Over last few decades, there has been a growing interest among researchers in understanding the link between trade liberalization and regional disparities within the context of an individual country. ...In this study, we develop the first ever single-country multiregional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for the Indian economy to investigate this linkage. Overall our results suggest that, in the short run, trade liberalization has a beneficial impact on the rich and fast-growing middle-income states and a marginal or negative impact on the poor states.
Gender Bias and Digital Financial Services in South Asia: Obstacles and Opportunities on the Road to Equal Accessexamines access to financial services to women in general in South Asia and ...specifically their access to digital financial services.
The hybrid manipulators are always found to be of great use in industries due to the major shortcoming of serial manipulators (lesser accuracy and heavy structure) and parallel manipulators (small ...workspace). Henceforth, a three-dimensional hybrid manipulator is presented in this paper and this hybrid manipulator connects two parallel manipulators in a serial arrangement. Afterwards, the theory of impedance control with some changes is applied for an operation on a three dimensional L-shaped path having some restrictions imposed on the interactive forces when the manipulator is interacting with an object in its environment along with an approach to eliminate amnesia i.e. difference between the actual trajectory and the command trajectory. The overwhelming controller is used between the actual system and the inverse controller. It is observed from the result that there is always some amnesia during force control and some time is provided before the next phase of force control to remove this difference in trajectory.
In this study, we examine disparities in financial development at the regional level in India. The major research questions of the study are: how do we measure the level of financial development at ...the sub-national level? How unequal is financial development across the states? Does it vary by ownership of financial institutions? To explore these research questions, our study develops a composite banking development index at the sub-national level for three different bank groups – public, private and foreign for 25 Indian states covering 1996–2015. Our findings suggest that despite reforms, banking development is significantly higher in the leading high income and more developed regions compared to lagging ones. Furthermore, we find that all bank groups including public banks are concentrated more in the developed regions. Overall, over the years the position of top three and bottom three states in the aggregate banking index have remained unchanged reflecting lop-sidedness of regional development. We also note improvement in the ranking of some north-eastern states during the period 2009–15.
Software Fault Prediction (SFP) is the most persuasive research area of software engineering. Software Fault Prediction which is carried out within the same software project is known as With-In Fault ...Prediction. However, local data repositories are not enough to build the model of With-in software Fault prediction. The idea of cross-project fault prediction (CPFP) has been suggested in recent years, which aims to construct a prediction model on one project, and use that model to predict the other project. However, CPFP requires that both the training and testing datasets use the same set of metrics. As a consequence, traditional CPFP approaches are challenging to implement through projects with diverse metric sets. The specific case of CPFP is Heterogeneous Fault Prediction (HFP), which allows the program to predict faults among projects with diverse metrics. The proposed framework aims to achieve an HFP model by implementing Feature Selection on both the source and target datasets to build an efficient prediction model using supervised machine learning techniques. Our approach is applied on two open-source projects, Linux and MySQL, and prediction is evaluated based on Area Under Curve (AUC) performance measure. The key results of the proposed approach are as follows: It significantly gives better results of prediction performance for heterogeneous projects as compared with cross projects. Also, it demonstrates that feature selection with feature mapping has a significant effect on HFP models. Non-parametric statistical analyses, such as the Friedman and Nemenyi Post-hoc Tests, are applied, demonstrating that Logistic Regression performed significantly better than other supervised learning algorithms in HFP models.
Outcome prediction for surgical patients with sepsis may be conducive to early aggressive interventions. In several studies, changes in the level of numerous biomarkers like red cell distribution ...width (RDW), platelet count (PC), mean platelet volume (MPV), and platelet distribution width (PDW) have been demonstrated to be associated with mortality in critically ill patients. We aimed at investigating the prognostic significance of dynamic changes in RDW, PC, MPV, and PDW in surgical patients with sepsis.
We prospectively enrolled 110 surgical patients of sepsis in our study admitted to the surgical ward and ICU. We measured RDW, PC, MPV, and PDW on days 1, day 4, and day 8. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) were generated for prognostic validation of these parameters and mortality in surgical patients with sepsis. Results: We found that higher RDW and PDW on day 1 among non-survivors as compared to survivors on day 1 were significantly associated with mortality. ROC curves showed that RDW and PDW on day 1 could be used to predict mortality in surgical patients with sepsis and it was dynamic changes in PC on day 4 and day 8 along with a change in MPV on day 8, which was significantly associated with mortality.
The major findings of our study were baseline value of RDW and PDW on day 1 and continuous decrease in PC and increase in MPV over one week were significantly associated with mortality. So, it is better to monitor dynamic changes in PC and MPV in combination with baseline RDW and PDW. So, these parameters can be promising markers to assess prognosis in surgical patients with sepsis.
