Untouchability and inter-caste relations in rural India : the case of southern Tamil villages

Justice and equality are the two subjects often talked about by most of the nationalists and leaders of various political and ideological streams across the world including India. India was at the fore-front in condemning racial discrimination particularly apartheid and also the influence of super powers) on the internal affairs of independent nations. Her commitment to secure its citizens' freedom, justice, equality and fraternity is reflected in the very preamble of the Indian Constitution. Towards achieving these challenging goals, special provisions have also been made in the Constitution to protect and promote the interests of the most oppressed section of Indian society - traditionally known as Untouchables and Constitutionally as the Scheduled Castes. These provisions are expected to alter the given unjust distribution of power (political and economic) and status (social) among different sections of people and thereby transform India into an egalitarian society. Given India's unequivocal commitment to secure its citizens these noble ideals - particularly the most exploited and pilloried section of India -, we shall attempt here to understand Indian villages, which host over 80 per cent of the Indian population, from the point of view of whether or not these villages patronise the institution of caste which is in contravention of these ideals or whether there are these little republics ideal for realising the said goals and thus to be preserved as they are as claimed by many social reformers including Mahatma Gandhi. In the process, we shall also address the question of how caste has remained unchanged, how it controls social interaction between higher and lower caste groups and accordingly perpetuates unequal control over power and status. And most importantly we shall also understand whether all the Scheduled Castes (lower castes) treat their members as equals or there is hierarchy, discrimination and practice of untouchability even among them

Iterative student‐based testing of automated information‐handling exercises

The continuing rapid changes in how information is handled via computers means that training in computer‐based information handling must itself undergo continuous modification. The investigations reported here examine the use of student feedback to improve presentation of hands‐on exercises. Student responses appear to be reasonably consistent across both time and different student backgrounds. For the groups examined here, such factors as age and sex appear to have little effect on responses. The only significant factor is duration and extent of prior computer experience. Problems in hands‐on exercises noted by the students therefore tend to have a continuing applicability, which suggests the value of iterative feedback in the provision of such exercises

Student reaction to parallel hypertext and menu‐based interfaces

It is often necessary to consider the question of what sort of interface is most useful for retrieving information from a particular land of database. A small database of text‐based but multi‐faceted items is used here in order to compare ease and speed of retrieval from two commonly used combinations of interface — HyperCard on an Apple Macintosh and dBase III+ on a PC. For the restricted range of tasks employed here, the latter combination appears to be more acceptable to students with limited computer experience. However, in more general terms, the acceptability of an interface for information retrieval depends on what particular aspect of information retrieval is being emphasized, and what conceptual frameworks students bring to their tasks

Quantization of the electromagnetic field outside static black holes and its application to low-energy phenomena

We discuss the Gupta-Bleuler quantization of the free electromagnetic field outside static black holes in the Boulware vacuum. We use a gauge which reduces to the Feynman gauge in Minkowski spacetime. We also discuss its relation with gauges used previously. Then we apply the low-energy sector of this field theory to investigate some low-energy phenomena. First, we discuss the response rate of a static charge outside the Schwarzschild black hole in four dimensions. Next, motivated by string physics, we compute the absorption cross sections of low-energy plane waves for the Schwarzschild and extreme Reissner-Nordstr\"om black holes in arbitrary dimensions higher than three.Comment: 26 pages (revtex), no figures, misprints in some conditions correcte

A Review on Dalith Women Empowerment in India

Empowerment is the expansion of asserts and capabilities of poor people to participate in negotiate with influence, control and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives. Education   is one of the important sources of empowering women with the knowledge, skill and self confidence   necessary to participate fully in development process. It enhances better socio-economic development. Women empowerment in India is highly dependent on several variables that include caste, class, family background and culture, Geographical location it may be urban or rural and age. The barriers of dalith women empowerment are discrimination in the society, economic disadvantages, religious practices, social believes and violence against women. They are unable to access health and educational services, lack decision making power and face higher level of violence. There is an immediate need for empowering dalith women in present scenario. Keywords: Dalith women empowerment, education, socio-economic development

Spunbonding studies with polypropylene polymers

Spunbonding is a continuous process to produce polymer laid nonwovens for various applications. Polypropylene is the major polymer used in this process. Metallocene polypropylene (mPP) manufactured using the single site catalyst technology has been of interest for this industry and some research has been done for the past few years. This polymer seems to be different compared to the conventional Ziegler-Natta catalyzed polypropylene (znPP). This research was conducted to investigate the structure and properties of the filaments and fabrics produced with a metallocene catalyzed propylene polymer and to determine the optimum process conditions to produce good quality fabrics. A comparison is also made between the filaments and the fabrics produced from both types of polymers i.e., mPP and znPP. An investigation of the processing behavior of mPP polymer was conducted using the Reicofil spunbonding pilot line at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The filaments at three different throughput rates were studied for tensile properties and other structural features such as birefringence, x-ray diffraction and thermal responses. The fabrics bonded at different process conditions were tested for various mechanical properties. The structure and properties of the two types of spunbond filaments and fabrics were compared. The failure mechanism of the fabrics at different bonding temperatures was studied using scanning electron microscope. The results showed that mPP filaments have lower melting temperature than znPP filaments. They also have higher strengths and lower elongation than znPP filaments. The mPP fabrics also have shown higher strength and elongation properties than the comparable znPP fabrics. The rupture mechanism of the mPP fabrics was found to be different than that of the znPP fabrics. Also higher strength and elongation were observed in mPP fabrics that were bonded at relatively lower temperatures. For spunbonding process mPP was found to be much better than the znPP polymer

Concurrently coupled solid shell-based adaptive multiscale method for fracture

Artículo Open Access en el sitio web del editor. Pago por publicar en abierto.A solid shell-based adaptive atomistic–continuum numerical method is herein proposed to simulate complex crack growth patterns in thin-walled structures. A hybrid solid shell formulation relying on the combined use of the enhanced assumed strain (EAS) and the assumed natural strain (ANS) methods has been considered to efficiently model the material in thin structures at the continuum level. The phantom node method (PNM) is employed to model the discontinuities in the bulk. The discontinuous solid shell element is then concurrently coupled with a molecular statics model placed around the crack tip. The coupling between the coarse scale and the fine scale is realized through the use of ghost atoms, whose positions are interpolated from the coarse scale solution and enforced as boundary conditions to the fine scale model. In the proposed numerical scheme, the fine scale region is adaptively enlarged as the crack propagates and the region behind the crack tip is adaptively coarsened in order to reduce the computation costs. An energy criterion is used to detect the crack tip location. All the atomistic simulations are carried out using the LAMMPS software. A computational framework has been developed in MATLAB to trigger LAMMPS through system command. This allows a two way interaction between the coarse and fine scales in MATLAB platform, where the boundary conditions to the fine region are extracted from the coarse scale, and the crack tip location from the atomistic model is transferred back to the continuum scale. The developed framework has been applied to study crack growth in the energy minimization problems. Inspired by the influence of fracture on current–voltage characteristics of thin Silicon photovoltaic cells, the cubic diamond lattice structure of Silicon is used to model the material in the fine scale region, whilst the Tersoff potential function is employed to model the atom–atom interactions. The versatility and robustness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by means of several fracture applications.Unión Europea ERC 306622Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2012-37187, MAT2015-71036-P y MAT2015-71309-PJunta de Andalucía P11-TEP-7093 y P12-TEP -105

Growing crimes against Dalits in India despite special laws

A. Ramaiah discusses why caste-based violence in India is increasing despite a history of legislation against caste discrimination