A Comparative study of HMM and SVM in Malayalam Digit Recognition

A primary medium for the human beings to communicate through language is Speech. Automatic Speech Recognition is wide spread today. Recognizing single digits is vital to a number of applications such as voice dialling of telephone numbers, automatic data entry, credit card entry, PIN (personal identification number) entry, entry of access codes for transactions, etc. In this paper we present a comparative study of SVM (Support Vector Machine) and HMM (Hidden Markov Model) to recognize and identify the digits used in Malayalam speech.

A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE I/W-'ll/EA/6'1.-' OF GANDHIJI AND HIS TEACHING ON MODERN HINDI POETRY

Hindi

BUDDHA AND BUDDHIST THOUGHT IN MODERN HINDI POETRY

Hindi

HINDI KRISHNA KAWAS OF BHAKTI PERIOD AND SANSKRIT KRISHNA KAVYAS: AN ANALYTICAL STU DY

HINDI

Production and comprehension of English and Hindi in multilingual transcortical aphasia

This study investigates the two later-acquired but proficient languages, English and Hindi, of two multilingual individuals with transcortical aphasia (right basal ganglia lesion in GN and brain stem lesion in GS). Dissociation between lexical and syntactic profiles in both the languages with a uniform performance across the languages at the lexical level and an uneven performance across the languages at the syntactic level was observed. Their performances are discussed in relation to the implicit/explicit language processes (Paradis, 1994 and Paradis, 2004) and the declarative/procedural model (Ullman, 2001b and Ullman, 2005) of bilingual language processing. Additionally, their syntactic performance is interpreted in relation to the salient grammatical contrasts between English and Hindi.

Hindi cinema and its other

 Wider understandings of popular, commercial Hindi (Indian) cinema centre on discourses surrounding the ‘Bollywood’ machine. In these discussions, a critical exploration of Adivasi (Indigenous) representation in Hindi cinema is often left unexplored. Popular Hindi cinema as a World Cinema exerts tremendous influence in India, and indeed South Asia. However, it continues to provide essentialist representations of Adivasi communities in India. This paper discusses some of these representations in commercial Hindi cinema, by looking at examples of film texts with Adivasi characters. It also examines the difficulties involved in cinematic representations which are blind to multiple identities within the nation-state, in this case, how Adivasis are constructed within popular Hindi cinema as the ‘Other’, to an already existing ‘Other’ subaltern (Indian) mass.
This paper additionally explores some examples of how, rather than be ‘swamped’ by Hindi film’s cultural dominance, local audiences, particularly in Adivasi communities, are negotiating with it to their advantage. It is in these peripheral and under-represented communities, that local media traditions are blending with popular Hindi cinema to produce creative results. How such results are re-invigorating the Adivasi film and music industries is examined.

Raat Ki Rani : nightclubs, vamps and urban transgressive spaces in Hindi cinema

This paper considers how city spaces in Hindi cinema have repeatedly been viewed as sites of transgressive sexual experience, particularly via representations of female sexuality in nightclubs and the flagrant performances of the women or ‘vamps’ that inhabit them. Emerging in Hindi cinema in the 1950s, and becoming a staple in films of the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘vamp’ became synonymous with unrestrained sexuality and the immorality of the city. The dichotomy between the idealised, bucolic, timeless village and the city as an icon of degenerate modernity was repeatedly seen in Hindi cinema, and the strongest signifier of this urban immorality was the ‘vamp’ who was seen as an outsider, and connoted urban vice, excess and desire. By and large the actresses that played ‘vamps’ (such as the blonde haired and blue eyed Helen) were of ‘Western’ appearance. The cabaret and nightclub were thus seen as being ‘Western’ in origin. This paper discusses how this was perhaps a response to colonial and Orientalist stereotyping, where the ‘Indian’ woman and the ‘Western’ woman operated as binary oppositional structures. Such oppositions were clearly present in nightclub dance performances, which were full of meaning to the cinematic audience, who would be able to ‘read’ the seductive, gyrating and explicit movements. This paper decodes examples of the movements in these ‘decadent’ performances, as it was through these movements and performances that the ‘westernised vamp’ became firmly located in urban transgressive spaces, closely tied with national anxiety about the depravity of city spaces.