In recent years there has been increasing interest in the rise of shadow banking in China and India. In this paper, we aim to get a better understanding of the differences in trends and investigate ...the factors leading to the increase of shadow banking in these two major emerging economies. We find that financial exclusion is a common factor leading to the growth of shadow banking in both countries. While financial reform has taken place in India, financially repressive policies still prevail in China. Although several regulatory measures have been adopted in India and China, the size of the shadow banking sector in these two countries remains underestimated. Thus, streamlining and enhancing data collection is a key priority for both nations. We argue that regulation in both countries should be more activity focused (specific field in which a shadow bank is focused on) rather than sector or entity based, and it should be at par with banks. The shadow banks provide last mile connectivity to remote, distant, and ignored segments of the population not serviced by the formal financial sector. As this enhances financial inclusion, a balanced approach is required keeping in view both costs and benefits of the shadow banking system.
Diabetes mellitus (DM) has become one of the major healthcare challenges worldwide in the recent times and inflammation being one of its key pathogenic process/mechanism affect several body parts ...including the peripheral and central nervous system. High-mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) is one of the major non-histone proteins that plays a key role in triggering the inflammatory response. Upon its release into the extracellular milieu, HMGB1 acts as an “alarmin” for the immune system to initiate tissue repair as a component of the host defense system. Furthermore, HMGB1 along with its downstream receptors like Toll-like receptors (TLRs) and receptors for advanced glycation end products (RAGE) serve as the suitable target for DM. The forthcoming research in the field of diabetes would potentially focus on the development of alternative approaches to target the centre of inflammation that is primarily mediated by HMGB1 to improve diabetic-related complications. This review covers the therapeutic actions of HMGB1 protein, which acts by activating the RAGE and TLR molecules to constitute a functional tripod system, in turn activating NF-κB pathway that contributes to the production of mediators for pro-inflammatory cytokines associated with DM. The interaction between TLR2 and TLR4 with ligands present in the host and the activation of RAGE stimulates various immune and metabolic responses that contribute to diabetes. This review emphasizes to elucidate the role of HMGB1 in the initiation and progression of DM and control over the inflammatory tripod as a promising therapeutic approach in the management of DM.
Graphic abstract
Context: The concept of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in cancer origin, progression, and metastasis is of recent origin and not fully understood. So far, many cell culture studies have been ...done to investigate the role of EMT in epithelial ovarian cancer, but only a few human studies have been conducted.
Aims: The aim of the study is to study the expression of E-cadherin and vimentin in serous and mucinous tumors of the ovary and to compare their expression in benign and malignant serous and mucinous ovarian tumors.
Methods: This study was a prospective study done on 60 patients with a histological diagnosis of serous and mucinous ovarian malignancy. The study was conducted in the Department of Pathology and Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Vardhman Mahavir Medical College and Safdarjung Hospital, New Delhi. The expression of epithelial marker E-cadherin and mesenchymal marker vimentin was studied in each of the tumors.
Statistical Analysis: Unpaired t-test/Mann-Whitney test, Chi-Square test/Fisher's exact test, and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test were used.
Results: Of the total 60 cases included in the study, 30 benign and 30 malignant cases of serous and mucinous tumors were taken. Of the 30 benign cases, 22 cases (73.3%) were that of serous cystadenomas, whereas 8 (26.67%) cases were of mucinous cystadenomas. Among the malignant cases, 21 cases (70%) were serous surface epithelial ovarian carcinoma, whereas 9 (30%) were mucinous surface epithelial ovarian carcinoma. Subsequently, the malignant cases were graded according to their glandular differentiation. Immunohistochemistry was performed in each of the 60 cases.
Conclusion: In the malignant cases with increasing grade of the tumor, a reduced expression of E-cadherin and an increased expression of vimentin were seen in the epithelial cells.
The Australian government as part of its aid programme allocates large funds to improve financial inclusion in developing countries. However, this does not take into account low educational levels in ...these countries. The existing literature on financial inclusion also treats the issue as mainly supply-centric and does not take cognisance of the fact that poor human development and high illiteracy levels in developing economies may prevent a large section of the population from benefitting from financial inclusion efforts, because of low awareness and comprehension of the financial services available. This study uses a detailed three-stage methodological approach to examine the relationship between financial development and human capital in 21 countries of developing Asia. The results show that a significant negative relationship exists between financial development proxied by M2/gdp and pupil:teacher ratios and a strong positive relationship exists between physical access to banks and expected years of schooling. Further, our financial development and educational development indices also show no clear pattern in the selected countries' financial and educational development.
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