Holograms: The story of a word and its cultural uses

Holograms reached popular consciousness during the 1960s and have since left audiences alternately fascinated, bemused or inspired. Their impact was conditioned by earlier cultural associations and successive reimaginings by wider publics. Attaining peak public visibility during the 1980s, holograms have been found more in our pockets (as identity documents) and in our minds (as video-gaming fantasies and “faux hologram” performers) than in front of our eyes. The most enduring, popular interpretations of the word “hologram” evoke the traditional allure of magic and galvanize hopeful technological dreams. This article explores the mutating cultural uses of the term “hologram” as marker of magic, modernity and optimism

WormBase: a comprehensive resource for nematode research

WormBase (http://www.wormbase.org) is a central data repository for nematode biology. Initially created as a service to the Caenorhabditis elegans research field, WormBase has evolved into a powerful research tool in its own right. In the past 2 years, we expanded WormBase to include the complete genomic sequence, gene predictions and orthology assignments from a range of related nematodes. This comparative data enrich the C. elegans data with improved gene predictions and a better understanding of gene function. In turn, they bring the wealth of experimental knowledge of C. elegans to other systems of medical and agricultural importance. Here, we describe new species and data types now available at WormBase. In addition, we detail enhancements to our curatorial pipeline and website infrastructure to accommodate new genomes and an extensive user base

Management of e-Resources in R amp; D Centers: A Case Study of the Information Center at NAL13;

The developments in information technology and their applications to library and information services have given new dimension to the entire spectrum of information management. The information generated is usually stored in four physical media: paper, film, optical, and magnetic disks. The e-document be it a book, journal, technical report, conference proceedings is portable; has random access to its contents; and the document can also be a multimedia object, in that it may contain not only text, but also graphics, drawings, photographs or video. Now we have the emergence of publications over the electronic networks and the activity took off in a big way following the invention of the World Wide Web. The Open Access movement is becoming the order of the day. More than 3000 journals are free on net for anybody to access. A number of Institutional repositories and e-Prints archives have thrown challenge to the publishing industry. Consortium approach through different pricing, management and licensing models is enabling the libraries to provide access to thousands of e- journals, e-books and other kinds of e-documents. The Information center at NAL with its state-of-the-art library has progressed a good deal in this direction by acquiring different kind of documents especially e-form, cataloguing amp; processing them appropriately, storing and giving access to its patrons not only in library premises, but on to the desk tops spread in three different campuses through laboratory LAN and also extending selected services through Internet for the benefit of any body from any part of the world. 13; Created and maintained by ICAST the Portal x2018;AeroInfox2019; (www.aeroinfo.org.in) serves as one window information search facility for Web sources in aerospace science and technology. This virtual library facilitates multiple approach to information seekers as the web sources are indexed and organised using different schemes of classification including NASA subject categories. Care is taken to cover Indian aerospace sources exhaustively. The ICAST site (www.icast.org.in), apart from giving detailed information about library sources including books, journals, E-journals, databases and technical reports makes available different search tools for its users. Other details like working hours, library rules, staff details, contact persons, etc are provided. One can submit an online query and suggest documents for acquisition using online forms provided. The Library Database (OPAC) is probably is single largest in the country with more than 3.25 lakh bibliographic records of books, technical reports, patents, standards, journals, etc. ICAST users can search International databases like Aerospace Database, NTIS, J-Gate, Medline, etc through campus LAN. Users can access more than 2500 full text journals covering titles published by Elsevier (ScienceDirect), ASME, AIAA, Springer, John Wiley, OUP, CUP, AMS, World Scientific, few Annual Series, etc. Created by ICAST an e-journals gateway with browse and search (alphabetical and subject wise) facility for titles provides access to more than 700 journals available free on the net. The Centre provides a number of web/e-mail based innovative information services including Journal Contents Service, News Clipping Service, Monthly Documents Additions Lists covering both Books and Technical Reports, Web Alert Service and Union Catalogue of Journals -CSIR and Aerospace Libraries, etc

An Approach to Automatically generating Riddles aiding Concept Attainment

One of the primary challenges in online learning environments, is to retain learner engagement. Several different instructional strategies are proposed both in online and offline environments to enhance learner engagement. The Concept Attainment Model is one such instructional strategy that focuses on learners acquiring a deeper understanding of a concept rather than just its dictionary definition. This is done by searching and listing the properties used to distinguish examples from non-examples of various concepts. Our work attempts to apply the Concept Attainment Model to build conceptual riddles, to deploy over online learning environments. The approach involves creating factual triples from learning resources, classifying them based on their uniqueness to a concept into `Topic Markers' and `Common', followed by generating riddles based on the Concept Attainment Model's format and capturing all possible solutions to those riddles. The results obtained from the human evaluation of riddles prove encouraging.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Fixation and incubation effects in problem-solving

