Earlier evidence suggests that besides humans, some species of mammals and birds demonstrate visual self-recognition, assessed by the controversial “mark” test. Whereas, there are high levels of inter-individual differences amongst a single species, some species such as macaques and pigeons which do not spontaneously demonstrate mirror self-recognition can be trained to do so. We were surprised to discover that despite being widely used as a model system for avian research, the performance of zebra finches on the mark test had not (...) been studied earlier. Additionally, we studied the behavioral responses of another species of passerine songbirds to a mirror and the MSR mark test. Although a small number of adult male zebra finches appeared to display heightened responses toward the mark while observing their reflections, we could not rule out the possibility that these were a part of general grooming rather than specific to the mark. Furthermore, none of the house crows demonstrated mark-directed behavior or increased self-exploratory behaviors when facing mirrors. Our study suggests that self-directed behaviors need to be tested more rigorously in adult male zebra finches while facing their reflections and these findings need to be replicated in a larger population, given the high degree of variability in mirror-directed behaviors. (shrink)

In vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy have enabled many to achieve their dreams of parenthood. With a turnover of $500 million, reproductive tourism in India has helped transform the country into a “global baby factory.” However, as the surrogacy industry grew, so did concerns of women’s exploitation, commodification of motherhood, and human rights violations. In an effort to prevent women from being exploited, the Indian government had taken successive administrative measures to regulate surrogacy. The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 and Assisted (...) Reproductive Technologies Bill 2008 were introduced in the Parliament to regulate various aspects of surrogacy arrangements. Yet, it was not until 25 January 2022, that the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 went into effect. The Act does, however, leave certain important points unaddressed. The article claims that the legislation’s purposeful exclusion of the LGBTQ population and emphasis on “familial altruism” stinks of inequity and moral conservatism. It also delineates the mechanics of altruistic surrogacy by examining documents that illustrate how the connections between money and morality are framed via the framing of altruism. The article therefore demands that a comprehensive dialogue must be held considering the socio-economic realities of Indian society, or else India risks enacting yet another law that cannot be implemented or that society dislikes. (shrink)

The call of the wild -- A stranger in strange lands -- Song of myself -- Senses and sensibilities -- I, robot -- Lord of the things -- And then there were none.

We have considered a simple word game called the word-morph. After making our participants play a stipulated number of word-morph games, we have analyzed the experimental data. We have given a detailed analysis of the learning involved in solving this word game. We propose that people are inclined to learn landmarks when they are asked to navigate from a source to a destination. We note that these landmarks are nodes that have high closeness-centrality ranking.

The article critically examines the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act 2021, its development process spanning 15 years, and its potential shortcomings in addressing the needs of India’s 27 million infertile couples. By scrutinizing the recommendations presented in the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare’s 129th report, the critique argues that the Act may not effectively cater to the diverse reproductive rights of the population. The article claims that most of its suggestions are in opposition to redefining families and (...) accepting inclusive family structures other than heterosexual marriages. The study posits that the Act, with its inherent limitations, perpetuates the reinforcement of patriarchal family structures that medical science intends to disrupt. In order to foster inclusivity and comprehensibility, the article advocates for necessary amendments that align with the interest of the general populace. (shrink)

We study repeated normal form games where the number of players is large. We argue that it is interesting to look at such games as being divided into subgames, each of which we call a neighbourhood. The structure of such a game is given by a graph G whose nodes are players and edges denote visibility. The neighbourhoods are maximal cliques in G. The game proceeds in rounds where in each round the players of every clique X of G play (...) a strategic form game among each other. A player at a node v strategises based on what she can observe, i.e., the strategies and the outcomes in the previous round of the players at vertices adjacent to v. Based on this, the player may switch strategies in the same neighbourhood, or migrate to another neighbourhood.We are interested in addressing questions regarding the eventual stability of such games. We incrementally impose constraints on the ‘types’ of the players. First, we look at players who are unconstrained in their strategising abilities, in that, players who may use unbounded memory. We then consider the case of memoryless players. We show that in both these cases the eventual stability of the game can be characterised in terms of potentials. We then introduce a simple modal logic in which the types of the players can be specified. We show that when the players play according to these specified types, it can be effectively decided whether the game stabilises. Finally, we look at the important heuristic of imitation. Simple imitative strategies can be specified in the logic introduced by us. We show that in a population of optimisers and imitators, we can decide how ‘worse-off’ the imitators are by playing imitative strategies rather than optimal ones. (shrink)

