56 research outputs found
Organ Trade in India - The Grey Area
No full textMaster Thesis Abstract Institute of Political Studies Faculty of Social Sciences Charles University in Prague Author: Pavithra Ramesh Supervisor: Janusz Salamon, Ph.D. E-mail: [email protected] m E-mail: janusz.salamon@univ- oxford.com Phone: +420774960096 Phone: +420731816202 Specialisation: IEPS Defense Planned: June 2017 Topic: Bioethics is the study concerned with the implications of medical procedures, technologies and treatments from the perspective of ethics, philosophy, law and its implementation. It encompasses a wide range of ethical concerns in relation to organ transplants, genetic engineering, artificial reproduction, euthanasia etc. My thesis is an attempt to probe into certain ethical nuances amidst the technological advances in the field of medicine. Particularly, with respect to organ trade in India. Since the origin of medicine the primal goals have followed the Hippocratic Oath of "Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always." (Adams 1891). The questions this perception of early medicine leaves us with are: Have we withdrawn from the compassion and ethics prescribed with the advent of advanced lab technology? What are the issues around organ trade in India? What causes these issues? And how can this be dealt with? The approach to pursue the answers for the above, revolves around..
Exploration of Spatiotemporal Expansion Pattern and Comparative Evaluation of Urban Growth Models: A Case Study of Colombo, Sri Lanka
No full textMitigating airport congestion : market mechanisms and airline response models
No full textThesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2009.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 157-165).Efficient allocation of scarce resources in networks is an important problem worldwide. In this thesis, we focus on resource allocation problems in a network of congested airports. The increasing demand for access to the world's major commercial airports combined with the limited operational capacity at many of these airports have led to growing air traffic congestion resulting in several billion dollars of delay cost every year. In this thesis, we study two demand-management techniques -- strategic and operational approaches -- to mitigate airport congestion. As a strategic initiative, auctions have been proposed to allocate runway slot capacity. We focus on two elements in the design of such slot auctions -- airline valuations and activity rules. An aspect of airport slot market environments, which we argue must be considered in auction design, is the fact that the participating airlines are budget-constrained. -- The problem of finding the best bundle of slots on which to bid in an iterative combinatorial auction, also called the preference elicitation problem, is a particularly hard problem, even more in the case of airlines in a slot auction. We propose a valuation model, called the Aggregated Integrated Airline Scheduling and Fleet Assignment Model, to help airlines understand the true value of the different bundles of slots in the auction. This model is efficient and was found to be robust to data uncertainty in our experimental simulations.(cont.) -- Activity rules are checks made by the auctioneer at the end of every round to suppress strategic behavior by bidders and to promote consistent, continual preference elicitation. These rules find applications in several real world scenarios including slot auctions. We show that the commonly used activity rules are not applicable for slot auctions as they prevent straightforward behavior by budget-constrained bidders. We propose the notion of a strong activity rule which characterizes straightforward bidding strategies. We then show how a strong activity rule in the context of budget-constrained bidders (and quasilinear bidders) can be expressed as a linear feasibility problem. This work on activity rules also applies to more general iterative combinatorial auctions.We also study operational (real-time) demand-management initiatives that are used when there are sudden drops in capacity at airports due to various uncertainties, such as bad-weather. We propose a system design that integrates the capacity allocation, airline recovery and inter-airline slot exchange procedures, and suggest metrics to evaluate the different approaches to fair allocations.by Pavithra Harsha.Ph.D
“Microwave and Sonication assisted extraction of pigments from marigold flower [tagetes erecta].
No full textThis Dissertation / Report is the outcome of investigation carried out by the creator(s) / author(s) at the department/division of Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI), Mysore mentioned below in this page
The effect of material and process parameters on impeller torque and power consumption in a bladed mixer
No full textA large number of industries including catalytic, chemical, cosmetic, food, and pharmaceutical industries frequently handle powders or granular materials in various unit operations. A cylindrical mixer mechanically agitated by an impeller blade is a common, industrially relevant geometry in numerous particle processing technologies. A bladed mixer has a capability of handling a wide variety of solid and liquid systems: free flowing and cohesive powders, pastes, or suspensions. The torque needed to move the impeller, provides insight into flow behavior of the material and can be monitored on the bench scale, pilot scale, and manufacturing scale so that it could provide useful information for scale-up and process monitoring & control. Experimental measurements of the agitation torque exerted on a particle bed and the power draw for the motor driving the impeller blades in a mixing process were conducted to investigate the impact of particle properties and blade geometry as a function of the blade rotation rate. It was found that the torque exerted on a granular bed and the power consumption were a strong function of the impeller blade configuration, the position of the blades in a deep granular bed, the fill height of the glass beads, and the size and friction coefficient of the particles. It was observed that the time-averaged torque and power consumption for different particle sizes qualitatively scaled with particle diameter. A scale-up relationship for a deep granular bed was developed: the time-averaged torque and average adjusted power consumption scaled with the square of the material fill height.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesby Pavithra Valliappa
Evaluating the searching capabilities of search engines and metasearch engines: a comparative study
No full text87-97Compares the
searching capabilities of two search engines (Google and Yahoo) and two
metasearch engines (Metacrawler and Dogpile) on the basis of the precision
value and relative recall. Fifteen queries which represented a broad range of
library and information science topics were selected and each query was
submitted to the search engines and metasearch engines. The first 100
results in
each scenario were evaluated and it was found that search engines did not
achieve higher precision than the metasearch engines. It is also found that
despite the theoretical advantage of searching the databases of several
individual search engines, metasearch engines did not achieve higher recall.
