Hereditary breast and ovarian cancers are frequently attributed to germline mutations in the tumor suppressor genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. BRCA1/2 act to repair double‐strand breaks (DSBs) and suppress the demise of unstable replication forks. Our work elucidated a dynamic interplay between BRCA2 and the WRN DNA helicase/exonuclease defective in the premature aging disorder Werner syndrome. WRN and BRCA2 participate in complementary pathways to stabilize replication forks in cancer cells, allowing them to proliferate. Whether the functional overlap of WRN and BRCA2 (...) is relevant to replication at gaps between newly synthesized DNA fragments, protection of telomeres, and/or metabolism of secondary DNA structures remain to be determined. Advances in understanding the mechanisms elicited during replication stress have prompted the community to reconsider avenues for cancer therapy. Insights from studies of PARP or topoisomerase inhibitors provide working models for the investigation of WRN's mechanism of action. We discuss these topics, focusing on the implications of the WRN‐BRCA2 genetic interaction under conditions of replication stress. (shrink)

This book brings together over 25 years of Arindam Chakrabarti's original research in East-West 'fusion' philosophy on issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Organized under the three basic concepts of a thing out there in the world, the self who perceives it, and other subjects or selves, his work revolves around a set of realism links. Examining connections between metaphysical stances toward the world, selves, and universals, Chakrabarti engages with classical Indian and modern Western philosophical approaches to (...) a number of live topics including the refutation of idealism; the question of the definability of truth, and the possibility of truths existing unknown to anyone; the existence of non-conceptual perception; and our knowledge of other minds. He additionally makes forays into fundamental questions regarding death, darkness, absence, and nothingness. Together with conceptual clarification and progress towards alternative solutions to these substantial philosophical problems, Chakrabarti demonstrates the advantage of doing philosophy in a cosmopolitan fashion. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of a thing, and ending with an analysis of the concept of nothing, Realisms Interlinked offers a preview of a future metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind without borders. (shrink)

Leading figures in comparative philosophy and cultural studies demonstrate what the future of comparative philosophy might look like in practice.

Connected vehicle fleets have formed significant component of industrial internet of things scenarios as part of Industry 4.0 worldwide. The number of vehicles in these fleets has grown at a steady pace. The vehicles monitoring with machine learning algorithms has significantly improved maintenance activities. Predictive maintenance potential has increased where machines are controlled through networked smart devices. Here, benefits are accrued considering uptimes optimization. This has resulted in reduction of associated time and labor costs. It has also provided significant increase (...) in cost benefit ratios. Considering vehicle fault trends in this research predictive maintenance problem is addressed through hybrid deep learning-based ensemble method (HDLEM). The ensemble framework which acts as predictive analytics engine comprises of three deep learning algorithms viz modified cox proportional hazard deep learning (MCoxPHDL), modified deep learning embedded semi supervised learning (MDLeSSL) and merged LSTM (MLSTM) networks. Both sensor as well as historical maintenance data are collected and prepared using benchmarking methods for HDLEM training and testing. Here, times between failures (TBF) modeling and prediction on multi-source data are successfully achieved. The results obtained are compared with stated deep learning models. This ensemble framework offers great potential towards achieving more profitable, efficient and sustainable vehicle fleet management solutions. This helps better telematics data implementation which ensures preventative management towards desired solution. The ensemble method's superiority is highlighted through several experimental results. (shrink)

1. Premadharma o Rāsalīlā.-- 2. Bedānta o bijñāna ebaṃ Jagadgurura ābirbhāba.-- 3. Upanishad-brahmatattva ebaṃ yājñabalkyera advaitabāda.-- 4. Upanishad-jaṛa o jībatattva.-- 5. Karmabāda o janmāntara, abatāratattva ebaṃ prakr̥ta yoga ki? -- v. 6. Sāṃkhya paricaẏa, Buddhadebera 'nāstikatā' ebaṃ buddhi o bodhi. -- v. 7. Gītāẏa Īśvarabāda, Raṅgamatī, ebaṃ Meghadūta (mūla o padyānubāda).

