Anna Hazare: A Corruption Crusader and His Grassroots Wisdom

This article explores the fight against corruption through the eyes of Anna Hazare, a renowned social activist from India, who spent more than 35 years of his life fighting corruption. Anna Hazare provides a detailed description of the anti-corruption movement he has led, provides his views on the World Bank guidelines to lower corruption, and highlights the need for sacrifice and righteousness on the part of leaders who fight corruption. The article presents insights into these concepts, which deserve greater attention from organization scholars and must be researched further if the literature on corruption is to be enriched

Filament Nucleation Tunes Mechanical Memory in Active Polymer Networks

Incorporating growth into contemporary material functionality presents a grand challenge in materials design. The F‐actin cytoskeleton is an active polymer network that serves as the mechanical scaffolding for eukaryotic cells, growing and remodeling in order to determine changes in cell shape. Nucleated from the membrane, filaments polymerize and grow into a dense network whose dynamics of assembly and disassembly, or “turnover,” coordinates both fluidity and rigidity. Here, the extent of F‐actin nucleation is varied from a membrane surface in a biomimetic model of the cytoskeleton constructed from purified protein. It is found that nucleation of F‐actin mediates the accumulation and dissipation of polymerization‐induced F‐actin bending energy. At high and low nucleation, bending energies are low and easily relaxed yielding an isotropic material. However, at an intermediate critical nucleation, stresses are not relaxed by turnover and the internal energy accumulates 100‐fold. In this case, high filament curvatures template further assembly of F‐actin, driving the formation and stabilization of vortex‐like topological defects. Thus, nucleation coordinates mechanical and chemical timescales to encode shape memory into active materials

Improved understanding of eutrophication trends, indicators and problem areas using machine learning

Nitrate is an essential inorganic nutrient limiting phytoplankton growth in many marine environments. Eutrophication, often caused by nitrogen deposition, is a reoccurring problem in coastal regions, including the North-West European Shelf (NWES). Despite of their importance, nitrate observations on the NWES are difficult to obtain and thus sparse both in time and space. We demonstrate that machine learning (ML) can generate, from sparse observations, a skilled, gap-free, bi-decadal (1998–2020) surface nitrate data-set. We demonstrate that the effective resolution (scales on which the data-set is skilled) is slightly coarser than the 7 km and daily resolution of the product, but still completely sufficient to analyse nitrate dynamics on a monthly scale. With such a data-set we can address questions that would be otherwise hard to answer: (i) We show that nitrate-limited regions on the NWES, potentially vulnerable to eutrophication, extend beyond the eutrophication-problem areas already identified by the monitoring bodies (i.e. OSPAR). The newly identified regions include southern Irish coastline and parts of Irish Sea, indicating that these areas could become problematic under sub-optimal policy, or management changes. (ii) We demonstrate that bi-decadal 1998–2020 trends in coastal nitrate, responding to long-term policy-driven reduction in riverine discharge, are mostly modest with a notable exception of the Bay of Biscay. (iii) We show that winter nitrate plays relatively minor direct role in the phytoplankton bloom intensity the following spring, which can have some implications for using winter inorganic nitrogen as eutrophication indicator (as often included by OSPAR)

Bivariate sea-ice assimilation for global-ocean analysis–reanalysis

In the last decade, various satellite missions have been monitoring the status of the cryosphere and its evolution. Besides sea-ice concentration data, available since the 1980s, sea-ice thickness retrievals are now ready to be used in global operational prediction and global reanalysis systems. Nevertheless, while univariate algorithms are commonly used to constrain sea-ice area or volume, multivariate approaches have not yet been employed due to the highly non-Gaussian distribution of sea-ice variables together with the low accuracy of thickness observations. This study extends a 3DVar system, called OceanVar, which is routinely employed in the production of global/regional operational/reanalysis products, to process sea-ice variables. The tangent/adjoint versions of an anamorphosis operator are used to locally transform the sea-ice anomalies into Gaussian control variables and back, minimizing in the latter space. The benefit achieved by such a transformation is described. Several sensitivity experiments are carried out using a suite of diverse datasets. The sole assimilation of the CryoSat-2 provides a good spatial representation of thickness distribution but still overestimates the total volume that requires the inclusion of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission data to converge towards the observation estimates. The intermittent availability of thickness data can lead to potential jumps in the evolution of the volume and requires a dedicated tuning. The use of the merged L4 product CS2SMOS shows the best skill score when validated against independent measurements during the melting season when satellite data are not available. This new sea-ice module is meant to simplify the future coupling with ocean variables

BPS black holes, the Hesse potential, and the topological string

The Hesse potential is constructed for a class of four-dimensional N=2 supersymmetric effective actions with S- and T-duality by performing the relevant Legendre transform by iteration. It is a function of fields that transform under duality according to an arithmetic subgroup of the classical dualities reflecting the monodromies of the underlying string compactification. These transformations are not subject to corrections, unlike the transformations of the fields that appear in the effective action which are affected by the presence of higher-derivative couplings. The class of actions that are considered includes those of the FHSV and the STU model. We also consider heterotic N=4 supersymmetric compactifications. The Hesse potential, which is equal to the free energy function for BPS black holes, is manifestly duality invariant. Generically it can be expanded in terms of powers of the modulus that represents the inverse topological string coupling constant, $g_s$, and its complex conjugate. The terms depending holomorphically on $g_s$ are expected to correspond to the topological string partition function and this expectation is explicitly verified in two cases. Terms proportional to mixed powers of $g_s$ and $\bar g_s$ are in principle present.Comment: 28 pages, LaTeX, added comment

