Making Visible the Invisible: An Analytical Elucidation of Tishani’s Poems

Tishani Doshi channels her unique potential into her creative work as a scholarly Indian poet, passionate artist and astounding dancer. She converts dexterously the bitter realities of life into words and scatters literary gems liberally in her poetic realm. Her ‘overlapping concerns’ through creative writing (poems, novels) and rhythmic movements make her subsequent career unparalleled. Although Tishani is deft to articulate her literary caliber through poetry and novel both, yet poetry provides her the nuts and bolts of expressing the abstract feelings into words with concrete images.  Her poems leave indelible impression upon the mind of the reader. The minimal words of poems contain plethora of philosophy and provide the possibilities to widen our imagination. She dares to ponder over umpteen baffling questions related to pre-natal existence, post mortal destination, our real abode etc. While pouring out her bubbling genuine notions particularly in poems, she appears to unwrap life’s those mysteries which remain incomprehensible or unrevealed for a layman. Through her treasure trove of poetry, she temps us to fumble the hidden philosophy regarding isolation, crisis of identity, nostalgia, rootlessness and nervous exhaustion with fluctuation of moody unhappiness. What makes the poems worth reading is the coating of spiritual belief and mysticism upon them. The comprehensive analytical articulation represents conspicuously the screeching of an alienated soul yearning for a perennial settlement in this cosmos

Performance Analysis of OFDM Transceiver using GMSK Modulation Technique

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing is one of the most arising technologies for digital communication. An OFDM signal is the addition of many individual signals modulated over a group of orthogonal subcarriers with same bandwidth. Because of its high robustness against interference, this technology becomes fundamental for modern wireless standards. In the proposed paper, OFDM is implemented using Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying encoding technique. The bit error rate (BER) performance has been evaluated in AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise) channel. The system performance has been interpreted by using BER Vs SNR plot

SYNTHESIS AND CHARACTERIZATION OF DOXORUBICIN CARRYING CETUXIMAB-PAMAM DENDRIMER BIOCONJUGATES

A tumor targeted dendrimer based drug delivery system was designed and synthesized to carry chemotherapy drug doxorubicin. Polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimer G4.5 was chosen as the underlying carrier. Anionic G4.5 is a good option for drug delivery as it consists of 128 surface groups, is less cytotoxic and favorably biodistributed. The delivery system was synthesized using a layer-by layer arrangement of three functional entities: chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, monoclonal antibody Cetuximab against EGF receptor, and polyethylene glycol (PEG). Doxorubicin was attached via an acid-sensitive hydrazon linkage to the dendrimer. Macromolecules are taken in by cells through endocytosis. pH inside the early endosomes to lysosomes ranges from pH 6 to 4.5. These acidic conditions are favorable for release of drug bound to the dendrimer vehicle through acid-sensitive linkage. 35% of all solid tumors of brain express exceptionally high EGF receptors whereas normal brain tumors express less EGFR. This makes the EGFR a potent targeting moiety for targeted drug delivery. Cetuximab will serve as a targeting ligand to help the delivery system target tumor cells. PEG was incorporated as a linker between Cetuximab and dendrimer to avoid reticuloendothelial system (RES) uptake of the system, increase biocompatibility, increase drug half-life and other shortcomings associated with nanomaterials. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), fluorescence anisotropy, and western blotting were used to confirm the conjugation of PEG, doxorubicin and cetuximab to the dendrimer. The synthesized delivery system was characterized using ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis) to approximate the number of doxorubicin attached. Dynamic light scattering (DLS) and zeta potential were used to analyze the change in size and surface properties of dendrimer during the synthesis. Doxorubicin release studies were conducted at different pHs. Maximum doxorubicin was released at pH 4.5 indicating the successful acid-sensitive linkage between the drug and dendrimer. Cytotoxicity studies indicated that the addition of PEG increased the biocompatibility as compared to free doxorubicin whereas; combination of doxorubicin and cetuximab exerted a significant toxic effect over a period of 72 hours. The cellular uptake of the delivery system was higher than that of free doxorubicin. Free DOX localized mainly in the nucleus whereas, CTX-G4.5-PEG-DOX conjugate localized within both cytoplasm and nucleus after 6 hour incubation. The synthesized delivery system represents a potential targeted drug delivery system

“From caged birds to women with wings”: A perspective on consumption practices of new middle-class Indian women

Purpose – This study aims to explore consumption practices of new middle-class Indian women to explicate how they are challenging traditional social norms and redefining their identity through their consumption practices.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 32 semi-structured and photo-elicitation interviews were conducted with new middle-class women between the age group of 23 and 40 years in India.Findings – This study illustrates how the doing of consumption practices that involve creating, controlling, knowing and transforming is enabling new middle-class Indian women to undo gender disparities embedded in hegemonic patriarchal social order. Also, the study provides new insights into how class and symbolic capital intersect gender to redefine middle-class women’s feminine self.Research limitations/implications – This study specifically illustrates how new middle-class women are using consumption practices to uplift their position in household; bring about new modes of social interface; and identity expression and a reversal in gender roles.Practical implications – The conflation of women’s independence with consumerism underlines the need for marketers to position consumer goods in a manner that strengthens women’s self and alleviates cultural perceptions of women as subordinate to men in the household. Indian market has considerable growth potential for publicly visible brands that affirm the elevated social status of women and allow them to effectively demonstrate their capital resources.Originality/value – An under-researched consumer segment is explored by focusing particularly on the intersection of discourses of women’s individuality with that of their consumption practices. Additionally, pioneering use of photo-elicitation technique coupled with hermeneutic approach enabled to elicit effectively women’s reflections on their behaviours, values and motivations underlying their consumption practices

