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What do we do with our e-waste? The answers would possibly be „what is e-waste‟, „office IT vendor‟ and „collection boxes‟ to „we just dump it in the dustbin‟ or „put it in our cupboards for a long long time.‟ It is like that disposing of e-waste effectively (or at all) is not a priority because, we think, it doesn‟t really get in our way.E-waste recycling is a concept barely existent in India. As a result, the electronic waste generated is often dumped in rivers or in dump yards without proper treatment. This is hazardous for both the environment and personal health. Electronic waste (e-waste) is one of fast-growing trash streams in the country. Knowledge Growth and The Telecommunications Technology sector has improved electronic use equipment exponentially. Soon expiration and subsequent upgrades of electronic products, are compelling consumers discard old products, which then accumulate large e-waste in a solid stream of waste. E-waste is growing in India at a rate of 10%. Major recycling of e-waste is carried out in the non-formal sector using primitive and hazardous methods. . Adequate legal action and inexpensive, friendly to nature, A technical solution will be needed to fix the issue.With increasing production of electronic devices, the carbon emission is also increasing drastically. Even processes like recycling have a high usage of resources like water and electricity which are also (though in lesser quantities) degrading the environment. The UN has set up Sustainable Development Goals which set up certain goals that we need to match up in future.Seeing that a large amount of carbon emissions come from development of electronics, we decided to build a project that can help people to REUSE old electronic products. Keywords: Reusability, Recycling, Android Development, Donation, NGOs

We study how the relationship between a firm’s growth opportunities and its dividend policies shifts in response to a reduction in information asymmetry between investors and firms. Existing litera...

We study background dynamics and the growth of matter perturbations in the extended quasidilaton setup of massive gravity. For the analysis of perturbations, we first choose a scalar field matter component and obtain the conditions under which all scalar perturbations are stable. We work in unitary gauge for the matter field, which allows us to directly map to known results in the limit of general relativity. By performing a parameter search, we find that the perturbations are unstable in general, while a particular choice of potential, where the scalar field effectively behaves like pressureless matter, allows for stable perturbations. We next consider the growth of matter perturbations in a cold dark matter-dominated Universe. Working in conformal Newtonian gauge, we obtain evolution equations for various observables including the growth factor and growth rate, and find scale-independent growth in the quasistatic and subhorizon approximations. We finally show how the Hubble parameter and matter perturbations evolve in massive gravity for a specific choice of parameter values, and how this evolution compares to the standard cosmological model consisting of a cosmological constant and cold dark matter., 16 pages, 5 figures. Mathematica notebook supplement is enclosed in the source file

Savings of (₹ or Indian Rupee (Code INR) is official Indian currency. 1 USD equals to apprx. ₹ 74) 28.69 crore (One Crore equals to 10 million) in one year!! No one could believe that it was possib...

One emerging application in geothermal energy is that of closed-loop systems, where two laterals are intersected so that a working fluid can be pumped down one wellhead and up another. These solutions are attractive because they do not rely on the natural permeability of a formation or a reservoir of heated water already in place, they simply require a high enough downhole temperature. While a great deal of discussion exists on wellbore intersection, most applications are by their nature heavily constrained by tight geologic requirements (e.g. coal-bed methane) or have one wellbore trajectory rigidly defined (e.g. relief well drilling). These intersection operations require extensive use of specialized ranging technologies and control drilling at the intersection point which can be time-consuming. Closed-loop geothermal presents a unique opportunity, with relatively few constraints to satisfy (e.g. target depth, lateral length). This study uses this freedom in trajectory design and quantifies the extent that various wellbore positioning techniques can increase the probability of intersection while minimizing the need for ranging workflows. A baseline scenario is described, with wells originating from differing pad locations, drilling with standard practices and active magnetic ranging. Using Monte Carlo techniques, the probability of successful intercept is evaluated for alternate trajectory combinations and compared to the baseline. These include well pairs originating from the same pad and pairs from differing pad locations. Major factors contributing to relative survey errors are identified and the impact of uncertainty reducing techniques are explored for each trajectory type. Techniques include survey corrections, variation of the trajectory profiles, incidence angle at intersection, and the use of alternative solutions to control relative vertical uncertainty. For each scenario, the probability of intercept was evaluated for cases without using ranging tools and for both passive and active ranging technologies. A cost-benefit comparison is conducted, and an optimal combination of factors is identified. For the baseline scenario, low probabilities of collision imply that extensive use of ranging is required for a successful operation. Positional uncertainty reduction techniques and multiple target intervals can greatly increase the collision probability and reduce the need for ranging. Of importance to increasing the probability of successful interception are techniques that maximize the uncertainty reduction along a single axis (e.g. the vertical plane). This enables a "sweep" across the other plane to achieve intersection. Value provided by additional uncertainty reduction techniques depends on the assumed costs of drilling additional footage, performing ranging operations, and rig spread rate. The application of sophisticated wellbore positioning techniques at scale to the closed-loop geothermal problem has not been previously explored. The relatively low number of constraints compared to traditional wellbore intersections enables strategies not otherwise available for successful project construction.

