Gender Equity in Education: A Review of Trends and Factors

This review paper draws on recent data to map the access and participation rates of girls relative to boys. This paper offers a critical assessment of findings of different recent researches on school education in India identifying the areas that need further research. The paper reveals that while enrolment of girls has increased rapidly since the 1990s, there is still a substantial gap in upper primary and secondary schooling and gender inequalities interlock with other forms of social inequality, notably caste, ethnicity and religion. The paper concludes with recommendation for implementation of enabling policy to meet the challenges for improving the quality of schools ensuring better opportunities for girls at higher levels of education, notably upper primary and secondary schools

VEWS: A Wikipedia Vandal Early Warning System

We study the problem of detecting vandals on Wikipedia before any human or known vandalism detection system reports flagging potential vandals so that such users can be presented early to Wikipedia administrators. We leverage multiple classical ML approaches, but develop 3 novel sets of features. Our Wikipedia Vandal Behavior (WVB) approach uses a novel set of user editing patterns as features to classify some users as vandals. Our Wikipedia Transition Probability Matrix (WTPM) approach uses a set of features derived from a transition probability matrix and then reduces it via a neural net auto-encoder to classify some users as vandals. The VEWS approach merges the previous two approaches. Without using any information (e.g. reverts) provided by other users, these algorithms each have over 85% classification accuracy. Moreover, when temporal recency is considered, accuracy goes to almost 90%. We carry out detailed experiments on a new data set we have created consisting of about 33K Wikipedia users (including both a black list and a white list of editors) and containing 770K edits. We describe specific behaviors that distinguish between vandals and non-vandals. We show that VEWS beats ClueBot NG and STiki, the best known algorithms today for vandalism detection. Moreover, VEWS detects far more vandals than ClueBot NG and on average, detects them 2.39 edits before ClueBot NG when both detect the vandal. However, we show that the combination of VEWS and ClueBot NG can give a fully automated vandal early warning system with even higher accuracy.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD Conference of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2015

Economic development as design: Insight and guidance through the PSI framework

Economic development is aimed at improving the lives of people in the developing world, and needs to be carried out with design at its heart, but this has often not been the case. This paper first reviews dominant approaches to economic development including the use of subsidies or the creation of markets and demand and the testing of initiatives using randomized control trials. It then introduces ‘development engineering’ as a representative engineering design approach to engineering and technology in development before presenting the view that successful development needs to involve continual learning through innovation in context. The PSI (problem social institutional) framework is presented as a basis for guiding such development as a design activity, and its application is illustrated using examples from India of the unsuccessful introduction of new cooking stoves and then both successful and unsuccessful approaches to rural electrification. A 2-level approach to PSI is taken, in which the lower level represents daily operation of communities and the 2nd level represents the development project including addressing misalignments between the different PSI spaces and levels

Coproducing universal primary education in a context of social exclusion : households, community organisations and state administration in a district of Karnataka, India

This thesis focuses on the challenge of achieving the goal of universal primary education in a context that is characterised by wide-ranging disparities in the education prospects of different social groups. An overall history of state failure to provide for universal education, and the patterns of exclusion and deprivation that constrain the participation of large sections of Indian rural populations provide the background to recent policy efforts to address the problem of low education participation. The thesis argues that concerted effort is required on the part of households and of the state if future efforts to achieve Universal Primary Education (UPE) are to be more successful than the past. It analyses new approaches which recognise the importance of challenging inequality in access to education, the role of community organisations in the process of stimulating participation in education, and the need for the reform of the administrative apparatus of the state into a more responsive, flexible institution. The coproduction framework facilitates the analysis of the means through which different institutional actors can co-operate in the production of goods and services. Recognition of the importance of social norms and networks that aid co-operation between different actors, and of the importance of effective governance on the part of the state in constructing positive relations between different actors are the strengths of the framework. However, the framework also has limitations. The thesis principally identifies the following: the assumption of shared orientations between users about the value of the good or service concerned, and the implicit assumption of homogeneity among service users and lack of attention paid to inequality and exclusion. Further, the thesis argues that there is insufficient empirical attention to the informal relations within which processes of implementation are embedded. Evidence of limitations is provided through application to a rural district, where the interface between state, community organisations and households in relation to primary education services is studied. Centrally, the thesis argues that the analysis of norms that perpetuate the reproduction of patterns of education exclusion is essential to identify the types of production processes and relationships that are necessary for inclusive and universal education

