Three recent publications on BEND3 firmly establish its role as a novel sequence‐specific transcription factor that is essential for PRC2 recruitment and maintenance of pluripotency. Here, we briefly review our current understanding of the BEND3‐PRC2 axis in the regulation of pluripotency and also explore the possibility of a similar connection in cancer.

Error‐free genome duplication and accurate cell division are critical for cell survival. In all three domains of life, bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, initiator proteins bind replication origins in an ATP‐dependent manner, play critical roles in replisome assembly, and coordinate cell‐cycle regulation. We discuss how the eukaryotic initiator, Origin recognition complex (ORC), coordinates different events during the cell cycle. We propose that ORC is the maestro driving the orchestra to coordinately perform the musical pieces of replication, chromatin organization, and repair.

This essay argues that the ‘thought figure’ of world literature has been under incalculable strain from its inception, given the diversity of linguistic and cultural contexts within which it must be understood. After a brief introductory discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s talk on world literature, the essay goes on to connect world literature debates with those in global modernism, especially modernism in the colony. Looking at the networks of modernism, and the role of little magazines in India, particularly Bengal, in creating (...) a sense of world literature through reviews and translations, it stresses the importance of location, language, and perspective in the wake of decolonization. However, in the present time of ecological and planetary crisis, with a global upsurge of xenophobia, insularity, and ethnic, racist, or communal violence, the notion of a world, or of a world literature, is hard to sustain. (shrink)

Electroencephalography provides a non-invasive means to advancing our understanding of the development and function of the brain. However, the majority of the world’s population residing in low and middle income countries has historically been limited from contributing to, and thereby benefiting from, such neurophysiological research, due to lack of scalable validated methods of EEG data collection. In this study, we establish a standard operating protocol to collect approximately 3 min each of eyes-open and eyes-closed resting-state EEG data using a low-cost (...) portable EEG device in rural households through formative work in the community. We then evaluate the acceptability of these EEG assessments to young children and feasibility of administering them through non-specialist workers. Finally, we describe properties of the EEG recordings obtained using this novel approach to EEG data collection. The formative phase was conducted with 9 families which informed protocols for consenting, child engagement strategies and data collection. The protocol was then implemented on 1265 families. 977 children and 1199 adults provided resting-state data for this study. 259 children refused to wear the EEG cap or removed it, and 58 children refused the eyes-closed recording session. Hardware or software issues were experienced during 30 and 25 recordings in eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions respectively. Disturbances during the recording sessions were rare and included participants moving their heads, touching the EEG headset with their hands, opening their eyes within the eyes-closed recording session, and presence of loud sounds in the testing environment. Similar to findings in laboratory-based studies from high-income settings, the percentage of recordings which showed an alpha peak was higher in eyes-closed than eyes-open condition, with the peak occurring most frequently in electrodes at O1 and O2 positions, and the mean frequency of the alpha peak was found to be lower in children as compared to adults. We observed a deterioration in the EEG signal with prolonged device usage. This study demonstrates the acceptability, feasibility and utility of conducting EEG research at scale in a rural low-resource community, while highlighting its potential limitations, and offers the impetus needed to further refine the methods and devices and validate such scalable methods to overcome existing research inequity. (shrink)

Mainly papers presented at a conference held at Jadavpur University in 2000.

In everyday conversations, professional codes, policy debates, and academic literature, the concept of respect is referred to frequently. Bioethical arguments in recent decades equate the idea of respect for persons with individuals who are capable of autonomous decision-making, with the focus being explicitly on ‘autonomy,’ ‘capacity,’ or ‘capability.’ In much of bioethics literature, respect for persons is replaced by respect for autonomy. Though the unconditional respect for persons and their autonomy (irrespective of actual decision-making capacity) is established in Kantian bioethics, (...) current argument and debates often revolve around a thin concept of autonomy, focusing on capacity and capability: persons are owed respect because they are ‘rational beings’ or with a focus on ‘agency’ and ‘decision-making abilities.’ However, these aspects alone are insufficient while engaging the concept of respect for persons, particularly in healthcare settings. This paper sets out to explore if the concept of respect for persons—as opposed to a thin concept of autonomy—could help us engage better in healthcare practices. We shall probe the practical value of the experiential aspect of respect—understood as the recognition of persons as respect-worthy through certain dispositions and deliberative acts—by reflecting on instances in clinical practice that tend to be dismissed as negligible or even unavoidable in a stressful environment such as a busy hospital. We shall argue that these instances are far from trivial but carry moral significance and express an unacceptable—disrespectful—attitude that can compromise the moral habitus in hospital settings. In our conclusion, we call for practicing recognition respect in the health professional–patient encounter by focussing on manners, attitudes, and behaviors. Furthermore, we call for continuous medical ethics education programs to address the moral significance of disrespectful behaviors and their manifestations in particular socio-cultural contexts. (shrink)

