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

Department of Environmental Studies

Maritime Studies

Rethinking fishing communities to safeguard life above water

This study evaluates local-scale drivers of shark harvests in India, one of the world's largest shark fishing nations. Focusing on key harbours in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, which together contribute 54% of India's shark harvest, this study uses a semi-structured survey to examine the practices of shark fishers and traders, their knowledge of shark trade and policy and perceptions of shark declines. Findings indicate that a domestic market for shark meat is presently the main local driver for harvests rather than the global trade in shark fins. Sharks are mostly non-target catch, landed whole, contributing to the protein needs of coastal communities. Consumer demand is the greatest for small-bodied and juvenile sharks. Perceived steep declines in shark numbers and sizes have had economic impacts on fishers and traders. The unregulated domestic market for shark meat is a key challenge requiring nuanced local approaches that diverge from global shark conservation priorities.

World University root node

Ambio

Local drivers of declining shark fisheries in India

In this paper we solve a long standing open problem for Random Schrödinger operators on L2(Rd) with i.i.d single site random potentials. We allow a large class of free operators, including magnetic potential, however our method of proof works only for the case when the random potentials satisfy a complete covering condition. We require that the supports of the random potentials cover Rd and the bump functions that appear in the random potentials form a partition of unity. For such models, we show that the Density of States (DOS) is m times differentiable in the part of the spectrum where exponential localization is valid, if the single site distribution has compact support and has Hölder continuous m+ 1 st derivative. The required Hölder continuity depends on the fractional moment bounds satisfied by appropriate operator kernels. Our proof of the Random Schrödinger operator case is an extensions of our proof for Anderson type models on ℓ2(G) , G a countable set, with the property that the cardinality of the set of points at distance N from any fixed point grows at some rate in Nα, α&gt; 0. This condition rules out the Bethe lattice, where our method of proof works but the degree of smoothness also depends on the localization length, a result we do not present here. Even for these models the random potentials need to satisfy a complete covering condition. The Anderson model on the lattice for which regularity results were known earlier also satisfies the complete covering condition. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

Department of Mathematics

Fulltext

Communications in Mathematical Physics

Regularity of the Density of States of Random Schrödinger Operators

We prove that the local eigenvalue statistics at energy E in the localization regime for Schrödinger operators with random point interactions on Rd, for d = 1, 2, 3, is a Poisson point process with the intensity measure given by the density of states at E times the Lebesgue measure. This is one of the first examples of Poisson eigenvalue statistics for the localization regime of multi-dimensional random Schrödinger operators in the continuum. The special structure of resolvent of Schrödinger operators with point interactions facilitates the proof of the Minami estimate for these models. © 2020 Author(s).

Journal of Mathematical Physics

Eigenvalue statistics for Schrödinger operators with random point interactions on R d, d = 1, 2, 3

This article traces how substantive decision-making power over extractive projects is denied to India’s indigenous and forest-dwelling communities, even as they have clinched rights to ownership and consent under the landmark Forest Rights Act of 2006. By examining the consent mechanism provided under the act, we contend that the possibilities, and limits of such mechanisms are shaped by the larger architecture of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and practices that govern the process of transferring forests (“forest diversion” in bureaucratese) from rural communities to corporations. By analyzing a case of a forest diversion proposal for an iron ore mine in India’s resource-rich state of Odisha, we argue that consent provisions are derailed by “bureaucratic sabotage,” i.e. the power of corporations and state officials to control and manipulate the movement and circulation of documents through different tiers of government. In conclusion, we offer some thoughts on the weaknesses of the FPIC mechanism and the possible ways to address some of these. However, ultimately, the larger implication of such sabotage is the headlong collision between FPIC provisions and the principle of eminent domain. For FPIC to be meaningful, in India and globally, this fundamental contradiction must be confronted and resolved in favor of resource justice. © 2019, © 2019 The Center for Political Ecology.