Il s’agit ici de mettre en relief les thématiques portées par des écritures de femmes algériennes, publiées dans les années 90. Thématiques en relation directe avec le réel algérien. Il ne sera pas tenu compte des genres – romans, journaux « de bord », essai… – en tant que tels dans lesquels ces expressions paraissent (ou prétendent paraître), ni de leur qualité littéraire… Le propos est de porter l’attention sur ces écrits en tant que documents forts témoignant de leur temps, (...) de la société qui les a impulsés. Société où se joue, violemment, passionnément, des enjeux essentiels. (shrink)

Il s’agit ici de mettre en relief les thématiques portées par des écritures de femmes algériennes, publiées dans les années 90. Thématiques en relation directe avec le réel algérien. Il ne sera pas tenu compte des genres – romans, journaux « de bord », essai… – en tant que tels dans lesquels ces expressions paraissent (ou prétendent paraître), ni de leur qualité littéraire… Le propos est de porter l’attention sur ces écrits en tant que documents forts témoignant de leur temps, (...) de la société qui les a impulsés. Société où se joue, violemment, passionnément, des enjeux essentiels. (shrink)

How people think about poverty is shown to be dependent on how the issue is framed..

Iyengar Yoga Wisdom & Practice" is a practical and an inspiring anthology of Iyengar's insights into yoga, life and the path to peace and happiness. Yoga practice lies at the heart of the book, and it is illustrated with over 60 new step-by-step sequences of yoga postures specially shot in India and accompanied by Iyengar's illuminating observations on technique, their significance, and their benefits. This book not only presents Iyengar's practical advice on how to perform key (...) yoga postures, but also draws on a wide range of other material taken from interviews and world lecture tours, to the many texts Iyengar has written about yoga and about his own life's journey. (shrink)

"The definitive work by B.K.S. Iyengar, the world's most respected yoga teacher. B.K.S. Iyengar has devoted his life to the practice and study of yoga. It was B.K.S. Iyengar's unique teaching style, bringing precision and clarity to the practice, as well as a mindset of 'yoga for all', which has made it into the worldwide phenomenon it is today. 'Light on Yoga' is widely called 'the bible of yoga' and has served as the source book for generations (...) of yoga students around the world. It is the classic text for all serious students of yoga." --Publisher description. (shrink)

The microfinance business model focuses largely on lending to the woman in the household, rather than the man. The belief is that women are more trustworthy borrowers than men, and that lending to women may have increased social impact. Yet in several cases, women do not have control over the loan backed business despite being the borrower of record. Such takeover of the business by the man constitutes an ethical violation. We find that high dependency ratios in the family are (...) correlates of such ethical violations. Further, we also find that ethical violations have a significant economic cost, consistent with prior scholarship in the family-business domain. While access to microfinance increases household welfare, this beneficial impact reduces by over 50% in the presence of an ethical violation. Our results suggest that microfinance lenders need to move beyond the traditional role of just being a lender to providing advice on issues like family planning, and money management, and enforcement, thus moving closer to the solidarity economy paradigm of integrating savings and credit into broader canvases of social relationships and social structures. (shrink)