The _Mahabharata _is at once an archive and a living text, a sourcebook complete by itself and an open text perennially under construction. Driving home this striking contemporary relevance of the famous Indian epic, _Mahabharata Now _focuses on the issues of narration, aesthetics and ethics, as also their interlinkages. The cross-disciplinary essays in the volume imaginatively re-interpret the ‘timeless’ classic in the light of the pre-modern Indian narrative styles, poetics, aesthetic codes, and moral puzzles; the Western theories on modern ethics, (...) aesthetics, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of science; and the contemporary social, ethical and political concerns. The essays are all united in their effort to situate the _Mahabharata_ in the context of _here _and _now _without violating the sanctity of the ‘written text’ as we have it today. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Indian and comparative philosophy, Indian and comparative literature, cultural studies, and history. (shrink)

Tactile exploration often involves sequential touches interspersed with stimulus-free durations. Whereas it is obvious that texture-related perceptual variables, irrespective of the encoding strategy, must be stored in memory for comparison, it is rather unclear which of those variables are held in memory. There are two established variables—“intensity” and “frequency”, which are “temporally global” variables because of the long stimulus integration interval required to average the signal or derive spectral components, respectively; on the other hand, a recently established third contender is (...) the “temporally local” variable that codes for kinematic profiles of very short, suprathreshold events in the vibrotactile signal. Here, we present the first psychophysical evidence that temporally local variables can be stored in memory. To that end, we asked participants to detect changes in pulsatile indentation stimuli at their fingertips with and without a gap of 1 s between stimulus presentations. The stimuli either contained global variables alone, or a mix of local and global variables. We found, first, that humans are much better at detecting a change in stimuli when local variables are available rather than global ones alone—as evident by the fact that 21 compared to only 6 participants out of 25 yielded a valid psychophysical curve, respectively. Second, this observation persists even when there is a gap between the stimuli, implying local variables must be stored in memory. Third, an extensive array of relevant intensity definitions failed to explain participants’ performance in any consistent manner, which implies that perceptual decisions were less likely to be driven by intensity coding. Taken together, our results suggest that humans perform pulsatile change detection utilizing local pulse shape, and to a lesser degree global pulse rate, and that both parameters can be stored in memory. (shrink)

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

The governments of China, India, and the United Kingdom are unanimous in their belief that bioinformatics should supply the link between basic life sciences research and its translation into health benefits for the population and the economy. Yet at the same time, as ambitious states vying for position in the future global bioeconomy they differ considerably in the strategies adopted in pursuit of this goal. At the heart of these differences lies the interaction between epistemic change within the scientific community (...) itself and the apparatus of the state. Drawing on desk-based research and thirty-two interviews with scientists and policy makers in the three countries, this article analyzes the politics that shape this interaction. From this analysis emerges an understanding of the variable capacities of different kinds of states and political systems to work with science in harnessing the potential of new epistemic territories in global life sciences innovation. (shrink)

The economic impacts of the Green Revolution have been studied widely, but not its social-cultural effects on different farming communities. The adoption of high yielding varieties (HYVs) of rice changed the nature of rice farming in the two West Bengal villages of Padulara and Naigachi. The villages present an interesting contrast of socio-economic and cultural change due to the differences in the level of adoption of agricultural technologies. This study documents the social and cultural impacts of agricultural technology adoption, specifically (...) the effect on rituals which guided the stages of traditional rice farming and communal life. Agricultural rituals are being modified to suit the processes of modern rice farming, while family rituals are holding strong. The study also shows the evolving nature of rituals as it reflects new found wealth, gender roles, and economic class in these villages. (shrink)

