Tuesday, August 25, 2020
What is Oxford university’s ChAdOx1 Covid-19 vaccine?
Oxford University Coronavirus (Covid-19) Vaccine: The Oxford shot is one of the front runners in the vaccine race and is already undergoing a combined Phase II/III trials in the UK, Brazil and South Africa.
Oxford Coronavirus (Covid-19) Vaccine: In a significant development, the Covid-19 vaccine jointly developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford has been found to be safe and induced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials. The AZD1222 vaccine, based on a chimpanzee adenovirus called ChAdOx1, elicited antibody and T-cell immune responses, according to results published in The Lancet medical journal on Monday.
The Oxford shot is one of the front runners in the vaccine race and is already undergoing a combined Phase II/III trials in the UK, Brazil and South Africa. AstraZeneca has signed deals to produce 400 million doses for the US and 100 million for the UK if it is successful in human trials.
According to the World Health Organization’s latest count, over two dozen experimental vaccines are being tested in humans and more than 160 are in earlier stages of development.
What is Oxford’s ChAdOx1 Covid-19 vaccine?
Oxford’s AZD1222 vaccine is made from a genetically engineered virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees. However, the virus has been modified so that it doesn’t cause infection in people and also to mimic the coronavirus.
Scientists did this by transferring the genetic instructions of the coronavirus’ “spike protein” – the crucial tool it uses to invade human cells – to the vaccine. This was done so that the vaccine resembles the coronavirus and the immune system can learn how to attack it.
Earlier, the Oxford vaccine was tested on monkeys in a small study and had shown some promising results on them. Researchers involved with the ChAdOx1 vaccine trials said the candidate had shown signs of priming the rhesus macaque monkeys’ immune systems to fend off the deadly virus and showed no indications of adverse effects.
Moreover, research by Britain’s Pirbright Institute revealed that a study in pigs has found that two doses of the Oxford vaccine produced a greater antibody response than a single dose.
For phase I in April, 1,102 participants were recruited in multiple study sites in the UK. On May 22, Oxford announced that 1,000 immunisations “have been completed and follow-up is currently ongoing”.
Last month, Professor Adrian Hill, the director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, told a webinar of the Spanish Society of Rheumatology that the “best scenario” would see results from “clinical trials in August and September and deliveries from October”.
Source: Indian Express, 20/07/20
Why Sanskrit has strong links to European languages and what it learnt in India
Newer scholarship has shown that even though Sanskrit did indeed share a common ancestral homeland with European and Iranian languages, it had also borrowed quite a bit from pre-existing Indian languages in India.
In 1783, the colonial stage in Bengal saw the entrance of William Jones who was appointed judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William. In the next couple of years, Jones established himself as an authority on ancient Indian language and culture, a field of study that was hitherto untouched. His obsession with the linguistic past of the subcontinent, led him to propose that there existed an intimate relationship between Sanskrit and languages spoken in Europe.
Jones’ claim rested on the evidence of several Sanskrit words that had similarities with Greek and Latin. For instance, the Sanskrit word for ‘three’, that is ‘trayas’, is similar to the Latin ‘tres’ and the Greek ‘treis’. Similarly, the Sanskrit for ‘snake’, is ‘sarpa’, which shares a phonetic link with ‘serpens’ in Latin. As he studied the languages further, it became clearer that apart from Greek and Latin, Sanskrit words could be found in most other European languages. For instance, ‘mata’ or mother in Sanskrit, is ‘mutter’ in German. ‘Dan’ or ‘to give’ in Sanskrit is ‘donor’ in Spanish.
To Jones’ surprise, there were many such words which were clearly born out of the same root. The Sanskrit for ‘father’, ‘pitar’ for instance, has remarkable phonetic relations across European languages. It is ‘pater’ in Greek and Latin, ‘padre’ in Spanish, ‘pere’ in French, and ‘vader’ in German.
“Jones’ hypothesis was picked up enthusiastically by European linguists in the last decade of the 18th century. From then, till about the 1930s, linguist after linguist in Russia, Iran, India, and Europe actively sought out similar words, their interconnections and etymologies, compiled dictionaries and histories of grammar to see if Jones’ thesis could be endorsed or refuted,” says linguist G N Devy in a telephonic interview with Indianexpress.com.