India’s self-projection as a knowledge economy, a goal it seeks to achieve by 2020, needs to be measured against both practical and conceptual difficulties. The National Knowledge Commission of India acknowledged the first, but elided the second set of problems. Basic education for all and an equitable distribution of educational resources are India’s first priorities, yet the public university remains the most important site of social change and knowledge production. While it is held back by funding and infrastructural inadequacies, shadowed (...) by political influence, and trapped in debates regarding public and private funding, central or state control, meritocracy and affirmative action, it is also a site of opportunity. Its strength lies in its ability to mirror the nation and the democratic process, and to create knowledge not just as product, but as tool. (shrink)

Spontaneous eye blinks are modulated around perceptual events. Our previous study, using a visual ambiguous stimulus, indicated that blink probability decreases before a reported perceptual switch. In the current study, we tested our hypothesis that an absence of blinks marks a time in which perceptual switches are facilitated in‐ and outside the visual domain. In three experiments, presenting either a visual motion quartet in light or darkness or a bistable auditory streaming stimulus, we found a co‐occurrence of blink rate reduction (...) with increased perceptual switch probability. In the visual domain, perceptual switches induced by a short interruption of visual input (blank) allowed an estimate of the timing of the perceptual event with respect to the motor response. This provided the first evidence that the blink reduction was not a consequence of the perceptual switch. Importantly, by showing that the time between switches and the previous blink was significantly longer than the inter‐blink interval, our studies allowed to conclude that perceptual switches did not happen at random but followed a prolonged period of nonblinking. Correspondingly, blink rate and switch rate showed an inverse relationship. Our study supports the idea that the absence or presence of blinks maps perceptual processes independent of the sensory modality. (shrink)

Developing World Bioethics, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 94-104, June 2022.

This article illustrates the less-acknowledged social construction of the concept of ‘incompetency’ and draws attention to the moral concerns it raises in health care encounters in the south Indian city of Chennai. Based on data drawn from qualitative research, this study suggests that surgeons subjectively construct the idea of incompetency through their understanding of the perceived circumstantial characteristics of the patients and family members they serve. The findings indicate that surgeons often underestimate patients and family members’ capacity based on constructed (...) assessments, which leads to paternalistic practice. In this article, I illustrate how these assessments influence the surgeons’ practices and provide the moral and practical justifications for their actions. The constructed knowledge becomes a source for drawing normative justification for surgeons’ actions and, in conjunction with socially enforced power relationships, results in patients and family members to be on the receiving end of disrespectful attitudes. Based on the data analysis and by drawing on philosophical analysis, I emphasize the need to focus on ‘respect for persons,’ to rethink the framework of ‘capacity,’ and to practice respect in hospital settings. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

In this paper, I examine the rhetoric employed by court judgements, with a particular emphasis on the narrative construct of the ‘passive patient’. This construction advances and reinforces paternalistic values, which have scant regard for the patients’ preferences, values, or choices within the legal context. Further, I critique the rhetoric employed and argue that the use of this rhetoric is the basis for a precedent that limits the understanding and respect of patients. Through this paper, I present the contemporary use (...) of the ‘passive patient’ construct in the context of the Indian legal system and describe how such constructions have become a source of normative justification for legal reasoning that jeopardizes the patient’s agency. I argue for the primacy of ‘respect for persons’ within Indian law and the need to treat each patient as a person who has agency, preferences, and values during clinical interactions. I conclude by suggesting that laws that adopt narratives that acknowledging the significance of patient engagement and the relevance of effective communication during clinical encounters would help cultivate a culture of patient-centred care, by moving beyond the rhetoric of ‘passive patient’ and the ‘health/choice’ dichotomy. (shrink)

In the recent past, it was common to hear complaints about the paucity of biographies on South Asian historical subjects. During the last few years, the situati.

