2,030 research outputs found
Conversations with authors: Saskya Jain
No full textA 2011 conversation with the author Saskya Jain about her life and the inspiration for her work
A histology-free description of a new species of the genus Tetrastemma (Nemertea: Hoplonemertea: Monostilifera) from Hawaii and India
No full textChernyshev, Alexei V., Polyakova, Neonila E., Vignesh, Mohandhas S., Jain, Ruchi P., Sanjeevi, Prakash, Norenburg, Jon L., Rajesh, Rajaian P. (2020): A histology-free description of a new species of the genus Tetrastemma (Nemertea: Hoplonemertea: Monostilifera) from Hawaii and India. Zootaxa 4808 (2): 379-383, DOI: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4808.2.1
Jain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives
No full textJain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives: Moral Vision and Literary Innovation traces how and why Jain authors at different points in history rewrote the story of Rāma and situates these texts within larger frameworks of South Asian religious history and literature. The book argues that the plot, characters, and the very history of Jain Rāma composition itself served as a continual font of inspiration for authors to create and express novel visions of moral personhood. In making this argument, the book examines three versions of the Rāma story composed by two authors, separated in time and space by over 800 years and thousands of miles. The first is Raviṣeṇa, who composed the Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa (“The Deeds of Padma”), and the second is Brahma Jinadāsa, author of both a Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa and a vernacular (bhāṣā) version of the story titled Rām Rās (“The Story of Rām”). While the three compositions narrate the same basic story and work to shape ethical subjects, they do so in different ways and with different visions of what a moral person actually is. A close comparative reading focused on the differences between these three texts reveals the diverse visions of moral personhood held by Jains in premodernity and demonstrates the innovative narrative strategies authors utilized in order to actualize those visions. The book is thus a valuable contribution to the fields of Jain studies and religion and literature in premodern South Asia
THE JAIN CENTRE IN LEICESTER
No full textThis dissertation discusses the formative years of the Jain Centre, Leicester, from 1979 when Jain Samaj Leicester, the community body of the Jains in Leicester, bought a dilapidated former chapel and set about converting it into a centre for the community. Central in the plan was the religious dimension which was to unite four "sects" of Jainism under one roof, Svetambara, Digambara, Sthanakvasi and the devotees of Srimad Rajchandra. The prehistory of Jain Samaj is looked at briefly, from the first meetings in members' homes and the formal foundation of Jain Samaj Leicester in 1973. In the main body of the dissertation, in Chapter Three, the approach is largely historical, with the key events being singled out for detailed examination. The account is taken right up-to-date, to 2001. A final chapter analyses the factors which led to the success of this venture.
Chapter One provides essential introductory orientation on the Jains, both as a community and as followers of an ancient religion, relating this to the situation of the Jains in Leicester. In a second part of this chapter sources and methodology are outlined. Primary sources comprise
(a) Information from members of the Jain community,
(b) Participant observation by the author over a quarter of a century,
(c) A large collection of written material put together over the years and comprising letters, notices and much more from Jain Samaj and others, and runs of the newsletters and journal published by Jain Samaj, as well as news cuttings, particularly from the local press.
These three sources have been of roughly equal weight.
Secondary sources are the author's own collection of some 200 books and pamphlets on Jainism and the Jains, together with the resources of other libraries particularly that of the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Chapter Two provides a description of the Jain Centre and examines some aspects of its functioning. Chapter Four is devoted to the temple, its architecture and iconography, and the religious life centred there.
Finally, in Chapter Five an analysis is made of some key aspects of the Centre's history, and a tentative forecast of the future is attempted
Interview with S. Lochlann Jain
No full textProf. S. Lochlann Jain (he/him, they/them) is a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. Jain is an award-winning scholar, artist, and author of three books: Injury (Princeton University Press, 2006), Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013), and Things that Art (University of Toronto Press, 2019).
Jain’s work lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, history, political economy, gender and sexuality, biology, and medicine and aims to unsettle some of the deeply held assumptions about objectivity that underlie the politics and history of medical research. His book Malignant traces the contested concepts of cancer that lie at the core of debates over cause, treatment, responsibility, and national progress, aiming to show why cancer remains such an intractable medical, social, and economic problem that takes millions of lives, while it both costs and generates billions of dollars.