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Manufacturing Consent: Mining, Bureaucratic Sabotage and the Forest Rights Act in India

The architecture of main memory has experienced a paradigm shift in recent years, with non volatile memory technologies (NVM) like Phase Change Memory (PCM) being incorporated into the hierarchy at the same level as DRAM. This transformation is being carried out by either splitting the memory address across two or more memory technologies, or using a faster technology with higher lifetimes, typically the DRAM, as a cache for the higher capacity, albeit slower main memory made up of a NVM. Design of such hybrid architectures remains an active area of research from the perspective of DRAM-as-a-cache design, since DRAM could quickly become the bottleneck, as cache lookups require multiple accesses for reading tag and data. In this paper, we augment the DRAM-as-a-cache model with a novel DRAM cache prefetcher that builds on state of the art Alloy Cache. The new DRAM cache architecture allows for prefetching data at both cacheline and page granularities from the NVM and as a result, provides upto a maximum of 2× performance improvement over a state of the art baseline.

Department of Computer Science

HotStorage 2020 - 12th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems, co-located with USENIX ATC 2020

Prefetching in hybrid main memory systems

Near the melting transition the bending elastic constant κ, an emergent property of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA), is shown not to follow the rodlike scaling for small-length N. The reduction in κ with temperature is determined by the denatured bubbles for a continuous transition, e.g., when the two strands are Gaussian, but by the broken bonds near the open end in a Y-like configuration for a first-order transition as for strands with excluded volume interactions. In the latter case, a lever rule is operational, implying a phase coexistence although dsDNA is known to be a single phase. © 2020 American Physical Society.

Department of Physics

Physical Review E

Softening of DNA near melting as disappearance of an emergent property

Economists are increasingly interested in subjective well-being, but the economic literature on perceptions of income adequacy, which is one of the factors that shape subjective well-being, is little. Our paper fills this lacuna. We utilize nationally representative data on perceptions of amounts considered as remunerative earnings from self-employment in India and examine how these are earnings shaped by social identity, namely, caste. We also investigate if institutional change such as the introduction of an employment guarantee scheme alters these perceptions. Finally, we examine the relationship between caste identity and actual earnings. We find that caste identity does shape both perceptions of income adequacy and actual earnings: lower-ranked groups perceive lower amounts as being remunerative and also earn lower amounts. Further, the employment guarantee scheme alters self-perceptions differentially for different caste groups, but in more nuanced ways than our ex-ante beliefs.

Department of Economics

Social identity and perceived income adequacy

Farsighted formulations of coalitional formation, for instance, by Harsanyi and Ray and Vohra, have typically been based on the von Neumann–Morgenstern stable set. These farsighted stable sets use a notion of indirect dominance in which an outcome can be dominated by a chain of coalitional “moves” in which each coalition that is involved in the sequence eventually stands to gain. Dutta and Vohra point out that these solution concepts do not require coalitions to make optimal moves. Hence, these solution concepts can yield unreasonable predictions. Dutta and Vohra restricted coalitions to hold common, history-independent expectations that incorporate optimality regarding the continuation path. This paper extends the Dutta–Vohra analysis by allowing for history-dependent expectations. The paper provides characterization results for two solution concepts that correspond to two versions of optimality. It demonstrates the power of history dependence by establishing nonemptyness results for all finite games as well as transferable utility partition function games. The paper also provides partial comparisons of the solution concepts to other solutions. Copyright © 2020 The Authors.

Theoretical Economics

Coalition formation and history dependence

This experimental study examined bilingual (English and another noun-dominant language) and monolingual (English) preverbal (10.5-month-old) and postverbal (12.5-month-old) infants' word-action mapping. Sixteen infants in each group were habituated to dynamic video-displays of novel word-action pairings during infant-controlled habituation. They received two words, /wem/ and /b{\ae}f/, spoken synchronously with an adult shaking or looming an object and were tested with switched versus same word-action pairings. Results revealed that for the preverbal bilingual infants, word-action mapping is intensified relative to postverbal bilingual infants. For the postverbal bilingual infants, word-action mapping is attenuated and inversely correlated with noun learning. No such differences were observed in the monolingual infants. These findings illustrate a perceptual protraction prior to word production and accelerated perceptual narrowing to nouns after word production in bilingual infants learning two noun-dominant languages.

Department of Psychology

Bilingualism

Bilingual versus monolingual infants' novel word-action mapping before and after first-word production: Influence of developing noun-dominance on perceptual narrowing