Sugar and spice: the golden age of the Hindi movie vamps, 1960s-70s

How do we define the globalized cinema and media cultures of Bollywood in an age when it has become part of the cultural diplomacy of an emerging superpower? Is it still an 'other' industry in a world dominated by Hollywood? Bollywood and Its Other(s) aims to compensate for the lack of scholarly literature on Indian film by opening up hitherto unexplored sites or sites that are in formation. It focuses on the aesthetic-philosophical questions of the other, Indian diaspora's negotiations with national identity, alternative reading strategies/research methods, marginal genres (sci-fi, horror), marginal characters (flaneuse, vamps), marginal gender (non-normative sexualities), marginal cinema (Hindi avant-garde), marginal language (Hinglish), and marginal regions (the Kashmir valley). It intends to address film scholars, South Asian studies researchers, cinephiles and lay readers alike.

Catalogues of the Hindi, Panjabi, Sindhi, and Pushtu printed books in the Library of the British Museum.

Accompanied by "A second supplementary catalogue of printed books in Hindi, Bihari (including Bhojpuria, Kaurmali and Maithili), and Pahari (including Nepali or Khaskura, Jaunsari, Mandeali, &c.) in the Library of the British Museum. Compiled by L.D. Barnett, J.F. Blumhardt, and J.V.S. Wilkinson." (viii p., 1678 columns. 29 cm.) Published: London, Trustees of the British Museum, 1957.

Language and utilisation of emergency care in Queensland

Objective: To compare access and utilisation of EDs in Queensland public hospitals between people who speak only English at home and those who speak another language at home. Methods: A retrospective analysis of a Queensland statewide hospital ED dataset (ED Information System) from 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2010 was conducted. Access to ED care was measured by the proportion of the state’s population attending EDs. Logistic regression analyses were performed to determine the relationships between ambulance use and language, and between hospital admission and language, both after adjusting for age, sex and triage category. Results: The ED utilisation rate was highest in English only speakers (290 per 1000 population), followed by Arabic speakers (105), and lowest among German speakers (30). Compared with English speakers, there were lower rates of ambulance use in Chinese (odds ratio 0.50, 95% confidence interval, 0.47–0.54), Vietnamese (0.87, 0.79–0.95), Arabic (0.87, 0.78–0.97), Spanish (0.56, 0.50–0.62), Italian (0.88, 0.80–0.96), Hindi (0.61, 0.53–0.70) and German (0.87, 0.79–0.90) speakers. Compared with English speakers, German speakers had higher admission rates (odds ratio 1.17, 95% confidence interval, 1.02–1.34), whereas there were lower admission rates in Chinese (0.90, 0.86–0.99), Arabic (0.76, 0.67–0.85) and Spanish (0.83, 0.75–0.93) speakers. Conclusion: This study showed that there was a significant association between lower utilisation of emergency care and speaking languages other than English at home. Further researches are needed using in-depth methodology to investigate if there are language barriers in accessing emergency care in Queensland.

Text and Intensification of Its Impact in Chishti Samā`

In my master’s thesis I analyse mystical Islamic poetry in ritualistic performance context, samā` , focusing on the poetry used by the Chishti Sufis. The work is based on both literary sources and ethnographic material collected in India. The central textual source is Surūd-i Rūhānī, a compilation of mystical poetry. Textual sources, however, can be understood properly only in relation to the living performance context and therefore I also utilise interviews of Sufis and performers of mystical music and recordings of samā` assemblies along with texts. First part of the thesis concentrates on thematic overview of the poems and the process of selecting a suitable text for performance. The poems are written in three languages, viz. in Persian, Urdu and Hindi. Among the authors are both Sufis and non-Sufis. The poems, mystical and non-mystical alike, share the same poetic images and they acquire a mystical meaning when they are set to qawwali music and performed in samā` assemblies. My work includes several translations of verses not previously translated. Latter part of the thesis analyses the musical idiom of qawwali and the ways in which the impact of text on listeners is intensified in performance. Typically the intensification is accomplished in the level of a single poem through three different techniques: using introductory verses, inserting verses between the verses of the main poem and repeating individual units of text. The former two techniques are tied to creating a mystical state in the listeners while the latter aims at sustaining it. It is customary that a listener enraptured by mystical experience offers a monetary contribution to the performers. Thus, intensification of the text’s impact aims at enabling the listeners to experience mystical states.

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10−8). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms.

