School of Liberal Arts (SoLA)

&ldquo;IIT Jodhpur is committed to impart quality education to facilitate the creation of qualified, competent and responsible human resources to meet the emerging technological challenges of the world. It is working towards creating an equitable learning platform that is positive, accessible and effective in the face of the modern societal and scientific advancements.

Flexibility in curriculum, in all its academic programs, encompassing elements of teaching, research, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship is the most unique feature of IIT Jodhpur. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems, has identified IIT Jodhpur as a Technology &amp; Innovation Hub in the area of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The institute has also been nominated as the coordinator for the Jodhpur City and Knowledge Cluster by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India.

The sprawling 852-acre IIT Jodhpur campus is a majestic tribute to the deep-rooted diverse cultural heritage of the region. The campus is an architectural masterpiece, which is slated to become an international exemplar of sustainability with net-zero energy, and advanced water and waste management strategies.&rdquo;

IIT Jodhpur

Toni Morrison's novels are deeply embedded in the African cultural heritage and primarily concerned with the experiences of African American women, whose quest for individual identity is integrally intertwined with a sense of community and cultural history. Therefore, it is not surprising that women of color play prominent, strong, and powerful roles in her novels. Morrison's Song of Solomon is one such novel where the main protagonist, Milkman's development is framed by the sacrificial stories of three women important in his life. On the surface, these female characters are shown to be living pathetic lives where rebellion is almost impossible. Their lives are constructed around men's desire or fancy. However, if one goes deeper down the surface to examine these female characters critically, then one would find that in reality, these women play a huge role in reconstructing cultural memory and demonstrating the importance of the past to the male protagonist. This paper critically looks at Morrison's Song of Solomon in order to establish that the ultimate experiences of these black women are not the loss and sufferings endured by them in the name of slavery, racism, and gender. Instead, their creative voices that connect one generation to another are the true markers of the potential of their womanhood. © 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

IUP Journal of English Studies

The politics of gender in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

Logic: Informal, Symbolic and Inductive

Objective: This study is aimed to determine the reliability of the Box and Block (B&B) Test for manual dexterity of upper extremity function in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to compare the results with age- and sex-matched healthy controls, and also with available normative data. Methods: The reliability of B&B Test was assessed within and between testers using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) in patients with RA attending rheumatology clinics of Christian Medical College Hospital, India. The dexterity scores of patients were then compared with age- and sex-matched controls and the Mathiowetz's population-based normative data by Student's independent t-test. Results: The interrater and intrarater reliability of the B&B Test in patients with RA (n = 60) ranged from 0.92 to 0.97 and 0.91 to 0.95, respectively. The dexterity scores in patients with RA were lower as compared to the control group (dominant hand 54.87 vs. 68.18, P < 0.001; contralateral hand 52.65 vs. 65.6, P < 0.001) and population-based normative score (dominant hand 54.87 vs. 80.02, P < 0.001; contralateral hand 52.65 vs. 77.23; P < 0.001). The control group scores were also lower than the normative data. Higher age of patient, longer disease duration and higher disease activity reflected by Disease Activity Score of 28 joints (DAS-28) also correlated well with lower dexterity score. Conclusions: The B&B Test is a reliable tool for assessing upper extremity function in patients with RA and the dexterity scores are lower for RA patients. The scores had correlation with age, disease duration and disease activity. © 2015 Asia Pacific League of Associations for Rheumatology and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

World University root node

Fulltext

International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases

Reliability of Box and Block Test for manual dexterity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis: a pilot study

Salaam Bollywood: Representations and interpretations

The way cinema was banished: The intervention of cinema studies in India

The term shastriya, while aligned with an art form such as cinema, sounds extremely anomalous. Shastriya connotes the sense of something classical, used primarily within the confines of North Indian/Hindustani classical music. It is not without reason that cinema remains dissociated from epithets like these, especially since cinema’s self-imposed inferiority gets in the way. This inferiority stems primarily from the publicness of cinema, from its status as a public institution. So when Mani Kaul tried to define his cinema with a preference for a term like shastriya, it was a decisive statement against the supposed publicness of the medium. His Uski Roti (1969) was given the Sunday evening slot in television, a slot better known for the popular Bombay films. Kaul, on a lighter note, suggested a different slot for his shastriya cinema: [I]t was as if they had shown a classical programme during Chhaya Geet. The point is not that classical music is superior to film music, it is that you cannot confuse the one with the other. They could have had a programme called Shastriya Cinema or something and shown Uski Roti there-like they have Mallikarjun Mansur on Shastriya Sangeet! (Rizvi & Amladi, 1980, pp. 9-10). © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014.

