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,

Three Essays on Sharing Economy

Overview The sharing economy for services like Uber and Airbnb has grown significantly. The growth is driven by technology that “whittled down the barriers to the formation and functioning of sharing markets by lowering or eliminating frictions in the identification, search, match, verification, and exchange” (Narasimhan et al 2017). Reductions in friction in steps to consummate transactions offer two types of savings to consumers. One, monetary savings, results from lower prices typically offered by sharing economy providers (SEP’s) relative to legacy providers (LP’s). The second type of savings results from reduced effort and/or time that consumers need to search, identify, and transact with providers. Thus, a consumer does not have to wait for a taxi to pass by and can instead hail a ride on Uber. A traveler can find an accommodation at a preferred spot in a city easily even in the absence of traditional hotels at that spot. Such reductions in the time and/ or effort needed to locate desired services result in what we label as hassle savings. While they may not be able to compete on monetary savings, LP’s can still provide hassle savings. For instance, although they may cost more, by being more readily available, traditional cabs in a city like New York can help riders save the time to hail and wait for Uber. Whether consumers weigh monetary or hassle savings more may, however, vary with the consumption context. For instance, avoiding the wait time for an Uber ride by taking a passing by taxi may weigh more if the ride is short and the savings are not substantial. The opposite may be true, however, for long rides where the difference in the cost of Uber and traditional taxis could be quite large. Monetary and/or hassle savings can, therefore, be strategic variables for LP’s and SEP’s. I examine if this is the case empirically in my dissertation through three essays on the sharing economy. Essay 1: Monetary and Hassle Savings as Strategic Variables in the Ride-Sharing Market The setting for my first essay is the ride-sharing market where I examine consumers’ choices between Yellow Taxi and Uber in New York City. Specifically, I assume that consumers will weigh monetary savings less than hassle savings if the former is below a threshold but that the opposite will be true for larger savings. I investigate if this is the case using data on paid rides on Yellow Taxi and Uber in New York City. The period of my investigation lies between April 1, 2014 and September 30, 2014, during which data on all rides taken on Yellow Taxi’s and Uber is available from the city. I focus my investigation on the hundred most frequently occurring latitude, longitude, combinations from where rides on Yellow Taxis originate in the city. I then relate the odds of riders in these neighborhoods choosing Uber over Yellow Taxi for a ride on different days of the week and at different times of the day to my primary variable of interest - the availability of Yellow Taxis. I operationalize availability as a one-week lagged proportion of the total of rides on Yellow Taxis from the neighborhood to the total rides on Yellow Taxi in NYC. I also consider other factors like the intrinsic preference for Uber in that neighborhood and in New York City as a whole, weather, time of day, and type of neighborhood. If my assumption about the relative importance of monetary and hassle savings is valid, there should be a ride distance below which Yellow Taxis should be preferred for the hassle savings and above which Uber should be preferred for the monetary savings. I find this indeed to be the case at a threshold of 6.64 miles. Given the potential endogeneity of availability of Yellow Taxis, I take two approaches to assess the reliability of my finding. First, I assume that the availability of Yellow Taxis in each neighborhood could be endogenous with the demand for and availability of paid transportation in the neighborhood. Specifically, I recalibrate my model including two additional covariates as proxies for demand and availability of paid transportation: number of rides taken on subways closest to the neighborhood at the time of the ride and the distance to the nearest subway station. Two, I jointly estimate a supply side equation for the availability of Yellow Taxis in the neighborhood at the time of the ride as a function of a 1-week lagged availability of Yellow Taxis in the same neighborhood at the time of the ride and the demand for and availability of public transportation. I include the residual from this equation as an additional covariate in the log-odds model. Findings from both models are very similar to and consistent with those from the proposed model and confirm that there is a threshold distance below (above) which Yellow Taxis (Uber) is the preferred option. Essay 2: Variations in the Strategic Value of Hassle Savings The accommodation sharing market is the setting for my second and third essays. Accommodations are experience goods because amenities and the quality of services may vary from provider to provider, increasing consumers’ uncertainty. Consumers, therefore, seek information on the features of accommodations before choosing one. Standardization mostly provides this information in the case of legacy providers like branded hotels. Sharing economy providers, however, cannot rely on standardization since the rented personal accommodations do vary across providers. Consumers, therefore, need to rely on alternative sources of information like user-generated ratings and reviews. Ratings and Reviews thus provide hassle savings by reducing uncertainty and can, therefore, be a strategic variable in the accommodation market. I investigate its effect in my second essay. In the first essay, I examined variations in the relative