An individual’s accountability to oneself leads to self-regulatory behaviour. A field experiment afforded an opportunity to test this relation, given that external accountability conditions were absent. A single group pre-test/post-test design was used to test the hypothesis. A group of full-time resident management students, n ≈ 550, take four meals during the day in the institute mess. As a part of the experiment, food wastage in the form of leftovers on the plates of subjects was measured. As a pre-test, the (...) measurement occurred at two levels. Subjects could see how much they are adding to the total waste by looking at a weighing scale placed under a waste basket, and they could also see the total waste data for each of the four meals for the day and a day earlier displayed at a prominent place. After 105 days, the weighing scale under the basket was removed, and as a post-test measurement, the total waste data for the four meals were noted down for another 72 days. A manipulation test indicated that the experiment has had the desired effect of invoking self-accountability in subjects during the pre-test phase, and diluting it during the post-test phase. Time series analysis of pre-test and post-test data indicated that the wastage data decreased in the pre-test phase. However, the post-test waste data showed an increase over a period of time. The results indicate that accountability conditions like social norms invoke self-accountability cognition leading to self-regulatory behaviours in individuals. (shrink)

Daya Krishna(Photo courtesy of Jay Garfield)Govind Chandra Pande(Photo courtesy of his daughter amita sharma)Daya Krishna was the public face of Indian philosophy in the first half-century after Indian independence. Nobody on the Indian scene in that period came close to him in influence or in contribution to the profession. Nobody else in the world thought as hard or as fruitfully about the relation of Indian philosophy to that of the rest of the world, and nobody else dared to think as (...) creatively and even as heretically about the history of Indian philosophy itself. To be sure, the Indian philosophical scene during this period was always a vibrant and creative matrix of thought, and many contributed to that .. (shrink)

The paper discusses anumāna and its variety in general from the point of view of inferential cognition for the sake of oneself as well as for the sake of others; i.e. svārthānumāna and parārthānumāna as given in the Buddhist tradition of logic, especially with parārthānumāna, its nature and role. The paper argues that the Buddhist intent of division of anumāna into svārthānumāna and parārthānumāna was to bring Buddha-vacanas under the category of parārthānumāna and to save them from being classified under (...) śabda pramāṇa. It contends that such a division was not just an epistemological demand, but had a deeper philosophical significance in the Buddhist conceptual framework. Such a division is, therefore, intended to reject the role of śabda as an extra causal means or pramāṇa. The paper identifies the logical commitment in Buddhist tradition as hetu-centric commitment as it differs from the Nyāya tradition of vyāpti-centric one. (shrink)

A wide-ranging analysis of the Mokṣopāya, the Indian literary classic that teaches through storytelling how to enjoy an active, successful, worldly life in a spiritually enlightened way. In the Mokṣopāya (also known as the Yogavāsiṣṭha), an eleventh-century Sanskrit poetic text, the great Vedic philosopher Vāsiṣṭha counsels his young protégé Lord Rāma about the ways of the world through sixty-four stories designed to bring Rāma from ignorance to wisdom. Much beloved, this work reflects the philosophy of Kashmir Śaivism. Precisely because all (...) worldly pursuits are dreamlike and fiction-like, the human soul must first come to an experience of non-dualistic, mind-only metaphysics, and after attaining this wisdom, promote moral activism. _Engaged Emancipation_ is a wide-ranging consideration of this work and the philosophical and spiritual questions it addresses by philosophers, Sanskritists, and scholars of religion, literature, and science. Contributors allow readers to walk with Rāma as his melancholy and angst transform into connectivity, peace, and spiritual equipoise. (shrink)

Background: Informed consent in the modern era is a common and important topic both for the well-informed patient and to prevent unnecessary litigation. However, the effectiveness of informed consent in trauma patients is an under-researched area. This paper aims to assess the differences in patient recall of the consent process and desire for information by performing a comparative analysis between orthopaedic trauma and elective patients. Methods: Information from 41 consecutive elective operations and 40 consecutive trauma operations was collected on the (...) first post-operative day. Results: 100% of elective patients and 90% of trauma patients knew what operation they had received (p = 0.06). Overall recall of complications was poor, but was significantly lower in trauma patients compared with elective patients (62% vs 22%, p<0.001). 30% of trauma patients desired more information about their operation compared to 12% of elective patients (p = 0.049), although only 35% of trauma patients wanted written as well as verbal explanations, compared to 85% of elective patients p<0.001). Overall 100% of elective and 90% of trauma patients were happy with the consent process (p = 0.06). Subset analysis of neck of femur compared to other trauma patients showed that the above factors were not significantly different between the two groups. Conclusions: Recall of complications in the trauma patients is significantly lower than in elective patients, although both groups scored poorly overall. Repeated verbal explanations should be reinforced with the option of additional information leaflets for trauma operations. Further research into the usefulness of DVDs for commonly performed operations is warranted, although official internet resources may be more cost-effective. (shrink)

