a given volume of heat sink material pin-finned heat sinks are the best option because of their high surface area to volume ratio. There are certain applications where very high jet velocities cannot be used because of limitations of noise and presence of delicate components. This process can further be improved by pulsating the jet. A steady jet often stabilizes the boundary layer on the surface to be cooled. Enhancement in the convective heat transfer can be achieved if the boundary layer is broken. Disruptions in the boundary layer can be caused by pulsating the impinging jet, i.e., making the jet unsteady. Besides, the pulsations lead to chaotic mixing, i.e., the fluid particles no more follow well defined streamlines but move unpredictably through the stagnation region. Thus the flow mimics turbulence at low Reynolds number. The pulsation should be done in such a way that the boundary layer can be disturbed periodically and yet adequate coolant is made available. So, that there is not much variation in temperature during one pulse cycle. From previous literature it was found that square waveform is most effective in enhancing heat transfer. In the present study the combined effect of pin-finned heat sink and impinging slot jet, both steady and unsteady, has been investigated for both laminar and turbulent flows. The effect of fin height and height of impingement has been studied. The jets have been pulsated in square waveform to study the effect of frequency and duty cycle. This thesis attempts to increase our understanding of the slot jet impingement on pin-finned heat sinks through numerical investigations. A systematic study is carried out using the finite-volume code FLUENT (Version 6.2) to solve the thermal and flow fields. The standard k-ε model for turbulence equations and two layer zonal model in wall function are used in the problem Pressure-velocity coupling is handled using the SIMPLE algorithm with a staggered grid. The parameters that affect the heat transfer coefficient are: height of the fins, total height of impingement, jet exit Reynolds number, frequency of the jet and duty cycle (percentage time the jet is flowing during one complete cycle of the pulse). From the studies carried out it was found that: a) beyond a certain height of the fin the rate of enhancement of heat transfer becomes very low with further increase in height, b) the heat transfer enhancement is much more sensitive to any changes at low Reynolds number than compared to high Reynolds number, c) for a given total height of impingement the use of fins and pulsated jet, increases the effective heat transfer coefficient by almost 200% for the same average Reynolds number, d) for all the cases it was observed that the optimum frequency of impingement is around 50 − 100 Hz and optimum duty cycle around 25-33.33%, e) in the case of turbulent jets the enhancement in heat transfer due to pulsations is very less compared to the enhancement in case of laminar jets.

Prior image-constrained l(1)-norm-based reconstruction method for effective usage of structural information in diffuse optical tomography

A novel approach that can more effectively use the structural information provided by the traditional imaging modalities in multimodal diffuse optical tomographic imaging is introduced. This approach is based on a prior image-constrained-l(1) minimization scheme and has been motivated by the recent progress in the sparse image reconstruction techniques. It is shown that the proposed framework is more effective in terms of localizing the tumor region and recovering the optical property values both in numerical and gelatin phantom cases compared to the traditional methods that use structural information. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America

Bilateral smoothing of gradient vector field and application to image segmentation

Medical image segmentation finds application in computer-aided diagnosis, computer-guided surgery, measuring tissue volumes, locating tumors, and pathologies. One approach to segmentation is to use active contours or snakes. Active contours start from an initialization (often manually specified) and are guided by image-dependent forces to the object boundary. Snakes may also be guided by gradient vector fields associated with an image. The first main result in this direction is that of Xu and Prince, who proposed the notion of gradient vector flow (GVF), which is computed iteratively. We propose a new formalism to compute the vector flow based on the notion of bilateral filtering of the gradient field associated with the edge map - we refer to it as the bilateral vector flow (BVF). The range kernel definition that we employ is different from the one employed in the standard Gaussian bilateral filter. The advantage of the BVF formalism is that smooth gradient vector flow fields with enhanced edge information can be computed noniteratively. The quality of image segmentation turned out to be on par with that obtained using the GVF and in some cases better than the GVF.