THREAD: What is Golden Crescent and Golden Triangle and how it impacts India?
Golden Crescent region of South Asia - comprises of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan - which is a principal global site for opium production and distribution.
- Its proximity to Indo-Pak border has worsened the trafficking of hashish and heroin into Indian soil
- Trafficking happens through the border states of J&K, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat.
- Myanmar-Northeast nexus is recognized by NCB as the root of heroin & chemical drugs
- Myanmar produces 80% of heroin produced in world
- Due to increased surveillance & frequent crackdowns on cartels in various part of SE Asian countries, India has been chosen by drug smugglers as the exit gateway
- Diverse topography, high mountains, rivers, dense rainforests provides numerous hideouts to the smugglers, and security forces cannot respond to criminal
- Also, rising nexus between the local ethnic insurgent groups & criminals across the border have developed into a potent threat of narco-terrorism that challenges India’s national security.
Narco-terrorism has not only developed a social security threat for India, but also dragged attentions of global communities, since trade happens in hard cash, & it becomes very difficult for security agencies
- Influx of narco-trade money leads to laundering, inflation, corruption, which not only causes terr0rism, political instability but also deter FDI.
- Assam CM @himantabiswa drove a road roller on 1000s of bottles of illegal cough syrups. The CM also set fire to seized drugs worth crores in an event.
- About 2.8% of Indians aged 10-75 years (3.1 crore individuals) are current users of any cannabis product, which is predominantly men.
More from All
https://t.co/6cRR2B3jBE
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.
https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d
Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.
...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.
Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.
https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d
Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.
...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.
Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.
How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?
Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!
Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z
🧵👇(1 / 12)
Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.
Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)
The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).
The secret is *balance* (3/12)
Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:
1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.
2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)
By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.
Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)
Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!
Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z
🧵👇(1 / 12)
Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.
Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)
The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).
The secret is *balance* (3/12)
Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:
1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.
2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)
By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.
Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)
