The Untouchable Soldier: Caste, Politics, and the Indian Army

Military establishments are omnipresent if not everywhere omnipotent. While these costly bureaucracies are the bane of finance ministers around the world, they do provide an important opportunity for comparative analysis. This paper examines a military system—the Indian one—through time, and attempts to demonstrate the changing relationship of that system to Indian politics and society in general, and to the low-caste communities of India in particular. We select the low-caste untouchables because they represent an extreme challenge to the integrative capacity of both political and social systems, and because they have recently been the subject of intensive political and academic concern.Stephen P. Cohen is Assistant Professor of Political Science in Asian Studies at the University of Illinois. Research for this paper was supported by a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies in 1964–65.

Effect of capillarity and heterogeneity in the numerical modelling of multiphase flow of fluids in unsaturated porous medium

The multiphase flow of fluids in the unsaturated porous medium is considered as a three phase flow of water, NAPL, and air simultaneously in the porous medium. The adaptive solution fully implicit modified sequential method is used for the numerical modelling. The effect of capillarity and heterogeneity effect at the interface between the media is studied and it is observed that the interface criteria has to be taken into account for the correct prediction of NAPL migration especially in heterogeneous media. The modified Newton Raphson method is used for the linearization and Hestines and Steifel Conjugate Gradient method is used as the solver.

A study on the usefulness of Support Vector Machines for the realtime computational simulation of soft biological organs

Realistic and realtime computational simulation of soft biological organs (e.g., liver, kidney) is necessary when one tries to build a quality surgical simulator that can simulate surgical procedures involving these organs. Since the realistic simulation of these soft biological organs should account for both nonlinear material behavior and large deformation, achieving realistic simulations in realtime using continuum mechanics based numerical techniques necessitates the use of a supercomputer or a high end computer cluster which are costly. Hence there is a need to employ soft computing techniques like Support Vector Machines (SVMs) which can do function approximation, and hence could achieve physically realistic simulations in realtime by making use of just a desktop computer. Present work tries to simulate a pig liver in realtime. Liver is assumed to be homogeneous, isotropic, and hyperelastic. Hyperelastic material constants are taken from the literature. An SVM is employed to achieve realistic simulations in realtime, using just a desktop computer. The code for the SVM is obtained from [1]. The SVM is trained using the dataset generated by performing hyperelastic analyses on the liver geometry, using the commercial finite element software package ANSYS. The methodology followed in the present work closely follows the one followed in [2] except that [2] uses Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) while the present work uses SVMs to achieve realistic simulations in realtime. Results indicate the speed and accuracy that is obtained by employing the SVM for the targeted realistic and realtime simulation of the liver.

SInCRe-structural interactome computational resource for Mycobacterium tuberculosis

We have developed an integrated database for Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv (Mtb) that collates information on protein sequences, domain assignments, functional annotation and 3D structural information along with protein-protein and protein-small molecule interactions. SInCRe (Structural Interactome Computational Resource) is developed out of CamBan (Cambridge and Bangalore) collaboration. The motivation for development of this database is to provide an integrated platform to allow easily access and interpretation of data and results obtained by all the groups in CamBan in the field of Mtb informatics. In-house algorithms and databases developed independently by various academic groups in CamBan are used to generate Mtb-specific datasets and are integrated in this database to provide a structural dimension to studies on tuberculosis. The SInCRe database readily provides information on identification of functional domains, genome-scale modelling of structures of Mtb proteins and characterization of the small-molecule binding sites within Mtb. The resource also provides structure-based function annotation, information on small-molecule binders including FDA (Food and Drug Administration)-approved drugs, protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and natural compounds that bind to pathogen proteins potentially and result in weakening or elimination of host-pathogen protein-protein interactions. Together they provide prerequisites for identification of off-target binding.