value of monetary and hassle savings with consumption context. In this essay, I investigate whether the value of hassle savings itself varies with consumption context. If it does, the strategic role of features that provide hassle savings to sharing economy customers will also vary for providers. Providers should then invest more in features that provide hassle savings in contexts where they are valued more but can reduce such investments in other contexts. Specifically, my goal is to understand if hosts obtain price premiums for receiving higher ratings from guests and how those premiums vary across consumption contexts, which I operationalize as different types of accommodations and regions within the city. Airbnb guests realize hassle savings by relying on ratings provided by other guests to reduce uncertainty about the features and services of listings. The value of the savings should, therefore, be higher in consumption contexts with greater uncertainty. I hypothesize that uncertainty is likely to be higher under two consumptions contexts. One, where the number of listings in a location is very large. Two, where the number of listings and hence the number of ratings is small. I investigate if these are indeed the patterns by estimating a hedonic model of rental prices for Airbnb listings between April 2016 and October 2017 in the five boroughs of New York City for three types of accommodations: (1) entire – a house or apartment rented in its entirety (2) private – one room in an apartment and (c) shared – an accommodation shared by multiple guests. In each of the borough-type combinations, I assume that listings that receive an average rating of 5.0 are the treatment group and those with ratings of 4.0 – 4.99 are part of the control group. I then use propensity score matching to identify the treatment and control samples for each of the combinations. Estimates of the effect of a higher rating on the price premium are consistent with my hypotheses. Premiums are higher in combinations that have fewer listings or have a large number of listings. Essay 3: Social Relationships as Strategic Variable in the Accommodation-Sharing Market In addition to reviews and ratings (as in Essay 2), an additional source that sharing economy providers have been offering is information on whether the host or any previous buyers of a shared accommodation are acquaintances of a prospective renter. Airbnb, for instance, offers this through a feature called social connections that allows visitors to see only those accommodations reviewed by their friends or friends of friends on Facebook. The feature thus provides hassle savings by reducing uncertainty (perceived risk) and can, therefore, be a strategic variable in the accommodation market. I investigate its effect in my third essay. My empirical analysis involves data on the search and time to the first purchase of a sharing accommodation by those who register on the Airbnb site. I examine two outcomes: (1) whether or not a purchase occurs (2) time to purchase if one occurs. The data includes Airbnb consumer prospects who registered between January 2014 and June 2014. I select consumer prospects who have used social connection feature at least once and use a proportional hazards model to relate time to first purchase to my primary variable of interest – social connections. I operationalize social connections as the number of times that a registered user uses the social connections feature before making the first purchase or terminating the search without a purchase. I also control for the effects of demographics (gender and age), how a registered user first arrived at the Airbnb site (e.g., via a link on Facebook or a search engine), and the number devices she uses for accessing the Airbnb site. I model the occurrence of the purchase/non-purchase of an accommodation as a binary logit related to the same variables and model the two outcomes jointly. My findings indicate a significant effect of social connections in reducing the time to, and increasing the likelihood of, the first purchase. The social connections variable could, however, be endogenous with search time. Those who have friends on Facebook may be more experienced online users and hence, faster in searching and more willing to purchase, online. Additionally, they may be using the social connections feature only because it allows them to see which of their friends may be hosts or had used accommodations they are also considering. I take two approaches to investigate whether these are alternative explanations for my findings. First, I use propensity score matching with visitors who use the social connections feature on Airbnb as the treatment group matched with those who do not use this feature and re-estimate my models on the pooled sample. I use signup method which indicates whether people used Facebook/Google to set up an account on Airbnb before searching for accommodations. I also use age as a matching variable as a proxy for experience with- and interest in- using social media and learning about friends’ activities. Results from this re-estimation are consistent with my findings and indicate that social connections are indeed reducing search time and increasing the likelihood of a purchase. Second, I exploit possible geographic differences in the hassle savings’ value of social connections to validate my findings. Specifically, I hypothesize that the value of hassle savings should be larger when someone is searching internationally rather than domestically in the US since uncertainty should be higher with the former. I therefore re-estimate my model with geographic-specific estimates of the effects of social connections. I do find that the effects are larger both on the time to make the first purchase and on the likelihood of the first purchase for international listings than domestic ones

