Has Cosmology Advanced in Recent Years?

Cosmologists are astronomers who study the universe as\ud a whole. The idea of the universe as a whole presents\ud some difficulty both to science and philosophy. In science,\ud because we can only study parts of a system unknown in\ud its totality. Moreover there are features of scientific cosmology\ud which set it apart from other sciences: we cannot\ud in cosmology speak of experiments or verifiable predictions\ud (Cosmologists are prophets of the past!). We can\ud only check astronomical observations with theories and\ud models. Philosophically, the connection between models\ud of the universe and reality, the intelligibility of an universe\ud as an independently existing entity and the perennial\ud questions about the origin of the universe remain unsolved

A Neural Network Classifier for the COI Barcode Gene

Mitochondrial Cytochrome C Oxidase subunit I (CO I – to be read as “see – oh one”) is a 658 base pair region in the gene encoding that is proposed as standard barcode for animals. Meaning, the CO I is a special region found in animal DNA that is studied to identify the species of the animal. Currently, there is an implementation of an algorithm called ARBitrator which identifies and extracts these CO I sequences from enormous genes database called GenBank. The ARBitrator is good at extracting the CO I sequences that have better specificity and accuracy as compared to other existing algorithms for CO I sequence identification[1][2]. Now, this project aims at training a neural network to learn the features of the CO I sequences extracted by ARBitrator, so that this neural network can be used in future to further recognize CO I sequences. Effectively, we are aiming to successfully design, train, and use a deep learning neural network to learn to recognize CO I sequences in a supervised way. This is the first time that a neural network is explored and used for this purpose

Gatherings of mobility and immobility: itinerant “criminal tribes” and their containment by the Salvation Army in colonial South India

In retelling the history of “criminal tribe” settlements managed by the Salvation Army in Madras Presidency (colonial India) from 1911, I argue that neither the mobility–immobility relationship nor the compositional heterogeneity of (im)mobility practices can be adequately captured by relational dialecticism espoused by leading mobilities scholars. Rather than emerging as an opposition through dialectics, the relationship between (relative) mobility and containment may be characterized by overlapping hybridity and difference. This differential hybridity becomes apparent in two ways if mobility and containment are viewed as immanent gatherings of humans and nonhumans. First, the same entities may participate in gatherings of mobility and of containment, while producing different effects in each gathering. Here, nonhumans enter a gathering, and constitute (im)mobility practices, as actors that make history irreducibly differently from other actors that they may be entangled with. Second, modern technologies and amodern “institutions” may be indiscriminately drawn together in all gatherings