Tapping into the ‘standing-reserve’: a comparative analysis of workers’ training programmes in Kolkata and Toronto

This paper examines employment-related training programmes offered by state funded agencies and multinational corporations in Toronto (Canada) and Kolkata (India). In recent years both cities have witnessed a rise in the service sector industries aligned with global regimes of flexible work and the consequent reinvention of a worker subject that is no longer disciplined according to the needs of industrial production. A worker must now be self-regulated, competitive, flexible, with an ability to convey an urbane, English-speaking deportment within the workplace. Training of employees, especially soft skill training becomes crucial in this connection as a form of technology for achieving this end. Based on Martin Heidegger’s conceptualisation of ‘standing-reserve’, we suggest that what training programmes do in the context of neoliberal capitalist production is the creation of an essential quality of human-ness that has to be harnessed, its potentialities tapped and amplified through training. We further suggest that such programmes often remain heavily influenced by race/class/gender hierarchies as well as stereotypical assumptions of desirable/undesirable bodies, forms of socialisation and modes of habitation that often are naturalised in the course of training

Improved and Formal Proposal for Device Independent Quantum Private Query

In this paper, we propose a novel Quantum Private Query (QPQ) scheme with full Device-Independent certification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time we provide such a full DI-QPQ scheme using EPR-pairs. Our proposed scheme exploits self-testing of shared EPR-pairs along with the self-testing of projective measurement operators in a setting where the client and the server do not trust each other. To certify full device independence, we exploit a strategy to self-test a particular class of POVM elements that are used in the protocol. Further, we provide formal security analysis and obtain an upper bound on the maximum cheating probabilities for both the dishonest client as well as the dishonest server.Comment: 33 pages, 2 figure

Cyclotron lines: from magnetic field strength estimators to geometry tracers in neutron stars

With exactly forty years since the discovery of the first cyclotron line in Her X-1, there have been remarkable advancements in the field related to study of the physics of accreting neutron stars -- cyclotron lines have been a major torchbearer in this regard, from being the only direct estimator of the magnetic field strength, a tracer of accretion geometry and an indicator of the emission beam in these systems. The main flurry of activities have centred around studying the harmonic separations, luminosity dependence, pulse phase dependence and more recently the shapes of the line and the trend for long term evolution in the line energy. This article visits the important results related to cyclotron lines since its discovery and reviews their significance. An emphasis is laid on pulse phase resolved spectroscopy and the important clues a joint timing and spectral study in this context can provide, to build a complete picture for the physics of accretion and hence X-ray emission in accreting neutron stars.Comment: Has appeared in Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy special issue on 'Physics of Neutron Stars and related objects', celebrating the 75th birth-year of G. Srinivasa

A form of Schwarz's lemma and a bound for the Kobayashi metric on convex domains

We present a form of Schwarz's lemma for holomorphic maps between convex domains $D_1$ and $D_2$. This result provides a lower bound on the distance between the images of relatively compact subsets of $D_1$ and the boundary of $D_2$. This is a natural improvement of an old estimate by Bernal-Gonz\'alez that takes into account the geometry of $\partial{D_1}$. Using similar techniques, we also provide a new estimate for the Kobayashi metric on bounded convex domains.Comment: 14 pages; minor changes in the introduction; somewhat more economical expositio

Between conformity and contestation: South Asian immigrant women negotiating soft skill training in Canada

In the current Canadian neoliberal labour market, work-related learning and training are considered key strategies for developing workers’ economic productivity as well as expediting their integration to the labour market. An important aspect of such training and learning now consists of soft skills. Yet some scholars are ambivalent about the nature of such soft skill training as their curriculum are often suffused with cultural and racial values geared towards assimilating immigrants of colour to the dominant and normative national culture of the country. This paper further problematizes soft skill training by examining the training/learning experiences of highly educated South Asian women trying to enter the Canadian labour market after immigration. In particular, it highlights these women’s engagement with such soft skill training and their negotiation processes, thereby analyzing their agency in the context of work-related learning