555 research outputs found
Chapter 7 Nutraceuticals and inflammation
No full textThe chronic state of inflammation is widely associated with number of pathologies including asthma, pneumonia, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic ailment, inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, neurodegenerative disorders, and cancer. The conventional drug therapies including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and corticosteroids have certain limitations, mainly related to their adverse effects and high cost. In this regard, there is continued focus on alternative therapies, including plant-derived components to prevent or treat inflammatory conditions. Food bioactive ingredients showed promising health effects with favorable safety profile and relatively low cost. In recent decades, they are being extensively evaluated for their anti-inflammatory effects, and further investigations on these bioactive ingredients will result in the development of effective and safe food supplement-based therapies for chronic inflammation. In this chapter, the immunomodulation and anti-inflammatory properties of dietary fibers, pre- biotics, probiotics, polyunsaturated fatty acids, polyphenols, and spice-derived bioactive components are reviewed
Lessons Learned: Raghuram Rajan
No full textRaghuram Rajan, a University of Chicago professor of economics and finance, served as director of research at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2003 to 2006. In 2005, Rajan warned very publicly of the risks of a financial crisis. Following his tenure at the IMF, Rajan served as chief economic adviser to India’s Finance Ministry and governor of the Reserve Bank of India. An expert on financial institutions and their effects on economic growth and development across countries, Rajan was recognized as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He is co-author of Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (2003) and author of The Third Pillar (2019), about community organization. This Lessons Learned is based on an interview with Rajan conducted on December 16, 2020
Self-identity, embodiment and the development of emotional resilience
No full textThis article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Recent social work reforms in the UK have highlighted the need for social work practitioners to be empathetic, reflexive and resilient. Current literature defines resilience as the individual's adaptive response to adversity, stress-resistant personality traits and the ability to ‘bounce back’, yet the processes by which resilience is developed remain underexplored. The stressors associated with training to be a social worker particularly necessitate such an investigation. This study adopts a phenomenological approach to explore social work students' lived experiences of managing emotion and developing resilience. Emotion is constructed as a relational concept, developed within intersubjective space and as an embodied experience. Findings indicate tensions in student narratives around the expression of emotion and ‘being professional’. Critical incident narratives reveal often overwhelming difficulties experienced by students, prior to and during the social work programme. A variety of coping strategies were adopted including active resistance, spirituality, critical reflection and social support. Narratives as ‘discourses-in-the-making’ highlight embodiment as a valuable analytical lens by which emotional conflicts are experienced, deconstructed and resolved through the process of integrating the personal and professional self. Spaces to develop emotional resilience within the social work curriculum are discussed
Do incumbents manipulate access to finance during banking crises?
No full textThe author tests the hypothesis that during systemic banking crises, access to finance is opportunistically tightened by incumbents to eliminate or weaken competition from mainly young firms. He finds this to be especially true in more corrupt countries. To do so, he uses a methodology similar to Rajan and Zingales (1998) on three-digit manufacturing industry-level data provided by the United Nations Statistics Division for about 15 industrial and developing countries in over 20 industries on average. The author shows that price-cost margins in externally more financially dependent industries are higher during crisis than in externally less dependent industries in countries with higher levels of corruption. He finds the opposite relationship for the change in the industry-level number of establishments during a crisis. The results withstand an array of robustness checks, including using different indices of corruption, different controls, and robust estimation techniques.
Natural image matting with non-negative matrix factorization
No full textThis report summaries the work done by the author on his Final Year Project at
Nanyang Technological University (NTU) under Associate Professor Deepu Rajan.
The author was involved in implementing an effective way to realize image matting
using Non – Negative Matrix Factorization.
The report provides an overview of the project. It aims to provide the reader an
insight into the author’s role in the development of the matting algorithm. The report
explains the salient features of matting, Non-Negative Matrix Factorization and how
the entire development process was done. The report summarizes the results found
and compares the obtained results with other known algorithms with the use of
images.
