Alternating sexualities: sociology and queer critiques in India

Questions of alternation might be read as intrinsic to sociological approaches to sexual difference and diversity. By this we mean ways in which the sexual as social scientific subject/object has oft been conceived of against the background of fluctuating conceptual and contextual registers. Terms for the empirical description, recognition and analysis of sexual life-worlds have most often been contested and queried. This might be especially so with regard to ‘sexually dissident’ subjects - those for whom terms of depiction in research and polity might be especially vexed and complex because running counter to claims to ‘normative’ modes of representation. Such processes, in turn, might be seen to respond to the alternating experiential and political framings of contemporary and historical sexual life-worlds. This has been evident in India in recent times, for instance, as non-cis-gendered and non-heteronormative subjects have found themselves on the cusp of legislative and social changes

Simulating Fleet Noise for Notional UAM Vehicles and Operations in New York

This paper presents the results of systems-level simulations using Metrosim that were conducted for notional Urban Air Mobility (UAM)-style vehicles analyzed for two different scenarios for New York (NY). UAM is an aviation industry term for passenger or cargo-carrying air transportation services, which are often automated, operating in an urban/city environment. UAM-style vehicles are expected to use vertical takeoff and landing with fixed wing cruise flight. Metrosim is a metroplex-wide route and airport planning tool that can also be used in standalone mode as a simulation tool. The scenarios described and reported in this paper were used to evaluate a fleet noise prediction capability for this tool. The work was a collaborative effort between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Intelligent Automation, Inc (IAI), and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ). One scenario was designed to represent an expanded air-taxi operation from existing helipads around Manhattan to the major New York airports. The other case represented a farther term vision case with commuters using personal air vehicles to hub locations just outside New York, with an air-taxi service running frequent connector trips to a few key locations inside Manhattan. For both scenarios, the trajectories created for the entire fleet were passed to the Aircraft Environmental Design Tool (AEDT) to generate Day-Night Level (DNL) noise contours for inspection. Without data for actual UAM vehicles available, surrogate AEDT empirical Noise-Power-Distance (NPD) tables used a similar sized current day helicopter as the Baseline, and a version of that same data linearly scaled as a first guess at possible UAM noise data. Details are provided for each of the two scenario configurations, and the output noise contours are presented for the Baseline and reduced noise DNL cases

The Impact of Service System Design and Flow Experience on Customer Satisfaction in Online Financial Services

Prior research examines customer satisfaction in retailing and e-commerce settings, yet online financial services have received little research attention. To understand customer satisfaction with this fast-growing service, this study investigates the role of flow experience, a sensation that occurs as a result of significant cognitive involvement. The study examines how service system characteristics affect the cognitive states of the flow experience, which determines customer satisfaction. The flow construct and total experience design suggest a structural model that is empirically tested using responses from a large sample of online investors. In support of the model and most of the hypotheses it suggests, the empirical results clarify the important antecedents and consequence of flow experience in online financial services and suggest the viability of using a dual-layer experience construct to investigate customer satisfaction. These findings can help researchers and service providers understand when, where, and how flow experience is formulated in online financial services

Towards Granularity-adjusted Pixel-level Semantic Annotation

Recent advancements in computer vision predominantly rely on learning-based systems, leveraging annotations as the driving force to develop specialized models. However, annotating pixel-level information, particularly in semantic segmentation, presents a challenging and labor-intensive task, prompting the need for autonomous processes. In this work, we propose GranSAM which distinguishes itself by providing semantic segmentation at the user-defined granularity level on unlabeled data without the need for any manual supervision, offering a unique contribution in the realm of semantic mask annotation method. Specifically, we propose an approach to enable the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with semantic recognition capability to generate pixel-level annotations for images without any manual supervision. For this, we accumulate semantic information from synthetic images generated by the Stable Diffusion model or web crawled images and employ this data to learn a mapping function between SAM mask embeddings and object class labels. As a result, SAM, enabled with granularity-adjusted mask recognition, can be used for pixel-level semantic annotation purposes. We conducted experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO-80 datasets and observed a +17.95% and +5.17% increase in mIoU, respectively, compared to existing state-of-the-art methods when evaluated under our problem setting

Utopia or elsewhere: queer modernities in small town West Bengal

This chapter is based on collaborative ethnographic work conducted by both researchers in Siliguri, and Barasat, regional towns in West Bengal, India. We explore concerns around 'liveable lives' and social visibility in terms of explicit same sex sexualities in these contexts, seeking to understand such lives as a part of ordinary and wider social discourses and practices concerning belonging and difference. A prevailing narrative of queer life-trajectories has been oriented around escape from small towns to larger and potentially more anonymous cities , where a sense of freedom and utopia from heternormative social mores and obligations may be imagined and experienced. We want to consider such narratives as undergirded by themes of excess. We explore this both in the sense of queer as an embodiment that might exceed containment within the hyper social visibility of small towns (where many people may be known to one another), but also in terms of big cities as excessive domains, big enough to contain excesses of social difference and diversity. Considering these themes as they pertain to the aspirations of some of our small-town interlocutors we are also interested in these small towns being cast as sites of origination and departure as opposed to the mise en scene of queer life-worlds. In this regard we are questioning what utopia means in a (economically) liberalised contemporary India where same-sex desires are at once contained and disciplined through ideals of modernity, where the urban, homonormative queer Indian subject has been made to stand for ideals of the progressive Indian state and political-economy (even as against the background of resurgent ‘re-criminalization’ of homosexuality in the Indian legal context.) This chapter looks at the experiences of those who might be imagined as queer subjects but who are pushed to the margins of prevailing narratives of queer utopian aspiration in India, for being too regional, peri-urban or rural; bodies and subjects in excess of urban narratives of acceptable difference

Infection Control in Endodontics During COVID Era: A Review

The outbreak of the SARS-C0V-2 pandemic has continued to affect people's lives on a global scale. When the number of infected cases decreased, several countries across the world lifted their lock-down controls and started to open. But the latest re-emergence of COVID-19 cases across Europe once again prompted nations to step back to contain the virus spread. The most prevalent route of transmission is through aerosols and droplet inhalation, which is crucial for dental health workers as most dental procedures generate significant amounts of droplets and aerosols. Thus, it is imperative to follow infection control strategies and patient management protocols to ensure optimum dental care and at the same time prevent nosocomial infection in dental settings. This review provides an insight into the steps taken for infection control and prevention from COVID-19 transmission in endodontic practices