Impact of the flood occurrence in Kota Bharu, Kelantan using statistical analysis

Over the years, flood has become one of the most destructive phenomena all over the world.It’s included Malaysia and the study area which located at the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia.Flood in Kota Bahru, Kelantan is mainly caused by heavy rainfall brought by the Northeast monsoon starting from November to March every year.It is categorized as annual flood as it occurs every year during the Monsoon season.The flood in the study area has become the most common natural hazard which caused a lot of damage for every time, during the flood event.People in the affected area had to bear with this event where they need to be evacuated and moves their private and belongings to the safe area. In this study, about 200 questionnaires were distributed to the people in the affected area after the 2010/2011 flood event. After that, the questionnaires were selected to undergo two kinds of statistical tests that were used to analyze the association of flood with the condition of flood in the study area such as frequency of flood, water depth, type of loss, total loss (in Malaysian currency, RM), health problem, electric/phone disruption and river expansion which was chi-square and bivariate correlation tests.The results of chi-square test shows that there is association between flood occurrence and the condition of flood such as frequency of flood, water depth, type of loss, average total loss, disease and psycology effect, electric/phone disruption and river expansion while the results of correlation test shows that most of the condition of flood has negative strong relationship with the flood occurrence.Overall study shows that the flood occurrences have decreased the impact of flood to the people in the affected area from years to years based on statistics of flood damage and also on victims experience

Jodenvervolging en daderprocessen in België en Nederland (1944-1951): rechtspraak en herinneringsculturen

In the aftermath of the Second World War, a number of ‘didactic trials’ against perpetrators of the Holocaust heavily influenced historiography, the construction of memory and historical thinking. The influence of small scale, serial trials immediately following the war is much harder to detect. In this article, we compare post war trials against Dutch and Belgian policemen, denouncers and concentration camp guards between 1944 and 1951. Both countries lacked specific ‘trial narratives’ with regard to local perpetrators in the Holocaust. Legal procedures against them thus closed off this part of the past. The trials were a legal confirmation of the existing consensus to deny the full responsibility of local perpetrators, a situation which persisted in Belgium for decades. In the Netherlands, however, the ‘closed off’ past resurfaced when ‘memory incidents’ came up in the 1950s. The notion of local perpetrators in the Holocaust was linked to a wave of more general social criticism during the 1960s. In de nasleep van de Tweede Wereldoorlog hadden sommige in het oog springende ‘didactische rechtszaken’ tegen daders van de Jodenvervolging een grote invloed op de geschiedschrijving, de herinneringsconstructie en het historische bewustzijn. De invloed van kleinere seriële processen onmiddellijk na de Tweede Wereldoorlog is veel moeilijker te bepalen. In dit artikel vergelijken we naoorlogse rechtszaken tegen Nederlandse en Belgische politiemensen en geüniformeerde wapendragers, verklikkers en kampbewakers tussen 1944 en 1951. In beide landen ontstonden om diverse redenen geen specifieke ‘procesnarratieven’ rond het daderschap van Belgische en Nederlandse Jodenvervolgers. De gerechtelijke procedures in beide landen sloten zo dit stuk verleden af. Deze processen vormden een juridische bekrachtiging van een bestaande consensus om de volle eigen verantwoordelijkheid niet onder ogen te zien. In België bleef deze situatie lange tijd bestaan. In Nederland werd dit ‘gesloten verleden’ toch snel weer opengebroken. Dit laatste gebeurde (onder meer) van onder uit. Het vermeende falen van de Bijzondere Rechtspleging in sommige zaken leidde al in de jaren 1950 tot herinneringsincidenten. Op die manier kon het eigen daderschap in de Jodenvervolging sneller aansluiting vinden bij de bredere golf van maatschappijkritiek in de jaren 1960.    </p