‘If You Build It, Will They Come?’:

Summaries Primary schooling is considered in policy circles to be an effective means to enhance the income and welfare of poor households, with particularly high returns for girls. Education achievement in India has, however, been slow, suggesting that the behaviour of poor households does not yet reflect the confidence of projections of high rates of return to primary education. Investigations into these factors have suggested that poverty, the opportunity cost of children's labour and entrenched social and cultural norms which give rise to inequality of caste, class and gender, are some of the factors constraining poor boys and girls from gaining access to education. Based on interviews with poor men and women in one village in southern India, this article reviews the reasons why parents do not send their children to school, and how household decision?making reflects both flexible responses to changing material circumstances in a drought?prone area, as well as rigid and non?negotiable responses to social norms. The operation of gender ideologies within household management strategies is particularly highlighted

Applying Chaotic Advection to Rheology: an In Situ Structuring Rheometer

A prototype In Situ Structuring Rheometer (ISSR) was designed and implemented to study changes in shear viscosity of polymer blends and composites while processing them in such a way as to control the evolution of microstructure. The ISSR is based on a regime of fluid mechanics known as chaotic advection, in which simple time-periodic flow fields can cause fluid particles to move chaotically. Chaotic advection is also the basis of Smart Blending, a technology employed to process polymer blends having a variety of morphologies at a fixed composition, and polymer composites in which the additives have been arranged into layered structures or networks. Smart Blending has been implemented as batch devices or continuous flow devices, with a device of the former type providing the basis for the ISSR. Designed as a test cell to be fitted into a commercial instrument so as to leverage its measurement capability, the core of the ISSR is a cylindrical blending cavity the end surfaces of which are formed by rotatable disks which induce stirring. While the upper disk is an attachment for the commercial instrument, the lower disk has an independent drive system. The ISSR also includes a heating chamber, temperature control systems and a purge gas system. Alternate counter-rotation of the disks through an appropriate displacement leads to a chaotic flow. The design of the ISSR and experiments conducted using it were guided by modeling. The result is that even as the microstructure in the sample is being controllably formed, the shear viscosity is measured each time the upper disk rotates. In contrast, conventional rheometry using a parallel-plate or cone-plate test cell involves mixing materials as melts beforehand, with a polymer blend usually having a droplet morphology and a composite usually having the additive randomly dispersed throughout the polymer matrix. Three types of systems were processed and studied using the ISSR. At least three samples of each system were processed to different extents, cryogenically fractured and examined using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). By so doing, the trends in viscosity were related to progressive structure development, which is the controlled evolution and retention of particular blend and composite morphologies, as has been documented in previous chaotic advection blending studies. The first system was a compatible blend of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE), for which the viscosity initially rose and eventually reached a plateau, which was consistent with a model that showed no change in viscosity with the number of layers. Blend samples at different stages of processing showed the initial formation of layers and the development of nanoscale features as these layers refined. The second system was a composite of linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) and carbon black (CB), for which the shear viscosity slowly decreased with continued processing. Micrographs indicated that the carbon black initially formed coarse striations and may have subsequently formed networks, as was observed in previous studies using related chaotic advection blending devices. The third system, an immiscible blend of LDPE and polypropylene (PP), exhibited a nearly constant viscosity. Repeatability of viscosity data was an issue for all three systems. Several problems with this prototype were identified as potential factors: misalignment of the cavity components, sample leakage, temperature cycling of the sample, and coordination of disk motions. To address these problems, it is recommended that the cavity seal be improved, the temperature control systems studied more thoroughly, and the disk motions coordinated automatically in a future ISSR

Autonomous Women\u27s Movement in Kerala: Historiography

This paper traces the historical evolution of the women’s movement in the southernmost Indian state of Kerala and explores the related social contexts. It also compares the women’s movement in Kerala with its North Indian and international counterparts. An attempt is made to understand how feminist activities on the local level differ from the larger scenario with regard to their nature, causes, and success. Mainstream history writing has long neglected women’s history, just as women have been denied authority in the process of knowledge production. The Kerala Model and the politically triggered society of the state, with its strong Marxist party, alienated women and overlooked women’s work, according to feminist critique. This paper seeks to ascertain the unique kind of feminism in Kerala under such prevailing social conditions