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

Northeast India: A Place of Relations

(Un)natural disasters and the role of the state in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam

Hindu College was set up in Calcutta in 1817 as a pioneering institution to impart Western learning to its students. In 1831, its most outstanding teacher, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, then only 22 years old, was compelled to resign. A look at the circumstances that forced his resignation attempts to reconstruct Derozio's ideas and his teaching methods. The episode offers a glimpse of the intellectual ambience of early 19th-century Calcutta.

Economic and Political Weekly

The Derozio affair: An annal of early Calcutta

How do great discoveries take place? This paper aims to looks at a 1924 discovery–that of the Indus civilization–in order to understand how it can be juxtaposed with the literature on how scientific discoveries take place. In the case of the Indus civilization, there was a specific constellation of ideas and factors that came into sync with each other in 1924. Several of these–an idea slowly taking shape or the platforms and transactions that facilitated flow of information and helped in connecting the dots–have frequently been discussed in histories of innovation and discovery. There are other factors, however, which are specific to this story. These range from the varying intellectual backgrounds of the many protagonists that figure in this discovery saga to the peculiar challenges of doing archaeology within the confines of a government department. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

World Archaeology

Are archaeological discoveries like scientific discoveries? The curious case of the Indus civilization

This paper examines the United States’ involvement in South Asia during the Second World War. It traces the evolution of American policy towards India against the backdrop of the US grand strategy during the war and its plans for a post-war international order. In this context it analyzes the tensions between American attitudes towards the Indian freedom movement and wartime imperatives of collaborating with the British Empire. By bringing into focus America’s policy towards the region at a time when it rose to global preponderance, the paper casts into relief key longer-term determinants of the US’ engagement with the subcontinent.

India and the World in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

The imperialism of anti-imperialism: The United States and India in the Second World War

Under strong pathogen pressure, insects often evolve resistance to infection. Many insects are also protected via immune memory (immune priming), whereby sublethal exposure to a pathogen enhances survival after secondary infection. Theory predicts that immune memory should evolve when the pathogen is highly virulent, or when pathogen exposure is relatively rare. However, there are no empirical tests of these hypotheses and the adaptive benefits of immune memory relative to direct resistance against a pathogen are poorly understood. To determine the selective pressures and ecological conditions that shape immune evolution, we imposed strong pathogen selection on flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) populations, infecting them with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) for 11 generations. Populations injected first with heat-killed and then live Bt evolved high basal resistance against multiple Bt strains. By contrast, populations injected only with a high dose of live Bt evolved a less effective but strain-specific priming response. Control populations injected with heat-killed Bt did not evolve priming; and in the ancestor, priming was effective only against a low Bt dose. Intriguingly, one replicate population first evolved priming and subsequently evolved basal resistance, suggesting the potential for dynamic evolution of different immune strategies. Our work is the first report showing that pathogens can select for rapid modulation of insect priming ability, allowing hosts to evolve divergent immune strategies (generalized resistance versus specific immune memory) with potentially distinct mechanisms.

Department of Biology

World University root node

Fulltext

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Experimental evolution of insect immune memory versus pathogen resistance

Docker containers are becoming the mainstay for deploying applications in cloud platforms, having many desirable features like ease of deployment, developer friendliness and lightweight virtualization. Meanwhile, storage systems have witnessed tremendous performance boost through recent innovations in the industry such as Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) and NVMe Over Fabrics (NVMf) standards. However, the performance of docker containers on these highspeed contemporary SSDs has not yet been investigated. In this paper, we first present a characterization of the performance impact among a wide variety of the available storage options for deploying Docker containers and provide the configuration options to best utilize the high performance SSDs.We then provide the first of its kind characterization results of a Dockerized NoSQL database on an NVMe-over-fabrics prototype and show that its performance matches closely to that of direct attached storage. Finally, we provide experimental results on scaling the performance of NVMf to multiple nodes and present the challenges and projections for future storage system design.

Department of Computer Science

33rd International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology, MSST 2017

Performance analysis of containerized applications on local and remote storage

This article outlines the conceptual foundation of India’s free speech regime by focusing on the debates of the Constituent Assembly (1946–1949), and traces the development of the Article 19 of the constitution, which guarantees all citizens the right to free speech and expression, albeit certain ‘reasonable restrictions’. While offering a synoptic account of the conservative side of its development—as framers negotiated the discrepancies between their imagined ideal and the existing, often-conflicting reality—the idea here is not to uncover some grand master plan of Indian democracy from which it has faltered, but to explore ways in which it might lend a fissure to violent outbursts of ‘hurt sentiments’ in contemporary India, which impinges upon the idea and enjoyment of free speech in general, and freedom of artists in particular. © 2017, © 2017 Lokniti, Centre For The Study Of Developing Societies.

Department of Political Science

Studies in Indian Politics

Collective Conservatism and the Constituent Assembly Debates: The Case of Free Speech in India

In the years following the India-China War (1962), Tawang underwent a significant makeover. In 1964, the Indian government sanctioned the construction of the Nehru Gompa monastery to commemorate Jawaharlal Nehru's visit to Tawang. Nehru Gompa is a symbol of the new relations between the Indian state and the Tibetan Buddhist institutions that were forged in the early postcolonial period in India's North East Frontier. This paper looks at the changing dynamics between the Tawang Monastery, the local population, and the state in this context, and focuses on how the Tawang Monastery negotiated with the local administration through the medium of official correspondence.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Embattled frontiers and emerging spaces: Transformation of the tawang border

Amid (near) jobless economic growth during 2000-12, construction employment boomed at over 9% annually. It was part of a 10 percentage point rise in fixed capital formation rate in 13 years, to 35% of gross domestic product. The boom was rural, growing 2.5 times (at over 12%) as fast as in urban areas (at a mere 5%). National Sample Survey Office primary data reveals that a rise in rural private residential construction is the principal factor explaining the boom. This suggests improvements in rural housing status: conversion of kutcha houses into pucca houses. Decline in price-to-income ratio-of cement to rural wages-expanded rural construction demand. The popular perception (or explanation) for the rural construction employment boom in terms of rural-urban migration-of short-term, circular or seasonal-does not hold water.

Department of Economics

Rural construction employment boom during 2000-12: Evidence from NSSO surveys

Countertransference is an important aspect of the therapeutic relationship that exists in therapies of all theoretical orientations and depending on how it is managed, it can either help or hinder treatment. Management of countertransference has been measured almost exclusively with the Countertransference Factors Inventory (Van Wagoner, Gelso, Hayes, & Diemer, 1991) and its variations, all of which focus on 5 therapist qualities theorized to facilitate management: self-insight, conceptualizing ability, empathy, self-integration and anxiety management. Existing versions of the Countertransference Factors Inventory, however, possess certain psychometric limitations that appear to constrain how well they assess actual management of countertransference during a therapy session. We thus sought to develop a new measure that addressed these limitations and that captured the 5 therapist qualities as constituents (rather than correlates) of countertransference management that manifest in the treatment hour. The development and initial validation of the resulting 22-item Countertransference Management Scale (CMS) is described here. Exploratory factor analysis of ratings of 286 therapy supervisors of current supervisees indicated that the 5 constituents of countertransference management could be grouped into 2 correlated factors: "Understanding Self and Client" and "Self-Integration and Regulation." Evidence of convergent and criterion-related validity was supported by CMS total and subscale scores correlating as expected with measures of theoretically relevant constructs, namely, therapist countertransference behavior, theoretical framework, self-esteem, observing ego, empathic understanding and tolerance of anxiety. Results also supported the internal consistency of the CMS and its subscales. Research, clinical and training implications are discussed.