Mouse models for preeclampsia: disruption of redox-regulated signaling

The concept that oxidative stress contributes to the development of human preeclampsia has never been tested in genetically-defined animal models. Homozygous deletion of catechol-Omethyl transferase (Comt-/-) in pregnant mice leads to human preeclampsia-like symptoms (high blood pressure, albuminurea and preterm birth) resulting from extensive vasculo-endothelial pathology, primarily at the utero-fetal interface where maternal cardiac output is dramatically increased during pregnancy. Comt converts estradiol to 2-methoxyestradiol 2 (2ME2) which counters angiogenesis by depleting hypoxia inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-1 alpha) at late pregnancy. We propose that in wild type (Comt++) pregnant mice, 2ME2 destabilizes HIF-1 alpha by inhibiting mitochondrial superoxide dismutase (MnSOD). Thus, 2ME2 acts as a pro-oxidant, disrupting redox-regulated signaling which blocks angiogenesis in wild type (WT) animals in physiological pregnancy. Further, we suggest that a lack of this inhibition under normoxic conditions in mutant animals (Comt-/-) stabilises HIF-1 alpha by inactivating prolyl hydroxlases (PHD). We predict that a lack of inhibition of MnSOD, leading to persistent accumulation of HIF-1 alpha, would trigger inflammatory infiltration and endothelial damage in mutant animals. Critical tests of this hypothesis would be to recreate preeclampsia symptoms by inducing oxidative stress in WT animals or to ameliorate by treating mutant mice with Mn-SOD-catalase mimetics or activators of PHD

A two-year participatory intervention project with owners to reduce lameness and limb abnormalities in working horses in Jaipur, India

Participatory methods are increasingly used in international human development, but scientific evaluation of their efficacy versus a control group is rare. Working horses support families in impoverished communities. Lameness and limb abnormalities are highly prevalent in these animals and a cause for welfare concern. We aimed to stimulate and evaluate improvements in lameness and limb abnormalities in horses whose owners took part in a 2-year participatory intervention project to reduce lameness (PI) versus a control group (C) in Jaipur, India.In total, 439 owners of 862 horses participated in the study. PI group owners from 21 communities were encouraged to meet regularly to discuss management and work practices influencing lameness and poor welfare and to track their own progress in improving these. Lameness examinations (41 parameters) were conducted at the start of the study (Baseline), and after 1 year and 2 years. Results were compared with control horses from a further 21 communities outside the intervention. Of the 149 horses assessed on all three occasions, PI horses showed significantly (P<0.05) greater improvement than C horses in 20 parameters, most notably overall lameness score, measures of sole pain and range of movement on limb flexion. Control horses showed slight but significantly greater improvements in four parameters, including frog quality in fore and hindlimbs.This participatory intervention succeeded in improving lameness and some limb abnormalities in working horses, by encouraging changes in management and work practices which were feasible within owners’ socioeconomic and environmental constraints. Demonstration of the potentially sustainable improvements achieved here should encourage further development of participatory intervention approaches to benefit humans and animals in other contexts

Entropy production rate is maximized in non-contractile actomyosin

The actin cytoskeleton is an active semi-flexible polymer network whose non-equilibrium properties coordinate both stable and contractile behaviors to maintain or change cell shape. While myosin motors drive the actin cytoskeleton out-of-equilibrium, the role of myosin-driven active stresses in the accumulation and dissipation of mechanical energy is unclear. To investigate this, we synthesize an actomyosin material in vitro whose active stress content can tune the network from stable to contractile. Each increment in activity determines a characteristic spectrum of actin filament fluctuations which is used to calculate the total mechanical work and the production of entropy in the material. We find that the balance of work and entropy does not increase monotonically and the entropy production rate is maximized in the non-contractile, stable state of actomyosin. Our study provides evidence that the origins of entropy production and activity-dependent dissipation relate to disorder in the molecular interactions between actin and myosin

An Efficient Representation of Euclidean Gravity I

We explore how the topology of spacetime fabric is encoded into the local structure of Riemannian metrics using the gauge theory formulation of Euclidean gravity. In part I, we provide a rigorous mathematical foundation to prove that a general Einstein manifold arises as the sum of SU(2)_L Yang-Mills instantons and SU(2)_R anti-instantons where SU(2)_L and SU(2)_R are normal subgroups of the four-dimensional Lorentz group Spin(4) = SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R. Our proof relies only on the general properties in four dimensions: The Lorentz group Spin(4) is isomorphic to SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R and the six-dimensional vector space of two-forms splits canonically into the sum of three-dimensional vector spaces of self-dual and anti-self-dual two-forms. Consolidating these two, it turns out that the splitting of Spin(4) is deeply correlated with the decomposition of two-forms on four-manifold which occupies a central position in the theory of four-manifolds.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figur