Magnetic Alignment of Polymer Macro‐Nanodiscs Enables Residual‐Dipolar‐Coupling‐Based High‐Resolution Structural Studies by NMR Spectroscopy

Experimentally measured residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) are highly valuable for atomic‐resolution structural and dynamic studies of molecular systems ranging from small molecules to large proteins by solution NMR spectroscopy. Here we demonstrate the first use of magnetic‐alignment behavior of lyotropic liquid‐crystalline polymer macro‐nanodiscs (>20 nm in diameter) as a novel alignment medium for the measurement of RDCs using high‐resolution NMR. The easy preparation of macro‐nanodiscs, their high stability against pH changes and the presence of divalent metal ions, and their high homogeneity make them an efficient tool to investigate a wide range of molecular systems including natural products, proteins, and RNA.The right alignment: Polymer macro‐nanodiscs are used as a novel alignment medium for the measurement of residual dipolar couplings using high‐resolution NMR spectroscopy. Their easy preparation, high stability against pH changes and the presence of divalent metal ions, and high homogeneity make them an efficient tool for the investigation of a wide range of molecular systems including natural products, proteins, and RNA.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151864/1/anie201907655-sup-0001-misc_information.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151864/2/anie201907655.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151864/3/anie201907655_am.pd

Empowerment through technology: Gender dimensions of social capital build-up in Maharashtra, India

"This paper explores how and to what extent women and men have benefited from the build-up of social capital in technology uptake, and the role of women in this process. Using a case study on Groundnut Production Technology (GPT) in Maharashtra, India, a systematic documentation of the process by which farmers – both men and women - as well as the whole community became empowered through the build-up of social capital is presented. The focus of the paper is on collective action as a mechanism to stimulate gender-equitable change processes. Our evidence suggests that the technology uptake process was enhanced with the build up of social capital, whereby men and women from all class and caste groups came together for improving their livelihoods. Collective action was enhanced with the increased involvement and participation of women. Strong kinship ties were developed among diverse classes all over the village including landless tribal women, who formed the major labor force for this technology. The paper concludes that social networks played a crucial mediating role in the process of technology uptake. The build-up of social capital played an important role in influencing impacts from the technology because of the ways in which social networks and social relationships facilitated technology dissemination. Gender relations played a significant role in mediating the translation of economic benefits into well being of the individual, the family and community. Finally, it is suggested that further insights into the role of social networks and power relations in the village may be examined in greater detail by establishing the village network architecture, especially marginalized groups." Author's AbstractEmpowerment, Technology adoption, Agricultural growth, Agricultural technology, Gender, Social capital buildup, Social networks, Impact, Collective action,

Achieving Continuous Delivery of Immutable Containerized Microservices with Mesos/Marathon

In the recent years, DevOps methodologies have been introduced to extend the traditional agile principles which have brought up on us a paradigm shift in migrating applications towards a cloud-native architecture. Today, microservices, containers, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery have become critical to any organization’s transformation journey towards developing lean artifacts and dealing with the growing demand of pushing new features, iterating rapidly to keep the customers happy. Traditionally, applications have been packaged and delivered in virtual machines. But, with the adoption of microservices architectures, containerized applications are becoming the standard way to deploy services to production. Thanks to container orchestration tools like Marathon, containers can now be deployed and monitored at scale with ease. Microservices and Containers along with Container Orchestration tools disrupt and redefine DevOps, especially the delivery pipeline. This Master’s thesis project focuses on deploying highly scalable microservices packed as immutable containers onto a Mesos cluster using a container orchestrating framework called Marathon. This is achieved by implementing a CI/CD pipeline and bringing in to play some of the greatest and latest practices and tools like Docker, Terraform, Jenkins, Consul, Vault, Prometheus, etc. The thesis is aimed to showcase why we need to design systems around microservices architecture, packaging cloud-native applications into containers, service discovery and many other latest trends within the DevOps realm that contribute to the continuous delivery pipeline. At BetterDoctor Inc., it is observed that this project improved the avg. release cycle, increased team members’ productivity and collaboration, reduced infrastructure costs and deployment failure rates. With the CD pipeline in place along with container orchestration tools it has been observed that the organisation could achieve Hyperscale computing as and when business demands

