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The article discusses the use of paper for social communication in early modern India, with focus given to the circulation of puranic manuscripts, or Hindu religious manuscripts. The author demonstrates how paper influenced communication and helped develop an Indian public sphere in spite of a lack of Indian print culture in the early modern period. Particular focus is given to the movement of texts within the Brahman social networks of Maratha, India, as well as the Maratha state's efforts to regulate communication deemed subversive to Brahman elites.

The decisions of if and when to have a first child are very important for any woman or couple. This paper develops a model to examine when a woman should begin trying to conceive, which depends on the personal circumstances and values of each woman. The model incorporates separate objectives for a woman's professional, social, and family aspects of life and integrates them into a quality-of-life function that includes the changing relative importance of these aspects with age over a woman's life. Descriptions of the relative quality of each of these three aspects of a woman's life are modeled over time for different cases. One case involves no child and other cases involve the woman giving birth at different ages from 21 to 50. The probabilities of conceiving when trying, as a function of a woman's age, are included. The relative pros and cons of waiting until the late thirties to have a child to avoid perceived detrimental impacts on one's career or social life are investigated. Several illustrations are included in the paper to demonstrate insights that can be generated using the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier paper, the author introduced a collection of rings that control a categorification of the quantum sl(2) invariant of tangles. We prove that centers of these rings are isomorphics to the cohomology rings of the (n, n) Springer varieties and show that the braid group action in the derived category of modules over these rings descends to the Springer action of the symmetric group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]