Bollywood and its Other(s): Towards New Configurations

Bombay cinema’s aesthetic other: Hindi shastriya cinema in retrospect

Purpose: The paper seeks to explore the interrelation among the phenomena of wandering mind, free-floating self and intuitive dualism. Further, the paper aims at looking at the possibility of revising the self-conception by changing the wandering nature of mind. Method: The paper proceeds by demonstrating the existence of the wandering mind and the presence of a particular kind of reflexive self-conception and then contends that reflexive self-conception, characterised in terms of free-floating nature of the self, can be understood to be the result of intuitive dualism along with the wandering mind. Result and Discussion: The relationship between wandering mind and reflexive self-conception brings out the possibility of revising the reflexive self-conception through practices such as mindfulness because it opens ways to reflexively realise embodiment and reduces the wandering nature of mind. This can possibly give rise to a different kind of self-conception that is more holistic in outlook and is less separative or free-floating. © 2016, ICPR.

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research

Voice in the Head: The Road Ahead

A major stumbling block in understanding the full significance of embodiment is the reflexive self-conception characterised by free-floating nature. The paper, in the initial sections, looks into the sensory motor approach to phenomenal consciousness and the approach to the study of vision where the world is treated as an external memory. Subsequently, the paper argues that the difficulty in exploring the sensory motor approach to phenomenal consciousness stems from the free-floating self-conception humans is endowed with. The assumption that experiences are internal can make us closed to the role external factors play in constituting experience. Accordingly, a revision in the self-conception carries the possibility of conceptualising experience in a different manner. © 2014, Springer-Verlag London.

AI and Society

Revisiting the self: a sine qua non for understanding embodiment

Trust plays a crucial role in establishing and retaining relationships. Sociopsychological analysis identifies three major constructs, such as ability, benevolence and integrity, upon which trust is being built up. On a similar note, in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), it is indispensable to have trust among nodes since nodes collectively sense physical parameters and send them to the base station. The nodes, however, can behave fraudulently and send bad information, mostly due to hardware and software faults. Taking inspiration from the sociopsychological account, the present paper introduces a novel model for computing trust of sensor nodes. Additionally, the immune inspired model is suggested for removing fraudulent nodes whose trust ratings fall below the threshold. Roles of the three factors, viz. ability, benevolence and integrity, are examined in WSN domain. The proposed model proves itself to be more advantageous than other methods that adopt machine learning and neural network models in performance metrics such as detection time, reliability, scalability, efficiency and complexity. Proposed work has been implemented on LabVIEW platform and the results substantiate the reliability of the proposed mathematical model. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Journal of Network and Computer Applications

Sociopsychological trust model for Wireless Sensor Networks

This book traces the journey of popular Hindi cinema from 1913 to contemporary times when Bollywood has evolved as a part of India's cultural diplomacy. Avoiding a linear, developmental narrative, the book re-examines the developments through the ruptures in the course of cinematic history. The essays in the volume critically consider transformatio. © 2016 Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra. All right reserved.

Salaam bollywood: Representations and interpretations

With the advent of the modern and postmodern era, the notion of family has undergone radical transformation. Moving far apart from their 'nuclear' status both families and communities are now a days heterogeneous constructions, driven primarily by materialism and self-interest. A widespread dissemination of statistical evidence in the mass media suggests the predominance of the so-called dysfunctional family in the American life due to a list of causes like: co-habitation, same-sex union, economic sustainability of women, lack of responsibility of men, increased rate of illegitimacy. For a long period of time the post-war American novels too have been focusing on the issue of family decline or the dysfunctional family and its effect on an individual identity. The reasons behind family decline in these fictions are not very different from real life. Several scholars have recently written books and articles claiming that the modern American family is not declining as much as it is changing its nature. The paper takes up an array of Post-war American fictions in order to portray that no matter what kind of perilous journey these fictionalized characters undertake, the root cause of their distress is a dysfunctional family, increasingly marked by a sense of mutability.