The sophisticated colony organization of eusocial insects is primarily maintained through the utilization of pheromones. The regulation of these complex social interactions requires intricate chemoreception systems. The recent publication of the genome of Zootermopsis nevadensis opened a new avenue to study molecular basis of termite caste systems. Although there has been a growing interest in ...

Abstract: This study attempts to measure discriminatory preferences using a field experiment in an established matrimonial market in India. Indian marriages exhibit strong marital segregation along caste lines, and grooms typically advertise their income in matrimonial advertisements. This combination yields an ideal opportunity to measure discriminatory preferences in terms of foregone financi...

The caste issue dominates a large part of India’s social and political life. Caste shapes Indians’ identities, and strong tensions exist between castes. This paper evaluates how caste-based comparisons may be exacerbated in such a conflictual context. Using subjective well-being data from an original panel survey, together with a national representative survey on expenditure, we find that both ...

This paper presents the design and implementation of CASTE, a Cloud-based automatic software test environment. We first present the architecture of CASTE, then the main packages and classes of it are described in detail. CASTE is built upon a private Infrastructure as a Service platform. Through concentrated resource management of virtualized testing environment and automatic execution control ...

In this paper we present a multi-caste ant colony optimization approach, where each caste has its own set of parameters. Two variants are proposed: in the first, the composition of the castes remains fixed throughout the optimization, whilst the other allows ants to move from one caste to another. Results obtained in several traveling salesperson problem instances reveal that the adoption of a ...

Caste as a system of social stratification was an encompassing system in the past. There was reciprocal system of exchange goods and services. With time, occupation and mode of generation of livelihood of various caste groups changed, and the traditional form of jajmani system fizzled out. This paper provides an account of changing perspectives of caste relations in social science writing and p...

In "Altruism and the Origin of the Worker Caste," Bert Hölldobler and Edward Osborne Wilson explore the evolutionary origins of worker ants. "Altruism and the Origin of the Worker Caste" is the fourth chapter of Hölldobler and Wilson's book, The Ants, which was published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University [4] in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1990. In "Altruism and the Origin of the Worke...

BACKGROUND The causes of ethnic and caste-based disparities in mental health are poorly understood. AIM The study aimed to identify mediators underlying caste-based disparities in mental health in Nepal. SUBJECTS AND METHODS A mixed methods ethnographic and epidemiological study of 307 adults (Dalit/Nepali, n=75; high caste Brahman and Chhetri, n=232) was assessed with Nepali versions of Be...

Recent years have witnessed a number of population genetics studies aiming to explore the ‘genetic profile’ of the South Asian population and to cast light on the ‘ethnic’ composition of the caste system. This paper examines four genetic studies and their mass media representations, as well as discusses interviews with leading historians and social scientists whose work focused on issues of the...

We examined how dietary, social, and genetic factors affect individual size and caste in the Florida harvester ant Pogonomyrmex badius, which has three discrete female castes. The diet that a larva consumed, as indicated by delta(13)C, delta(15)N, and C:N, varied with caste. Both N content and estimated trophic position of dietary input was higher for major than for minor workers and was highes...