Marital Violence and Women's Employment and Property Status: Evidence from North Indian Villages

Dominant development policy approaches recommend women's employment on the grounds that it facilitates their empowerment, which in turn is believed to be instrumental in enhancing women's well-being. However, empirical work on the relationship between women's employment status and their well-being as measured by freedom from marital violence yields an ambiguous picture. Motivated by this ambiguity, this paper draws on testimonies of men and women and data gathered from rural Uttar Pradesh, to examine the effect of women's employment and asset status as measured by their participation in paid work and their ownership of property, respectively, on spousal violence. Unlike the existing literature, we treat women's work status and violence as simultaneously determined and find that women's engagement in paid work and ownership of property, are associated with sharp reductions in marital violence.domestic violence, employment status, property ownership, India

STATISTICAL METHODS FOR INFERRING GENETIC REGULATION ACROSS HETEROGENEOUS SAMPLES AND MULTIMODAL DATA

As clinical datasets have increased in size and a wider range of molecular profiles can be credibly measured, understanding sources of heterogeneity has become critical in studying complex phenotypes. Here, we investigate and develop statistical approaches to address and analyze technical variation, genetic diversity, and tissue heterogeneity in large biological datasets. Commercially available methods for normalization of NanoString nCounter RNA expression data are suboptimal in fully addressing unwanted technical variation. First, we develop a more comprehensive quality control, normalization, and validation framework for nCounter data, benchmark it against existing normalization methods for nCounter, and show its advantages on four datasets of differing sample sizes. We then develop race-specific and genetic ancestry-adjusted tumor transcriptomic prediction models from germline genetics in the Carolina Breast Cancer Study (CBCS) and study the performance of these models across ancestral groups and molecular subtypes. These models are employed in a transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) to identify four novel genetic loci associated with breast-cancer specific survival. Next, we extend TWAS to a novel suite of tools, MOSTWAS, to prioritize distal genetic variation in transcriptomic predictive models with two multi-omic approaches that draw from mediation analysis. We empirically show the utility of these extensions in simulation analyses, TCGA breast cancer data, and ROS/MAP brain tissue data. We develop a novel distal-SNPs added-last test, to be used with MOSTWAS models, to prioritize distal loci that give added information, beyond the association in the local locus around a gene. Lastly, we develop DeCompress, a deconvolution method from gene expression from targeted RNA panels such as NanoString, which have a much smaller feature space than traditional RNA expression assays. We propose an ensemble approach that leverages compressed sensing to expand the feature space and validate it on data from the CBCS. We conduct extensive benchmarking of existing deconvolution methods using simulated in-silico experiments, pseudo-targeted panels from published mixing experiments, and data from the CBCS to show the advantage of DeCompress over reference-free methods. We lastly show the utility of in-silico cell-type proportion estimation in outcome prediction and eQTL mapping.Doctor of Philosoph

Early clinical exposure to first year medical students through case-based learning in endocrine physiology

Background:As per the Medical Council of India’s Vision-2015 document, coordinated inter-departmental efforts should be undertaken to provide early clinical exposure and to develop communication skills among medical students during the first year of Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) course. For this reason, this inter-departmental study was undertaken, to provide early clinical exposure while teaching endocrine physiology to first-year medical students. Case based learning (CBL) was used as an add-on to traditional didactic lectures (TDLs) for teaching endocrine physiology to first-year undergraduate medical students to compare the cognitive domain scores in pre CBL and post CBL tests.Methods: After getting permissions from the Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) and other institutional authorities for conducting the study, the objectives of the study were explained to first year MBBS students. Written informed consent was taken from students (n=59) who were willing to participate in the study. After delivering regular TDLs on endocrine physiology as per topics in the syllabus, a pre CBL test was conducted. Subsequently, the participating students were simultaneously exposed to case scenarios related to the endocrine system by the same facilitator. A post CBL test (identical to pre CBL test) was administered to compare the cognitive domain scores.Results: Statistically significant differences were found in the student wise and question wise scores in the pre and post tests.Conclusions: Early clinical exposure of a relatively larger batch of students to CBL by the same facilitator was found to increase cognitive domain scores.

Timing of Communication

Using an experiment, we demonstrate that a communication regime where a worker communicates about his intended effort is less effective in i) soliciting truthful information, and ii) motivating effort, than a regime where he communicates about his past effort. Our experiment uses a real-effort task, which additionally allows us to demonstrate the effects of communication on effort over time. We show that the timing of communication affects the dynamic pattern of work. In both treatments, individuals are most cooperative closest to the time of communication. Our results reveal that the timing of communication is a critical feature that merits attention in the design of mechanisms for information transmission in strategic settings. JEL: C72, C91, D83 Keywords: cheap talk, asymmetric information, lying Across a wide range of settings, agents take actions which are not observable by their strategic counterparts. In these situations, the interacting parties often communicate to overcome the informational asymmetry that results from hidden action. Over the last decade, a large literature has analyzed these environments focusing on the effect of pre-play communication on static choices. These papers have established that statements of intent or non-binding promises can be informative and increase cooperation in social dilemmas