When two people engage in a conversation, knowingly or unknowingly, they are playing a game. Players of such games have diverse objectives, or winning conditions: an applicant trying to convince her potential employer of her eligibility over that of a competitor, a prosecutor trying to convict a defendant, a politician trying to convince an electorate in a political debate, and so on. We argue that infinitary games offer a natural model for many structural characteristics of such conversations. We call such (...) games message exchange games, and we compare them to existing game theoretic frameworks used in linguistics—for example, signaling games—and show that message exchange games are needed to handle non-cooperative conversation. In this paper, we concentrate on conversational games where players’ interests are opposed. We provide a taxonomy of conversations based on their winning conditions, and we investigate some essential features of winning conditions like consistency and what we call rhetorical cooperativity. We show that these features make our games decomposition sensitive, a property we define formally in the paper. We show that this property has far-reaching implications for the existence of winning strategies and their complexity. There is a class of winning conditions for which message exchange games are equivalent to Banach- Mazur games, which have been extensively studied and enjoy nice topological results. But decomposition sensitive goals are much more the norm and much more interesting linguistically and philosophically. (shrink)

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)

Prof. Iyengar's biography of Sri Aurobindo, long a standard reference work, is now in its fifth edition. The author's subtitle indicates the depth and breadth of the book, as it links the life of Sri Aurobindo, who played for our age the crucial role of leader of humanity's evolving destiny , with the history of India and the world. It also provides detailed discussions of Sri Aurobindo's writings, from the early poems and plays to the politics of Bande Mataram, (...) from the philosophy and social thought of the Arya to the epic masterpiece of Savitri, as the essential keys to understanding his life and work. This book is available again after a long time. (shrink)

This paper refines the game theoretic analysis of conversations in Asher et al. by adding epistemic concepts to make explicit the intuitive idea that conversationalists typically conceive of conversational strategies in a situation of imperfect information. This ‘epistemic’ turn has important ramifications for linguistic analysis, and we illustrate our approach with a detailed treatment of linguistic examples.

A wide body of research in the field of happiness economics shows that individuals adapt to both prosperity and to adversity and return to their usual levels of happiness. In this paper we used novel methods and data to assess the effects of the deep economic crisis of 2008-2009 on well-being in the United States. We found, as expected, that the crisis had profound effects on happiness levels, as well as on individuals' assessments of their standards of living and of (...) their future. These attitudes varied significantly depending on respondents' socioeconomic cohort, the industry that they were employed in, and their pre-existing states of mental and physical health. Our most notable finding, though, is a clear, U-shaped trend in reported happiness, with levels falling sharply with the onset of the crisis in mid-08 and trending downward until late March 2009 — around the time that stock markets stopped their free fall. From that point on, happiness levels increased, eventually surpassing the levels that they were in the pre-crisis period of early 2008. This general pattern supports our previous research suggesting that although people react negatively to unpleasant events, they adapt to unpleasant certainty better than they do to uncertainty. (shrink)

_Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action_ offers researchers, practitioners, donors, and decisionmakers insights into entry points for education systems change needed to reorient human society’s relationship with our planetary systems.

This second volume which is under preparation will contain, in addition to a treatment in the I part of the general priniciples of value such as the ...

Biochemical networks, including those containing signaling pathways, display a wide range of regulatory properties. These include the ability to propagate information across different time scales and to function as switches and oscillators. The mechanisms underlying these complex behaviors involve many interacting components and cannot be understood by experiments alone. The development of computational models and the integration of these models with experiments provide valuable insight into these complex systems‐level behaviors. Here we review current approaches to the development of computational models (...) of biochemical networks and describe the insights gained from models that integrate experimental data, using three examples that deal with ultrasensitivity, flexible bistability and oscillatory behavior. These types of complex behavior from relatively simple networks highlight the necessity of using theoretical approaches in understanding higher order biological functions. BioEssays 24:1110–1117, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Our paper, ‘Message Exchange Games in Strategic Contexts’ lost the funding information and acknowledgments. We had put in it on its way to publication. We include them in this erratum here.