Data deduplication has become an integral part of managing repositories of outsourced data to the cloud data centers. However, centralized data centers face issues of data loss and accessibility if something goes faulty as deduplication maintains just a unique copy of the content. Secure data deduplication exploits convergent encryption to perform data deduplication in encrypted domain. However, managing convergent keys provides a single point of vulnerability and overhead problems. Towards this end, we propose a secure data deduplication scheme that formally addresses the problems of fault tolerance, efficient and reliable key management, data confidentiality by obfuscation of outsourced information and integrity check at the user’s end prior to downloading via computation of authentication codes. Data is distributed into random looking shares based on Permutation ordered binary (POB) number system at multiple servers and is further made secure via the notion of proof of ownership (PoW) concept. Also, key overhead is minimized using Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) based secret sharing. The efficacy of the proposed scheme has been demonstrated by the experimental results and security analysis validates its suitability with respect to various attacks in real time scenarios.

We examine the effect of firms’ information environment on asymmetric cost behavior (cost stickiness). Using plausibly exogenous variation in firms’ information environment stemming from brokerage closures, we find that the stickiness of selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs reduces in response to adverse changes in the information environment. This effect is concentrated in firms characterized, ex ante, by poorer reporting quality, higher information uncertainty, lower institutional holdings, greater financial constraints, and lower resource adjustment costs. Managers respond to adverse information shocks by reducing the stickiness of SG&A costs that are less likely to create future value, thereby paving way for higher enterprise valuation. Our paper contributes to the growing literature on cost behavior research by documenting the link between firms’ external information environment and internal cost management, and presents novel evidence on managers’ altering their cost behavior to generate internal funds when access to external capital is limited.

Soil liquefaction is one of the primary concerns during construction of foundations on saturated sand in seismically active areas. Seismically induced settlement and tilting of structures due to the liquefaction have resulted in detrimental consequences. The generation of excess pore pressure is the key to the initiation of liquefaction which mainly occurs due to an earthquake. A series of measures have been tried over time to time to mitigate the effects of liquefaction but till now no effective measure has been evolved to safe a structure founded on a liquefiable soil. The present paper covers an experimental study on a two-storeyed frame structure standing on liquefiable soil to show its performance soon after liquefaction. The shape of the footing is changed from conventional to non-conventional footing. Two non-conventional shapes adopted in this study are spherical and trapezoidal in cross section, designed in such a way that they achieve stable equilibrium under both vertical loads and upthrust generated due to pore water pressure generation during liquefaction. Series of tests were performed with conventional rectangular footing, spherical-shaped footing and trapezoidal-shaped footing on a one-dimensional shaker at frequencies from 1 to 5 Hz. Accelerations of the tank were compared with the accelerations imposed over the footings. Displacements were measured from a fixed point using a ruler scale, and tilt was measured from comparison of photographs taken before and after shaking from a stationary point. It was observed that the vibrations at upper floors are more for conventional footing while vibrations at footing level are more for modified footings. It was also observed that the modified footings floated over the liquefied sand for a longer time and then sank instead of being tilted. The paper concludes that spherical-shaped footing is the best alternative to eliminate the tilting problem.

Acute mesenteric ischemia (AMI) occuring due to sudden, partial or complete interruption of blood ow in main visceral arteries of the abdomen eventually resulting in intestinal ischemia and/or bowel gangrene is a surgical emergency. It represents 0.1% of hospital admissions and 2% of the revascularization operations for atheromatous lesions. 50% of AMI is caused by embolic phenomenon, 25% by thrombotic episode and rest 25% by both. The most common vessel involved in AMI is superior mesenteric artery. Acute mesenteric embolic ischemia (AMEI) arises typically from a cardiac emboli in patients with atrial brillation or following MI. Patients usually presents with central abdominal pain, out of proportion to the physical ndings initially, later becoming diffuse associated with bloody diarrhoea during the episode. An early diagnosis, an aggressive resuscitation, intravascular or surgical restoration of blood ow and subsequent bowel resection based on bowel viability helps reduce morbidity and mortality.

