This article describes how the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the higher education institutes in developing nations like India to relook at pedagogical approaches. Due to government imposing nationwide lockdown, higher educational institutes were quickly adopting to imbibe online learning medium. This research takes a qualitative thematic analytical approach to explore the facilitators and challenges to online learning from the perspectives of both learners and educators in higher education institutes. We have specifically explored the ethical and social concerns related to online (...) learning and the possible solution for the same. (shrink)

The book develops the necessary background in probability theory underlying diverse treatments of stochastic processes and their wide-ranging applications. With this goal in mind, the pace is lively, yet thorough. Basic notions of independence and conditional expectation are introduced relatively early on in the text, while conditional expectation is illustrated in detail in the context of martingales, Markov property and strong Markov property. Weak convergence of probabilities on metric spaces and Brownian motion are two highlights. The historic role of size-biasing (...) is emphasized in the contexts of large deviations and in developments of Tauberian Theory. The authors assume a graduate level of maturity in mathematics, but otherwise the book will be suitable for students with varying levels of background in analysis and measure theory. In particular, theorems from analysis and measure theory used in the main text are provided in comprehensive appendices, along with their proofs, for ease of reference. Rabi Bhattacharya is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona. Edward Waymire is Professor of Mathematics at Oregon State University. Both authors have co-authored numerous books, including the graduate textbook, Stochastic Processes with Applications. Advanced undergrads and graduate students, analysts. (shrink)

What factors drove the transformation of the cyanobacterial progenitor of plastids (e.g. chloroplasts) from endosymbiont to bona fide organelle? This question lies at the heart of organelle genesis because, whereas intracellular endosymbionts are widespread in both unicellular and multicellular eukaryotes (e.g. rhizobial bacteria, Chlorella cells in ciliates, Buchnera in aphids), only two canonical eukaryotic organelles of endosymbiotic origin are recognized, the plastids of algae and plants and the mitochondrion. Emerging data on (1) the discovery of non‐canonical plastid protein targeting, (2) (...) the recent origin of a cyanobacterial‐derived organelle in the filose amoeba Paulinella chromatophora, and (3) the extraordinarily reduced genomes of psyllid bacterial endosymbionts begin to blur the distinction between endosymbiont and organelle. Here we discuss the use of these terms in light of new data in order to highlight the unique aspects of plastids and mitochondria and underscore their central role in eukaryotic evolution. BioEssays 29:1239–1246, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This essay proposes to review the problems of reconstructing and interpreting ancient texts, particularly philosophical commentaries, in the context of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system of India. Following an overview of the Indian philosophical text tradition and the ontological and epistemological positions of the Cārvākas, three cases are discussed: (1) when there is no invariance in the text and the commentary, (2) when commentators differ among themselves in their interpretations, and (3) when contradictory interpretations are offered. The paper further discusses why certain (...) commentaries are to be treated as inconsistent with the base text and concludes that innovations inconsistent with the intention of the author should be treated differently from glosses that seek to explain the author’s original intentions. (shrink)

Study in the context of Hindu philosophy.

This paper examines the effects of employees’ sense that they work for a purpose-driven company on their workplace sustainability behaviors. Conceptualizing corporate purpose as an overarching, relevant, shared ethical vision of why a company exists and where it needs to go, we argue that it is particularly suited for driving employee sustainability behaviors, which are more ethically complex than the types of employee ethical behaviors typically examined by prior research. Through four studies, two involving the actual employees of construction companies, (...) we demonstrate that purpose drives the sustainability behaviors of employees by causing them to take psychological ownership of sustainability. In addition, we show that the sustainability-enhancing effect of purpose is stronger when employees perceive that they have higher autonomy in enacting their sustainability actions and for those employees for whom being moral is more central to their sense of self. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to gain attention atop the corporate agenda and is by now an important component of the dialogue between companies and their stakeholders. Nevertheless, there is still little guidance as to how companies can implement CSR activity in order to maximize returns to CSR investment. Theorists have identified many company-favoring outcomes of CSR; yet there is a dearth of research on the psychological mechanisms that drive stakeholder responses to CSR activity. Borrowing from the literatures on meansend (...) chains and relationship marketing, we propose a conceptual model that explains how CSR provides individual stakeholders with numerous benefits (functional, psychosocial, and values) and how the type and extent to which a stakeholder derives these benefits from CSR initiatives influences the quality of the relationship between the stakeholder and the company. The paper discusses the implications of these insights and highlights a number of areas for future research. (shrink)

