Cabs, male drivers and midnight commuting: manufacturing respectability of the unmarried women agents of call centers in India

The present paper discusses the role of cabs and the presence of other men in the cab in manufacturing respectability for the unmarried women agents of call centers in India. The night shift, an intrinsic part of work, at call centers in India demands mobility and access to public space during nights for its women employees. The paper elaborates how the relation between gender and space is evolving in the backdrop of the presence of someone trusted, through a shift from private patriarchy to public patriarchy for the women agents while accessing the public space. The paper is based on a total of sixty-one qualitative interviews conducted with unmarried women call center employees and parents based in Gurgaon, India.     

Natural resonance extraction from multiple data sets using agenetic algorithm

The paper presents a scheme to extract the natural frequencies of a radar target from multiple data sets using a genetic algorithm technique (GAT). This technique prevents the extracted damping coefficients from being positive, as often happens with low signal-to-noise ratio data, by restricting the search parameters of the damping coefficients to be negative values. The GAT does not require an initial guess, unlike the constrained E-pulse technique (CET). The results from the GAT compare well with the CET (with much less effort required) and also with such established techniques as the pencil-of-functions method and the nonlinear least-squares technique     

Energy and electromagnetic pollution considerations in ARoF-based multi-operator multi-service systems

Energy-efficient system design with controlled levels of electromagnetic pollution, without compromising on the user quality of experience and operator revenue, are essential considerations in the design of next-generation wireless communication networks. Integration of multiple services and multiple operator transmissions onto a common shared infrastructure is the solution forward to satisfy the contradictory subscriber and operator requirements and also to derive a future-proof fronthaul to support new techniques like opportunistic, co-operative and cognitive communications. This paper reports the link budget analysis, energy efficiency estimation and electromagnetic radiation calculation for a Multi-Operator Multi-Service Analog Radio over Fiber fronthaul for a small cell configuration. The BER analysis and the link budget analysis are presented for the central base station to remote antenna unit (RAU) link as well as the RAU to user equipment link. The estimated minimum transmission power sufficient to establish and maintain a quality connection suggests the possibility of eliminating the energy consuming power amplifiers in the transceivers and also achieve a reduced electromagnetic pollution in the environment.     

Transient field produced by a traveling-wave wire antenna

The electromagnetic fields of a transient traveling wave current on a straight wire segment are calculated directly in the time domain. Retarded potential theory is used to establish an impulse response valid in both far and near zones. A closed-form expression for the field due to a rectangular current pulse is obtained, and corresponding plots are given. Numerical results from this permit the investigation of the differences between near versus far zones and coated versus uncoated wires. Experimental findings for both coated and uncoated wires show good agreement with theory. A formula for far-zone radiation from an arbitrarily shaped wire is developed; results for a proposed directive antenna geometry are presented     

Radar target identification using a combined early-time/late-timeE-pulse technique

The E-pulse technique has been applied in the past to both the early- and the late-time components of a transient radar response. While the late-time E-pulse technique uses aspect-independent waveforms, the early-time E-pulse technique requires a separate waveform for each target aspect angle and thus significantly more storage and processing time. This paper discusses a combination of the two techniques that employs the early-time technique to remove ambiguities generated from application of the late-time method. By narrowing the possible range of aspect angles of the potential targets, the early-time technique can be employed more efficiently     

A general E-pulse scheme arising from the dual early-time/late-timebehavior of radar scatterers

A duality between the temporal late-time response and the spectral early-time response of a radar target is used to form the basis for a general E-pulse technique. Examples, using the ultrawide-band measurements of an aircraft model, reveal that E-pulse cancellation is possible both in the time domain for the late-time component and in the frequency domain for the early-time component. Applications to radar target discrimination and clutter cancellation are described, and the aspect dependence of early-time discrimination is investigated     

Performance of an automated radar target discrimination schemeusing E pulses and S pulses

Previous studies have demonstrated the viability of natural resonance based target discrimination using extinction pulses (E pulses) and single-mode pulses (S pulses). These studies qualitatively demonstrated the principles of resonance annihilation by forcing the interrogating pulse to have zeros at the complex natural resonance frequencies of the target. Here a quantitative scheme for evaluating discrimination using the E pulse and the S pulse is given. The performance of an automated E-pulse and S-pulse discrimination scheme is evaluated using numerically derived scattering data with varying amounts of noise     

Detection of Spammers in Twitter marketing: A Hybrid Approach Using Social Media Analytics and Bio Inspired Computing

Customer engagement is drastically improved through Web 2.0 technologies, especially social media platforms like Twitter. These platforms are often used by organizations for marketing, of which creation of numerous spam profiles for content promotion is common. The present paper proposes a hybrid approach for identifying the spam profiles by combining social media analytics and bio inspired computing. It adopts a modified K-Means integrated Levy flight Firefly Algorithm (LFA) with chaotic maps as an extension to Firefly Algorithm (FA) for spam detection in Twitter marketing. A total of 18,44,701 tweets have been analyzed from 14,235 Twitter profiles on 13 statistically significant factors derived from social media analytics. A Fuzzy C-Means Clustering approach is further used to identify the overlapping users in two clusters of spammers and non-spammers. Six variants of K-Means integrated FA including chaotic maps and levy flights are tested. The findings indicate that FA with chaos for tuning attractiveness coefficient using Gauss Map converges to a working solution the fastest. Further, LFA with chaos for tuning the absorption coefficient using sinusoidal map outperforms the rest of the approaches in terms of accuracy.     

Mattering Matters: Agency,Empowerment, and Mobile Phone Use by Female Microentrepreneurs

This article attempts to enrich our understanding of the role that mobile phones play in the empowerment of women in the developing world. We adapt and explicate an innovative social psychological concept, “mattering,” embed it in the literature that examines the impact of mobile phones on social development outcomes, and consider the utility of mattering for the ICT4D community. Mattering is the perception that others are aware of, interested in, and depend on us. Based on a sample of 335 female microentrepreneurs in Chennai, India, we created a valid and reliable measure of mattering and its three dimensions. Mattering was predicted by (1) entrepreneurial expectations, an element of an individual's mindset; (2) social use of mobile phones; and (3) the perceived benefits of mobile phones for maintaining business networks. Findings suggest that mobile phone use plays a significant role in contributing to female entrepreneurs' perception that they matter.     

Bridging ICTD research and policy-making: notes from a systematic review on MSMEs in the low- and middle-income countries

There is criticism that information and communication technology and development research community contributes less to policy-making. The present article shares an attempt to fill this gap. Systematic review is a structured way to collate, review, summarize, and use the published research for policy-making. A systematic review on the impact of information and communication technologies on the growth of urban micro, small, and medium enterprises in the low- and middle-income countries indicates a tiny impact and a lack of rigorous causal studies in this focus area. Quantitative meta-analysis did not find statistical significance for the impact. From an initial result of 24,000 plus hits, a set of 10 research studies were finalized for data extraction and analysis. The article suggests areas for future research and calls for rigorous research and reporting.