Nationalism and globalization in contemporary indian cinema: The development motif as an identity Marker

La componente nacionalista del cine indio ha estado siempre a la orden del día y sigue estándolo en la actualidad, ya sea en el marco de películas bélicas, anticolonialistas o, simplemente, que apelan de manera enfática a la vigencia y pervivencia de la cultura, la tradición y los valores indios en un mundo crecientemente globalizado. En los últimos años, sin embargo, muchas de estas películas han pasado relativamente desapercibidas mientras que otras, que exploran de forma consistente la asociación entre nacionalismo y desarrollismo, subrayando el enorme potencial de la India contemporánea en un cambiante contexto internacional, han cosechado grandes éxitos y se han convertido incluso en una suerte de subgénero de la producción comercial de Bollywood. Este nacionalismo de nuevo cuño, de corte abiertamente desarrollista, refleja en realidad los profundos cambios que se están produciendo actualmente en la sociedad india y está en consonancia con las grandes transformaciones a que está sometido también el mercado cinematográfico indio, cada vez más estratificado y dependiente para sus rendimientos de sectores acomodados y aun diaspóricos del públicoThe nationalist factor has been a constant presence in Indian cinema and continues to be so to this day, be it in war films, anticolonial movies or simply in those films that stress the validity and permanence of the Indian values, culture and traditions in an increasingly globalized world. In the last few years, however, many of these movies have gone relatively unnoticed while others that explore the links between nationalism and development, underlying the enormous potential of contemporary India in an ever changing international context, have resulted in big hits and have become a sort of subgenre in the commercial production of Bollywood. This new brand of nationalism-cum-developmental undertones reflects the profound changes that are taking place in the Indian society, and runs parallel to the big transformations that the Indian film market is undergoing –a market increasingly stratified and dependent on the upper urban classes and the diaspora for box office revenue

Characterizations of regular local rings via syzygy modules of the residue field

Let $R$ be a commutative Noetherian local ring with residue field $k$. We show that if a finite direct sum of syzygy modules of $k$ surjects onto `a semidualizing module' or `a non-zero maximal Cohen-Macaulay module of finite injective dimension', then $R$ is regular. We also prove that $R$ is regular if and only if some syzygy module of $k$ has a non-zero direct summand of finite injective dimension.Comment: 7 page

Immunogenic Modulations Induced by Prospective Anti-Malarial Herbal Extracts in Murine Model

Keeping in view the ever increasing problem of drug resistance and affordability of the antimalarial drugs by the poor mass, herbal medicines can become an important and alternative sustainable strategy for malaria treatment. Aqueous extracts of three Himalayan herbs― _Equisetum ravense_, _Artemisia vulgaris_ and _Centella asiatica_, with reported antimalarial property were screened for clinical efficacy against a local strain of _Plasmodium vivax_ antigen in murine model. _E. arvense_ extract was consistent in boosting phagocytic activity, nitric oxide generation, acid phosphatase and alkaline phosphatase activities in the peritoneal macrophages. The effectiveness of the rest herbals was discrete. A need for further detailed investigation to evaluate the clinical efficacy of these herbals seems essential

Bimodal protection of DNA by Mycobacterium smegmatis DNA-binding protein from stationary phase cells

Some members of the DNA-binding protein from stationary phase cells (Dps) family of proteins have been shown to play an important role in protecting microorganisms from oxidative or nutritional stress. Dps homologs have been identified in various bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, and Listeria innocua. Recently we have reported the presence of a Dps homolog, Ms-Dps, in Mycobacterium smegmatis. Ms-Dps was found to have a nonspecific DNA binding ability. Here we have detected two stable oligomeric forms of Ms-Dpsin vitro, a trimeric and a dodecameric form. Interestingly, the conversion of Dps from a trimeric to a dodecameric form takes place upon incubation at 37° C for 12 h. These two oligomeric forms differ in their DNA binding properties. The dodecameric form is capable of DNA binding and forming large crystalline arrays with DNA, whereas the trimeric form cannot do so. However, even in the absence of DNA binding, the trimeric form has the capacity to protect the DNA against Fenton's-mediated damage. The protection is afforded by the ferroxidase activity of the trimer. However, the trimeric form cannot protect DNA from DNaseI attack, for which a direct physical shielding of DNA by the dodecamer is required. Thus we suggest that Ms-Dps provides a bimodal protection of DNA by its two different oligomeric forms

TSO: Curriculum Generation using continuous optimization

The training of deep learning models poses vast challenges of including parameter tuning and ordering of training data. Significant research has been done in Curriculum learning for optimizing the sequence of training data. Recent works have focused on using complex reinforcement learning techniques to find the optimal data ordering strategy to maximize learning for a given network. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient technique based on continuous optimization. We call this new approach Training Sequence Optimization (TSO). There are three critical components in our proposed approach: (a) An encoder network maps/embeds training sequence into continuous space. (b) A predictor network uses the continuous representation of a strategy as input and predicts the accuracy for fixed network architecture. (c) A decoder further maps a continuous representation of a strategy to the ordered training dataset. The performance predictor and encoder enable us to perform gradient-based optimization in the continuous space to find the embedding of optimal training data ordering with potentially better accuracy. Experiments show that we can gain 2AP with our generated optimal curriculum strategy over the random strategy using the CIFAR-100 dataset and have better boosts than the state of the art CL algorithms. We do an ablation study varying the architecture, dataset and sample sizes showcasing our approach's robustness.Comment: 10 pages, along with all experiment detail