Jain has won numerous prizes in anthropology, medical journalism, and science and technology studies, including the Staley Prize, June Roth Memorial Award, Fleck Prize, Edelstein Prize, Victor Turner Prize, and the Diana Forsythe Prize. His work has been supported by Stanford Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the National Humanities Center
Optimization of energy parameters in buildings
No full textThesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 34).When designing buildings, energy analysis is typically done after construction has been completed, but making the design decisions while keeping energy efficiency in mind, is one way to make energy-efficient buildings. The conscious design of building parameters could decrease or completely eliminate the need for Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems, and thus, optimizing building parameters could help conserve a great amount of energy. This work focuses on two buildings - a passive solar house and an apartment in Beijing. The Beijing apartment is used to study natural ventilation in a space. Both buildings are modeled using EnergyPlus, and analyzed using VBA in Excel. The Genetic Algorithm Optimization Toolbox (GAOT) is used to optimize the parameters for the solar house. The program was run for 150 generations, with there being 20 individuals in each population. The optimized parameters for the solar house resulted in a mean internal temperature of 20.1 C, 7 C lower than that for randomly chosen parameters. The extreme temperatures in both cases were also markedly different, with the optimized parameters providing a more comfortable atmosphere in the house.(cont.) The apartment parameters were not optimized due to the inherent difficulty in quantifying an objective function. Through the simulation however, it was determined that each window has mass inflow and outflow occurring at the same time. In order to check that mass was conserved through the flow of air in and out of the apartment, the net flow in or out through each window had to be considered. This comparison did show the conservation of mass, which provided confidence in the EnergyPlus model used.by Ruchi V. Jain.S.B
Evaluating the reliability of an authoritative discourse in a Jain epistemological eulogy of the 6th c.
No full textThis paper explores the coexistence of more apologetic and of more systematic considerations in the Āpta-mīmāṁsā (ĀMī), Investigation on authority, of the Jain author Samantabhadra (530–590). First, this treatise offers a relevant case study to investigate the transition from a conception in which the reliability criterion of an authoritative discourse is the authoritative character of its utterer, to a conception in which the criteria of validity and soundness of the discourse itself are foremost. Second, Samantabhadra is one of the first authors to undertake to logically prove the omniscience of the Jain teachers. And third, he links these questions to the celebrated Jain epistemological theory of non-one-sidedness
Tetrastemma freyae Chernyshev & Polyakova & Vignesh & Jain & Sanjeevi & Norenburg & Rajesh 2020, sp. nov.
No full textTetrastemma freyae sp. nov. (Fig. 1 A–G) Type material. Holotype No JLN1622.01 (NMNH), Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, Hawaii, July 2017, depth 3 m, live corals, coll. J.L. Norenburg. Paratype JLN1622.02 (NMNH), collected with holotype. Paratype No ZSI / MBRC /NE-356 (ZSI), Covelong (Kovalam) beach (12.7925ºN, 80.2530ºE), Tamil Nadu, India, mussel beds, intertidal, 16 December 2019, coll. M.S. Vignesh. Other material examined. Three specimens, Covelong (Kovalam), Tamil Nadu, India, mussel beds, intertidal, 21 February 2019. GenBank accession numbers. Holotype MT 247877 (COI), MT 247879 (H3); paratype MT 247878 (COI), MT 247880 (H3). Description. External features. Live specimens 2–5 сm long and up to 1 mm wide, with spatulate- to diamondshaped head, bearing four black eyes. Two anterior eyes not distinguishable being masked by patch of cephalic pigment. Oblique cephalic furrows in two pairs: posterior furrows located behind posterior pair of eyes and anterior pair immediately in front of posterior eyes. Body tapering posteriorly, with blunt-rounded tail. General body color pale yellowish, with a patch of black pigment on dorsal surface of head. Patch trapezoid or oval, slightly varying in shape between specimens. Deeply located white pigment (possibly cephalic glands) present near anterior and posterior margins of patch. Some specimens bear small irregularly spaced black spots located dorsally. In holotype, lateral gut pouches visible as two darker lines. Internal features (on squeezed live specimens). Rhynchocoel as long as body. Basis cylindrical, with truncated and widened posterior part, 105 µm long and 35 µm in maximum width; central stylet 80 µm long. Two accessory stylet pouches each containing two accessory stylets. Gut pouches deeply branched. Ovaries contain 1–2 ovules. Remarks. A total of 16 described