Department of History

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

How does the public want a COVID-19 vaccine to be allocated? We conducted a conjoint experiment asking 15,536 adults in 13 countries to evaluate 248,576 profiles of potential vaccine recipients who varied randomly on five attributes. Our sample includes diverse countries from all continents. The results suggest that in addition to giving priority to health workers and to those at high risk, the public favors giving priority to a broad range of key workers and to those with lower income. These preferences are similar across respondents of different education levels, incomes, and political ideologies, as well as across most surveyed countries. The public favored COVID-19 vaccines being allocated solely via government programs but were highly polarized in some developed countries on whether taking a vaccine should be mandatory. There is a consensus among the public on many aspects of COVID-19 vaccination, which needs to be taken into account when developing and communicating rollout strategies. © 2021 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

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Other Publications

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Citizens from 13 countries share similar preferences for COVID-19 vaccine allocation priorities

When one says, “I had a desire to have a glass of water and this was followed by my action to fetch the glass of water” then the common sense observation would assume that one’s mind caused this action. In this paper, I assume that there is a mind or there are ‘mental states’ which either belong to an enduring self or constitute a selfless stream of consciousness. I will provide the debate between Advaita Vedanta and Abhidharma Buddhism to present this tension between enduring self and selfless stream of consciousness clearly. However, the aim of this paper is to look at how the mind is assumed to have causal powers. Is this assumption valid or not? Jaegwon Kim presents three problems that arise out of this assumption: “mental anomalism,” content externalism and causal exclusion. I shall look at these problems in detail in part I. In part II, I shall provide Buddhist arguments in favour of mind especially consciousness that can escape the reductionist arguments formulated by Kim by looking at the recent debates in contemporary physics especially quantum mechanics. © 2021, ICPR.

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research

Mental Causation—Problems and Buddhist Response

In this paper, we explore the connection between the curvature of the background De Sitter space-time with the spectroscopic study of entanglement of two atoms. Our set up is in the context of an Open Quantum System (OQS), where the two atoms, each having two energy levels and represented by Pauli spin tensor operators projected along any arbitrary direction. The system mimic the role of a pair of freely falling Unruh De-Witt detectors, which are allowed to non-adiabatically interact with a conformally coupled massless probe scalar field which has the role of background thermal bath. The effective dynamics of this combined system takes into account of the non-adiabatic interaction, which is commonly known as the Resonant Casimir Polder Interaction (RCPI) with the thermal bath. Our analysis revels that the RCPI of two stable entangled atoms in the quantum vacuum states in OQS depends on the de Sitter space-time curvature relevant to the temperature of the thermal bath felt by the static observer. We also find that, in OQS, RCPI produces a new significant contribution appearing in the effective Hamiltonian of the total system and thermal bath under consideration. We find that the Lamb shift is characterised by a decreasing inverse square power law behaviour, L- 2, when inter atomic Euclidean distance, L, is much larger than a characteristic length scale, k, which is the inverse surface gravity of the background De Sitter space. If the background space time would have been Minkowskian this shift decreases as, L- 1, and is independent of temperature. Thus, we establish a connection between the curvature of the De Sitter space-time with the Lamb shift spectroscopy. © 2021, The Author(s).

Fulltext

European Physical Journal C

Relating the curvature of De Sitter universe to open quantum Lamb shift spectroscopy

Pregnenolone (P5) promotes prostate cancer cell growth and de novo synthesis of intratumoural P5 is a potential cause of development of castration resistance. Immune cells can also synthesize P5 de novo. Despite its biological importance, little is known about P5's mode of actions, which appears to be context dependent and pleiotropic. A comprehensive proteome-wide spectrum of P5-binding proteins that are involved in its trafficking and functionality remains unknown. Here, we describe an approach that integrates chemical biology for probe synthesis with chemoproteomics to map P5-protein interactions in live prostate cancer cells and murine CD8+ T cells. We subsequently identified P5-binding proteins potentially involved in P5-trafficking and in P5's non-genomic action that may drive the promotion of castrate-resistance prostate cancer and regulate CD8+ T cell function. We envisage that this methodology could be employed for other steroids to map their interactomes directly in a broad range of living cells, tissues and organisms.

