3,194 research outputs found
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
Dynamic Display of Changing Posterior in Bayesian Survival Analysis: The Software
We consider the problem of estimating an unknown distribution function in the presence of censoring under the conditions that a parametric model is believed to hold approximately. We use a Bayesian approach, in which the prior on is a mixture of Dirichlet distributions. A hyperparameter of the prior determines the extent to which this prior concentrates its mass around the parametric family. A Gibbs sampling algorithm to estimate the posterior distributions of the parameters of interest is reviewed. An importance sampling scheme enables us to use the output of the Gibbs sampler to very quickly recalculate the posterior when we change the hyperparameters of the prior. The calculations can be done sufficiently fast to enable the dynamic display of the changing posterior as the prior hyperparameters are varied. This paper provides a literate program completely documenting the code for performing the dynamic graphics.
Building Morphological Chains for Agglutinative Languages
In this paper, we build morphological chains for agglutinative languages by
using a log-linear model for the morphological segmentation task. The model is
based on the unsupervised morphological segmentation system called
MorphoChains. We extend MorphoChains log linear model by expanding the
candidate space recursively to cover more split points for agglutinative
languages such as Turkish, whereas in the original model candidates are
generated by considering only binary segmentation of each word. The results
show that we improve the state-of-art Turkish scores by 12% having a F-measure
of 72% and we improve the English scores by 3% having a F-measure of 74%.
Eventually, the system outperforms both MorphoChains and other well-known
unsupervised morphological segmentation systems. The results indicate that
candidate generation plays an important role in such an unsupervised log-linear
model that is learned using contrastive estimation with negative samples.Comment: 10 pages, accepted and presented at the CICLing 2017 (18th
International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational
Linguistics
Can coarse-graining introduce long-range correlations in a symbolic sequence?
We present an exactly solvable mean-field-like theory of correlated ternary
sequences which are actually systems with two independent parameters. Depending
on the values of these parameters, the variance on the average number of any
given symbol shows a linear or a superlinear dependence on the length of the
sequence. We have shown that the available phase space of the system is made up
a diffusive region surrounded by a superdiffusive region. Motivated by the fact
that the diffusive portion of the phase space is larger than that for the
binary, we have studied the mapping between these two. We have identified the
region of the ternary phase space, particularly the diffusive part, that gets
mapped into the superdiffusive regime of the binary. This exact mapping implies
that long-range correlation found in a lower dimensional representative
sequence may not, in general, correspond to the correlation properties of the
original system.Comment: 10 pages including 1 figur
Chirality and fermion number in a knotted soliton background
We consider the coupling of a single Dirac fermion to the three component
unit vector field which appears as an order parameter in the Faddeev model.
Classically, the coupling is determined by requiring that it preserves a
certain local frame independence. But quantum mechanically the separate left
and right chiral fermion number currents suffer from a frame anomaly. We employ
this anomaly to compute the fermion number of a knotted soliton. The result
coincides with the self-linking number of the soliton. In particular, the
anomaly structure of the fermions relates directly to the inherent chiral
properties of the soliton. Our result suggests that interactions between
fermions and knotted solitons can lead to phenomena akin the Callan-Rubakov
effect
Dynamic Display of Changing Posterior in Bayesian Survival Analysis: The Software
We consider the problem of estimating an unknown distribution function in the presence of censoring under the conditions that a parametric model is believed to hold approximately. We use a Bayesian approach, in which the prior on is a mixture of Dirichlet distributions. A hyperparameter of the prior determines the extent to which this prior concentrates its mass around the parametric family. A Gibbs sampling algorithm to estimate the posterior distributions of the parameters of interest is reviewed. An importance sampling scheme enables us to use the output of the Gibbs sampler to very quickly recalculate the posterior when we change the hyperparameters of the prior. The calculations can be done sufficiently fast to enable the dynamic display of the changing posterior as the prior hyperparameters are varied. This paper provides a literate program completely documenting the code for performing the dynamic graphics. July 2, 1998 bsa.nw 4 1 Copyright We begin with our usual copyright. ..
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
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