Background: Taste perception is an important factor in sustaining human life. Impairment of taste is one of the important features of oral submucous fibrosis (OSMF), and it has not received much attention, owing to limited research work in the field. Therefore, the present study was conducted to determine taste alteration in OSMF patients. Materials and Methods: A total of 200 participants, both males and females with the age range of 20 years to 55 years, were included in the study. Four basic tastants (i.e., sweet, salt, sour, and bitter) were prepared as follows: sucrose for sweet (0.1–1.0 mol/l), sodium chloride for salty (0.01–1.0 mol/l), citric acid for sour (0.320–0.032 mol/l), and quinine sulfate for bitter (0.01–1.0 mol/l) and full mouth rinse test was performed for a complete taste response examination, after which punch biopsy was taken from buccal mucosa to determine histopathological staging. The data obtained were tabulated and analyzed by the Pearson Chi-square test; P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The overall results suggested that there was a significant alteration of taste. The sweet taste was altered followed by salty and bitter was least affected. Conclusion: The study points out at the significance of alteration in taste perception is OSMF patients related to sweet, salt, sour, and bitter taste by using physiological stimuli tastants.

This study examines the role of textual coherence in making annual integrated reports in South Africa more informative for investors. Using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to measure coherence, I demonstrate that informativeness of integrated reports is positively associated with their coherence. Further analysis reveals that coherence mitigates the negative effects of linguistic complexity, captured by Fog Index, on report informativeness and stock price delay. My findings contribute to the growing literature on IR by documenting a potential benefit for investors, and also suggest that Fog Index or other traditional measures of linguistic complexity may not be sufficient to gauge the consequences of IR adoption on the informativeness of annual reports.

The benefits of high-end computation infrastructure facilities provided by cloud-based multimedia systems are attracting people all around the globe. However, such cloud-based systems possess security issues as third party servers become involved in them. Rendering data in an unreadable form so that no information is revealed to the cloud data centers will serve as the best solution to these security issues. One such image encryption scheme based on a Permutation Ordered Binary Number System has been proposed in this work. It distributes the image information in totally random shares, which can be stored at the cloud data centers. Further, the proposed scheme authenticates the shares at the pixel level. If any tampering is done at the cloud servers, the scheme can accurately identify the altered pixels via authentication bits and localizes the tampered area. The tampered portion is also reflected back in the reconstructed image that is obtained at the authentic user end. The experimental results validate the efficacy of the proposed scheme against various kinds of possible attacks, tested with a variety of images. The tamper detection accuracy has been computed on a pixel basis and found to be satisfactorily high for most of the tampering scenarios.

We study how the relationship between a firm’s growth opportunities and its dividend policies shifts in response to a reduction in information asymmetry between investors and firms. Existing literature suggests a negative relationship between growth opportunities and dividend payouts in the presence of information asymmetry. Using the mandatory adoption of IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) as an exogenous shock to the information environment of a firm, we document that the negative relationship between growth opportunities and dividend payout strengthens. This suggests IFRS adoption improves capital allocation by shifting dividend demand towards low-growth firms and reducing dividend demand from high-growth firms.

An important aspect of social media analytics is understanding themes, i.e., popular discussion topics, as they evolve in time. Techniques like topic models, which assume a generative model of theme distribution over documents, often suffer from three problems -- they are expensive to compute in real-time, they usually limit the number of topics, and they do not consider the continuous change in the topic proportions, emergence and noise that occurs in social media. To address these problems, we have developed MINT, a framework that uses a non-uniform stochastic model of term occurrence to identify themes as they evolve in real-time, and periodically stores the identified themes in a semi-structured database. MINT therefore supports both theme detection and evolution queries on social media. Themes encode useful information like their rate of growth, changing user communities around them, links to related real-world events, their representative topic-handles, etc., that can be queried upon. We experimentally show that our extracted themes compare well with more traditional methods but performs well in real-time.

