Assessment of quality of higher education in hostile environment: an analysis on provincialised colleges under Assam University Silchar

Historically low average pass rate has been a perennial challenge for the universities and provincialised colleges in the North-Eastern states of India (Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh). Pass rate refers to the proportion of students promoted from one semester to the next and also the proportion of students who pass the final examination to be a graduate. The paper attempts to trace the key parameters for quality improvement for higher education in the region and subsequently augment the pass rate. An inductive content analysis was conducted based on focus group interviews at various levels at Assam University, Silchar and its affiliated provincialised colleges. The four broad categories thus identified (academic, administrative, socio-economic and placement issues) were subjected to Pareto 80-20 principle to identify the issues that are to be given priority for evolving the system. The study would help the administrators to measure the quality of higher education system in a hostile environment characterised by adverse topography, political disturbances, skewed distribution of income, widespread poverty and lack of literacy.     

Communicating resilience in actual and imagined boundaries: narrative plots and meanings of retention in organizations

The paper examines the narratives of STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics) career pathways constructed by women scientists and engineers through the theoretical lens of resilience. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with 45 women who are currently employed in STEM organizations in Singapore, I explore the narrative actions women deploy to survive in largely masculine STEM organizations. Using narrative analysis, I explore the stories women craft as strategies of resilience when negotiating STEM career pathways. Given the critical role of storytelling in resilience, the study points to the role of communication in enabling networks, and in making available opportunities for circulating stories. Moreover, the cultural and structural challenges to women’s work in STEM suggest the key role for communication interventions that are directed at changing sociocultural attitudes toward women’s work in STEM.     

How birds fly together: The dynamics of flocking

We explain the physical motivation for studying the collective coherent motion of large numbers of self-propelled biological organisms. Starting from a well-known discrete model, we discuss the fundamental microscopic mechanisms leading to collective behavior in bird flocks, and how appropriate behavioral rules for the individuals can determine specific features of the aggregation at the group level. We further discuss the theoretical, experimental, and computational effort undertaken to explore this phenomenon together with possible directions for future research in this area.     

On some n-normed linear space valued difference sequences

The main aim of this article is to extend the notion of strongly Cesàro summable and strongly lacunary summable real sequences to n-normed linear space valued (n-nls valued) difference sequences. Consequently we introduce the spaces |σ₁|(X,?) and N_θ(X,?), respectively, where X is an n-normed space and ? is a difference operator. We investigate these spaces for completeness as well as for the relationship between these spaces.     

A Curious Case of Hyperbilirubinemia

A 60-year-old patient suffering from easy fatigability was noted to have high total but normal conjugated bilirubin level though serum colour was pale. On further investigation the patient was found to be suffering from multiple myeloma and gamma globulin was possibly interfering with total bilirubin estimation.