32 research outputs found
"There are millions of young Indians who feel frustrated with their lives.... I really want the Indian government to take these frustrations seriously." - Snigdha Poonam
Get PDFLSE South Asia Centre recently invited Snigdha Poonam, journalist at Hindustan Times and author of Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World, for a panel discussion entitled 'Who are the Middle Class in South Asia?' as part of the South Asia Summit 2018. In conversation with Anirbaan Banerjee, she talks about aggressive Indian nationalism, the political and economic frustrations of the middle-class young Indian, women's aspirations and a growing social-political crisis in India
Importance of marriage for Asian Indian women in the U.S.: an exploratory study
No full textThroughout the past century and across various cultures, the concept of marriage has significantly changed from being a union between two families to a union between two individuals. The change has penetrated South Asia, despite collectivism being the norm in Asian Indian culture. The current exploratory study was done to investigate an unexamined area of research namely, the pressure experienced by unmarried Asian Indian women in the United States. A qualitative research design combining ethnographic and grounded theory was used. Ten interviews were conducted with heterosexual, Asian Indian, Hindu women, above the age of 25, and raised in the United States. Four main research questions were addressed: (1) What pressures do family and community put on Asian Indian women to get married (2) What effect does remaining unmarried have on Asian Indian women (3) How do certain factors (i.e., past relationships, religion, skin color, and education) affect how desirable these women are to others, and how desirable they feel? and (4) What are Asian Indian women’s perspectives on marriage? The interview data collected were analyzed to uncover qualitative themes. These themes included the following: the women interviewed felt that all Asian Indian women were born to be brides, that Asian Indian women did not go through a process of separation-individuation as defined in Western psychology, that parents experienced a great deal of shame if their daughters remained unmarried, that a great amount of interpersonal conflict with family and friends resulted from staying single, and that most women had felt that they needed to get married before the age of thirty. Although several of the women interviewed stated that they were ambivalent about the idea of marrying someone of Indian origin, the women felt that several factors affected how desirable they were to other members of the Indian community. The findings of this study suggest important implications for clinical psychology training for mental health clinicians. The study suggests that therapists should have an increased understanding of the difference in separation-individuation between Western and Asian Indian culture, the importance of an Asian Indian woman’s external presentation, and the extreme shame that these women may experience by remaining single.Psy. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Snigdha Ramesh Ratho
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Advancing enabling technology and genome editing in monocot crops for disease resistance and sustainability
Get PDFIt is projected that by the year 2050, global agriculture will need to increase the output of staple crops by 60% to feed the world’s rapidly growing population amidst threats posed by climate change and crop disease. One strategy to meet this challenge is to develop new genetic diversity in the germplasm to generate robust and resilient lines with beneficial traits. Conventional breeding has played an essential and major role in crop trait improvement. However, those methods can be difficult, laborious, and time-consuming. The development of effective technology for precision and time-saving plant breeding is required. A breakthrough tool to this end has been CRISPR-Cas9. Noteworthy for its simple sequence-specific programmability, the gene editing system has unleashed remarkable potential for plant biotechnology and functional genomics. Here, we explore several aspects and parameters to advance Cas9-mediated gene editing technology in the essential monocot food crops: rice and wheat. Early-stage plant gene-editing projects benefit greatly from a rapid transient pipeline using protoplasts to evaluate the efficacy of gene editing reagents. We describe here a novel and sustainable method for protoplast isolation from rice tissue and demonstrate their use in ribonucleoprotein (RNP) based Cas9 gene editing assays. Next, we focus on applications of Cas9 technology in wheat to engineer disease resistance. Wheat is a critical target organism because the complexity of its large allohexaploid genome has rendered genetic manipulation by classic methods extremely difficult. Using DNA plasmids encoding CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing reagents, we optimize conditions and demonstrate that all three homoeologous copies of genes in allohexaploid wheat can be simultaneously edited within a single generation. We recognize, however, that DNA plasmid gene editing approaches have a number of limitations including random integration into the plant genome and unpredictability of expression. To address this, we finally present significant improvements to DNA-free Cas9-RNP based gene editing in wheat. We show that increased temperature treatment greatly enhances Cas9-mediated editing efficiency and regenerate transgene-free edited wheat plants at a high rate. Lastly, we utilize this DNA-free gene editing method to generate de novo partial resistance to the agronomically important pathogen Parastagonospora nodorum
Advancing enabling technology and genome editing in monocot crops for disease resistance and sustainability
No full textAdvancing enabling technology and genome editing in monocot crops for disease resistance and sustainability
No full textSupervised Classification of Aerosol Types from POLDER-3 and OMI satellite data: An investigative study into using microphysical parameters and class labels for aerosol classification