English scholar Thomas Young coined the term, ‘Indo-European’ for this widely spread group of related languages. But where did these languages come from and how did they migrate over such a large expanse of geographical territory? The question of the ancestral homeland of the Indo-European languages has, for more than two centuries, intrigued scholars. The issue has also led to several upheavals in the modern world, and continues to shape theories of racial supremacy. Yet, newer scholarship has shown that even though Sanskrit did indeed share a common ancestral homeland with European and Iranian languages, it had also borrowed quite a bit from pre-existing Indian languages in India.
The great Indo-European migration
In the middle of the 19th century, linguistic scholarship entered a new phase wherein the Indo-European languages were assumed to be derived from a common ancestral language called ‘proto-Indo-European’ (PIE). The PIE was a theoretical construct, and we still do not know what this language was like or who precisely were its speakers.
With the advancement of linguistics and archaeology, by the middle of the 20th century, some theories were put forward to explain the spread of the Indo-European languages. First is the Kurgan hypothesis, formulated in the 1950s by a Lithuanian-American archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas. It claimed that in the fourth millennium BCE people living in the Pontic steppe, north of the Black sea, were most likely to be the speakers of PIE.
Anthropologist David Anthony, in his book ‘The horse, the wheel, the language’, claims the domestication of horses, and the invention of wheeled vehicles gave the speakers of PIE an advantage over other settled societies of Europe and Asia. “As the steppes dried and expanded, people tried to keep their animal herds fed by moving them frequently. They discovered that with a wagon you could keep moving indefinitely,” writes Anthony. “With a wagon full of tents and supplies, herders could take their herds out of the river and live for weeks or months out in the open steppes between the major rivers,” he adds.
Consequently, the Kurgan theory claimed that the PIE speakers expanded in several waves in the third millennium BCE. “They started moving because of their military superiority. Some of them came to India, some went to Iran and others to Europe. The branch that went to Iran became Indo-Iranian, and the one that came to India became Indo-Aryan,” says Devi.
Even though other theories have emerged that have suggested the homeland of the proto-Indo-European speakers in Armenian highlands and in Asia Minor, scholars have largely refuted these claims and the Pontic steppe continues to be the most widely accepted region from where the source of Sanskrit and European languages emerged.
It was this theory of Indo-European migration that became the basis of Adolf Hitler’s Aryan supremacy theory. In India, Hindutva ideologues have long held the view that the Indo-European language speakers or the Aryans spread out from the subcontinent elsewhere.
The multiple migrations to India
Even as Hindutva ideologues have remained resistant to the theory of Sanskrit being a product of migration, newer research from 2010, particularly those based on genetics, have further complicated the picture. These studies of ancient DNA have shown that the Indo-European migration was preceded by several other rounds of migration and the South Asian language and culture is a product of different kinds of external and internal influences.
In the hugely popular 2018 book ‘Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From’, journalist Tony Joseph claims there indeed was large-scale migration of Indo-European language speakers to South Asia in the second millenium BCE. However, he further goes on to explain that “population groups in India draw their genes from several migrations to India”. He writes: “There is no such thing as a ‘pure’ group, race or caste that has existed since ‘time immemorial’.”
Yet another book, ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past’, written by American geneticist David Reich in 2018, reiterated how the modern man is a product of several rounds of mass migration. “The formation of South Asian populations parallels that of Europeans. In both cases, a mass migration of farmers from the Near East nine thousand years ago mixed with previously established hunter-gatherers, and a second migration from the European steppe after five thousand years ago brought a different kind of ancestry and probably Indo-European languages as well,” he writes.
“Sanskrit arrived in the subcontinent around 1800 BCE at a time when there were already pre-existing languages here. These pre-existing languages were fairly developed, capable of producing philosophy and poetry,” says Devy. Devy explains how ancient Sanskrit developed in India in collaboration with these pre-existing languages. A good example to mention here is the addition of the sound ‘ri’ to Sanskrit, that produces words such as ‘rishi’, ‘richa’ and ‘ritu’. “This sound is not present in Indo-Iranian languages. It is derived from the ancient mother of Assamese language that was already existing in India,” says Devy.
