Gopal Krishna Gokhale

"Reprinted from the Fergusson College Magazine [July, 1915]"Mode of access: Internet

River basin development and management

In Molden, David (Ed.). Water for food, water for life: a Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. London, UK: Earthscan; Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute (IWMI)

Dissecting biological “dark matter” with single-cell genetic analysis of rare and uncultivated TM7 microbes from the human mouth

We have developed a microfluidic device that allows the isolation and genome amplification of individual microbial cells, thereby enabling organism-level genomic analysis of complex microbial ecosystems without the need for culture. This device was used to perform a directed survey of the human subgingival crevice and to isolate bacteria having rod-like morphology. Several isolated microbes had a 16S rRNA sequence that placed them in candidate phylum TM7, which has no cultivated or sequenced members. Genome amplification from individual TM7 cells allowed us to sequence and assemble >1,000 genes, providing insight into the physiology of members of this phylum. This approach enables single-cell genetic analysis of any uncultivated minority member of a microbial community

Complete genome sequence of Vibrio fischeri: A symbiotic bacterium with pathogenic congeners

Vibrio fischeri belongs to the Vibrionaceae, a large family of marine γ-proteobacteria that includes several dozen species known to engage in a diversity of beneficial or pathogenic interactions with animal tissue. Among the small number of pathogenic Vibrio species that cause human diseases are Vibrio cholerae, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, and Vibrio vulnificus, the only members of the Vibrionaceae that have had their genome sequences reported. Nonpathogenic members of the genus Vibrio, including a number of beneficial symbionts, make up the majority of the Vibrionaceae, but none of these species has been similarly examined. Here we report the genome sequence of V. fischeri ES114, which enters into a mutualistic symbiosis in the light organ of the bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes. Analysis of this sequence has revealed surprising parallels with V. cholerae and other pathogens

Delta lake: high-performance ACID table storage over cloud object stores

Cloud object stores such as Amazon S3 are some of the largest and most cost-effective storage systems on the planet, making them an attractive target to store large data warehouses and data lakes. Unfortunately, their implementation as key-value stores makes it difficult to achieve ACID transactions and high performance: metadata operations such as listing objects are expensive, and consistency guarantees are limited. In this paper, we present Delta Lake, an open source ACID table storage layer over cloud object stores initially developed at Databricks. Delta Lake uses a transaction log that is compacted into Apache Parquet format to provide ACID properties, time travel, and significantly faster metadata operations for large tabular datasets (e.g., the ability to quickly search billions of table partitions for those relevant to a query). It also leverages this design to provide high-level features such as automatic data layout optimization, upserts, caching, and audit logs. Delta Lake tables can be accessed from Apache Spark, Hive, Presto, Redshift and other systems. Delta Lake is deployed at thousands of Databricks customers that process exabytes of data per day, with the largest instances managing exabyte-scale datasets and billions of objects

Development-induced displacement and women: the case of the Tehri dam, India

Large-scale development projects often result in massive displacement of population. Based on an ethnographic study of the people displaced by the Tehri dam in India, the present paper examines the impact of displacement on women and demonstrates that their experiences of displacement and resettlement are qualitatively different from those of men. Displacement not only results in physical dislocation, but also in women's disempowerment. Resettlement policies and programmes, in the Indian context, have largely remained gender biased and fail to take into account the differential experiences of women, making resettlement a difficult process for them. I argue for a better understanding of women's experiences of development-induced dislocation and a subsequent refocusing of policy