Tetrastemma species have a pale general body color and a dark patch of pigment on the dorsal surface of the head. Four of these, Tetrastemma verinigrum Iwata, 1954, T. pseudocoronatum Chernyshev, 1998, T. pimaculatum Chernyshev, 1998, and T. olgarum Chernyshev, 1998, have been recorded from Asian waters. Some varieties of Tetrastemma nigrifrons (Coe, 1904) (formerly placed in Quasitetrastemma – see Chernyshev 2004) also have a similar color (see Zaslavskaya et al. 2010). These species possess pear- or ovalshaped basis of the central stylet, whereas the basis in the new species is cylindrical with a flared posterior margin. A similar basis is characteristic for species in the genus Zygonemertes Montgomery, 1897, as well as Tetrastemma albomaculatum Chernyshev, 2016. The latter species, unlike T. freyae, has a white spot on the head (Chernyshev 2016). As the obtained data show, not only the body color, but also the shape of the central stylet basis should be taken into account in ‘histology-free’ descriptions of the new species of Tetrastemma. DNA barcode analysis. Among the Pacific Tetrastemma species with a dark pigment patch on the head, COI sequences are known for T. pseudocoronatum, T. pimaculatum, T. olgarum, and T. nigrifrons. The p -distances be- tween these species and T. melanocephalum from the European coast are provided in Table 1. The samples of T. freyae from Hawaii and India have p -distances 1.3% for COI and 0.3% for H3, which warrant designating a single species despite the substantial geographical space between these findings. Etymology. The specific epithet honors Ms Freya Goetz (NMNH) for her invaluable assistance to JLN in support of his field and laboratory work.Published as part of Chernyshev, Alexei V., Polyakova, Neonila E., Vignesh, Mohandhas S., Jain, Ruchi P., Sanjeevi, Prakash, Norenburg, Jon L. & Rajesh, Rajaian P., 2020, A histology-free description of a new species of the genus Tetrastemma (Nemertea: Hoplonemertea: Monostilifera) from Hawaii and India, pp. 379-383 in Zootaxa 4808 (2) on pages 380-382, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.4808.2.10, http://zenodo.org/record/393345
Jain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives: Moral Vision and Literary Innovation
No full textJain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives: Moral Vision and Literary Innovation traces how and why Jain authors at different points in history rewrote the story of Rāma and situates these texts within larger frameworks of South Asian religious history and literature.
The book argues that the plot, characters, and the very history of Jain Rāma composition itself served as a continual font of inspiration for authors to create and express novel visions of moral personhood. In making this argument, the book examines three versions of the Rāma story composed by two authors, separated in time and space by over 800 years and thousands of miles. The first is Raviṣeṇa, who composed the Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa (“The Deeds of Padma”), and the second is Brahma Jinadāsa, author of both a Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa and a vernacular (bhāṣā) version of the story titled Rām Rās (“The Story of Rām”). While the three compositions narrate the same basic story and work to shape ethical subjects, they do so in different ways and with different visions of what a moral person actually is. A close comparative reading focused on the differences between these three texts reveals the diverse visions of moral personhood held by Jains in premodernity and demonstrates the innovative narrative strategies authors utilized in order to actualize those visions.
The book is thus a valuable contribution to the fields of Jain studies and religion and literature in premodern South Asia.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1184/thumbnail.jp
Who Are Jain - A Reappraisal [Author Copy]
No full textIt is reasonable to conclude that jain (all lower case letters) are a people who carry the following three ancestries, to a differing extent. Probably the most dominant is the kṣatrīya ancestry; “early farmers from southwestern Iran” [Quintana-Murci et al, 2001]; “early farmers of western Iran” [Lazaridis et al, 2016]; “genetic outliers from sites in Iran and Turkmenistan” [Shinde et al, 2019]; “early hunter-gatherers of Iran”; [Narsimhan et al, 2019]; we have called them simply ‘farmers-herders from the foothills of the Zagros mountains’. Next is the kirāt ancestry; ‘migrants from China and East Asia, who entered the Indian peninsula around 6,000 BCE from the north-east’. The last, and probably the least, is the native Indian ancestry. This is the ancestry derived from the early Anatomically Modern Humans who evolved in the sub-continent, or travelled there from Africa. Probably we do not find any communities in India at present who carry exclusively the native Indian ancestry; the closest we can get are the vēḍār of Sri Lanka
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