Yet another instance of Sanskrit borrowing from pre-existing languages in India is that of ‘sandhi’, or compound words. “Take the example of ‘nava’ and ‘uday’ it becomes ‘navyodaya’. This feature of compounding words, through which a phonetic change occurs in the original words, did not exist in the pre-Sanskrit version of Sanskrit. Neither will you see this feature in Greek, German or other European languages. Whether Sanskrit acquired it from an earlier version of Tamil or Pali is difficult to say. But it is clear that it did acquire this feature after coming to the Indian subcontinent,” explains Devy. He goes on to remark that these are gifts that pre-existing languages in India gave to Sanskrit.
Further reading:
Archaeology and language: The puzzle of Indo-European origins by Colin Renefrew
The horse, the wheel, the language by David Anthony
Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From by Tony Joseph
Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich
Source: Indian Express, 25/08/2020
Friday, June 26, 2020
Are Some IITs Over-Pampered and Underperforming
The fifth edition of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) was released online June 11. This year, seven of the top 10 places have gone to the IITs. In all five instalments, the old and preeminent IITs have been at the top spots.
On June 14, I had pointed out that the NIRF methodology had an important flaw. It builds a single score from five categories: teaching, learning and resources (TLR), research and professional practices (RPC), graduation outcomes (GO), outreach and inclusivity (OI), and perception. These five broad heads are built up from various sub-heads, and a complex weighting and addition scheme is used to obtain the overall rating score, which can take a maximum value of 100. The institutions are finally rank-ordered based on these scores.
The flaw is that output and input scores are added to obtained the final score instead of being divided. Any performance analysis requires identifying an input score and a quality score based on the ratio of output (RPC and GO being appropriate proxies) to input (TLR). Instead, NIRF adds the inputs to the outputs, i.e. TLR, RPC and GO along with OI and perception, to get the final score. Note in addition that OI and perception relate neither to academic excellence nor research excellence, but these are added as well.
P. Sriram of IIT Madras recently pointed out in a personal communication that the NIRF uses performance parameters in several groups, including TLR, publications and graduation outcomes as reflecting “desirable” and “undesirable” traits, where the desirables get positive and high scores and undesirables get low scores. From this viewpoint, the TLR parameter receives a high score for a high faculty-student ratio, high spending on infrastructure, high PhD enrolment etc. NIRF adds up all the scores – but completely overlooks the systems’ paradigm. That is, from a systems viewpoint, the ‘best’ institute should be based on the ratio of outputs to inputs.
Now, nowhere in the NIRF portal can a measure be found for the size-dependent input nor a size-dependent proxy for the output, both vis-à-vis academic excellence. The systems approach allows one to compute quality as output score divided by input score. Professor Sriram suggested that capital expenditure can be a meaningful input measure, but a lot of experimenting showed that the major chunk of expenditure is committed to salaries of faculty members and non-teaching staff, and that it may be better to use ‘total expenditure’ as a proxy for the input.
Keeping this in mind, I computed the total expenditure (sum of capital and operating expenditures) as a proxy for input and the sum of RPC and GO scores as the output scores for the top 100 engineering institutes (in the current form of the NIRF rankings). Then the cost effectiveness of each institution becomes simply the ratio of output to input.
The table and figure below summarise what we found. IIT Indore and Jadavpur University stand out on this basis. Many National Institutes of Technology get into the top positions. And most of the preeminent IITs vanish from this list, as the law of diminishing returns comes to the fore. So perhaps we must ask if some of the IITs are over-pampered and underperforming.
Source: The Wire, 25/06/20
Why do Indigenous Communities Continue to Practice Shifting Cultivation?
Shifting cultivation continues to be a predominant agricultural practice in many parts of India, despite state discouragement and multipronged efforts to wean indigenous communities away from it. Their land, due to remoteness, poor access to markets and undulating terrain, leaves them with few alternatives.
In northeast India, a 2018 report released by the Indian government revealed that an area of 8500 square kilometres is still being used to practice shifting cultivation (SC) – an agricultural system practiced for centuries.
