The Kandhkelgaon Story: a bold bid by women in Kandhkelgaon Village, Saintala Block, Bolangir District, to break out of their poverty trap

One third of the people on earth who are described as living in absolute poverty are found today in India. “These people,” says Mr B K Satpathy, “are caught in a poverty trap’.” “Poverty trap?” we ask. “These are creative weavers; their cloth has a distinctive style, but those who supply their thread also take away and sell the cloth, paying just a small labor cost for each saree. If they are skilled and work hard this amounts to only 25-30 rupees (60-70 US cents) per day.” Under this arrangement, weaving does not provide enough to live on, and people are seeking ways to escape their entrapment in poverty. (Pdf contains 6 pages).

Characterization of the neural mechanisms supporting the implementation of cognitive control in human decision making

Humans are particularly adept at modifying their behavior in accordance with changing environmental demands. Through various mechanisms of cognitive control, individuals are able to tailor actions to fit complex short- and long-term goals. The research described in this thesis uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to characterize the neural correlates of cognitive control at two levels of complexity: response inhibition and self-control in intertemporal choice. First, we examined changes in neural response associated with increased experience and skill in response inhibition; successful response inhibition was associated with decreased neural response over time in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region widely implicated in cognitive control, providing evidence for increased neural efficiency with learned automaticity. We also examined a more abstract form of cognitive control using intertemporal choice. In two experiments, we identified putative neural substrates for individual differences in temporal discounting, or the tendency to prefer immediate to delayed rewards. Using dynamic causal models, we characterized the neural circuit between ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area involved in valuation, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in self-control in intertemporal and dietary choice, and found that connectivity from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to ventromedial prefrontal cortex increases at the time of choice, particularly when delayed rewards are chosen. Moreover, estimates of the strength of connectivity predicted out-of-sample individual rates of temporal discounting, suggesting a neurocomputational mechanism for variation in the ability to delay gratification. Next, we interrogated the hypothesis that individual differences in temporal discounting are in part explained by the ability to imagine future reward outcomes. Using a novel paradigm, we imaged neural response during the imagining of primary rewards, and identified negative correlations between activity in regions associated the processing of both real and imagined rewards (lateral orbitofrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, respectively) and the individual temporal discounting parameters estimated in the previous experiment. These data suggest that individuals who are better able to represent reward outcomes neurally are less susceptible to temporal discounting. Together, these findings provide further insight into role of the prefrontal cortex in implementing cognitive control, and propose neurobiological substrates for individual variation.

Application of sample-and-hold circuits in the laser frequency-shifting

A new method of frequency-shifting for a diode laser is realized. Using a sample-and-hold circuit, the error signal can be held by the circuit during frequency shifting. It can avoid the restraint of locking or even lock-losing caused by the servo circuit when we input a step-up voltage into piezoelectric transition (PZT) to achieve laser frequency-shifting.

Description of sampling stations, methods of benthic sampling and biological water quality assessment; with some consideration of the influence of sample variation on the assessment values obtained

The first bilateral study of methods of biological sampling and biological methods of water quality assessment took place during June 1977 on selected sampling sites in the catchment of the River Trent (UK). The study was arranged in accordance with the protocol established by the joint working group responsible for the Anglo-Soviet Environmental Agreement. The main purpose of the bilateral study in Nottingham was for some of the methods of sampling and biological assessment used by UK biologists to be demonstrated to their Soviet counterparts and for the Soviet biologists to have the opportunity to test these methods at first hand in order to judge the potential of any of these methods for use within the Soviet Union. This paper is concerned with the nine river stations in the Trent catchment.

Entanglement negativity in the harmonic chain out of equilibrium

We study the entanglement in a chain of harmonic oscillators driven out of equilibrium by preparing the two sides of the system at different temperatures, and subsequently joining them together. The steady state is constructed explicitly and the logarithmic negativity is calculated between two adjacent segments of the chain. We find that, for low temperatures, the steady-state entanglement is a sum of contributions pertaining to left-and right-moving excitations emitted from the two reservoirs. In turn, the steady-state entanglement is a simple average of the Gibbs-state values and thus its scaling can be obtained from conformal field theory. A similar averaging behaviour is observed during the entire time evolution. As a particular case, we also discuss a local quench where both sides of the chain are initialized in their respective ground states.

A habilidade preditiva e os impactos dos choques na política monetária e no câmbio: comparações entre modelos DSGE, VAR e BVAR estimados para o Brasil

Este artigo compara a habilidade preditiva foradaamostra de um modelo DSGE (DynamicStochastic General EquilibriumModel)Novo-Keynesiano, especificado e estimado para o Brasil, com a de um modelo Autorregressivo Vetorial (VAR) e com a de um modelo AutorregressivoVetorial Bayesiano (BVAR). O artigo inova em relação a outros trabalhos similares feitos para o Brasil (Castro et al. (2011) e Caetano e Moura (2013)), ao escolher uma especificação para o modelo DSGE que, ao permitir o uso de um conjunto de informação mais rico, tornou possível computar-se a habilidade preditiva do DSGE a partir de previsões que são,verdadeiramente,previsõesfora da amostra. Ademais, diferentemente de outros artigos que utilizaram dados brasileiros, avalia-se em que medida as respostas das variáveis aos choques na política monetária e no câmbio, obtidas pelo modelo DSGE, se assemelham àquelas de um BVAR estimado através de procedimentos bayesianos desenvolvidos de forma consistente. O modelo DSGE estimado é similar ao utilizado por Justiniano e Preston (2010) e Alpanda (2010). O modelo BVAR foi estimado utilizando uma metodologia semelhante à desenvolvida por Sims e Zha (1998), Waggoner e Zha (2003) e Ramírez, Waggoner e Zha (2007).Os resultados obtidos mostram que o modelo DSGE é capaz de gerar, para algumas variáveis, previsões competitivas em relação às dos outros modelos rivais VAR e BVAR. Além disso, as respostas das variáveis aos choques nas políticas monetária e cambial, nos modelos DSGE e BVAR, são bastante similares.

Multiple maternal origins of chickens: Out of the Asian jungles

Domestic chickens have long been important to human societies for food, religion, entertainment, and decorative uses, yet the origins and phylogeography of chickens through Eurasia remain uncertain. Here, we assessed their origins and phylogeographic hist

Transcription of multi-genre media archives using out-of-domain data

We describe our work on developing a speech recognition system for multi-genre media archives. The high diversity of the data makes this a challenging recognition task, which may benefit from systems trained on a combination of in-domain and out-of-domain data. Working with tandem HMMs, we present Multi-level Adaptive Networks (MLAN), a novel technique for incorporating information from out-of-domain posterior features using deep neural networks. We show that it provides a substantial reduction in WER over other systems, with relative WER reductions of 15% over a PLP baseline, 9% over in-domain tandem features and 8% over the best out-of-domain tandem features. © 2012 IEEE.