Literary Cosmopolitanisms of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy

Since the 1980s, literary critics have examined contemporary cosmopolitanism’s relationship with globalization from postcolonial perspectives. An intriguing question in this area is: how do postcolonial authors justify their cosmopolitan critiques of globalization while relying on the economic structures that sustain the publishing industry? This dissertation attempts to answer the question by studying literary cosmopolitanisms of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy. It argues that by developing forms of literary cosmopolitanisms through fiction, some postcolonial writers create alternatives to neoliberal globalization and a reactionary nationalism from within those systems. The primary methods employed in this study include close-reading and critical-research-qualitative analysis. Specifically, the dissertation contends that Salman Rushdie has developed a critical cosmopolitanism of the urban migrant that simultaneously challenges the inhibiting nature of fundamentalist nationalism and homogenizing globalization. Not satisfied with Rushdie’s individualistic cosmopolitanism, Amitav Ghosh recuperates a family-based South Asian cosmopolitanism that evolved during the British colonialism in Asia and provided an alternative to Western cosmopolitanism through the dynamism of the littoral. Celebrating this familial-littoral cosmopolitanism, Ghosh envisions the possibility of a world-community, capable of defying rigid nationalism as well as neoliberal capitalism on the strength of family-like relationships among migrants. Also diverging from Rushdie, Arundhati Roy evolves a small cosmopolitanism that appeals to the global through the local. Roy reaches out to global readers with narratives of local struggles to inspire them to cultivate a cosmopolitan empathy towards those others who inhabit socioculturally backward parts of the World. This dissertation identifies forms of postcolonial literary cosmopolitanisms that enable Rushdie, Roy, and Ghosh to imagine a cosmopolitan world-community, rooted in mutual respect and acceptance of difference. It opens avenues for further research in literary studies that examine postcolonial literature’s creative potential to promote grounded cosmopolitanism as a powerful antidote to economic globalization in the twenty-first century

GAIT Technology for Human Recognition using CNN

Gait is a distinctive biometric characteristic that can be detected from a distance; as a result, it has several uses in social security, forensic identification, and crime prevention. Existing gait identification techniques use a gait template, which makes it difficult to keep temporal information, or a gait sequence, which maintains pointless sequential limitations and loses the ability to portray a gait. Our technique, which is based on this deep set viewpoint, is immune to frame permutations and can seamlessly combine frames from many videos that were taken in various contexts, such as diversified watching, angles, various outfits, or various situations for transporting something. According to experiments, our single-model strategy obtains an average rank-1 accuracy of 96.1% on the CASIA-B gait dataset and an accuracy of 87.9% on the OU-MVLP gait dataset when used under typical walking conditions. Our model also demonstrates a great degree of robustness under numerous challenging circumstances. When carrying bags and wearing a coat while walking, it obtains accuracy on the CASIA-B of 90.8% and 70.3%, respectively, greatly surpassing the best approach currently in use. Additionally, the suggested method achieves a satisfactory level of accuracy even when there are few frames available in the test samples; for instance, it achieves 85.0% on the CASIA-B even with only 7 frames

VHDL Implementation of High Performance and Dynamically Configured Multi-port Cache Memory

This project presents the implementation of 64x64 multi-port dynamically configured SRAM in VHDL (VHSIC hardware description language). It employs isolation nodes and dynamic memory partitioning algorithm to facilitate simultaneous multi-port accesses without duplicating bit-lines. VHDL test-bench is developed to verify the functionality of the dynamically configured memory. Results demonstrate that critical memory operations such as "read miss", "write miss" and "write bypass" can be performed using newly proposed low power, area efficient dynamically configured memory

A forward planned treatment planning technique for non small cell lung cancer stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy. Based on a Systematic Review of Literature.

Purpose & Method: A systematic literature review of six computerised databases was undertaken in order to review and summarise a forward planned lung Stereotactic Ablative Body Radiotherapy (SABR) treatment planning (TP) technique as a starting point for clinical implementation in the author's department based on current empirical research. The data was abstracted and content analysed to synthesize the findings based upon a SIGN quality checklist tool. Findings: A Four Dimensional Computer Tomography (4DCT) scan should be performed upon which the Internal Target Volume (ITV) and Organs at Risk (OAR) are drawn [1, 2]. A Set-up margin (SM) of 5mm is applied to account for inter-fraction motion. The field arrangement consists of a combination of 7 to 13 coplanar and non-coplanar beams all evenly spaced. Beam modifiers are used to assist in the homogeneity of the beam, although a 20% planning target volume (PTV) dose homogeneity is acceptable. The recommended fractionations by the UK SABR consortium are 54 Gy in 3#s (standard), 55–60 Gy in 5#s (conservative) and the 50-60 Gy in 8-10#s (very conservative). Conformity indices (CI) for both the target volume (TV) and OAR will be used to assess the planned distribution.) [3] Conclusion: An overview of a clinically acceptable forward planned lung SABR TP technique based on current literature as a starting point, with a view to inverse planning with support from the UK SABR Consortium mentoring scheme. [1, 2

Embedding Environmental Ethics in Engineering Courses

This work focuses on embedding ethics topics in electrical and biomedical engineering courses. A dedicated course titled Engineering Ethics that existed in the curriculum has been replaced in the department recently by embedding ethics topics into several courses. This work focuses on including topics in the area of environmental ethics into two courses, Electric circuits and Biosensors. It is very relevant as it introduces students to current consumerism and its environmental impact. The global world relies on handheld devices that use rechargeable batteries. There is a need to educate public on the proper disposal of them. Some engineering students are unaware of environmental impact of the improper disposal of batteries and other electronic products and discard them as normal waste. The first course on electric circuits is taken by all engineering majors. Energy from mobile device batteries is discussed at the start of the course along with the need for safe disposal. A project to research on safe disposal regionally and internationally is assigned. The project includes students to survey family members and friends on disposal practices and on the need for advocacy and social responsibility. A survey of students on impact of this assignment will be presented here. Similarly, topics relevant to the study of environmental contamination are covered in the Biosensors course. Students are assigned a project on the use of biosensors to study environmental toxins and to survey family and friends on practices of hazardous waste disposal. A survey of the students on its impact will be presented

Effect of Microgravity on Nanoparticle-Cellular Interaction

A cell contains numerous proteins on its surface and in the cytoplasm that carry out a variety of functions. Maleimide – functionalized Graphene quantum dots (m-GQDs) have the ability to attach or “tag” both cell surface and intracellular proteins in the gravitational setting. Such quantum dots have photoluminescent properties, which can be utilized for tagging the cysteine residue on the proteins and hence in the bio-imaging applications of these proteins. This experiment proposes whether m-GQDs will have a stable binding to cellular proteins on Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) mammalian cells under the influence of microgravity. If this occurs, it can provide a wide variety of applications for studying the effects of micro gravity on a physiological system in the way proteins behave compared to a gravitational setting. The basic principle of this procedure can be further utilized to study many more cellular processes under the influence of microgravity by simply tracking these “tagged” cellular proteins under a fluorescence microscope