The task of rhetorical role labeling is to assign labels (such as Fact, Argument, Final Judgement, etc.) to sentences of a court case document. Rhetorical role labeling is an important problem in the field of Legal Analytics, since it can aid in various downstream tasks as well as enhances the readability of lengthy case documents. The task is challenging as case documents are highly various in structure and the rhetorical labels are often subjective. Previous works for automatic rhetorical role identification (...) (i) mainly used Conditional Random Fields over manually handcrafted features, and (ii) focused on certain law domains only (e.g., Immigration cases, Rent law), and a particular jurisdiction/country (e.g., US, Canada, India). In this work, we improve upon the prior works on rhetorical role identification by proposing novel Deep Learning models for automatically identifying rhetorical roles, which substantially outperform the prior methods. Additionally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed models over documents from five different law domains, and from two different jurisdictions—the Supreme Court of India and the Supreme Court of the UK. Through extensive experiments over different variations of the Deep Learning models, including Transformer models based on BERT and LegalBERT, we show the robustness of the methods for the task. We also perform an extensive inter-annotator study and analyse the agreement of the predictions of the proposed model with the annotations by domain experts. We find that some rhetorical labels are inherently hard/subjective and both law experts and neural models frequently get confused in predicting them correctly. (shrink)

While considerable attention has been given to the harm done to consumers by marketing, less attention has been given to the harm done by consumers as an indirect effect of marketing activities, particularly in regard to supply chains. The recent development of dramatically expanded global supply chains has resulted in social and environmental problems upstream that are attributable at least in part to downstream marketers and consumers. Marketers have responded mainly by using corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication to counter the (...) critique of CSR practice, but these claims of ethical corporate behavior often lack credibility and can result in a backlash against brands. The article argues that more adequate attention to the harmful upstream effects of downstream marketing and consumption decisions requires greater attention to stakeholder marketing and marketer efforts to help create responsible consumers. It concludes by identifying implications for further research in this important emergent area of marketing ethics. (shrink)

Articles on comparative philosophy; includes articles on Indic philosophy.

Critical analysis of the fundamentals of Advaita Vedanta philosophy.

Two words, pañcagupta and kuṇḍakīṭa, are found in modern Sanskrit lexicons such as the Śabdakalpadruma, the Vācaspatya, the Sanskrit-Wörterbuch, and A Sanskrit English Dictionary. They are said to signify the Cārvāka philosophy and an expert in the Cārvāka philosophy respectively. Both the words have been taken from some twelfth-century Sanskrit kośas but no example of actual use is available. Nor do they occur in any earlier Sanskrit kośa, such as the Amarakośa and the Halāyudhakośa. The inference is that the words (...) must have appeared in some late philosophical work that was critical of the materialist Cārvāka system of philosophy and the kośakāras found them in the same source. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility positively impacts relationships between firms and customers. Previous research construes this as an outcome of customers’ warm glow that results from supporting firms’ benevolence. The current research demonstrates that beyond warm glow, CSR positively impacts firms’ sales through mitigating their customers’ perceptions of purchase risk. We demonstrate this effect across three conditions in which customers’ perceived risk of purchase is heightened, using both secondary data and two lab experiments. Under conditions of greater purchase risk, CSR positively impacts (...) both sales and customer purchase intentions to a greater extent than in conditions of lower purchase risk. In addition to measuring purchase risk as the mediating process behind these effects, we demonstrate that the effect of CSR on sales is stronger for those CSR activities that signal a stakeholder orientation. (shrink)

Immunology researchers are beginning to explore the possibilities of reproducibility, reuse and secondary analyses of immunology data. Open-access datasets are being applied in the validation of the methods used in the original studies, leveraging studies for meta-analysis, or generating new hypotheses. To promote these goals, the ImmPort data repository was created for the broader research community to explore the wide spectrum of clinical and basic research data and associated findings. The ImmPort ecosystem consists of four components–Private Data, Shared Data, Data (...) Analysis, and Resources—for data archiving, dissemination, analyses, and reuse. To date, more than 300 studies have been made freely available through the ImmPort Shared Data portal , which allows research data to be repurposed to accelerate the translation of new insights into discoveries. (shrink)

The Mahabharata, one of the major epics of India, is a sourcebook complete by itself as well as an open text constantly under construction. This volume looks at transactions between its modern discourses and ancient vocabulary. Located amid conversations between these two conceptual worlds, the volume grapples with the epic's problematisation of dharma or righteousness, and consequently, of the ideal person and the good life through a cluster of issues surrounding the concept of agency and action. Drawing on several interdisciplinary (...) approaches, the essays reflect on a range of issues in the Mahabharata, including those of duty, motivation, freedom, selfhood, choice, autonomy, and justice, both in the context of philosophical debates and their ethical and political ramifications for contemporary times. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers engaged with philosophy, literature, religion, history, politics, culture, gender, South Asian studies, and Indology. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in South Asian epics and the Mahabharata. (shrink)