This paper articulates the commitments, contours and justifications for a pluralist but non-eclectic critical, realist, reflexive social science with emancipatory aims. In it, we stress that social science can and should be used to guide the conceptualization of desirable and viable forms of social organization and their conditions of realization. In this regard, we advocate explanatory theorizing as an ethical duty of social scientists and as a moral good in itself as well as being an inherent epistemological component of scientific (...) practice. This entails that we take seriously the research strategies apposite to our disciplinary, intertextual and interdiscursive locations to make a serious theoretical case and practical case for the kind of social science here advocated. In our view, such a social science must acknowledge the path-breaking work of Roy Bhaskar, but must also recognize that the arguments deployed in texts as a resource in intellectual work can never be treated as the axiomatic grounds for further thought, but must be interrogated thoroughly and in each case what is to be retained must be defensible. No position has a monopoly of relevant insights and the development of science often involves syntheses. Syntheses must not be syncretic but reflexively interrogated to assess epistemological, ontological and conceptual coherence to avoid eclecticism. Development in critical realist philosophy will, we believe, continue to confront and offer plausible resolutions to a range of battles within and pertinent to philosophy and social-scientific metatheory. However, realists must recognize the continuing importance and discursive effects of a variety of critical and realist work in being able to defend, sustain and develop rigorous social-scientific research with emancipatory commitments. (shrink)

Besides seeing a rabbit or seeing that the rabbit is grayish, do we also sometimes see barely just the particular animal (not as an animal or as anything) or the feature rabbitness or grayness? Such bare, nonverbalizable perception is called "indeterminate perception" (nirvikalpaka pratyakṣa) in Nyāya. Standard Nyāya postulates such pre-predicative bare perception in order to honor the rule that awareness of a qualified entity must be caused by awareness of the qualifier. After connecting this issue with the Western debate (...) concerning the "myth of the given," seven distinct arguments are presented showing that the very notion of such indeterminate perception is epistemically otiose and that the Nyāya theory of perception is better off without it. (shrink)

Corporate governance involves balancing the interests of the many stakeholders in a corporation—from shareholders and management to customers and the larger society. Corporate governance also offers the framework for attaining a company’s vision and mission, providing guidance and oversight on a broad spectrum—action plans and internal controls to performance measurement and corporate disclosure. Companies’ Act 2013 has been introduced in India with the primary objective of improving corporate governance practices in Indian corporations. In this paper, we investigate the moderating role (...) of corporate governance practices in large Indian corporations on firm performance, post introduction of Companies’ Act 2013. Specifically, we study the influence of board’s involvement in company’s affairs, board’s diversity, CEO duality, board compensation, and promoters’ involvement in the board. We find sufficient evidence that board involvement and board diversity positively influence firm performance, while CEO duality, board compensation, and promoters’ presence do not have an influence on firm performance. (shrink)

Study on Upanishads and commentaries of Śaṅkarācārya, Hindu philosopher, on it.

Collection of lectures on Hindu philosophy, religion, and culture of India.