Audio watermarking using transformation techniques

Watermarking is a technique, which is used in protecting digital information like images, videos and audio as it provides copyrights and ownership. Audio watermarking is more challenging than image watermarking due to the dynamic supremacy of hearing capacity over the visual field. This thesis attempts to solve the quantization based audio watermarking technique based on both the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The underlying system involves the statistical characteristics of the signal. This study considers different wavelet filters and quantization techniques. A comparison is performed on diverge algorithms and audio signals to help examine the performance of the proposed method. The embedded watermark is a binary image and different encryption techniques such as Arnold Transform and Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) are considered. The watermark is distributed uniformly in the areas of low frequencies i.e., high energy, which increases the robustness of the watermark. Further, spreading of watermark throughout the audio signal makes the technique robust against desynchronized attacks. Experimental results show that the signals generated by the proposed algorithm are inaudible and robust against signal processing techniques such as quantization, compression and resampling. We use Matlab (version 2009b) to implement the algorithms discussed in this thesis. Audio transformation techniques for compression in Linux (Ubuntu 9.10) are applied on the signal to simulate the attacks such as re-sampling, re-quantization, and mp3 compression; whereas, Matlab program for de-synchronized attacks like jittering and cropping. We envision that the proposed algorithm may work as a tool for securing intellectual properties of the musicians and audio distribution companies because of its high robustness and imperceptibility

Empowerment through technology uptake: gender dimensions in social capital build-up

This paper explores how and to what extent women and men have benefited from the social capital build-up (referred to as the ability of men and women farmers to develop and use various kinds of social networks and the resources that become available thereof) in technology uptake, and the role of women in this process. Using a case study of ICRISAT’s Groundnut Production Technology (GPT), the process by which farmers – both men and women - as well as the whole community became empowered through the build-up of social capital is systematically documented. The focus of the paper is on collective action as a mechanism to stimulate gender-equitable change processes. Our evidence suggests that the technology uptake process was enhanced with the build up of social capital, whereby the men and women from all class and caste groups came together for improving their livelihoods. Collective action was enhanced with the increased involvement and participation of women. Strong kinship ties were developed among diverse classes including the landless tribal women, which formed the major labor force for this technology. Reference to the Umra case study illustrated in the paper presents the process of empowerment whereby the marginalized group including women gained better access to resources, information, knowledge and some opportunities for political participation. The paper concludes that social networks played a crucial mediating role in the process of technology uptake. The build-up of social capital played an important role in influencing the distribution of benefits from the technology because of the ways in which social networks and social relationships facilitated technology dissemination. Gender relations played a significant role in mediating the translation of economic benefits into well being of the individual, the family and community. Finally, it is suggested that further insights into the role of social networks and power relations in the village may be examined in greater detail by establishing the village network architecture especially including the marginalized groups

Magnetic Alignment of Polymer Macro‐Nanodiscs Enables Residual‐Dipolar‐Coupling‐Based High‐Resolution Structural Studies by NMR Spectroscopy

Experimentally measured residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) are highly valuable for atomic‐resolution structural and dynamic studies of molecular systems ranging from small molecules to large proteins by solution NMR spectroscopy. Here we demonstrate the first use of magnetic‐alignment behavior of lyotropic liquid‐crystalline polymer macro‐nanodiscs (>20 nm in diameter) as a novel alignment medium for the measurement of RDCs using high‐resolution NMR. The easy preparation of macro‐nanodiscs, their high stability against pH changes and the presence of divalent metal ions, and their high homogeneity make them an efficient tool to investigate a wide range of molecular systems including natural products, proteins, and RNA.Korrekt ausgerichtet: Polymer‐Nanoscheiben werden als Ausrichtungsmedium für die Messung dipolarer Restkopplungen mit hochauflösender NMR‐Spektroskopie genutzt. Ihre einfache Herstellung, hohe Stabilität gegen pH‐Änderungen und die Anwesenheit zweiwertiger Metallionen sowie ihre hohe Homogenität machen sie zu einem effizienten Werkzeug für die Untersuchung vieler molekularer Systeme wie Naturstoffe, Proteine und RNA.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151827/1/ange201907655-sup-0001-misc_information.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151827/2/ange201907655_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151827/3/ange201907655.pd