The process consists of cultivating land temporarily and then abandoning it – usually for a period of one to two decades so the soil recuperates its fertility and reverts to its natural state. Because it involves the felling of trees for temporary cultivation, it is blamed for deforestation, soil erosion and loss of biodiversity, all contributors to global climate change.
However, contrary to this popular notion held by state officials and other agencies, the practice does provide a sustainable means of livelihood and food security to the communities that practice it. The problem lies in both its commercialisation and production pressures arising from a human-population increase, leading to a reduction in fallow length – the period between two cultivation phases.
In a book called Shifting cultivation policies: Balancing environmental and social sustainability (2017), an outline of the role of government and local institutions in regulating shifting cultivation over time has been described. Interventions aimed at stopping shifting cultivation go as far back as pre-British rule when the Ahoms from upper Burma ruled over Assam state. The rulers discouraged the practice and instead introduced alternatives such as wet-rice farming. Additionally, between 1827 and 1947, in the early colonial period of British rule, shifting cultivation was seen as primitive and efforts were made to ban the practice and wean farmers away from it.
In 2011 a New Land Use Policy aimed at transforming SC in northeast India was implemented by the state government of Mizoram. Multiple efforts to discourage farmers continue to this present day.
Considering all these government policies, schemes, and interventions aimed at discouraging the practice over the last century, a burning question emerges: why, after so many years of attempts at termination and control, do these indigenous communities persist in practicing SC? A recent study published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics set out to investigate just that.
Based on a survey of 500 people drawn from 52 villages, representing six districts in northeast India; Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, they highlighted key findings on the impacts of transformative adaptation, specifically the socio-economic and environmental impacts of shifting away from SC towards other uses. This adaptation is considered necessary to mitigate the adverse impacts of global climate change, seeking to reduce the risk it poses. However, such transformative changes, such as the increased dominance of settled agriculture, for example, could have unintended consequences, such as the erosion of their rich cultural traditions.
The found attachment takes three forms: traditional or institutional social bonding (attachment to the local community and traditions), economic bonding (attachment to the form of livelihood and the place) and nature bonding (attachment to the natural landscape). The fourth dimension analysed was the lack of any worthwhile alternative.
Social bonding was found to be the most important factor, understandably so given it is a collective exercise that requires cooperative behaviour. It also allows them to sustain their rich cultural traditions. It is strengthened through culturally imbibed practices such as festivals that are observed throughout the agricultural cycle.
Karthik Teegalapalli, a researcher at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, studies shifting cultivation and spent months studying the Adi tribe in Central Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India, where families cultivate together in large patches. He discovered a barter system when it came to managing the land.
“Since SC is an arduous form of cultivation, families band together during clearing and burning of the fields, and also during sowing and harvesting,” he said. “Each hillslope and cultivated patch has a long history that every farming household in the village is aware of.”
Lack of suitable alternatives was the second most important factor. As Dileep Kumar Pandey, the study’s lead author and an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Central Agricultural University (Manipur), Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh said: “At times, SC is the only potential option available to ensure the food and nutrition security of the indigenous people.” If alternatives were offered, they would consider giving up SC.
Because of the relatively inaccessible mountainous and hilly locations, access to markets is difficult and therefore indigenous communities derive a higher sense of economic security from SC, explaining the third most important factor – economic bonding. Also, settled agriculture requires an initial investment and regular purchase of chemical weed and pesticides.
Finally, nature bonding is the fourth most important dimension – forests are sacred to those who practice SC and the diversity of crops strongly links with food security. SC differs not only from state to state in the northeast but village to village and among families too. Teegalapalli says current systems have adapted to the locations and access available to them: “The more remote locations have continued to practice SC as they always have with minor modifications, whereas communities closer to urban centres have completely modified their practice and undertake it almost completely for monetary outputs,” he says.
The dense forests supply them with everything they need to survive, including timber to build homes, food, and medicines, increasing the probability they can earn livelihoods and survive. “SC is not only a land-use system but a way of life, hence, the people cling on to this,” said Pandey. “To safeguard sustainability, optimise ecosystem-based approaches and socio-ecological system frameworks, harmonisation of cultural ecosystem services and human wellbeing would be essential so as to ensure positive outcomes of management interventions on SC.”