The Mughal court was the main sponsor of Persian works on Vedānta, broadly conceived, from the late sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth century. Thereafter, the audience for such works shifted outside the court. Several Hindus literate in Persian composed or circulated Vedāntic writings. This article surveys three hitherto neglected Persian texts treating Vedānta that appear to have been composed independently from court sponsorship. All three are attributed to Banwālīdās Walī (d. 1674). They comprise the Gulzār-i ḥāl [Rose-garden of ecstatic states], which (...) is itself a translation of the Prabodhacandrodaya; a translation of the Rāma Gītā, which is a dialogue between Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa from the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa; and the Om-nāma [Book of Oṃ], a poem loosely based on the Yogavāsiṣṭha that incorporates Vedāntic themes. In general, Indo-Persian authors such as Walī associated Vedānta with a non-dualist doctrine, even when they did not specifically refer to Advaita Vedānta. The article discusses the approaches to translation that these texts take. It also reflects on the functions of these Persian translations in a context where conveying the meaning of the source texts was not the only motive. (shrink)

The Mughal court was the main sponsor of Persian works on Vedānta, broadly conceived, from the late sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth century. Thereafter, the audience for such works shifted outside the court. Several Hindus literate in Persian composed or circulated Vedāntic writings. This article surveys three hitherto neglected Persian texts treating Vedānta that appear to have been composed independently from court sponsorship. All three are attributed to Banwālīdās Walī. They comprise the Gulzār-i ḥāl [Rose-garden of ecstatic states], which is itself (...) a translation of the Prabodhacandrodaya; a translation of the Rāma Gītā, which is a dialogue between Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa from the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa; and the Om-nāma [Book of Oṃ], a poem loosely based on the Yogavāsiṣṭha that incorporates Vedāntic themes. In general, Indo-Persian authors such as Walī associated Vedānta with a non-dualist doctrine, even when they did not specifically refer to Advaita Vedānta. The article discusses the approaches to translation that these texts take. It also reflects on the functions of these Persian translations in a context where conveying the meaning of the source texts was not the only motive. (shrink)

The Mughal court was the main sponsor of Persian works on Vedānta, broadly conceived, from the late sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth century. Thereafter, the audience for such works shifted outside the court. Several Hindus literate in Persian composed or circulated Vedāntic writings. This article surveys three hitherto neglected Persian texts treating Vedānta that appear to have been composed independently from court sponsorship. All three are attributed to Banwālīdās Walī. They comprise the Gulzār-i ḥāl [Rose-garden of ecstatic states], which is itself (...) a translation of the Prabodhacandrodaya; a translation of the Rāma Gītā, which is a dialogue between Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa from the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa; and the Om-nāma [Book of Oṃ], a poem loosely based on the Yogavāsiṣṭha that incorporates Vedāntic themes. In general, Indo-Persian authors such as Walī associated Vedānta with a non-dualist doctrine, even when they did not specifically refer to Advaita Vedānta. The article discusses the approaches to translation that these texts take. It also reflects on the functions of these Persian translations in a context where conveying the meaning of the source texts was not the only motive. (shrink)

The Mughal court was the main sponsor of Persian works on Vedānta, broadly conceived, from the late sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth century. Thereafter, the audience for such works shifted outside the court. Several Hindus literate in Persian composed or circulated Vedāntic writings. This article surveys three hitherto neglected Persian texts treating Vedānta that appear to have been composed independently from court sponsorship. All three are attributed to Banwālīdās Walī. They comprise the Gulzār-i ḥāl [Rose-garden of ecstatic states], which is itself (...) a translation of the Prabodhacandrodaya; a translation of the Rāma Gītā, which is a dialogue between Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa from the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa; and the Om-nāma [Book of Oṃ], a poem loosely based on the Yogavāsiṣṭha that incorporates Vedāntic themes. In general, Indo-Persian authors such as Walī associated Vedānta with a non-dualist doctrine, even when they did not specifically refer to Advaita Vedānta. The article discusses the approaches to translation that these texts take. It also reflects on the functions of these Persian translations in a context where conveying the meaning of the source texts was not the only motive. (shrink)

Theories of discursive genres provide the philosophical and theoretical framework for the empirical examination of the ways in which immigrant women construct their cultural identities in contexts of violence. The claim of the paper is that the analytical genres of confessional and testimonial discourse enable the examination of the particular ways by which immigrant women both reproduce and resist power and violence.