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

Gender and Social Capital Mediated Technology Adoption

This study explores gender-differentiated benefits from the social capital buildup in technology uptake, and the decision-making patterns of men and women with respect to production, consumption and household task; and allocation of resources. The background research examined women’s role in developing social capital, and research developed a case study of the groundnut producing areas of Maharashtra in western India, and compared ‘with’ and ‘without’ technology situations, and ‘before’ and ‘after’ situations in relation to the package of groundnut production technology introduced in the region in 1987. The paper addresses three aspects: (1) social networks in technology adoption, (2) the gender-based activity pattern, and (3) build-up of social capital leading to improvements in the welfare of farmers and the farming community with a gender perspective. Available evidence suggests substantial differences in networks of men and women, particularly in composition. The evidence suggests that men belong to more formal networks reflecting their employment or occupation status, while women have more informal networks that are centered on family and kin. Findings show that women who are engaged in agriculture and allied activities develop bonding social capital characterized by strong bonds such as that found among family members or among members of an ethnic group. Men who are engaged in agriculture, on the other hand, develop bridging social capital characterized by weaker, less dense but more crosscutting ties such as with farmers, acquaintances, friends from different ethnic groups and friends of friends. Women’s employment opportunities significantly improved with the introduction of technology. Finally, the study concludes that while technology development and exchange can build upon social capital as a means of empowering women, much more needs to be learned about the approaches that foster build-up of social capital.

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

Exploring the Role of Nutrition Education in Reducing Obesity Among the U.S. Adult Population

Obesity is a major concern among the low-income groups, yet the problem lacks adequate awareness. It is observed that the prevalence of obesity in the United States is increasing in the U.S., this paper is focused on obtaining information on low-income participants’ knowledge about consumption of nutritious food and its contribution in preventing obesity. This paper focuses on identifying the steps that participants have been taking to prevent obesity. To reach the goal of this qualitative study two surveys were designed by the researcher. From the study, it was found that majority of the participants were aware that consumption of nutritious food is important for a healthy lifestyle. But it was also found that they had limited access to nutritious food. Hence, there is a need to implement programs that can provide better resources and awareness for low-income groups

DIGITAL FACILITIES UTILIZATION AND COMPUTER SKILLS AMONG SCIENCE AND ARTS STUDENTS

The computer world expanded into each and every sector in the current digital era including the education field and  rapidly targeting students to acquaint computer and digital knowledge not only for entertaining but also to enhance academic skills. The basics of digital technology are in reach of the people through different sources such as smart phones, desktop computers, laptops and tablets. Recently, the curricular and competency levels are gradually incorporating to the students to acquire digital skills by motivating to various modes of pedagogy such as seminars, assignments and project works. The present research was mainly focused on understanding the digital devices owning by the students, studying knowledge levels of computer skills and frequency of utilizing digital services. The study was carried out from the randomly selected college students of both science and arts streams from the university and colleges students located at Tirupati urban. The sample size of the present investigation comprised of 60 students from each stream of science and arts with total sample of 120 members. The findings well demonstrated that absolutely all the students owned the smart phone and surprisingly one third of them were even planned to purchase the new mobile within one year. The data indicated that around one fourth of science students had desktop and tablets and about one tenth in arts students. The computer skills and levels of confidence also noticed at higher levels in science students against their arts students’ counterparts probably the science students regular academic activities might be intricately enabled the basic computer skills. The information gathered from the students strongly highlighted the high frequency utilization of smart phone by students of both streams. Educating students, creating awareness and organizing digital training programmes by colleges will surely helpful to enhance the digital skills among the students and to excel their academic and future career opportunities