No full textAerosol is defined as the suspension of solid or liquid in the atmosphere. While some aerosols do not pose any serious threat to humankind, others have devastating effects. Thus, it is important to understand the type and distribution of these aerosols in the atmosphere. While traditional satellite data pose delays due to the huge amount of data that it has to process through the traditional pipeline, machine learning is quickly proving to be a likely winning candidate in providing accurate and efficient models. The advances in machine learning and cloud computing combined with the terabytes of data from the earth observation satellites open up avenues for creating newer and variant data products of better accuracy in the domain of aerosol classification. There is a recognized need for distinguishing and characterizing different kinds of aerosols in the 5.6 billion dollar air quality market. This research focuses on the investigation and designing of machine learning models for the aerosol retrieval process. To meet this end we implement supervised learning on satellite data to achieve aerosol classification to distinguish the different types of aerosols. The two satellites whose data will be analyzed are POLDER-3 and OMI. In this study, the three supervised learning algorithms SVM, RF and KNN were implemented to classify aerosol types for the year 2006 on POLDER-3 and OMI satellite data. We used results from previous studies on POLDER-3 as eight input aerosol class labels along with selected microphysical parameters for supervised learning and could achieve a very high reproducibility of the aerosol classes with a reduction in training time. Similarly, we used three aerosol label classes as input along with selected microphysical parameters to generate a high reproducibility. The results showed that SVM performed best on POLDER-3 data while RF was the best performing algorithm on OMI data. Using SVM on POLDER-3 dataset with hyperparameter tuning we reached an overall accuracy of 99%, precision of 99%, recall of 98%, and f1-score of 99% on POLDER-3 dataset for the eight classes of aerosols. Using RF on OMI dataset with hyperparameter tuning we reached an overall accuracy of 99%, precision of 99%, recall of 99%, and f1-score of 99% on OMI dataset for the three classes of aerosols. It was concluded that while machine learning still has a long way to go, it shows promising results in the field of satellite data processing for aerosol classification.Aerospace Engineerin
Summaries of re-constituted history: Tracing the continuities in Modern Restoration
No full textThe Old Pinakothek, with its progressive concept, became a model for many 19th -century museums. Completed in 1846, by Leo von Klenze, the structure was severely damaged post-war. Its first restoration plans included a complete tear-down and a new master plan. Hans Döllgast fought for its preservation and state of history, adding a method of plain textured exposed brickwork as a commitment to the present, consequently giving rise to a new perspective of ruin conservation. Creative approaches of re-constitution that involve analyzing a monumental space and its history with a focus on reconstruction that is strategic, have brought a shift in the way one can approach architecture since the 1890s. The unconventional philosophy and strategic craftsmanship serve as an inventory of practices that have inspired architecture in Berlin and across Europe today.Keywords: Modern restoration, Creative re-building, Analytical futures, Alte Pinakothek, Repair, CraftsmanshipAR1A066Architectural History and TheoryArchitecture, Urbanism and Building Science
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Get PDFThe directed evolution of biomolecules to improve or change their activity is central to many engineering and synthetic biology efforts. However, selecting improved variants from gene libraries in living cells requires plasmid expression systems that suffer from variable copy number effects, or the use of complex marker-dependent chromosomal integration strategies. We developed quantitative gene assembly and DNA library insertion into the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome by optimizing an efficient single-step and marker-free genome editing system using CRISPR-Cas9. With this Multiplex CRISPR (CRISPRm) system, we selected an improved cellobiose utilization pathway in diploid yeast in a single round of mutagenesis and selection, which increased cellobiose fermentation rates by over 10-fold. Mutations recovered in the best cellodextrin transporters reveal synergy between substrate binding and transporter dynamics, and demonstrate the power of CRISPRm to accelerate selection experiments and discoveries of the molecular determinants that enhance biomolecule function
Exploring the experiences of carers for young people with emotional outbursts in the UK: insights from and before the COVID-19 pandemic
Get PDFThe author is a Clinical Psychologist in training and is submitting this thesis as a partial fulfilment of the Doctor of Clinical Psychology course at the University of Birmingham. This thesis encompasses four chapters, the first of which is a meta-ethnography of qualitative studies on the experiences of ethnic minority carers for people with developmental difficulties in the last twenty years in the UK. The second chapter is an empirical qualitative research study that explores the lived experiences of carers for young people with emotional outbursts in the UK before and during the pandemic, and its clinical implications. The third and fourth chapters are press releases for the meta-ethnography and the empirical research respectively, which present the key findings of each paper for dissemination to the public. Supplementary information for the first and second chapters is provided in the form of appendices and references
Promoting Science Communication among Scheduled Tribe Students through Museum
Get PDF166-176Governments try to improve the educational status of socially excluded sections like Dalits, tribals and women through various strategies and tools. It is already proven that students learn better and retain more when they participate actively in the learning process. Students find science difficult as the language of instruction is very much different from their own language. They generally fail to adapt to new circumstances as well as the new language. The science curriculum is far from their dreams, aspirations and life pursuits.
This study is a descriptive survey based on the data collected by the author from Scheduled Tribe (ST) students and staff of a Museum in Bhubaneswar. It was found that student visitors to the museum experienced a change in the way they thought about science, and thus developed a bonding relationship with science. As visiting a museum had a measurable impact on students of this study, it is concluded that regular visits to the museum may further fuel their interest to study science. Though the study was limited in its scope, it provided evidence that positive science outreach experiences can have a strong impact on students’ ability to learn and understand science