It is not a semantic accident that four key notions of social ethics are also key concepts of theater. These are the concepts of character, playing a part/role, performance, and acting. Of course, one could object that there is a touch of pun in this claim: A character in a drama is not quite the same as good or bad character in a virtue ethics; acting in theater is mere play-acting, whereas acting in social and personal life is serious business. (...) But the distinction between play and serious business does not mean that the former is any less important than the latter. In Homo Ludens, his magisterial study of the play-element in culture, Johan Huizinga remarks: “Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is.. (shrink)

You cannot say “thank you” in Sanskrit. It would be ridiculous to deduce from this (as William Ward, a British Orientalist) that gratefulness as a sentiment was unknown to the ancient Indian people. It is no less ridiculous to argue that rationality as a concept is absent from or marginal to the entire panoply of classical Indian philosophical traditions on the basis of the fact that there is no exact Sanskrit equivalent of that word.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to Stephen PhillipsArindam ChakrabartiMuch as I am honored by Stephen Phillips' detailed defense, in the face of my methodological "refutation," of the Nyāya thesis that a raw perception of the qualifier is a necessary causal factor for some (not all) determinate perception of an entity as qualified, I am not fully convinced that my deeper qualms about the very idea of immaculate perception unimpregnated by predicative structure have (...) all been adequately addressed. Instead of a detailed response, which I intend to undertake elsewhere, I wish to underscore the central worry behind my fifth (which Phillips calls "good") and seventh (which Phillips calls "weak") objections.When I claimed that perception is introduced, taxonomically, as a variety of veridical awareness, I had in mind the opening line of Gaṅgeśa's section on the definition of perception:sā ca pramā caturvidhā, pratyakṣānumityupamitiśābdā-bhedātAnd such veridical awareness is of four kinds: perception, inferential knowledge, knowledge from similarity, and knowledge from words.1This seems to be flatly incompatible with the admission of a subclass of perceptions that are not veridical awarenesses!Why does Phillips say that I am simply mistaken? True, taxonomic difficulties cannot overturn empirical evidence. But recall that there is no direct apperceptive evidence for "raw perception." The sole evidence is a generalization from a whole series of mediate (parokṣa) awarenesses that can happily afford to be instrumentally and crucially caused by other awarenesses. On the other hand, immediacy, which is the hallmark of a perception, consists of not having another awareness in its causal nexus. My seeing of a wall as white is direct, rather than inferential, analogical, or testimonial, to the extent that I did not have to go through any other awareness first in order to arrive at this visual perception. An inductive generalization from other mediate (cognition-generated) cognitions should not have such inexorable probative power over our account of immediate sensory cognition as to force us into admitting a neither-true-nor-false third kind of raw awareness!Phillips seems to have overlooked the metaphor of "spelling" that I used in this context while giving my second objection. If the step-by-step picture of building up the content of perception that Gaṅgeśa assumes is correct, then each element of the perceptual content of the predicative perception that this is a flower—the universal flowerhood, the actual physical object identified as "this," and qualification as a cementing relation, in this case inherence—would first have to be cognized in the unconnected "raw" manner! Now, even if we somehow swallow the idea of seeing a universal barely and not in relation to any one of its instances, it simply makes no [End Page 114] sense to talk about a bare, raw, unstructured perceptual acquaintance with qualification or inherence! Logically and structurally one could argue that unless you have "got" a, b, and R first, you cannot have the complex aRb. But this is admittedly a process of logical postmortem dissection of a whole piece of direct qualificative perception. And the point of my metaphorical warning—"You need to have 'L' and 'O' and 'D' and 'N' to spell 'London,' but you do not need to spell 'L' or 'O' or 'D' or 'N' first. Single letters simply cannot be spelled!"—was this: there are all sorts of different ways of "getting." You need to "get" the qualifying feature somehow in order to see or hear or taste something as qualified by that feature, but you do not therefore need to see or hear or taste that feature alone first in a bare, raw, unqualified manner! I do believe, like a good Naiyāyika, that high-pitchedness (or fifthness, in the octave) can be heard although it is a sound-universal. But I refuse to admit that before I can hear a sung note as high-pitched or (the fifth) I must somehow hear that universal directly without hearing it in any note!The central point, once again, is this: all awareness is intentional, according to Nyāya. There are only three kinds of intentional roles that our awarenesses assign to their objects: the role of... (shrink)