Defining the role of common variation in the genomic and biological architecture of adult human height

Using genome-wide data from 253,288 individuals, we identified 697 variants at genome-wide significance that together explained one-fifth of the heritability for adult height. By testing different numbers of variants in independent studies, we show that the most strongly associated approximately 2,000, approximately 3,700 and approximately 9,500 SNPs explained approximately 21%, approximately 24% and approximately 29% of phenotypic variance. Furthermore, all common variants together captured 60% of heritability. The 697 variants clustered in 423 loci were enriched for genes, pathways and tissue types known to be involved in growth and together implicated genes and pathways not highlighted in earlier efforts, such as signaling by fibroblast growth factors, WNT/beta-catenin and chondroitin sulfate-related genes. We identified several genes and pathways not previously connected with human skeletal growth, including mTOR, osteoglycin and binding of hyaluronic acid. Our results indicate a genetic architecture for human height that is characterized by a very large but finite number (thousands) of causal variants.

Choosing the Arranged One, Arranging the Chosen One – Imagining an Indian Modernity: Reconciling Love, Marriage and Family On and Off the Screen

This is a study on the changing practices of kinship in Northern India. The change in kinship arrangements, and particularly in intermarriage processes, is traced by analysing the reception of Hindi popular cinema. Films and their role and meaning in people´s lives in India was the object of my research. Films also provided me with a methodology for approaching my other subject-matters: family, marriage and love. Through my discussion of cultural change, the persistence of family as a core value and locus of identity, and the movie discourses depicting this dialogue, I have looked for a possibility of compromise and reconciliation in an Indian context. As the primary form of Indian public culture, cinema has the ability to take part in discourses about Indian identity and cultural change, and alleviate the conflicts that emerge within these discourses. Hindi popular films do this, I argue, by incorporating different familiar cultural narratives in a resourceful way, thus creating something new out of the old elements. The final word, however, is the one of the spectator. The “new” must come from within the culture. The Indian modernity must be imaginable and distinctively Indian. The social imagination is not a “Wild West” where new ideas enter the void and start living a life of their own. The way the young women in Dehra Dun interpreted family dramas and romantic movies highlights the importance of family and continuity in kinship arrangements. The institution of arranged marriage has changed its appearance and gained new alternative modes such as love cum arranged marriage. It nevertheless remains arranged by the parents. In my thesis I have offered a social description of a cultural reality in which movies act as a built-in part. Movies do not work as a distinct realm, but instead intertwine with the social realities of people as a part of a continuum. The social imagination is rooted in the everyday realities of people, as are the movies, in an ontological and categorical sense. According to my research, the links between imagination and social life were not so much what Arjun Appadurai would call global and deterritorialised, but instead local and conventional.

PARTAKE survey of public knowledge and perceptions of clinical research in India.

BACKGROUND: A public that is an informed partner in clinical research is important for ethical, methodological, and operational reasons. There are indications that the public is unaware or misinformed, and not sufficiently engaged in clinical research but studies on the topic are lacking. PARTAKE - Public Awareness of Research for Therapeutic Advancements through Knowledge and Empowerment is a program aimed at increasing public awareness and partnership in clinical research. The PARTAKE Survey is a component of the program. OBJECTIVE: To study public knowledge and perceptions of clinical research. METHODS: A 40-item questionnaire combining multiple-choice and open-ended questions was administered to 175 English- or Hindi-speaking individuals in 8 public locations representing various socioeconomic strata in New Delhi, India. RESULTS: Interviewees were 18-84 old (mean: 39.6, SD ± 16.6), 23.6% female, 68.6% employed, 7.3% illiterate, 26.3% had heard of research, 2.9% had participated and 58.9% expressed willingness to participate in clinical research. The following perceptions were reported (% true/% false/% not aware): 'research benefits society' (94.1%/3.5%/2.3%), 'the government protects against unethical clinical research' (56.7%/26.3%/16.9%), 'research hospitals provide better care' (67.2%/8.7%/23.9%), 'confidentiality is adequately protected' (54.1%/12.3%/33.5%), 'participation in research is voluntary' (85.3%/5.8%/8.7%); 'participants treated like 'guinea pigs'' (20.7%/53.2%/26.0%), and 'compensation for participation is adequate' (24.7%/12.9%/62.3%). CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest the Indian public is aware of some key features of clinical research (e.g., purpose, value, voluntary nature of participation), and supports clinical research in general but is unaware of other key features (e.g., compensation, confidentiality, protection of human participants) and exhibits some distrust in the conduct and reporting of clinical trials. Larger, cross-cultural surveys are required to inform educational programs addressing these issues.