Italian Communist Party cultural policies during the post-war period 1944-1951

This thesis considers the cultural politics of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the immediate post-war period in the context of Italian History, the artistic developments of the first half of the 20th Century and the ideological basis of the PCI. The text has been divided in two parts: The first part focuses on the cultural policy of the PCI from 1944 to 1951 and its relationship with contemporary Italian culture. In the second part, I discuss the influence of Communist cultural politics in post-war Italian art. I have identified two phases of the cultural politics of the PCI which correspond to two phases of the political developments in Italy after World War II: From 1944, the Italian Communists pursued a policy of alliances with nonproletarianised sectors of society and the other Italian anti-Fascist parties. This policy of alliances collapsed in 1947, when the PCI was expelled from the Government of national unity, which was controlled by the Christian Democrats. In the second part of the thesis, I explain how, similarly, Italian artists were heavily influenced by political allegiances in the wake of Fascism. But, precisely, anti-Fascism was a cornerstone for collaboration and understanding between representatives of disparate trends, and associations of artists from a broad political spectrum were organised. Artists with a PCI card were fully involved with such associations. After 1947, however, as a result of its marginalisation from government, the PCI Politics hardened in all fields, including culture. Party officials began to ask artists to put their skills at the service of the Communist's wider political programme and express Communist contents through their work in every case, with an 'understandable' style aimed to ideologically shape the uneducated proletariat. Nevertheless, this policy seemed unacceptable for those artists who equated Communism with political anti-fascism and free intellectual enquiry. The prestige of the PCI among intellectuals accordingly underwent a quick decline, and Communist officials had to develop a more relaxed cultural line from 1951. This substantially meant the return to the policy pursued in the wake of the war. After this, the relationship of the PCI with fine artists was recomposed. However, the political influence of this collective was fading away in the early 1950s, when new means of mass communication, such as cinema, radio and magazines, appeared in Italy and succeeded in shaping public opinion in a far more effective way than the fine arts

Post world war II Cuba: survey of political, economic and social trends, 1944-1951.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityFollowing four hundred years of Spanish rule, the political scene for the first twenty-five years of the Republic saw the Liberal and Conservative Parties battle for political power. But no matter which party was in power, the corruption and graft remained. Within these years, Cuba also witnessed her largest economic boom followed by her severest depression from which she did not recover until the 1940s. [TRUNCATED] The major social developments have been the granting of labor's wage and job security demands by the government to maintain their political support at the expense of higher production costs. Educationally, the country has retrogressed as evidenced by decreasing enrollments and lack of educational opportunities, especially in the rural areas and on the higher levels of education. It Cuba is to have a dynamic society, capable of meeting the complexities of economic development, her educational system and opportunities will have to be improved. In general, the instabilities that existed in Cuba before World War II have not been decreased by the prosperity of this period, but in some ways have become intensified, as evidenced by the increasing importance of the sugar industry in the economic welfare of the island. [TRUNCATED

Recombinator Networks: Learning Coarse-to-Fine Feature Aggregation

Deep neural networks with alternating convolutional, max-pooling and decimation layers are widely used in state of the art architectures for computer vision. Max-pooling purposefully discards precise spatial information in order to create features that are more robust, and typically organized as lower resolution spatial feature maps. On some tasks, such as whole-image classification, max-pooling derived features are well suited; however, for tasks requiring precise localization, such as pixel level prediction and segmentation, max-pooling destroys exactly the information required to perform well. Precise localization may be preserved by shallow convnets without pooling but at the expense of robustness. Can we have our max-pooled multi-layered cake and eat it too? Several papers have proposed summation and concatenation based methods for combining upsampled coarse, abstract features with finer features to produce robust pixel level predictions. Here we introduce another model --- dubbed Recombinator Networks --- where coarse features inform finer features early in their formation such that finer features can make use of several layers of computation in deciding how to use coarse features. The model is trained once, end-to-end and performs better than summation-based architectures, reducing the error from the previous state of the art on two facial keypoint datasets, AFW and AFLW, by 30\% and beating the current state-of-the-art on 300W without using extra data. We improve performance even further by adding a denoising prediction model based on a novel convnet formulation.Comment: accepted in CVPR 201

Profesors Vilhelms Burkēvics - Latvijas Universitātes rektora pienākumu izpildītājs

Raksts iekļauts LU Bibliotēkas veidotajā virtuālajā izstādē "Pēc diviem mirkļiem 100 gadi: rektoru galerija."Rakstā sniegts ieskats LU prof. Vilhelma Burkēvica dzīves gājumā, atspoguļojot viņa zinātnisko, pedagoģisko darbu LU, kā arī ieguldījumu latviešu izglītības un kultūras veicināšanā emigrācijā Vācijā (1944-1951) un Kanādā (1951-1967). Neilgs, bet ļoti būtisks posms prof. V. Burkēvica darbā bija 1944. gada septembris, kad viņš uzņēmās LU rektora pienākumu izpildi, vēlāk šos pienākumus nododot LU prof. Augustam Ķešānam

Industrial Policy and Technology Diffusion: Evidence from Paper Making Machinery in Indonesia

technology diffusion, Indonesia