This paper investigates the impact of competitive position of the firm on the quality of risk disclosures in annual report. We develop a composite measure as a proxy for quality of disclosures by factoring in both the quantity of disclosure and the semantic attributes, namely, nature, time-orientation and tone of disclosure. In the backdrop of a unique natural setting that Indian regulatory environment offers, we use a sample of more than 4000 annual reports covering a 10-year period from 2005 to 2015 and employ a system-GMM regression to address the problem of endogeneity to find that firms that have an advantageous competitive position provide more comprehensive disclosures. In sharp contrast to the tenets of proprietary cost hypothesis that due to associated disclosure costs firms lose their competitive advantage and hence shy away from disclosure, we find that companies that fare well in product markets signal their strengths through enhanced disclosure to maintain their legitimacy and stakeholders' confidence. Further analysis reveals that firms with sound industry position tend to be transparent on a higher number of risk items. This study makes a unique contribution to the literature by examining an unexplored strategic dimension- firm's competitive position- as a deterrent or inducement to risk disclosure. Accordingly, the results have policy implications for various jurisdictions that do not have mandatory disclosure norms and even for those that follow the ‘comply or explain’ approach.

Retroperitoneal schwannomas are though more common among females, are very much rare tumors arising from sheath of nerves. Also, extremely rare during pregnancy. Very few articles till date are there regarding retroperitoneal schwannomas that’s too in pregnant female. Usually these are symptomatic unless causing some compression to other intra-abdominal structures like vessels or bowel and usually malignant. As its retroperitoneal very difficult to diagnose it. So, with proper investigations and radiological imaging, first have to find out the differential diagnosis prior to planning for surgery.

The wide attacking surface of the public cloud poses threats to the security of sensitive information such as medical information stored at these distributed cloud data centers. Obscuring this information using traditional encryption schemes would limit the processing capabilities in encrypted domain that are provided via various cloud services. Moreover, it is vital to address the issue of rightful ownership so that the person to which the medical information belongs to can be determined. To address these issues, Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) based secret sharing scheme has been employed to divide the medical images into multiple random looking shares which are information theoretically secure and reveal no information about the images. Based on a secret key, some of these encrypted shares are embedded with the secret owner specific information in the encrypted domain itself prior to outsourcing. To prove rightful ownership at the receiver end, this secret information can be extracted either directly from the shares stored at the cloud data centers or obtained after recovery of the medical information at the authentic entity end which possesses the secret keys. The robustness of the scheme against different attack scenarios while stored at the cloud,,,, data centers in encrypted domain has been tested to validate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

We derive the evolution equation for the density matrix of a UV- and IR- limited band of comoving momentum modes of the canonically normalized scalar degree of freedom in two examples of nearly de Sitter universes. Including the effects of a cubic interaction term from the gravitational action and tracing out a set of longer wavelength modes, we find that the evolution of the system is non-Hamiltonian and non-Markovian. We find linear dissipation terms for a few modes with wavelength near the boundary between system and bath, and nonlinear dissipation terms for all modes. The non-Hamiltonian terms in the evolution equation persist to late times when the scalar field dynamics is such that the curvature perturbation continues to evolve on super-Hubble scales.

Banking industry has gone through one of the worst crisis in recent times, and is still recovering from the after-shocks. However, there were a lot of learnings that banks would have taken away from this crisis. One of them is the need for a robust risk management system. The crisis dealt a blow to the banking system, catching them off guard when it came to foreseeing the risk. Banks, in the credit card business, face financial risk in the form of both credit risk and fraud risk. Sharma and Agarwal (2013) proposed a model for predicting the credit risk from the merchants. This paper builds upon their technique to predict the fraud risk posed by the merchants to the banks. Fraud risk is an important aspect of risk management systems, particularly in the credit space. The uncertainty surrounding the receipt of paybacks calls for designing robust risk prediction models. Fraud risk is very different from credit risk because fraud risk does not follow a pattern. It happens suddenly, and may not always have a trend before it happens. This creates a need for separate model for fraud risk prediction. This paper develops a fraud risk prediction model that uses logistic regression technique, deployed using SAS. The setup of the study is the merchant-bank relationship in the credit card industry. The model developed in this paper triggers on a transaction level, and assigns a ‘probability score of default (PF) to each merchant for a possible fraud risk whenever a transaction is done at the merchant. Such a score warns the management in advance of probable future losses on merchant accounts. Banks can rank order merchants based on their PF score, and instead of working on the entire merchant portfolio, they can focus on the relatively riskier set of merchants. The PF model is validated by comparing the actual defaults with those predicted by the model and a good alignment is found between the two. The results show that the model can capture 62 percent frauds in the first decile when the transactions are sorted by the probability of fraud computed by the model.

