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

In this work, our prime focus is to study the one to one correspondence between the conduction phenomena in electrical wires with impurity and the scattering events responsible for particle production during stochastic inflation and reheating implemented under a closed quantum mechanical system in early universe cosmology. In this connection, we also present a derivation of quantum corrected version of the Fokker–Planck equation without dissipation and its fourth order corrected analytical solution for the probability distribution profile responsible for studying the dynamical features of the particle creation events in the stochastic inflation and reheating stage of the universe. It is explicitly shown from our computation that quantum corrected Fokker–Planck equation describe the particle creation phenomena better for Dirac delta type of scatterer. In this connection, we additionally discuss Itô, Stratonovich prescription and the explicit role of finite temperature effective potential for solving the probability distribution profile. Furthermore, we extend our discussion of particle production phenomena to describe the quantum description of randomness involved in the dynamics. We also present computation to derive the expression for the measure of the stochastic non-linearity (randomness or chaos) arising in the stochastic inflation and reheating epoch of the universe, often described by Lyapunov Exponent. Apart from that, we quantify the quantum chaos arising in a closed system by a more strong measure, commonly known as Spectral Form Factor using the principles of random matrix theory (RMT). Additionally, we discuss the role of out of time order correlation function (OTOC) to describe quantum chaos in the present non-equilibrium field theoretic setup and its consequences in early universe cosmology (stochastic inflation and reheating). Finally, for completeness, we also provide a bound on the measure of quantum chaos (i.e. on Lyapunov Exponent and Spectral Form Factor) arising due to the presence of stochastic non-linear dynamical interactions into the closed quantum system of the early universe in a completely model-independent way.

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European Physical Journal C

Quantum out-of-equilibrium cosmology

Journal of Adolescent Health

Scaling-up Norms-Focused Interventions for Adolescent and Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health: Current Practice and Reflections for Moving the Field Forward

Despite humans’ capacity for rational thought, they are not immune to superstitions. Superstitions are strongly tied to cultural practices, especially in India. Although 17% of the world’s population resides in India, Indian culture is understudied, and there have not been sufficient attempts to understand Indian superstitions in a scientific manner from a psychometric standpoint. By creating a proper superstition measurement for the Indian population, we can better understand how Indians think and behave. The goal of the present research is to create a superstition measure specific to Indian culture. The results reveal 18 items reflecting Indian superstitions that can be generalised across contemporary India.

Journal of Beliefs and Values

The Indian superstition scale: creating a measure to assess Indian superstitions

In this article, I argue that embodied forms of identity, politics and protests have become critical to South Asian social movements because actors have started identifying ways in which society uses their bodies to oppress them. The fact that “embodied” form of resistance is the prevalent theme of countless contemporary movements like Girls at Dhaba in Pakistan, Women’s March against President Donald Trump in the USA, “Pinjra Tod” in India, etc., proves that it is increasingly becoming urgent to study the way the female body can resist domination and oppressive structures. Discussing the definition of “embodied” resistance, and the gendered idea of “safety” and “peril” in urban spaces, I examine the ways in which recent protest movements such as Pinjra Tod (Break the Cages) in Delhi use embodied forms of politics and identity to subvert the norms that chain and restrict the female body.

Asian Journal of Women's Studies

Embodied forms of politics and identity in South Asian protest movements: Pinjra Tod and Delhi

Animportant question that arises from autobiographical memory research is whether the variables that influence memory in the laboratory also drive memory for autobiographical episodes in real life. We explored this question within the context of e-mail communications and investigated the variables that influence recall for personally familiar names and temporal information in emails. We designed a Web-based program that analyzed each participant’s year-old sent e-mail archive and applied textual analysis algorithms to identify a set of sentences likely to be memorable. These sentences were then used as the stimuli in a cued recall task. Participants saw two sentences from their sent e-mail as a cue and attempted to recall the name of the e-mail recipient. Participants also rated the vividness of recall for the e-mail conversation and estimated the month in which they had written the e-mail. Linear mixed-effect analyses revealed that recipient name recall accuracy decreased with longer retention intervals and increased with greater frequency of contact with the recipient. Also, with longer retention intervals, participants dated e-mails as being more recent than their actual month. This telescoping error was moderately larger for e-mails with greater sentiment. These findings suggest that memoryfor personallyfamiliarnames and temporalinformation ine-mails closely follows the patterns for autobiographical memory and proper-name recall found in laboratory settings. This study introduces an innovative, Web-based experimental method for studying the cognitive processes related to autobiographical memories using ecologically valid, naturalistic communications.

