PROPERTY CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WTP AND WTA

It is well known in Environmental Economics that payment offered on the Willingness to Pay (WTP) principle is much smaller than the compensation demanded on the Willingness to Accept (WTA) principle. Payment under WTP goes into the environment and is communally enjoyed, whereas compensation under WTA goes into one’s bank account. Public goods/benefits are valued less than private goods/benefits, due to technical reasons, as well as ‘pure property consciousness’. This explains why WTP is much less than WTA. It is suggested here that the ratio of WTP to WTA can be taken as an index of socialisation of property consciousness. A value of zero would indicate complete individualism, while a value of 1 would indicate an indifference between public and private forms of enjoyment of environmental benefits. It is interesting to note that this ratio is generally less than ½, (95% confidence interval: 0.8 £ q £ 0.38). The measure has a wide range of application. It can be derived from the difference in valuation of any quasi public good that can also be privately supplied and enjoyed. And its measurement may throw light on the failures and successes of co- operative/public/collective property based experiments.Willingness to Pay, Willingness to Accept, Property consciousness, Socialisation

Globalisation and the National Market

Globalisation is likely adversely impact the traditional classes. It also threatens to destroy national market, from which stems the bargaining power of the traditional classes.In spite of this, the paper suggests that the response to globalisation in India has necessarily to be discordant. It argues that the state will be unable to oppose globalisation due to the strategic need for economic growth, new technology, military knowhow, and ultimately the survival of India as a nation. Hence the society must protect itself from globalisation, independently of the positions of the Indian state. The paper argues that class actions will primarily protect the special interests of different classes, but may fail to protect the national market. Yet, since the national market is the basis of the independence of the national classes, it needs to be protected at all costs. For this, a socio-cultural mobilisation to protect the national market is required. The struggle to conserve cultural barriers to the national market is a common struggle of all national classes. However, this struggle can be informed by a knowledge of the labour content of different items sold to the consumers. Protection of the national market from globalisation is urgent, and its loss may put the Indian people at the mercy of forces beyond their national borders and political control.Globalisation, National Market, Capital, Labour, Culture, Labour Theory of Value, Karl Marx

Manufacturing Growth and Liberalisation in India (1960-1999): A Demand Side Analysis

The trend in manufacturing has not shifted post-91. Liberalisation shares in the high trend phase in manufacturing, that was ushered in after 1981, which continued even after 1991. Liberalisation however, seems to have changed the structure of demand responses of manufacturing output. In contrast to pre-liberalisation years, after 1991, manufacturing growth seems to have become highly sensitive to growth in personal consumption expenditure. After 1991, a one percentage point increase in personal consumption expenditure seems to change manufacturing growth by nearly 2 percentage points! Liberalisation also seems to have increased the responsiveness of manufacturing growth to fluctuations in growth of gross capital formation and exports. However, the increase in responsiveness to changes in export growth is not statistically significant.Liberalisation, Indian Manufacturing, Demand-side analysis, personal consumption, exports, Keynesian Economics

Cloud Index Tracking: Enabling Predictable Costs in Cloud Spot Markets

Cloud spot markets rent VMs for a variable price that is typically much lower than the price of on-demand VMs, which makes them attractive for a wide range of large-scale applications. However, applications that run on spot VMs suffer from cost uncertainty, since spot prices fluctuate, in part, based on supply, demand, or both. The difficulty in predicting spot prices affects users and applications: the former cannot effectively plan their IT expenditures, while the latter cannot infer the availability and performance of spot VMs, which are a function of their variable price. To address the problem, we use properties of cloud infrastructure and workloads to show that prices become more stable and predictable as they are aggregated together. We leverage this observation to define an aggregate index price for spot VMs that serves as a reference for what users should expect to pay. We show that, even when the spot prices for individual VMs are volatile, the index price remains stable and predictable. We then introduce cloud index tracking: a migration policy that tracks the index price to ensure applications running on spot VMs incur a predictable cost by migrating to a new spot VM if the current VM's price significantly deviates from the index price.Comment: ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 201

Innate immunity and neuroinflammation

Copyright © 2013 Abhishek Shastri et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Inflammation of central nervous system (CNS) is usually associated with trauma and infection. Neuroinflammation occurs in close relation to trauma, infection, and neurodegenerative diseases. Low-level neuroinflammation is considered to have beneficial effects whereas chronic neuroinflammation can be harmful. Innate immune system consisting of pattern-recognition receptors, macrophages, and complement system plays a key role in CNS homeostasis following injury and infection. Here, we discuss how innate immune components can also contribute to neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration

A rare cryptic translation product is presented by Kb major histocompatibility complex class I molecule to alloreactive T cells.

The identity of allogeneic peptide/major histocompatibility complex (MHC) complexes that elicit vigorous T cell responses has remained an interesting problem for both practical and theoretical reasons. Although a few abundant MHC class I-bound peptides have been purified and sequenced, identifying the unique T cell-stimulating peptides from among the thousands of existing peptides is still a very difficult undertaking. In this report, we identified the antigenic peptide that is recognized by an alloreactive bm1 anti-B6 T cell clone using a novel genetic strategy that is based upon measurement of T cell receptor occupancy in single T cells. Using lacZ-inducible T cells as a probe, we screened a splenic cDNA library in transiently transfected antigen-presenting cells (APCs) and isolated a cDNA clone that allowed expression of the appropriate peptide/Kb MHC complex in APC. The antigenic octapeptide (SVVEFSSL) exactly matched the consensus Kb MHC motif, but was surprisingly encoded by a non-ATG defined translation reading frame. Furthermore, the abundance of the naturally processed analog in untransfected cells was estimated to be <10 copies per cell. These results illustrate a novel strategy for identifying T cell-stimulating antigens in general and directly show that alloreactive T cells can respond to rather rare peptide/MHC complexes. These results also suggest that the total pool of processed peptides expressed on the APC surface may include those generated by cryptic translation of normally expressed transcripts