Conceptualising the panic buying phenomenon during COVID-19 as an affective assemblage

Purpose-This study aims to conceptualise the panic buying behaviour of consumers in the UK during the novel COVID-19 crisis, using the assemblage approach as it is non-deterministic and relational and affords new ways of understanding the phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach-The study undertakes a digital ethnography approach and content analysis of Twitter data. A total of 6,803 valid tweets were collected over the perio

Data Augmentation for Mental Health Classification on Social Media

The mental disorder of online users is determined using social media posts. The major challenge in this domain is to avail the ethical clearance for using the user generated text on social media platforms. Academic re searchers identified the problem of insufficient and unlabeled data for mental health classification. To handle this issue, we have studied the effect of data augmentation techniques on domain specific user generated text for mental health classification. Among the existing well established data augmentation techniques, we have identified Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), conditional BERT, and Back Translation (BT) as the potential techniques for generating additional text to improve the performance of classifiers. Further, three different classifiers Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Logistic Regression (LR) are employed for analyzing the impact of data augmentation on two publicly available social media datasets. The experiments mental results show significant improvements in classifiers performance when trained on the augmented data.Comment: 1

Explainable Causal Analysis of Mental Health on Social Media Data

With recent developments in Social Computing, Natural Language Processing and Clinical Psychology, the social NLP research community addresses the challenge of automation in mental illness on social media. A recent extension to the problem of multi-class classification of mental health issues is to identify the cause behind the user's intention. However, multi-class causal categorization for mental health issues on social media has a major challenge of wrong prediction due to the overlapping problem of causal explanations. There are two possible mitigation techniques to solve this problem: (i) Inconsistency among causal explanations/ inappropriate human-annotated inferences in the dataset, (ii) in-depth analysis of arguments and stances in self-reported text using discourse analysis. In this research work, we hypothesise that if there exists the inconsistency among F1 scores of different classes, there must be inconsistency among corresponding causal explanations as well. In this task, we fine tune the classifiers and find explanations for multi-class causal categorization of mental illness on social media with LIME and Integrated Gradient (IG) methods. We test our methods with CAMS dataset and validate with annotated interpretations. A key contribution of this research work is to find the reason behind inconsistency in accuracy of multi-class causal categorization. The effectiveness of our methods is evident with the results obtained having category-wise average scores of $81.29 \%$ and $0.906$ using cosine similarity and word mover's distance, respectively

Avatar Taxonomy: A New Technological Tool to Enhance the Consumer-Brand Relationships

PurposeAvatars, which are used as a technology and marketing tactic, can embody consumer-facing employees and mimic their real-life roles on companies' websites, thereby playing a key role in enhancing the relationships between consumers and brands in the online environment. Academics and practitioners have increasingly acknowledged the significance of the consumer-brand relationship in both traditional and online contexts. However, the impersonal nature of the online environment is considered to be a hindrance to the development of these relationships. Despite the importance of this technology, little attention has been paid to the investigation of the avatar concept from a marketing perspective. This paper explores the nature of the avatar concept, including its main characteristics, dimensions, and conditions as well as the attitudinal and behavioural consequences of avatar users.Design/methodology/approachAdopting the qualitative design, a taxonomy was developed from interviews. In total, 42 interviews were conducted with current university students. 30 participants participated in the exploratory interviews. A total of 12 interviews were conducted during the in-depth stage based on findings in the preceding research.FindingsBased on the qualitative data analysis, a taxonomy was developed. The idea of the taxonomy is summarized in that different dimensions of the avatar are considered the main base (first phase) of the taxonomy. There are consequential three parts: the attitudinal consequences related to the website; the attitudinal consequences related to the brand; the behaviours towards the brand. These behaviours represent the final phase of the taxonomy.Originality/valueBy developing a taxonomy of using avatars on brands' websites, the authors advance the understanding consumer-brands relationships. Using avatars' verbal interactions helps in shaping consumers' cognitive, affective, attitudinal and behavioural responses and add vital empirical evidence to the increasing body of research and practices involving avatar usage in the interactive marketing area

Archaeological tourism : a creative approach

This theoretical paper conceptualises the role of tourism providers in facilitating creative tourism experiences by focusing on their ingenious enterprise, which we argue can help capture the tourism potential of intangible archaeological heritage. Intangible archaeological heritage can be understood as knowledge emanating from actors’ own interpretation of archaeological sites that have either become physically inaccessible or been destroyed since initial exploration. Archaeological heritage is often equated with tangibility, which results in an omission of experiences that intangible archaeological heritage can offer. By proposing a rethinking of the archaeological tourism framework, we argue that the touristic value of both tangible and intangible archaeological heritage is better realised and can be further utilised to study the easily overlooked aspect of providers’ ingenuity