It also highlights the domain knowledge, skills gained to accomplish these tasks and
the challenges faced in the process and how they were overcome. The technical
knowledge gained at NTU, was utilized in various ways to fulfill the requirements of
the project.Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Engineering
The Attorney General v Rajan Mahthani (Appeal No. 4 of 2020) [2025] ZMSC (24 July 2025): Judicial Recusal and Why it is Important to Strike a Balance
No full textThis contribution examines The Attorney General v Rajan Mahthani, a Supreme Court ruling on judicial recusal. The author critically assesses the Court’s insistence on proving actual, extrajudicial bias as a prerequisite for recusal. Though the importance of shielding the judiciary from frivolous motions is acknowledged, the piece warns that the Court’s rigid stance, paired with its admonishing tone, may undermine the right to a fair hearing guaranteed under Article 18 of the Constitution. Drawing on South African and Kenyan jurisprudence, the author proposes adopting a “reasonable apprehension of bias” standard that respects judicial independence while safeguarding public confidence in the impartiality of the courts
A policy model for Tunisia with real and financial flows
No full textThis model was developed to provide a moacroeconomic framework for Tunisia's structural adjustment program and a flexible tool for further country economic analysis. As currently specified, it is designed to analyze fiscal, debt, and incomes policies, while deriving implications for the exchange rate and for the availability of credit to the private sector. Several policy experiments are carried out to illustrate this focus, and suggestions are offered for variations in model closure and detail.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Stabilization,Financial Intermediation
Moral Rights: The Future of Copyright?
No full textAugust 20, 2009 Speaker: Mira T. Sundara Rajan, DPhil (Oxon) Canada Research Chair in Intellectual Property Law Associate Professor of Law University of British Columbia Presented by: Frederick K. Cox International Law Center Summary: This lecture will introduce the concept of the moral rights of the author, a special branch of copyright law dealing with the artistic, personal, and cultural interests implicated in copyright works. The session will seek to familiarize authors with the approach to moral rights in the United States and major international jurisdictions, including the European Union and United Kingdom, Canada, and India. Moral rights are an area of growing international importance, and there is a strong probability that moral rights claims and concerns will become increasingly common in an era of expanding digital technology. This seminar will help lawyers to identify moral rights issues in their practices, and to present effective arguments on moral rights claims, based on national and international copyright laws
Investigating multilingualism and its association with executive functioning: An exploratory study comparing bilingual, trilingual and quadrilingual college students in India
No full textMultilingualism has both advantages and disadvantages. Past research has highlighted this dichotomy by exploring the impact of linguistic ability on individuals’ executive functioning. This study explores the relationship between individuals’ linguistic ability (number of languages spoken) and their executive functioning, specifically, working memory – measured using the Corsi Block-Tapping task (Mueller, 2011a), inhibitory control – measured using the Go/No-Go task (Mueller, 2011b) and problem solving – measured using the Tower of London task (Mueller, 2011c) among bilingual, trilingual and quadrilingual Indian colleges students. Results from a Kruskal Wallis test indicated non-significant results for problem solving among the three groups. However, significant differences were found between groups for working memory (p = 0.050) (particularly between bilinguals and quadrilinguals, and trilinguals and quadrilinguals) and inhibitory control (p = 0.020) (particularly between trilinguals and quadrilinguals). The mixed results indicate a need for further research in this domain within the vast and diverse population of India.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
* Corresponding author: Garima Rajan,
0000-0002-4874-2228 [email protected]
Distributed Gaussian Process Hyperparameter Optimization for Multi-Agent Systems
No full textGaussian Process (GP) is a flexible non-parametric method which has a wide variety of applications e.g., field estimation using multi-agent systems. However, the training of the hyperparameters suffers from high computational complexity. Recently, distributed hyperparameter optimization with proximal gradients has been proposed to reduce complexity, however only for a network with a central station. In this work, exploiting edge-based constraints, we propose two fully-distributed algorithms pxADMMfd and pxADMMfd,fast for a network of multi-agent systems, which do not rely on a central station. In addition, asynchronous versions of the algorithms are also proposed to reduce the synchronization overhead in heterogeneous networks. Simulations are conducted for a field estimation problem, using both artificial, and real-world datasets, which show that the proposed fully-distributed algorithms successfully converge, at the cost of an increased number of iterations.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Signal Processing System
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