The key objective of this paper is to emphasize the importance of acknowledging breastfeeding as an embodied social practice within interventions related to breastfeeding and lactation and illustrate how this recognition holds implications for public health ethics debates. Recent scholarship has shown that breastfeeding and lactation support interventions undermine women’s autonomy. However, substantial discourse is required to determine how to align with public health goals while also recognizing the embodied experiences of breastfeeding and lactating individuals. Presently, interventions in this realm (...) predominantly revolve around health-related messaging and the promotion of individual behaviors, often neglecting the systemic and structural factors that influence choices and practices. I closely examine breastfeeding interventions in India, in particular Mothers’ Absolute Affection health promotion program, along with breastfeeding narratives. I argue that for such interventions to evolve, they must acknowledge the intrinsic embodied social nature of breastfeeding during their design and implementation. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that achieving equity and justice objectives necessitates moving beyond the confines of both conventional public health frameworks and frameworks solely centered on private choices. Instead, a more encompassing approach that embraces the concept of embodiment should be adopted. (shrink)

Nicholas Makins argues persuasively that medical decisions should be made with consideration for patients’ higher order risk attitudes.1 I will argue that an understanding of risk attitudes in medical decision-making is incomplete without critical engagement with emotions and affects (feelings associated with something good or bad). The primary aim of this commentary is to emphasise that clinical decisions are often emotionally charged, and it is crucial to engage closely with emotions and affects that shape these decisions, particularly when navigating complex (...) and uncertain situations. In the face of uncertainty, emotions such as fear, sadness or anxiety play a significant role in risk attitudes and medical decisions. I contend that recognising risk as a feeling is crucial to respecting patients’ values, preferences and decisions in light of the substantial body of research on risk perception and attitudes that suggests individuals make decisions based not only on what they think, but also on how they feel. In recent years, scholars have begun to acknowledge the value of emotions in understanding medical decisions and healthcare decision-making processes,2 especially under uncertainty. Furthermore, some philosophers and social scientists in field of risk research acknowledge emotions as both affective and cognitive in nature, and influence risk perceptions and attitudes.3 Risk …. (shrink)

Eye-related movements such as blinks and microsaccades are modulated during bistable perceptual tasks. However, if they play an active role during internal perceptual switches is not known. We conducted two experiments involving an ambiguous plaid stimulus, wherein participants were asked to continuously report their percept, which could consist of either unidirectional coherent or bidirectional component movement. Our main results show that blinks and microsaccades did not facilitate perceptual switches. On the contrary, a reduction in eye movements preceded the perceptual switch. (...) Blanks, on the other hand, thought to mimic the retinal consequences of a blink, consistently led to a switch. Through the timing of the blank-introduced perceptual change, we were able to estimate the delay between the internal switch and the response. This delay further allowed us to evaluate that the reduction in blink probability co-occurred with the internal perceptual switch. Additionally, our results indicate that distinct internal processes underlie the switch to coherent vs. component percept. Blanks exclusively facilitated a switch to the coherent percept, and only the switch to coherent percept was followed by an increase in blink rate. In a second study, we largely replicated the findings and included a microsaccade analysis. Microsaccades only showed a weak relation with perceptual switches, but their direction was correlated with the perceived motion direction. Nevertheless, our data suggests an interaction between microsaccades and blinks by showing that microsaccades were differently modulated around blinks compared with blanks. This study shows that a reduction in eye movements precedes internal perceptual switches indicating that the rate of blinks can set the stage for a reinterpretation of sensory input. While a perceptual switch based on changed sensory input usually leads to an increase in blink rate, such an increase was only present after the perceptual switch to coherent motion but absent after the switch to component percept. This provides evidence of different underlying mechanism or internal consequence of the two perceptual switches and suggests that blinks can uncover differences in internal percept-related processes that are not evident from the percept itself. (shrink)