Non-Gaussianity in the distribution of inflationary perturbations, measurable in statistics of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large scale structure fluctuations, can be used to probe non-trivial initial quantum states for these perturbations. The bispectrum shapes predicted for generic non-Bunch-Davies initial states are non-factorizable ("non-separable") and are highly oscillatory functions of the three constituent wavenumbers. This can make the computation of CMB bispectra, in particular, computationally intractable. To efficiently compare with CMB data one needs to construct a separable template that has a significant similarity with the actual shape in momentum space. In this paper we consider a variety of inflationary scenarios, with different non-standard initial conditions, and how best to construct viable template matches. In addition to implementing commonly used separable polynomial and Fourier bases, we introduce a basis of localized piecewise spline functions. The spline basis is naturally nearly orthogonal, making it easy to implement and to extend to many modes. We show that, in comparison to existing techniques, the spline basis can provide better fits to the true bispectrum, as measured by the cosine between shapes, for sectors of the theory space of general initial states. As such, it offers a useful approach to investigate non-trivial features generated by fundamental properties of the inflationary Universe., 14 pages, 6 figures, comments welcome

Quasidilaton massive gravity offers a physically well-defined gravitational theory with non-zero graviton mass. We present the full set of dynamical equations governing the expansion history of the universe, valid during radiation domination, matter domination, and a late-time self-accelerating epoch related to the graviton mass. The existence of self-consistent solutions constrains the amplitude of the quasi-dilaton field and the graviton mass, as well as other model parameters. We point out that the effective mass of gravitational waves can be significantly larger than the graviton mass, opening the possibility that a single theory can explain both the late-time acceleration of the cosmic expansion and modifications of structure growth leading to the suppression of large-angle correlations observed in the cosmic microwave background., 5 pages, 1 figure; eq. 7 corrected - conclusions have not changed

Photometric large scale structure (LSS) surveys probe the largest volumes in the Universe, but are inevitably limited by systematic uncertainties. Imperfect photometric calibration leads to biases in our measurements of the density fields of LSS tracers such as galaxies and quasars, and as a result in cosmological parameter estimation. Earlier studies have proposed using cross-correlations between different redshift slices or cross-correlations between different surveys to reduce the effects of such systematics. In this paper we develop a method to characterize unknown systematics. We demonstrate that while we do not have sufficient information to correct for unknown systematics in the data, we can obtain an estimate of their magnitude. We define a parameter to estimate contamination from unknown systematics using cross-correlations between different redshift slices and propose discarding bins in the angular power spectrum that lie outside a certain contamination tolerance level. We show that this method improves estimates of the bias using simulated data and further apply it to photometric luminous red galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as a case study., Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures; Expanded discussion of results, added figure 2; Version to be published in JCAP

Release planning is part of iterative software development and strongly impacts the success of a product by providing a roadmap for future releases. As such, it is of key importance for lean and agile organizations. Often features are highly dependent on each other and the value of a release is influenced by a set of bundled features constituting a theme. This paper addresses the topic of theme-based release planning. Themes might be defined, manually, upfront or as the result of computer-based analysis. In this paper, we propose an analytical approach to detect themes from a given set of feature dependencies. On top of an existing release planning methodology called EVOLVE II, our approach applies clustering performed on a feature dependency graph. The release plans generated from such an approach are a balance between two goals: (i) considering the values of individual features, (ii) detecting and utilizing synergy effects between semantically related features. As a proof-of-concept, we present a case study addressing the theme-based release planning for 50 features of a text processing system. The preliminary evaluation results show improved release plans with regards to accommodating themes.

Primordial non-Gaussianity induces a scale-dependent bias in large scale structure (LSS) data, proportional to $f_{\rm NL}/k^2$ for the exact local ansatz. Recent work has shown that models of inflation that predict a large squeezed limit bispectrum, such as multi-field models and single field inflation with a modified initial state, typically give rise to a generalized local ansatz, with the scale-dependent bias now proportional to ${\cal A}_{\rm NL}/k^\alpha$. We use photometric measurements of the angular power spectrum of luminous red galaxies and quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Eight (SDSS DR8) with the above parameterization to constrain the amplitude ${\cal A}_{\rm NL}$ and scale-dependence $\alpha$. We find that the marginalized upper limit on $\alpha$ is 2.0 at the $95\%$ confidence level, consistent with the local ansatz. We also present Fisher forecasts for a survey of the same size as DR8 to assess the role of systematics in current photometric LSS data. Moreover, we present analytic results on the expected mass dependence of ${\cal A}_{\rm NL}$ for different inflationary models, which can be an important observable for future surveys, if primordial non-Gaussianity is non-zero., Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, Modified figures 1 and 2 and made other minor revisions, Version to be published in JCAP