Problems in peer review, the backbone of maintaining high standards in scientific publishing, have led to wide spread discontent within the scientific community. Training in the peer review process and a simpler format to assist in decision making are possible courses to improve and expedite the process of peer review and scientific publishing. The authors discuss problems in the peer review process focusing on challenges related to major revisions and reviewer's wish list of experiments; this leads to the loss of (...) time and money. Major revisions rarely lead to significant improvements, while simultaneously delay the dissemination of knowledge. The authors propose simple solutions including training peer reviewers to improve the peer review system. (shrink)

At times we come across traditional sayings that pose enigmas. Often, striving to resolve the puzzle turns into a quest, a search for meaning that, quite unexpectedly, throws light on problems facing us today. Such an enigmatic Sanskrit couplet exhorts invoking five females regularly to redeem us of failings, howsoever grievous. Ahalya draupadi kunti tara mandodari tatha/ Panchakanya smarenityam mahapataka nashinim// The choice of the five is itself intriguing, all being epic heroines: Ahalya, Tara and Mandodari from the Ramayana; Kunti (...) and Draupadi from the Mahabharata. Even more so is the celebration of each as kanya, not as nari or sati. If kanya connotes ‘virgin’, the matter becomes more puzzling since each had intimate relationships with more than one man. In analysing what is known about them, we are surprised, for these heroines of ancient myth turn out to be, quite unexpectedly, guides for us in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Every individual in this world seeks to achieve a healthy, wealthy, secured and blissful life as suggested by Maslow’ Need Hierarchy. A regression analysis taking Life Satisfaction Index (as obtained from World Database of Happiness between 1995–2005) as the dependent variable indicated rule of law, voice and accountability, regularity authority as well as economic freedom indicators (as obtained from Heritage Foundation Database, 1995–2006) as very significant predictors. In this article, an attempt has been made to understand this tridimensional concept of (...) happiness and combining them to arrive at a Composite Index of Happiness. Efforts have also been made to evaluate performance of various nations in their persistency to achieve these dimensions of happiness. Most studies have been either in direction of Subjective Well-being or Developmental Well-being. This article has been in an effort to combine both the factors and incorporating age-old values and virtues required for reaching higher realm of lasting peace, tranquility and happiness for one and all. The study shows that mental happiness has significant positive correlation with materialistic and spiritualistic happiness, perhaps for being the intermediary step, but materialistic has no significant correlation with spiritualistic happiness. (shrink)

Prior research on the impact of mandatory quotas in one dimension of diversity, on other dimensions, shows contradictory results. We seek to resolve this puzzle by relying on theory in social psychology on homophily and recategorization processes in hiring. In the context of a law mandating a gender quota on Indian boards, we predict and find that boards respond to the law by hiring new women directors who are similar to existing directors in terms of caste and community dimensions. We (...) find that this homophily effect is impactful to the extent that even high-status women directors cannot overcome it. At the aggregate level, these organizational-level practices result in caste and community inequalities remaining intact despite the introduction of 1309 new women directors. We contribute to research on inequality, board of directors, and affirmative action. (shrink)

Commemoration volume for Kalidas Bhattacharya, 1911-1984, Indian philosopher; comprises articles on Indian philosophy.

The photosynthetic organelle of algae and plants (the plastid) traces its origin to a primary endosymbiotic event in which a previously non‐photosynthetic protist engulfed and enslaved a cyanobacterium. This eukaryote then gave rise to the red, green and glaucophyte algae. However, many algal lineages, such as the chlorophyll c‐containing chromists, have a more complicated evolutionary history involving a secondary endosymbiotic event, in which a protist engulfed an existing eukaryotic alga (in this case, a red alga). Chromists such as diatoms and (...) kelps then rose to great importance in aquatic habitats. Another algal group, the dinoflagellates, has undergone tertiary (engulfment of a secondary plastid) and even quaternary endosymbioses. In this review, we examine algal diversity and show endosymbiosis to be a major force in algal evolution. This area of research has advanced rapidly and long‐standing issues such as the chromalveolate hypothesis and the extent of endosymbiotic gene transfer have recently been clarified. BioEssays 26:50–60, 2004. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)