In India, more than ninety percent of the workforce is informal. In spite of this enormous percentage of informal workers, these workers remain invisible to law and policy circles. One of the reasons for such exclusion and invisibility is the absence of unionism involving informal workers. In order to overcome this invisibility, informal workers are increasingly organizing into associations that are different from traditional trade unions. These organizations devise their strategies and their legal statuses in view of the atypical characteristics (...) of informal activities. In this Article, I document some of these organizations of self-employed informal workers in India – their characteristics and functions. On this basis, I contend that these organizations offer a model for collective action by informal workers. I argue that these associations are a sui generis organization of informal workers, and could become a precursor to solidarity-based collective initiatives by informal workers globally. In the backdrop to this proposition, I analyze the role of law in promoting such aggregation of informal workers in furtherance of their collective action. I argue that while organizations of informal workers in India employ the existing legal framework to the best of their advantage, the law fails to recognize some of their status as workers, thereby creating hurdles towards informal workers’ collective action. A small farmer works on her own farm. In tough times, she also works on other farms as a laborer. When the agriculture season is over, she goes to the forest to collect gum and other forest produce. Year round, she produces embroidered items either at a piece rate for a contractor or for sale to a trader who comes to her village to buy goods. Now, how should her trade be categorized? Does she belong to the agricultural sector, the factory sector, or the home-based work sector? Should she be categorized as a farmer or a farm worker? Is she self-employed or is she a piece-rate worker? Because her situation cannot be defined and contained neatly in a box, she has no work status and her right to representation in a union is unrealized. She is denied access to financial services or training to upgrade her skills. The tyranny of having to belong to a well-defined “category” has condemned her to having no “identity.” — Ela R. BhattEla R. Bhatt, We Are Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India 17. (shrink)

Critical study of Ādipurāṇa, work on Jaina philosophy and religion by Jinasena.

Language is a social act. We have previously argued that language remains embedded in sociality because the motivation to communicate exists only within a social context. Schilbach et al. underscore the importance of studying linguistic behavior from within the motivated, socially interactive frame in which it is learnt and used, as well as provide testable hypotheses for a participatory, second-person neuroscience approach to language learning.

The pupils of the eyes reflexively constrict in light and dilate in dark to optimize retinal illumination. Non-visual cognitive factors, like attention, arousal, decision-making, etc., also influence pupillary light response. During passive viewing, the eccentricity of a stimulus modulates the pupillary aperture size driven by spatially weighted corneal flux density, which is the product of luminance and the area of the stimulus. Whether the scope of attention also influences PLR remains unclear. In this study, we contrasted the pupil dynamics between (...) diffused and focused attentional conditions during decision-making, while the global CFD remained the same in the two conditions. A population of 20 healthy humans participated in a pair of forced choice tasks. They distributed attention to the peripheral decision cue in one task, and concentrated at the center in the other to select the target from four alternatives for gaze orientation. The location of this cue did not influence participants’ reaction time. However, the magnitude of constriction was significantly less in the task that warranted attention to be deployed at the center than on the periphery. We observed similar pupil dynamics when participants either elicited or canceled a saccadic eye movement, which ruled out pre-saccadic obligatory attentional orientation contributing to PLR. We further addressed how the location of attentional deployment might have influenced PLR. We simulated a biomechanical model of PLR with visual stimulation of different strengths as inputs corresponding to the two attentional conditions. In this homeomorphic model, the computational characteristic of each element was derived from the physiological and/or mechanical properties of the corresponding biological element. The simulation of this model successfully mimicked the observed data. In contrast to common belief that the global ambient luminosity drives pupillary response, the results of our study suggest that the effective CFD determined via the luminance multiplied by the size of the stimulus at the location of deployed attention in the visual space is critical for the magnitude of pupillary constriction. (shrink)

If we live on the weak brane with zero effective cosmological constant in a warped 5D bulk spacetime, gravitational waves and brane fluctuations can be generated by a part of the 5D Weyl tensor and carries information of the gravitational field outside the brane. We consider on a cylindrical symmetric warped FLRW background a U self-gravitating scalar field coupled to a gauge field without bulk matter. It turns out that brane fluctuations can be formed dynamically, due to the modified energy–momentum (...) tensor components of the scalar-gauge field. As a result, we find that the late-time behavior could significantly deviate from the standard evolution of the universe. The effect is triggered by the time-dependent warpfactor with two branches of the form \}\) constants) and the modified brane equations comparable with a dark energy effect. This is a brane-world mechanism, not present in standard 4D FLRW, where the large disturbances are rapidly damped as the expansion proceed. Because gravity can propagate in the bulk, the cosmic string can build up a huge angle deficit by the warpfactor and can induce massive KK-modes felt on the brane. Disturbances in the spatial components of the stress-energy tensor cause cylindrical symmetric waves, amplified due to the presence of the bulk space and warpfactor. They could survive the natural damping due to the expansion of the universe. It turns out that one of the metric components becomes singular at the moment the warp factor develops an extremum. This behavior could have influence on the possibility of a transition from acceleration to deceleration or vice versa. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.