The effective field theory (EFT) of inflation has become the preferred method for computing cosmological correlation functions of the curvature fluctuation, $\zeta$. It makes explicit use of the soft breaking of time diffeomorphisms by the inflationary background to organize the operators expansion in the action of the Goldstone mode $\pi$ associated with this breaking. Despite its ascendancy, there is another method for calculating $\zeta$ correlators, involving the direct calculation of the so-called Horndeski action order by order in powers of $\zeta$ and its derivatives. The question we address in this work is whether or not the $\zeta$ correlators calculated in these seemingly different ways are in fact the same. The answer is that the actions to cubic order in either set of variables do indeed give rise to the same $\zeta$ bispectra, but that to make this equivalence manifest requires a careful understanding of the non-linear transformations relating $\pi$ to $\zeta$ and how boundary terms in the actions are affected by imposing this relation. As a by product of our study we find that the calculations in the $\pi$ language can be simplified considerably in a way that allows us to use only the linear part of the $\pi-\zeta$ relation simply by changing the coefficients of some of the operators in the EFT. We also note that a proper accounting of the boundary terms will be of the greatest importance when computing the bispectrum for more general initial states than the Bunch-Davies one., Comment: v1: 20 pages, 1 figure. v2: references and minor clarifications added, results remain unchanged; matches version to be published in JCAP

Despite the significant research in electroporation, high electric field was applied to the whole cells resulted in permeabilizing the membrane of millions of cells without reversibility [1]. To deliver biomolecules through the specific region of the cell membrane with high cell viability and high transfection rate is important for various biological and therapeutic applications.This report presents a new type localized single cell membrane electroporation (LSCMEP), at specific region of the single cell with the application of 800 μs electric pulse. The ITO nano-electrodes with 100nm thickness and 500 nm gap between two electrodes can generate an intense electric field to track biomolecules inside HeLa cell in our studies. This small gap between two nano-electrodes can neglect thermal effect on cell membrane and permit reversible electroporation with high cell viability (90%) and minimum effected electroporation region (0.48 μm). Our approach successfully delivers biomolecules through a specific region of single cell with high transfection rate (82%) and high cell viability. This process, not only generates well-controlled nano-pores allowing rapid recovery of cell membrane, but also it provides a clear optical path potentially tracking of drugs to deliver inside single cell.

We argue that a plausible operational definition for an initial state of the Universe is the initial quantum state of the curvature perturbations generated during inflation. We provide a parameterization of this state and generalize the standard in-in formalism to incorporate the structures in this state into the computation of correlators of the perturbations. Measurements of these correlators using both the CMB as well as large scale structure probe different structures in the initial state, as they give rise to bi- and tri-spectra peaked on different shapes of triangles and quadrilaterals in momentum space. In essence, the shapes implied by the correlators feed directly into information about the shape of the initial state and what physics could have preceded inflation to set this state up., Comment: 7 pages, Essay awarded second prize in the Gravity Research Foundation 2013 essay competition, Version published in IJMPD

We study the effects of non-trivial initial quantum states for inflationary fluctuations within the context of the effective field theory for inflation constructed by Cheung et al. which allows us to discriminate between different initial states in a model-independent way. We develop a Green's function/path integral based formulation that incorporates initial state effects and use it to address questions such as how state-dependent is the consistency relation for the bispectrum, how many e-folds beyond the minimum required to solve the cosmological fine tunings of the big bang are we allowed so that some information from the initial state survives until late times, among others. We find that the so-called consistency condition relating the local limit of the bispectrum and the slow-roll parameter is a state-dependent statement that can be avoided for physically consistent initial states either with or without initial non-Gaussianities., 34 pages, minor revisions, version accepted for publication in JHEP

We present the results of three-dimensional simulations of quasar polarizations in the presence of pseudoscalar-photon mixing in the intergalactic medium. The intergalactic magnetic field is assumed to be uncorrelated in wave vector space but correlated in real space. Such a field may be obtained if its origin is primordial. Furthermore we assume that the quasars, located at cosmological distances, have negligible initial polarization. In the presence of pseudoscalar-photon mixing we show, through a direct comparison with observations, that this may explain the observed large scale alignments in quasar polarizations within the framework of big bang cosmology. We find that the simulation results give a reasonably good fit to the observed data., 15 pages, 8 figures, significant changes, to appear in EPJC