Garcinol loaded vitamin E TPGS emulsified PLGA nanoparticles: preparation, physicochemical characterization, in vitro and in vivo studies

Garcinol (GAR) is a naturally occurring polyisoprenylated phenolic compound. It has been recently investigated for its biological activities such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti ulcer, and antiproliferative effect on a wide range of human cancer cell lines. Though the outcomes are very promising, its extreme insolubility in water remains the main obstacle for its clinical application. Herein we report the formulation of GAR entrapped PLGA nanoparticles by nanoprecipitation method using vitamin E TPGS as an emulsifier. The nanoparticles were characterized for size, surface morphology, surface charge, encapsulation efficiency and in vitro drug release kinetics. The MTT assay depicted a high amount of cytotoxicity of GAR-NPs in B16F10, HepG2 and KB cells. A considerable amount of cell apoptosis was observed in B16f10 and KB cell lines. In vivo cellular uptake of fluorescent NPs on B16F10 cells was also investigated. Finally the GAR loaded NPs were radiolabeled with technetium-99m with >95% labeling efficiency and administered to B16F10 melanoma tumor bearing mice to investigate the in vivo deposition at the tumor site by biodistribution and scintigraphic imaging study. In vitro cellular uptake studies and biological evaluation confirm the efficacy of the formulation for cancer treatmen

Identification, Activity and Disulfide Connectivity of C-di-GMP Regulating Proteins in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

C-di-GMP, a bacterial second messenger plays a key role in survival and adaptation of bacteria under different environmental conditions. The level of c-di-GMP is regulated by two opposing activities, namely diguanylate cyclase (DGC) and phosphodiesterase (PDE-A) exhibited by GGDEF and EAL domain, respectively in the same protein. Previously, we reported a bifunctional GGDEF–EAL domain protein, MSDGC-1 from Mycobacterium smegmatis showing both these activities (Kumar and Chatterji, 2008). In this current report, we have identified and characterized the homologous protein from Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Rv 1354c) named as MtbDGC. MtbDGC is also a bifunctional protein, which can synthesize and degrade c-di-GMP in vitro. Further we expressed Mtbdgc in M. smegmatis and it was able to complement the MSDGC-1 knock out strain by restoring the long term survival of M. smegmatis. Another protein Rv 1357c, named as MtbPDE, is an EAL domain protein and degrades c-di-GMP to pGpG in vitro. Rv1354c and 1357c have seven cysteine amino acids in their sequence, distributed along the full length of the protein. Disulfide bonds play an important role in stabilizing protein structure and regulating protein function. By proteolytic digestion and mass spectrometric analysis of MtbDGC, connectivity between cysteine pairs Cys94-Cys584, Cys2-Cys479 and Cys429-Cys614 was determined, whereas the third cysteine (Cys406) from N terminal was found to be free in MtbDGC protein, which was further confirmed by alkylation with iodoacetamide labeling. Bioinformatics modeling investigations also supported the pattern of disulfide connectivity obtained by Mass spectrometric analysis. Cys406 was mutated to serine by site directed mutagenesis and the mutant MtbC406S was not found to be active and was not able to synthesize or degrade c-di-GMP. The disulfide connectivity established here would help further in understanding the structure – function relationship in MtbDGC

Determining Sequence of Image Processing Technique (IPT) to Detect Adversarial Attacks

Developing secure machine learning models from adversarial examples is challenging as various methods are continually being developed to generate adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose an evolutionary approach to automatically determine Image Processing Techniques Sequence (IPTS) for detecting malicious inputs. Accordingly, we first used a diverse set of attack methods including adaptive attack methods (on our defense) to generate adversarial samples from the clean dataset. A detection framework based on a genetic algorithm (GA) is developed to find the optimal IPTS, where the optimality is estimated by different fitness measures such as Euclidean distance, entropy loss, average histogram, local binary pattern and loss functions. The "image difference" between the original and processed images is used to extract the features, which are then fed to a classification scheme in order to determine whether the input sample is adversarial or clean. This paper described our methodology and performed experiments using multiple data-sets tested with several adversarial attacks. For each attack-type and dataset, it generates unique IPTS. A set of IPTS selected dynamically in testing time which works as a filter for the adversarial attack. Our empirical experiments exhibited promising results indicating the approach can efficiently be used as processing for any AI model

Small and large scale genomic DNA isolation protocol for chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), suitable for molecular marker and transgenic analyses

Chickpea is an important food legume crop with high nutritional value. Lack of appropriate DNA isolation protocol is a limiting factor for any molecular studies of this crop. The present report describes a rapid and efficient protocol for small and large scale preparation of superior quality and quantity of DNA from four cultivars (JG62, WR315, C235 and ICCV89314) compared to that of earlier reports. The yield of DNA through both the methods was estimated to be approximately 80 μg per g of plant tissue. Both small and large scale preparations were essentially suitable for PCR and Southern blot hybridization analyses, which are the key steps in crop improvement programme through marker development and genetic engineering techniques.Key words: Cicer arietinum L., phenolics, restriction enzyme digestion, PCR amplification, Southern hybridization