Magnetotransport properties of individual InAs nanowires

We probe the magnetotransport properties of individual InAs nanowires in a field effect transistor geometry. In the low magnetic field regime we observe magnetoresistance that is well described by the weak localization (WL) description in diffusive conductors. The weak localization correction is modified to weak anti-localization (WAL) as the gate voltage is increased. We show that the gate voltage can be used to tune the phase coherence length ($l_\phi$) and spin-orbit length ($l_{so}$) by a factor of $\sim$ 2. In the high field and low temperature regime we observe the mobility of devices can be modified significantly as a function of magnetic field. We argue that the role of skipping orbits and the nature of surface scattering is essential in understanding high field magnetotransport in nanowires

Teams promise but do not deliver

Individuals and two-person teams play a hidden-action trust game with pre-play communication. We replicate previous results for individuals that non-binding promises increase cooperation rates, but this does not extend to teams. While teams promise to cooperate at the same rate as individuals, they consistently renege on those promises. Additional treatments begin to explore the basis for team behavior. We rule out explanations hypothesizing that concern for partner's payoff drives team outcomes, as absent within-team communication, promise fulfillment rates increase compared to individuals. Rather, the results are consistent with the idea that communication between teammates provides support for self-serving behavior

Injecting drug users in India: Understanding sexual behaviours and sexual networks to design effective behaviour change strategies

The practice of injecting drug use has been spreading to different parts of India since the early 1980s and is associated with an increase in HIV prevalence rates. Injecting drug users (IDUs) engage in both risky injection and sexual practices that increase the risk for HIV transmission. While risky injection practices are well understood, there is limited understanding of IDUs’ sexual behaviors and social networks. The Population Council conducted a cross-sectional study to explore patterns of risky sexual behaviors, sexual network characteristics, and drivers of high-risk behaviors of IDUs in Delhi and Imphal. The contrasting settings were selected to allow for differences in social and behavioral characteristics that influence the HIV epidemic. Researchers conducted a study with current IDUs who had used nonprescription intravenous drugs in the past six months and were over 16 years of age. The study, conducted in one high- and one low-HIV-prevalence state, suggests that two different drug-use patterns are shaping the HIV epidemic. These differences, as noted in this brief, require a varied approach to addressing HIV prevention

Proteome-wide Mendelian randomization in global biobank meta-analysis reveals multi-ancestry drug targets for common diseases

Proteome-wide Mendelian randomization (MR) shows value in prioritizing drug targets in Europeans but with limited evidence in other ancestries. Here, we present a multi-ancestry proteome-wide MR analysis based on cross-population data from the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative (GBMI). We estimated the putative causal effects of 1,545 proteins on eight diseases in African (32,658) and European (1,219,993) ancestries and identified 45 and 7 protein-disease pairs with MR and genetic colocalization evidence in the two ancestries, respectively. A multi-ancestry MR comparison identified two protein-disease pairs with MR evidence in both ancestries and seven pairs with specific effects in the two ancestries separately. Integrating these MR signals with clinical trial evidence, we prioritized 16 pairs for investigation in future drug trials. Our results highlight the value of proteome-wide MR in informing the generalizability of drug targets for disease prevention across ancestries and illustrate the value of meta-analysis of biobanks in drug development

Nanocolumnar Crystalline Vanadium Oxide-Molybdenum Oxide Antireflective Smart Thin Films with Superior Nanomechanical Properties

Vanadium oxide-molybdenum oxide (VO-MO) thin (21-475 nm) films were grown on quartz and silicon substrates by pulsed RF magnetron sputtering technique by altering the RF power from 100 to 600 W. Crystalline VO-MO thin films showed the mixed phases of vanadium oxides e.g., V2O5, V2O3 and VO2 along with MoO3. Reversible or smart transition was found to occur just above the room temperature i.e., at similar to 45-50 degrees C. The VO-MO films deposited on quartz showed a gradual decrease in transmittance with increase in film thickness. But, the VO-MO films on silicon exhibited reflectance that was significantly lower than that of the substrate. Further, the effect of low temperature (i.e., 100 degrees C) vacuum (10(-5) mbar) annealing on optical properties e.g., solar absorptance, transmittance and reflectance as well as the optical constants e.g., optical band gap, refractive index and extinction coefficient were studied. Sheet resistance, oxidation state and nanomechanical properties e.g., nanohardness and elastic modulus of the VO-MO thin films were also investigated in as-deposited condition as well as after the vacuum annealing treatment. Finally, the combination of the nanoindentation technique and the finite element modeling (FEM) was employed to investigate yield stress and von Mises stress distribution of the VO-MO thin films