The results of the study offer guidance for internet surfers to choose
appropriate
search tools
for information retrieval. It also provides some inputs to search engine
designers to make search engines’ search
capabilities
more efficient
Developing Edible Barcodes from Hydrogels: A study on the influence of drying
No full textCounterfeiting of food and pharmaceutical products, albeit a more serious issue in developing countries is, however, omnipresent. Therefore, there is an ever-growing need for anticounterfeiting measures to address this challenge. Currently, the existing overt and covert anticounterfeiting measures are more prevalent on the packaging of such products. While such measures are helpful to a certain extent, they are however, easier to by-pass with re-used authentic packaging, fake barcodes and duplicate product numbering. Furthermore, advanced research and new innovations have indicated that it is also possible to have additional levels of security by incorporating similar measures into or on the product itself. Although these novel anticounterfeiting measures offer a unique opportunity to safeguard the customer’s interest at best, they present certain challenges. Some of these include bio-compatibility of the materials and the need for them to be in compliance with regulatory organizations. However, overcoming these challenges confronts the issue directly. In this work, the approach is to develop a proof of concept of entirely edible barcodes from naturally available and/or food grade materials such as sodium alginate. This study also focusses on the influence of drying on the macroscopic structure of such barcodes. The bar-codes are produced by physically cross-linking the polymer in specific moulds, converting them into a hydrogel barcode in itself. Altogether, this work provides a qualitative under-standing that such a concept can be developed and that the significant structural changes upon drying is not exclusively governed by the concentration of sodium alginate.Chemical Engineerin
Monitoring deformation in glasshouses using InSAR
No full textThe Netherlands has for long been witnessing problems due to subsidence. While urban infrastructure is mostly safeguarded from differential settlement by deep pile foundations, the same cannot be said about greenhouses. The greenhouses of the Netherlands has enabled the country to become the largest exporter of vegetables, second only to the United States of America. It is imperative that these greenhouses which form the backbone of the agriculture infrastructure of the country, are monitored continuously to minimize unprecedented damage. This thesis aims to study the feasibility of using time series Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) as a means to monitor differential settlement in greenhouse structures. The analysis was primarily done using RADARSAT-2 data. In case of translucent surfaces of greenhouses, it was important to firstly identify the physical targets that are associated to scattering centres. This was done by analysing the statistics of the heights of the scatterers which helps in ascertaining where the radar signal is getting back-scattered from. It was inferred that the persistent and distributed scatterers are primarily identified from objects on the roof and outer walls of the greenhouses. Moreover, the magnitude of deformation estimated from the scatterers have been corroborated with geotechnical data. It was seen that higher magnitudes of deformation was seen in locations with compressible soil types such as clay and peat close to the ground surface. It was also seen that greenhouse structures are prone to differential settlement when the depths of the piles are insufficient in areas with varying soil types. The effect of thermal contributions has also been studied and it was found that the estimation of thermal expansion does not significantly affect the estimated deformations. From the study, it is evident that time series InSAR offers an effective means to monitor differential settlements in greenhouses. In order to check for differential settlement in individual greenhouses, it is proposed that a persistent scatter interferometric analysis be done initially and if it is seen that the density of these scatterers is insufficient, the analysis can be followed up with time series interferometry of distributed scatterers. Incorporating multiple track directions of radar data increases the number of greenhouses that can be monitored. Moreover, it was also seen that persistent scatterers were identified from additional greenhouses when Sentinel-1 data was used, despite its poorer spatial resolution. For further study, it is recommended that corner reflectors are used to validate the positions of the targets that are identified as persistent and distributed scatterers.Geoscience and Remote Sensin
Endogenous Indole Amines in Food Value Plants
No full textThis Dissertation / Report is the outcome of investigation carried out by the creator(s) / author(s) at the department/division of Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI), Mysore mentioned below in this page
Antioxidant Activity of Polyphenols and Polysaccharides from Brown Seaweeds
No full textThis Dissertation / Report is the outcome of investigation carried out by the creator(s) / author(s) at the department/division of Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI), Mysore mentioned below in this page
- …