Department of Biology

iScience

CLICK-enabled analogues reveal pregnenolone interactomes in cancer and immune cells

LINEs are retrotransposable elements found in diverse organisms. Their activity is kept in check by several mechanisms, including transcriptional silencing. Here we have analyzed the transcription status of LINE1 copies in the early-branching parasitic protist Entamoeba histolytica. Full-length EhLINE1 encodes ORF1, and ORF2 with reverse transcriptase (RT) and endonuclease (EN) domains. RNA-Seq analysis of EhLINE1 copies (both truncated and full-length) showed unique features. Firstly, although 20/41 transcribed copies were full-length, we failed to detect any full-length transcripts. Rather, sense-strand transcripts mapped to the functional domains- ORF1, RT and EN. Secondly, there was strong antisense transcription specifically from RT domain. No antisense transcripts were seen from ORF1. Antisense RT transcripts did not encode known functional peptides. They could possibly be involved in attenuating translation of RT domain, as we failed to detect ORF2p, whereas ORF1p was detectable. Lack of full-length transcripts and strong antisense RT expression may serve to limit EhLINE1 retrotransposition. © 2021

Plasmid

Transcriptomic analysis of Entamoeba histolytica reveals domain-specific sense strand expression of LINE-encoded ORFs with massive antisense expression of RT domain

In the early 20th century, when K M Munshi was making a name for himself in the literary and cultural sphere of Gujarat, he was both intervening in and departing from the past. Curating elements of the past that suited his equally curated modernity, Munshi exemplifies many connections that become evident of Gujarat in the subsequent years. In this paper, we ask: “What was Munshi's past?” In other words, whom was he responding to from the 19th century? The period of our inquiry in Munshi's life is the one that witnessed the famous Patan trilogy. The questions are situated in both cultural history and literature.

Department of English

Economic and Political Weekly

Past continuous K M Munshi, Gujarat and the Patan Trilogy

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Journal of Public Health (United Kingdom)

PerspectivesIs there an opioid epidemic in India?

Philosophers have long been interested in love and its general role in morality. This volume focuses on and explores the complex relation between love and justice as it appears within loving relationships, between lovers and their wider social context, and the broader political realm. Special attention is paid to the ensuing challenge of understanding and respecting the lovers’ personal autonomy in all three contexts. Accordingly, the essays in this volume are divided into three thematic sections. Section I aims at shedding further light on conceptual and practical issues concerning the compatibility or incompatibility of love and justice within relationships of love. For example, are loving relations inherently unjust? Might love require justice? Or do love and justice belong to distinct moral domains? The essays in Section II consider the relation between the lovers on the one hand and their broader societal environment on the other. Specifically, how exactly are love and impartiality related? Are they compatible or not? Is it unjust to favor one’s beloved? Finally, Section III looks at the political dimensions of love and justice. How, for instance, do various accounts of love inform how we are to relate to our fellow citizens? If love is taken to play an important role in fostering or hindering the development of personal autonomy, what are the political implications that need to be addressed, and how? In addressing these questions, this book engenders a better understanding both of conceptual and practical issues regarding the relation between love, justice, and autonomy as well as their broader societal and political implications. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working on the philosophy of love from ethical, political, and psychological angles.&nbsp;

Department of Philosophy

Love, Justice, and Autonomy: Philosophical Perspectives

The Reserve Bank of India pursues inflation targeting, which is based on the premise that inflation is related to the ‘output gap', defined as the deviation of output from its natural level. We present an alternative model of inflation derived from structuralist macroeconomics, the highlight of which is an agricultural sector prone to fluctuating output. A distinctive feature of the model is that inflation is related to the relative price of agricultural goods, in addition to other determining variables. We then subject both the models to econometric testing that involved alternative measures of inflation, sample periods and data frequencies. The output-gap model is rejected while the structuralist model is statistically validated in the tests. This evidence points strongly to the need to take agricultural prices into account when designing anti-inflationary policy in India.

Department of Economics

Journal of Quantitative Economics

Modelling Inflation in India

We investigate the strategy-proof provision and financing of indivisible club good facilities when individuals are subject to congestion costs that are non-decreasing in the number of other club members and in a private type parameter. An allocation rule specifies how the individuals are to be partitioned into clubs and how the costs of the facilities are to be shared by club members as a function of the types. We show that some combinations of our axioms are incompatible when congestion costs are continuous and strictly increasing in the type parameter, but that all of them are compatible if congestion costs are dichotomous and there is equal cost sharing. We present a number of examples of allocation rules with equal cost sharing and determine which of our axioms they satisfy when the congestion cost is linear in the type parameter. We also show that using iterative voting on ascending size to determine a club partition is not, in general, strategy-proof when each facility’s cost is shared equally. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.