Traditional vocations and modern professions among Tamil Brahmans in colonial and post-colonial south India

Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans’ role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical data are particularly used as evidence about changing patterns of employment, education and migration. Caste traditionalism was not a determining constraint, for Tamil Brahmans were predominant in medicine and engineering as well as law and administration in the colonial period, even though medicine is ritually polluting and engineering resembles low-status artisans’ work. Crucially though, as modern, English-language, credential-based professions that are wellpaid and prestigious, law, medicine and engineering were and are all deemed eminently suitable for Tamil Brahmans, who typically regard their professional success as a sign of their caste superiority in the modern world. In reality, though, it is mainly a product of how their old social and cultural capital and their economic capital in land were transformed as they seized new educational and employment opportunities by flexibly deploying their traditional, inherited skills and advantages

Information technology professionals and the new-rich middle class in Chennai (Madras)

Since 1991, when the policy of economic liberalisation began in earnest, the size and prosperity of India's middle class have grown considerably. Yet sound sociological and ethnographic information about its social structure and cultural values is still sparse, and as André Béteille comments: ‘Everything or nearly everything that is written about the Indian middle class is written by middle-class Indians…[who] tend to oscillate between self-recrimination and self-congratulation’. The former is exemplified by Pavan Varma's The Great Indian Middle Class (1998), which excoriates this class for its selfish materialism and the ‘retreat from idealism’ that was manifest in the smaller, ‘traditional middle class’ of the earlier, post-independence period. A good example of the opposite tendency is Gurcharan Das's India Unbound (2002), which celebrates ‘the rise of a confident new middle class’Das's diagnosis of what has changed is actually very similar to Varma's, but he insists that the new middle class is no ‘greedier’ than the old one, and the ‘chief difference is that there is less hypocrisy and more self-confidence

An R Package for Assessing Drug Synergism/Antagonism

Synergistic and antagonistic drug interactions are important to consider when developing mixtures of anticancer or other types of drugs. Boik, Newman, and Boik (2008) proposed the MixLow method as an alternative to the Median-Effect method of Chou and Talalay (1984) for estimating drug interaction indices. One advantage of the MixLow method is that the nonlinear mixed-effects model used to estimate parameters of concentration-response curves can provide more accurate parameter estimates than the log linearization and least-squares analysis used in the Median-Effect method. This paper introduces the mixlow package in R, an implementation of the MixLow method. Results are reported for a small simulation study.

Novel, high throughput method to study in vitro protein release from polymer nanospheres

Controlled delivery of therapeutic protein drugs using biodegradable polymer carriers is a desired characteristic that enables effective, application-specific therapy and treatment. Previous studies have focused on protein delivery from polymers using conventional one-sample-at-a- time techniques, which are time-consuming and costly. In addition, many therapeutic proteins are in limited supply and are expensive, so it is desirable to reduce sample size for design and development of delivery devices. We have developed a rapid, high throughput technique based on a highly sensitive fluorescence-based assay to detect and quantify protein released from polyanhydrides while utilizing relatively small amounts of protein (∼40 μg). These studies focused on the release of a model protein, Texas Red conjugated bovine serum albumin, from polyanhydride copolymers based on sebacic acid (SA) and 1,6-bis(p-carboxyphenoxy)hexane (CPH). The protein release profiles were assessed simultaneously to investigate the effect of polymer device geometry (nanospheres vs films), polymer chemistry, and pH of the release medium. The results indicated that the nanosphere geometry, SA-rich chemistries, and neutral pH release medium led to a more rapid release of the protein compared to the film geometry, CPH-rich chemistries, and acidic pH release medium, respectively. This high throughput fluorescence-based method can be readily extended to study release kinetics for other proteins and polymer systems

