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

Distress propagation occurs in connected networks, its rate and extent being dependent on network topology. To study this, we choose economic production networks as a paradigm. An economic network can be examined at many levels — linkages among individual agents (microscopic), among firms/sectors (mesoscopic) or among countries (macroscopic). New emergent dynamical properties appear at every level, so the granularity matters. For viral epidemics, even an individual node may act as an epicenter of distress and potentially affect the entire network. Economic networks, however, are known to be immune at the micro-levels and more prone to failure in the meso/macro-levels. We propose a dynamical interaction model to characterize the mechanism of distress propagation, across different modules of a network, initiated at different epicenters. Vulnerable modules often lead to large degrees of destabilization. We demonstrate our methodology using a unique empirical data-set of input–output linkages across 0.14 million firms in one administrative state of India, a developing economy. The network has multiple hub-and-spoke structures that exhibits moderate disassortativity, which varies with the level of coarse-graining. The novelty lies in characterizing the production network at different levels of granularity or modularity, and finding ‘too-big-to-fail’ modules supersede ‘too-central-to-fail’ modules in distress propagation. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.

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Other Publications

Fulltext

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

Distress propagation on production networks: Coarse-graining and modularity of linkages

There is a stellar upsurge in the number of persons pursuing a master’s level of education as well as the institutions offering it in the current generation. Nevertheless, an explicit theoretical and empirical implication of how the tutelages, at this level, shape the well-being of learners—such that it could help individuals overcome career decision-making difficulties remains to be elucidated. The present study addressed two major objectives. Firstly, we investigated the well-being of master’s degree students along with career decision-making difficulties in India. Secondly, apart from exploring the possible influence of nationality of the respondents on career decision difficulty, the study expanded the literature on career decision-making difficulties to under-researched populations in developing countries. Through a cross-sectional research design, we recruited a sample of 136 master’s degree respondents. The result reveals that while the composite well-being resources significantly influenced Career Decision Difficulties, the nationality of respondents appeared not as a germane factor in this context. Following the evaluation of the direct effect of individual well-being resources; Self-acceptance and Personal growth proved to have a statistically significant effect on career decision-making difficulties. Also, among the constituents of career decision-making difficulties studied, lack of readiness appears to be the major concern among the respondents. The findings expand the literature on cognitive, vocational, and organization science vis-a-vis career decision-making difficulties and provide useful insights for educational institutions and practitioners. © 2021 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Cogent Psychology

Well-being and Career Decision-making Difficulties Among Master’s Students: A Simultaneous Multi-Equation Modeling

Economic and Political Weekly

The Welfarist Prime Minister: Explaining the National-State Election Gap

We model the behavior of a decision maker (DM) who is psychologically constrained from choosing according to her tastes by her normative preferences that capture her values and ideals. In any menu, choosing the worst alternative according to her normative preferences may produce overwhelming feelings of guilt. Hence, to mitigate such feelings, she eliminates this alternative and chooses the best amongst the remaining ones according to her tastes. We formally define this sequential choice procedure and behaviorally characterize it. We show that the parameters of the model— the DM's tastes and norms—can be (almost) uniquely identified from choices. We also highlight the model's implications for "non-standard" choices © 2021, Economics Bulletin.All Rights Reserved.

Economics Bulletin

Eliminate the normative worst, then choose

We investigated the perceptions of the effectiveness of a single 60- to 90-min session of Hill’s (2004) model of dream work for 37 Asian international students who had recently come to the United States. Participants reported having made gains in terms of exploration, insight, and action from the dream sessions and having made changes in their lives, although they did not change significantly in terms of psychological distress and acculturative stress from presession to the 2-week follow-up. A total of 2 weeks after their dream session, a subset of 14 participants participated in follow-up interviews about their perceptions of the outcomes of the dream sessions and the helpful and unhelpful components. Qualitative analyses of interviews revealed that outcomes typically included gaining awareness or insight, improving emotions and attitudes, and implementing new actions; participants typically found the action stage and variantly found the insight and exploration stages to be helpful; having to explore unimportant images and having to provide too much detail about images were variantly reported as unhelpful. Implications for practice and research are presented. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) © 2021 American Psychological Association

Dreaming

Working on dreams to facilitate Asian international university students’ transition to the United States.

In this paper, we study two properties viz., property-U and property-SU of a subspace Y of a Banach space X, which correspond to the uniqueness of the Hahn–Banach extension of each linear functional in (Formula presented.) and when this association forms a linear operator of norm-1 from (Formula presented.) to (Formula presented.). It is proved that, under certain geometric assumptions on (Formula presented.) these properties are stable with respect to the injective tensor product; Y has property-U (SU) in Z if and only if (Formula presented.) has property-U (SU) in (Formula presented.). We prove that when (Formula presented.) has the Radon–Nikod (Formula presented.) m Property for (Formula presented.), (Formula presented.) has property-U (property-SU) in (Formula presented.) if and only if Y is so in X. We show that if (Formula presented.) and Y has property-U (SU) in X then Y/Z has property-U (SU) in X/Z. On the other hand, Y has property-SU in X if Y/Z has property-SU in X/Z and (Formula presented.) is an M-ideal in X. This partly solves the 3-space problem for property-SU. We characterize all hyperplanes in (Formula presented.) which have property-SU. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for all finite codimensional proximinal subspaces of (Formula presented.) which have property-U (SU). © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &amp; Francis Group.