Behavior Research Methods

Autobiographical recall of personally familiar names and temporal information in e-mails: An automatic analytic approach using e-mail communications

We study evolution of preferences in large population aggregative games. In such games, all agents in society interact with each other. The material payoff or fitness of agents is entirely individualistic. Subjective payoffs, which represent preferences, depend upon a non-individualistic component which is adjusted through a type-dependent preference parameter. Using the indirect evolutionary approach, we show that the individualistic type enjoys fitness dominance under any type distribution in such games. Hence, under a class of evolutionary dynamics that satisfy monotone percentage growth, all non-individualistic types are eliminated. We apply this analysis to two classes of non-individualistic preferences-altruistic and Kantian. Altruistic preferences put a positive weight on the externality imposed on society while Kantian preferences incorporate the Kantian categorical imperative. In two important economic models, the tragedy of the commons and the public goods game, we show that both these classes of preferences are eliminated.

Department of Economics

Journal of Mathematical Economics

Elimination of non-individualistic preferences in large population aggregative games

This article seeks to understand stigma faced by students from groups who enter higher educational institutions on the basis of affirmative action. The article uses the theoretical insights from the “stereotype content model” which disentangles the social-psychological mechanisms of “externalization” and “internalization.” The data are from a primary survey administered to university students in India to understand the channel of stigma associated with caste-based affirmative action (AA). The article finds that despite a significant gap in entry scores at admission, there are no significant differences in the effort and academic attitudes between AA and non-AA students. Yet, there are clear and significant differences between caste groups that reveal the presence of stigma through the “externalization” mechanism, that is, upper caste peers tend to evaluate beneficiary performance prejudicially, indicating the prevalence of discriminatory attitudes toward students who are admitted through AA. However, there is no compelling evidence of “internalization”: that is, students from beneficiary groups do not necessarily internalize their peers' low evaluation of their own competence. These findings suggest the need for establishing an antidiscriminatory apparatus inside higher educational institutions to counter stigmatizing attitudes and microaggressions against AA admits.

Review of Black Political Economy

Double Jeopardy? Stigma of Identity and Affirmative Action

We propose a class of measures of welfare change that are based on the generalized Gini social welfare functions. We analyze these measures in the context of a second-order dominance property that is akin to generalized Lorenz dominance as introduced by Shorrocks (Economica 50:3–17, 1983) and Kakwani (Advances in econometrics, vol 3. JAI Press, Greenwich, pp 191–213, 1984). Because we consider welfare differences rather than welfare levels, the requisite equivalence result involves affine welfare functions only, as opposed to the entire class of strictly increasing and strictly S-concave welfare indicators. Thus, our measures are associated with those members of the generalized-Gini class that are strictly increasing and strictly S-concave. Moving from second-order dominance to first-order dominance does not change this result significantly: for most intents and purposes, the generalized Ginis remain the only strictly increasing and strictly S-concave measures that are equivalent to this first-order dominance condition phrased in terms of welfare change. Our final result provides a characterization of our measures of welfare change in the spirit of Weymark’s (Math Soc Sci 1:409–430, 1981) original axiomatization of the generalized Gini welfare functions. Journal of Economic Literature Classification No.: D31. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

Social Choice and Welfare

The measurement of welfare change

On the space of positive definite matrices, we consider distance functions of the form d(A, B) = [tr A(A, B) - tr G(A, B)] 1 / 2, where A(A, B) is the arithmetic mean and G(A, B) is one of the different versions of the geometric mean. When G(A, B) = A1 / 2B1 / 2 this distance is ‖ A1 / 2- B1 / 2‖ 2, and when G(A,B)=(A1/2BA1/2)1/2 it is the Bures–Wasserstein metric. We study two other cases: G(A,B)=A1/2(A-1/2BA-1/2)1/2A1/2, the Pusz–Woronowicz geometric mean, and G(A,B)=exp(logA+logB2), the log Euclidean mean. With these choices, d(A, B) is no longer a metric, but it turns out that d2(A, B) is a divergence. We establish some (strict) convexity properties of these divergences. We obtain characterisations of barycentres of m positive definite matrices with respect to these distance measures. One of these leads to a new interpretation of a power mean introduced by Lim and Palfia, as a barycentre. The other uncovers interesting relations between the log Euclidean mean and relative entropy. © 2019, Springer Nature B.V.

Department of Mathematics

Letters in Mathematical Physics

Matrix versions of the Hellinger distance

This article focuses on the young men from agrarian backgrounds who work as field marketing agents for companies like Monsanto in western Maharashtra, India. They promote pesticides, herbicides and other agrichemicals to farmers who often belong to higher castes. My ethnography suggests that the promotion of agrichemicals deploys the idiom of agricultural extension, upsetting India's tenacious social hierarchies on the one hand, and driving corporate profits and indebtedness among farmers on the other. With respect to the subordination of agriculture to industrial capital, I contend that farmers and marketing agents can neither be arrayed against one another, nor is their relation to industrial capital alike. Agrichemicals marketing troubles dichotomous frameworks, such as farmers against industrial capital. Ultimately, I call for re-conceiving political economy in terms of graded informality, where opportunities and constraints for accumulation map onto a gradient, rather than fall on opposite ends of a binary. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.