In other words, planning for better adaptation needs to satisfy the less tangible needs and aspirations of these communities, allowing them to sustain their rich cultural traditions.
Suresh Babu, head of capacity strengthening at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), believes COVID-19 has allowed SC to be seen with a fresh perspective, particularly in terms of boosting food security and agriculture for the communities who practice it. He says, “the ecological aspects of SC are key for the preservation of indigenous crops and cultivars grown by native populations for centuries.” Its characteristics are “useful in the context of addressing climate change and other uncertainties.” These, however, require “strong institutional support” and “collective action institutions to be nurtured amongst them.”
Recently, the government has announced shifting cultivation may soon receive legal backing. A comprehensive policy is being written, spearheaded by government think tank NITI Aayog, aimed at supporting the practice and ensuring cultivators have access to credit and benefits such as subsidies. This plan includes defining the land used for SC as agricultural land, something Teegalapalli sees as “a welcome move” as long as it is carefully implemented.
Aimee Gabay is an intern at Mongabay and studies journalism in London
Source: The Wire, 24/06/2020
Daulat Beg Oldie: A strategic post named after the spot where a sultan died
Daulat Beg Oldie is a name hard to forget. A quick examination of the etymology reveals the rather exotic origins of the name, translated from Turkic as ‘the spot where the rich man died’.
In 2000, when India’s Border Roads Organisation (BRO) began the construction of 255-km-long Darbuk-Shyokh-Daulat Beg Oldie (DSDBO) all-weather road, the idea was to connect Leh, the capital of Ladakh to Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO), an Indian military base, located at the Northernmost tip of India in the Karakoram mountains. In the past month, the road has come at the forefront of the India-China stand-off. Daulat Beg Oldie is a name hard to forget. A quick examination of the etymology reveals the rather exotic origins of the name, translated from Turkic as ‘the spot where the rich man died’.
The 19th century British medical officer, Henry Walter Bellew, who worked in Afghanistan and wrote extensively on his explorations of the region, translated the name ‘Daulat Beg Oldie’ as the place where ‘the Lord of the state died’.
Both the etymologies, however, are indicative of the same person: Sultan Said Khan, the 16th century ruler of Yarkent Khanate. The Yarkent Khanate was a state in Central Asia existing between 1514 and 1705 CE, with its seat of government being situated at Yarkand, in Xinjiang, China. At its peak, the Yarkent Khanate ruled over large parts of Central Asia from Xinjiang. Khan who was the descendant of MongIn 1531, Khan commissioned his general Mirza Haider to invade Ladakh as a prelude to his larger plan of conquering Lhasa in Tibet. While Haider was busy confronting the ruler of Ladakh, Khan himself decided to march down with a large force. However, as the ruler’s health took a turn for the worse, the expedition of Lhasa was entrusted to Haider, while he hurried back home. However, Khan died on his way back to Yarkand, at the spot that went on to be named after him as ‘Daulat Beg Oldie’.ol emperor Genghis Khan, was the first ruler of the state.
Describing Khan’s expedition in Ladakh, historians Iqtidar A. Khan and Irfan Habib wrote in the book ‘History of Civilizations of Central Asia: Development in Contrast: from the Sixteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century’: “It was, apparently, designed to clear the route linking Kashmir with Yarkand and create a social base for Chaghatayid rule in the valley, where the majority of the population were Sunni Muslims.” They added: “Said Khan’s death during the march back from Ladakh to Yarkand in 1533 and the subsequent disturbances in Kashgar, however, did not allow sufficient time for this scheme to come to fruition.”
The memory of Khan’s ambitions, however, has been retained in the spot that has over the years acquired strategic importance for India. Less than 10 kilometers west of the LAC at Aksai Chin, a military outpost was created at DBO after the Chinese occupation at Aksai Chin during the Sino-Indian war of 1962. In July 1962, a few months before the Sino-Indian conflict, an airfield was commissioned at DBO. Located at an elevation of 16,614 feet above seal level, it is the highest airfield in the world.
Source: Indian Express, 26/06/20
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