Remembering Daya Krishna and G. C. Pande: Two Giants of Post-Independence Indian Philosophy

Daya Krishna was the public face of Indian philosophy in the first half-century after Indian independence. Nobody on the Indian scene in that period came close to him in influence or in contribution to the profession. Nobody else in the world thought as hard or as fruitfully about the relation of Indian philosophy to that of the rest of the world, and nobody else dared to think as creatively and even as heretically about the history of Indian philosophy itself. This special issue of Philosophy East and West commemorates G. C. Pande and Daya Krishna as philosophers. But we would be remiss if we were not to acknowledge that Pande was also an elegant poet, both in Hindi and in Sanskrit. In this article, the authors have continue the dialogue that Krishna and G. C. Pande initiated between the argumentative and the spiritual, the skeptical-individualistic and the traditional-communitarian styles of thinking, self-critical and culture-sensitive on all the practical and theoretical problems that haunt human rationalities and relationships

Differential regional expression patterns of alpha-synuclein, TNF-alpha, and IL-1beta; and variable status of dopaminergic neurotoxicity in mouse brain after Paraquat treatment

BACKGROUND: Paraquat (1, 1-dimethyl-4, 4-bipyridium dichloride; PQ) causes neurotoxicity, especially dopaminergic neurotoxicity, and is a supposed risk factor for Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms of PQ-induced neurodegeneration are far from clear. Previous studies have shown that PQ induces neuroinflammation and dopaminergic cell loss, but the prime cause of those events is still in debate. METHODS: We examined the neuropathological effects of PQ not only in substantia nigra (SN) but also in frontal cortex (FC) and hippocampus of the progressive mouse (adult Swiss albino) model of PD-like neurodegeneration, using immunohistochemistry, western blots, and histological and biochemical analyses. RESULTS: PQ caused differential patterns of changes in cellular morphology and expression of proteins related to PD and neuroinflammation in the three regions examined (SN, FC and hippocampus). Coincident with behavioral impairment and brain-specific ROS generation, there was differential immunolocalization and decreased expression levels of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) in the three regions, whereas α-synuclein immunopositivity increased in hippocampus, increased in FC and decreased in SN. PQ-induced neuroinflammation was characterized by area-specific changes in localization and appearances of microglial cells with or without activation and increment in expression patterns of tumor necrosis factor-α in the three regions of mouse brain. Expression of interleukin-1β was increased in FC and hippocampus but not significantly changed in SN. CONCLUSION: The present study demonstrates that PQ induces ROS production and differential α-synuclein expression that promotes neuroinflammation in microglia-dependent or -independent manners, and produces different patterns of dopaminergic neurotoxicity in three different regions of mouse brain

An Interface Formalism for Web Services

Web application development using distributed components and web services presents new software integration challenges, because solutions often cross vendor, administrative, and other boundaries across which neither binary nor source code can be shared. We present a methodology that addresses this problem through a formalism for specifying and manipulating behavioral interfaces of multi-threaded open software components that communicate with each other through method calls. An interface constrains both the implementation and the user of a web service to fulfill certain assumptions that are specified by the interface. Our methodology consists of three increasingly expressive classes of interfaces. Signature interfaces specify the methods that can be invoked by the user, together with parameters. Consistency interfaces add propositional constraints, enhancing signature interfaces with the ability to specify choice and causality. Protocol interfaces specify, in addition, temporal ordering constraints on method invocations. We provide approaches to check if two or more interfaces are compatible; if a web service can be safely substituted for another one; and if a web service satisfies a specification that represents a desired behavioral property

Contract Aware Components, 10 years after

The notion of contract aware components has been published roughly ten years ago and is now becoming mainstream in several fields where the usage of software components is seen as critical. The goal of this paper is to survey domains such as Embedded Systems or Service Oriented Architecture where the notion of contract aware components has been influential. For each of these domains we briefly describe what has been done with this idea and we discuss the remaining challenges.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Synthesizing Systems with Optimal Average-Case Behavior for Ratio Objectives

We show how to automatically construct a system that satisfies a given logical specification and has an optimal average behavior with respect to a specification with ratio costs. When synthesizing a system from a logical specification, it is often the case that several different systems satisfy the specification. In this case, it is usually not easy for the user to state formally which system she prefers. Prior work proposed to rank the correct systems by adding a quantitative aspect to the specification. A desired preference relation can be expressed with (i) a quantitative language, which is a function assigning a value to every possible behavior of a system, and (ii) an environment model defining the desired optimization criteria of the system, e.g., worst-case or average-case optimal. In this paper, we show how to synthesize a system that is optimal for (i) a quantitative language given by an automaton with a ratio cost function, and (ii) an environment model given by a labeled Markov decision process. The objective of the system is to minimize the expected (ratio) costs. The solution is based on a reduction to Markov Decision Processes with ratio cost functions which do not require that the costs in the denominator are strictly positive. We find an optimal strategy for these using a fractional linear program.Comment: In Proceedings iWIGP 2011, arXiv:1102.374