Book Review: Bourgeois Hinduism, Or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists

A review of Bourgeois Hinduism, Or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists by Brian A. Hatcher

Book Review: Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought: Toward a Fusion of Horizons

A review of Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought: Toward a Fusion of Horizons edited by Rita Sherma and Arvind Sharma

Nine More- or Less-related Observations on Historical Approaches to Hindu-Christian Studies

For the purposes of this panel discussion, it seems more appropriate to make a series of suggestions and observations about the difficulties and promises of writing history within a Hindu-Christian framework than to offer a paper arguing a single point or perspective. Hindu-Christian history presents a particular set of challenges given the shifting political and material conditions that have attended the dramatic encounter between these disparate cultures and traditions. In what follows I attempt to articulate some of the larger issues with which I wrestle as I study and write Hindu-Christian history

Reverend William Ward and His Legacy for Christian (Mis)perception of Hinduism

My assignment for this thematic issue of the Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin is to address Christian misperceptions of Hinduism, which I shall do by evaluating the work and legacy of William Ward of Serampore, missionary to Bengal, and author on Hinduism in the early nineteenth century. First, however, I would like to make three preliminary observations about the idea of Christian misperception

The Pitfalls of Trying to Be Different

For more than a decade Rajiv Malhotra has been known to the study of South Asian religion as a vigorous critic of the practices and frameworks that academics have employed to represent India to the West. Those who know him from his no-holds-barred online articles or by his unflinching confrontation with established scholars at academic meetings may be pleased by the rather different tone of Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, Malhotra’s latest attempt to intervene in the academic study of the religious traditions of the South Asian subcontinent. Whereas Malhotra has achieved much of his renown through intemperate language, he is and should be remembered also for his demands that practicing Hindus have a say in how they are represented and for provoking a needed self-examination by the scholarly community writing about the traditions of South Asia. These are not the primary concerns of Being Different, and if one reads it motivated by the lurid promise of a new assault by Malhotra on the motives, character, or methods of senior scholars in the study of Hinduism, one will discover the author pursuing a somewhat different agenda

Decision-making and problem-solving methods in automation technology

The state of the art in the automation of decision making and problem solving is reviewed. The information upon which the report is based was derived from literature searches, visits to university and government laboratories performing basic research in the area, and a 1980 Langley Research Center sponsored conferences on the subject. It is the contention of the authors that the technology in this area is being generated by research primarily in the three disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Control Theory, and Operations Research. Under the assumption that the state of the art in decision making and problem solving is reflected in the problems being solved, specific problems and methods of their solution are often discussed to elucidate particular aspects of the subject. Synopses of the following major topic areas comprise most of the report: (1) detection and recognition; (2) planning; and scheduling; (3) learning; (4) theorem proving; (5) distributed systems; (6) knowledge bases; (7) search; (8) heuristics; and (9) evolutionary programming

Conference on Automated Decision-Making and Problem Solving, the Third Day: Issues Discussed

A conference held at Langley Research Center in May of 1980 brought together university experts from the fields of Control Theory, Operations Research, and Artificial Intelligence to explore current research in automation from both the perspective of their own particular disciplines and from that of interdisciplinary considerations. Informal discussions from the final day of the those day conference are summarized

Moving beyond “Us” versus “Them”: Social identities in digital gaming

This was an invited submission for a special focus issue on gender and gaming for the Psychology of Women Section Review (British Psychological Society)

Identifying Retweetable Tweets with a Personalized Global Classifier

In this paper we present a method to identify tweets that a user may find interesting enough to retweet. The method is based on a global, but personalized classifier, which is trained on data from several users, represented in terms of user-specific features. Thus, the method is trained on a sufficient volume of data, while also being able to make personalized decisions, i.e., the same post received by two different users may lead to different classification decisions. Experimenting with a collection of approx.\ 130K tweets received by 122 journalists, we train a logistic regression classifier, using a wide variety of features: the content of each tweet, its novelty, its text similarity to tweets previously posted or retweeted by the recipient or sender of the tweet, the network influence of the author and sender, and their past interactions. Our system obtains F1 approx. 0.9 using only 10 features and 5K training instances.Comment: This is a long paper version of the extended abstract titled "A Personalized Global Filter To Predict Retweets", of the same authors, which was published in the 25th ACM UMAP conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, in July 201

Switch and template pattern formation in a discrete reaction diffusion system inspired by the Drosophila eye

We examine a spatially discrete reaction diffusion model based on the interactions that create a periodic pattern in the Drosophila eye imaginal disc. This model is capable of generating a regular hexagonal pattern of gene expression behind a moving front, as observed in the fly system. In order to better understand the novel switch and template mechanism behind this pattern formation, we present here a detailed study of the model's behavior in one dimension, using a combination of analytic methods and numerical searches of parameter space. We find that patterns are created robustly provided that there is an appropriate separation of timescales and that self-activation is sufficiently strong, and we derive expressions in this limit for the front speed and the pattern wavelength. Moving fronts in pattern-forming systems near an initial linear instability generically select a unique pattern, but our model operates in a strongly nonlinear regime where the final pattern depends on the initial conditions as well as on parameter values. Our work highlights the important role that cellularization and cell-autonomous feedback can play in biological pattern formation