In four experiments, the effects of fixation and suppression processes in problem solving ability were investigated. Previous research has shown that efficient suppression mechanisms are integral to verbal ability (e.g., Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991; Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990; Hartman & Hasher, 1991). The present set of experiments demonstrated that such a mechanism is also a component of problem solving ability. The efficiency with which participants were able to suppress inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words was used as a measure of suppression skill. Experiment I established that participants who were able to make use of previously-presented information to solve difficult insight problems were also more efficient at suppressing the inappropriate word meanings. Experiment 3 showed that participants who scored highly on the Remote Associates Test (RAT) were also better able to suppress the inappropriate meanings, in comparison to low RAT solvers. Experiments 1--4 investigated fixation effects. Experiment 1 demonstrated that fixation to incorrect responses on the insight problems is not easily attenuated when these incorrect responses have been generated by the subject. Experiment 2 showed that this fixation effect is not attenuated even with the inclusion of an incubation period between a first solution trial in which the initial incorrect response is generated and a subsequent trial in which the same problems are again presented, along with clues to solution. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that fixation can be attenuated when initial incorrect solutions to RAT items are suggested by the experimenter. This is in contrast to Experiments 1 and 2, in which initial incorrect responses were generated by the participants. These attenuation effects were evidenced by increased solution rates to the RATs after an incubation period. These experiments also investigated the degree to which participants of varying ability levels can benefit from a period of incubation. Previous research has shown mixed results in this regard. The present findings are also inconclusive. Experiment 3 showed that high-ability participants benefited more from the incubation period, while Experiment 4 revealed no differences in the incubation effects for participants of varying problem solving ability

Diaspora and economic perspective

Abstract. Diaspora members are migrants also inhabitants who contribute to the society in which they live in. It’s like a process that implies transforming the relationship between home countries and host countries. Diaspora members always try to establish a potential relationship between countries through their multiple networks, identities and share things of belonging. Though the knowledge about diaspora is still limited they play a crucial role in economic perspective. It’s really necessary to understand not only their motivations but also the modalities of the diaspora to facilitate the development is one of the most important matters. There is a strong connection between the diaspora and the financial market in developing and emerging economies. Sometimes it’s difficult to attract foreign investors due to perceptions of high risk, volatile currencies, also for asymmetric information. In a border sense, diaspora may help to overcome this situation because of various perceptions of risk, informational advantages, and a bias toward home country capitalization. In economic perspective diaspora bonds, deposit account, remittance flows, transitional loans play a vital role in every sphere of development. A deposit account is conquered both in home and host countries. Another and most important part of a diaspora is the securitization of remittance flows. It allows banks to leverage remittance revenues for greater lending. Diaspora bonds permit the government to derive long term funds. There is also one kind of investment as a diaspora fund which assembles pools of individual investors for co-operative investments. Contributions of the diaspora to the home country beyond the standard monetary assistance. Ethnic and national identity make a difference between host countries and home countries

Practice-oriented controversies and borrowed epistemic credibility in current evolutionary biology: phylogeography as a case study

Although there is increasing recognition that theory and practice in science are intimately intertwined, philosophy of science perspectives on scientific controversies have been historically focused on theory rather than practice. As a step in the construction of frameworks for understanding controversies linked to scientific practices, here we introduce the notion of borrowed epistemic credibility (BEC), to describe the situation in which scientists, in order to garner support for their own stances, exploit similarities between tenets in their own field and accepted statements or positions properly developed within other areas of expertise. We illustrate the scope of application of our proposal with the analysis of a heavily methods-grounded, recent controversy in phylogeography, a biological subdiscipline concerned with the study of the historical causes of biogeographical variation through population genetics- and phylogenetics-based computer analyses of diversity in DNA sequences, both within species and between closely related taxa. Toward this end, we briefly summarize the arguments proposed by selected authors representing each side of the controversy: the ‘nested clade analysis’ school versus the ‘statistical phylogeography’ orientation. We claim that whereas both phylogeographic ‘research styles’ borrow epistemic credibility from sources such as formal logic, the familiarity of results from other scientific areas, the authority of prominent scientists, or the presumed superiority of quantitative vs. verbal reasoning, ‘theory’ plays essentially no role as a foundation of the controversy. Besides underscoring the importance of strictly methodological and other non-theoretical aspects of controversies in current evolutionary biology, our analysis suggests a perspective with potential usefulness for the re-examination of more general philosophy of biology issues, such as the nature of historical inference, rationality, justification, and objectivity