Word order and information status in child language

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously mentioned referents (“old” or accessible information) first, before they introduce referents that have not yet been mentioned in the discourse (“new” or inaccessible information) at both sentential and phrasal levels. Here we ask whether a similar principle influences ordering patterns at the phrasal level in children who are in the early stages of combining words productively. Prior research shows that when conveying semantic relations, children reproduce language-specific ordering patterns in the input, suggesting that they do not have a bias for any particular order to describe “who did what to whom”. But our findings show that when they label “old” versus “new” referents, 3- to 5-year-old children prefer an ordering pattern opposite to that of adults (Study 1). Children’s ordering preference is not derived from input patterns, as “old-before-new” is also the preferred order in caregivers’ speech directed to young children (Study 2). Our findings demonstrate that a key principle governing ordering preferences in adults does not originate in early childhood, but develops: from new-to-old to old-to-new

Earnings Quality and Stock Returns

An exclusive focus on bottom-line income misses important information about the quality of earnings. Accruals (the difference between accounting earnings and cash flow) are reliably, negatively associated with future stock returns. Earnings increases that are accompanied by high accruals, suggesting low-quality earnings, are associated with poor future returns. We explore various hypotheses -- earnings manipulation, extrapolative biases about future growth, and under-reaction to business conditions -- to explain accruals' predictive power. Distinctions between the hypotheses are based on evidence from operating performance, the behavior of individual accrual items, and discretionary versus nondiscretionary components of accruals.

An R Package for Assessing Drug Synergism/Antagonism

Synergistic and antagonistic drug interactions are important to consider when developing mixtures of anticancer or other types of drugs. Boik, Newman, and Boik (2008) proposed the MixLow method as an alternative to the Median-Effect method of Chou and Talalay (1984) for estimating drug interaction indices. One advantage of the MixLow method is that the nonlinear mixed-effects model used to estimate parameters of concentration-response curves can provide more accurate parameter estimates than the log linearization and least-squares analysis used in the Median-Effect method. This paper introduces the mixlow package in R, an implementation of the MixLow method. Results are reported for a small simulation study

Marriage in modern India: companionate marriage among a middle-class Brahman subcaste

LSE’s C.J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan describe how the marriage system of the Eighteen-Village Vattimas has changed with the end of child marriage and the growing value of individuals’ education, employment, and compatibility. This article is the final instalment of a three-part series on changing marriage norms among middle-class Indians

Wave Particle Duality, the Observer and Retrocausality

We approach wave particle duality, the role of the observer and implications on Retrocausality, by starting with the results of a well verified quantum experiment. We analyze how some current theoretical approaches interpret these results. We then provide an alternative theoretical framework that is consistent with the observations and in many ways simpler than usual attempts to account for retrocausality, involving a non-local conscious Observer.Comment: 9 pages, Retrocausality Conference, AIP, June 201

A Dynamic Pricing Game Investigating The Interaction Of Price And Quality On Sales Response

There is some question as to whether or not consumers use price as an indicator of product quality. In the case of non-durable goods there is some evidence that consumers do equate higher price products with higher quality products. These products are those that the consumer must experience personally before making a judgment on the product quality. In the case of durable goods there is less empirical evidence to support the price-quality connection. This paper develops a dynamic game model to investigate the price-quality connection in the presence of competition.  Specifically, the paper investigates whether or not the optimal pricing strategy in the case of a durable good, where consumers may collect quality information about the product as units diffuse into the market, should be a high quality-high price strategy or a high quality-low price strategy. This question is examined by means of a dynamic game model, which is an extension of the Narasimhan-Ghosh-Mendez (NGM) quality diffusion model. The paper explicitly incorporates competition into the NGM model. Price trajectories for two competing firms are derived so that profits are maximized for the two competitors. It is shown that the price trajectory for the firm using quality as a strategic lever is shown to be lower than that of the firm that was not using a quality strategy. This result strongly suggests that a firm pursuing a quality strategy should couple this strategy with a lower price than its competition and should not couple high prices with high quality in an effort to signal the product’s superior quality to consumers.&nbsp