Linear and Multilinear Algebra

Stability of unique Hahn–Banach extensions and associated linear projections

Nanotechnology has imparted excellent substitutes in the area of agriculture for the management of insect pests without deteriorating the surrounding biota and thereby allows a more verdant environment. Particular idiosyncrasies have arisen in innovative nanoagrochemicals due to the viable applications of nanotechnology in a myriad of agricultural settings. Concerns have been raised about the need for novel products, therefore they have been predicted to have considerable potential to underpin the obligatory increase in worldwide food production in a sustainable manner. Conventional strategies like assimilated pest management employed in agriculture are inadequate and the application of chemical pesticides has pernicious impacts on the environment and mankind. There is a dire need to develop a repository of safe and propitious formulations to implement a regulatory paradigm for nanopesticides. Nanopesticides are well known in agriculture to reduce costs, improve the outcomes of agricultural products and enhance shelf life and nutrition. Much research has presented the innovation in a range of industrial domains that allows the improvement in the effective use of nanopesticides in water, nanocapsules for the delivery of biocides, nanosensors for the detection of pests, etc. Furthermore, the current consumption pattern of nanopesticides and their health repercussions has been elucidated. This much needed discussion will address the gap between the need for adequate control, environmental efficacy, associated benefits and the detrimental impacts of nanoagrochemicals. © 2021 The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Materials Advances

The framework of nanopesticides: A paradigm in biodiversity

Background: Sexual dimorphism in immunity is believed to reflect sex differences in reproductive strategies and trade-offs between competing life history demands. Sexual selection can have major effects on mating rates and sex-specific costs of mating and may thereby influence sex differences in immunity as well as associated host–pathogen dynamics. Yet, experimental evidence linking the mating system to evolved sexual dimorphism in immunity are scarce and the direct effects of mating rate on immunity are not well established. Here, we use transcriptomic analyses, experimental evolution and phylogenetic comparative methods to study the association between the mating system and sexual dimorphism in immunity in seed beetles, where mating causes internal injuries in females. Results: We demonstrate that female phenoloxidase (PO) activity, involved in wound healing and defence against parasitic infections, is elevated relative to males. This difference is accompanied by concomitant sex differences in the expression of genes in the prophenoloxidase activating cascade. We document substantial phenotypic plasticity in female PO activity in response to mating and show that experimental evolution under enforced monogamy (resulting in low remating rates and reduced sexual conflict relative to natural polygamy) rapidly decreases female (but not male) PO activity. Moreover, monogamous females had evolved increased tolerance to bacterial infection unrelated to mating, implying that female responses to costly mating may trade off with other aspects of immune defence, an hypothesis which broadly accords with the documented sex differences in gene expression. Finally, female (but not male) PO activity shows correlated evolution with the perceived harmfulness of male genitalia across 12 species of seed beetles, suggesting that sexual conflict has a significant influence on sexual dimorphisms in immunity in this group of insects. Conclusions: Our study provides insights into the links between sexual conflict and sexual dimorphism in immunity and suggests that selection pressures moulded by mating interactions can lead to a sex-specific mosaic of immune responses with important implications for host–pathogen dynamics in sexually reproducing organisms.

Department of Biology

BMC Biology

Sexual conflict drives micro- and macroevolution of sexual dimorphism in immunity

Current Science

Researching the pandemic and research during the pandemic

The importance of pollinators as selective agents for many floral traits is well established, but understanding their role in the evolution of complex floral shapes remains challenging. This is because pollinators often need much practice to efficiently handle morphologically complex flowers and extract their food rewards. What induces foragers to persistently visit and pollinate complex flowers despite their initial low profitability? We previously found that naive bumblebees and unsuccessful feeding attempts of experienced ones, contribute to the pollination of complex flowers. Here we tested a complementary hypothesis, positing that successful foraging on flowers of one complex shape prepares pollinators to visit other species of different complex morphologies. We trained bumblebees to computer-controlled artificial flowers that were either simple, complex or both simple and complex. We then recorded their feeding choices and handling times on a second array of simple and complex flowers that had different shapes and required another handling technique. Bees trained on a single flower type (whether simple or complex) preferred flowers of the same type in the testing array. The foragers' preferences after training on both flower types depended on the reward schedule during training: when both flower types rewarded equally, simple flowers were preferred at the test phase; when complex flowers provided higher reward during training, they became the preferred flower type during testing. These results suggest that successful foraging on complex flowers, especially when highly rewarding, can indeed induce insect pollinators to attempt additional flower species with other complex shapes.