Do Participatory Learning and Action Women’s Groups Alone or Combined with Cash or Food Transfers Expand Women’s Agency in Rural Nepal?

Participatory learning and action women’s groups (PLA) have proven effective in reducing neonatal mortality in rural, high-mortality settings, but their impacts on women’s agency in the household remain unknown. Cash transfer programmes have also long targeted female beneficiaries in the belief that this empowers women. Drawing on data from 1309 pregnant women in a four-arm cluster-randomised controlled trial in Nepal, we found little evidence for an impact of PLA alone or combined with unconditional food or cash transfers on women’s agency in the household. Caution is advised before assuming PLA women’s groups alone or with resource transfers necessarily empower women.     

ForensicNet: Modern convolutional neural network-based image forgery detection network

The advancements in Image editing techniques produce realistic-looking artificial images with ease. These images can easily circumvent the forensic systems making the authentication process more tedious and difficult. To overcome this problem, we introduce a modern convolutional neural network (CNN) named ForensicNet, inspired by the recent developments in computer vision. The three major contributions of our CNNs are inverted bottleneck, separate downsampling layers, and using depth-wise convolutions for mixing information in the spatial dimension. The inverted bottlenecks help improve accuracy and reduce network parameters/FLOPs. The separate downsampling layers help converge the network. The normalization layers also help stabilize training whenever the spatial resolution is changed. The depth-wise convolution is a grouped convolution where the number of groups and channels are the same. The experiments show that ForensicNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.     

Jumping Together: A Fatal Suicide Pact

In suicide pact, two or more victims mutually agree and execute to end their lives together by predetermined method, preferably by hanging, drowning, gunshot, or poisoning. The victims are usually spouses, lovers, or friends, and the reasons behind such steps are various. In this reported suicide pact, husband–wife duo jumped from the terrace of a 12‐meter‐high building with their wrist bound to each other. Although they jumped together, the injury patterns were completely different. The man landed on head sustaining mainly craniocerebral injuries, and the wife landed on feet sustaining long bone injuries. They left a suicide note pointing out sudden demise of their only child as the reason for the suicide, and it was signed by both of them. Jumping from a height in suicide pact has not been reported in the scientific literature yet.     

Spontaneous ignition in case of celphos poisoning

Celphos (aluminum phosphide) poisoning is the most common cause of poisoning in India. The mechanism of action, acute and chronic effect on human body, its symptoms and signs, and the line of treatment are well documented and research is still going on to find a suitable antidote. "Spontaneous ignition" is a rare but interesting finding in case of aluminum phosphide poisoning. We present the autopsy findings in this case report along with the probable factors that led to occurrence of such finding.     

Dynamics of governance,gross capital formation,and growth: Evidence from Brazil,Russia, India,China, and South Africa

This study investigates the impact of governance index and gross fixed capital formation on the economic growth of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) using annual data from 2002 to 2019. This study employs Fixed Effect Model, Driscoll and Kraay standard error with fixed effect, Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square, Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) and Panel Dumitrescu Hurlin Causality test. The study has divided the variables into two models where model I includes the impact of governance index (jointly) on economic growth while model II examines the impact of governance index on economic growth individually. The findings demonstrate that the governance index, gross fixed capital formation, population, control of corruption, and governance effectiveness have a positive and significant impact on economic growth, whereas regulatory quality showed a significant and negative impact on economic growth. Furthermore, regarding the Panel test, we notice the presence of unidirectional causality among the constituent variables. Therefore, this study suggests that the government should encourage economic development in the BRICS countries and move away from outdated ideas and poor institutional quality in favor of a new comprehensive reform to achieve excellent governance, population growth control, labor law changes, and corruption control.