2,354 research outputs found

    Harmonious Living: Sustainability, Ecology, and Eco-Islam in Wales

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    This thesis is an in-depth examination of Eco-Islam in Wales. Eco-Islam refers to the conceptual intersection of Islamic principles with environmental and ecological concerns. It is not necessarily a formalised movement with a centralised structure but rather a broader concept that explores the compatibility between Islamic teachings and environmental stewardship. It emphasises the idea that Islamic values and ethics can be applied to address contemporary environmental challenges. This dissertation addresses the question of the normative influence of Islamic environmental principles and their implementation within Welsh Muslim communities and Welsh society. More generally, this thesis is embedded in the academic discourse on the normative role and agency of religions in motivating their members to engage in proenvironmental behaviour. Given the urgency of the environmental crisis facing humanity, which requires a concerted effort from all sectors of society, the research question of this thesis is particularly relevant. Furthermore, despite the growing body of literature on ecology and Islam, there has been little research on the practical implementation of Islamic teachings on nature. Therefore, whilst giving a comprehensive overview of Islamic environmental ethics based on a literature review, the thesis also provides research data on the Eco-Islam movement based on fieldwork conducted in Wales. Particular attention is paid to the social and power structures that contribute to or hinder the development of a Muslim environmental movement. The study provides practical recommendations for better cooperation between faith communities and the (still) predominantly secular environmental movement, with particular attention to the challenges faced by minority communities such as the Muslim communities in Wales

    Current and Future Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

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    Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a central, longstanding, and active area of Artificial Intelligence. Over the years it has evolved significantly; more recently it has been challenged and complemented by research in areas such as machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty. In July 2022 a Dagstuhl Perspectives workshop was held on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The goal of the workshop was to describe the state of the art in the field, including its relation with other areas, its shortcomings and strengths, together with recommendations for future progress. We developed this manifesto based on the presentations, panels, working groups, and discussions that took place at the Dagstuhl Workshop. It is a declaration of our views on Knowledge Representation: its origins, goals, milestones, and current foci; its relation to other disciplines, especially to Artificial Intelligence; and on its challenges, along with key priorities for the next decade

    Understanding Hackers' Work: An Empirical Study of Offensive Security Practitioners

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    Offensive security-tests are a common way to pro-actively discover potential vulnerabilities. They are performed by specialists, often called penetration-testers or white-hat hackers. The chronic lack of available white-hat hackers prevents sufficient security test coverage of software. Research into automation tries to alleviate this problem by improving the efficiency of security testing. To achieve this, researchers and tool builders need a solid understanding of how hackers work, their assumptions, and pain points. In this paper, we present a first data-driven exploratory qualitative study of twelve security professionals, their work and problems occurring therein. We perform a thematic analysis to gain insights into the execution of security assignments, hackers' thought processes and encountered challenges. This analysis allows us to conclude with recommendations for researchers and tool builders to increase the efficiency of their automation and identify novel areas for research.Comment: 11 pages, we have chosen the category "Software Engineering" and not "Cryptography and Security" as while this is a paper about security practices, we target software engineering researcher

    Once More, With Feeling: Partnering With Learners to Re-see the College Experience Through Metaphor and Sensory Language

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    This study focuses on better understanding students and their internal worlds through conceptual metaphor theory and sensory language. Using a phenomenological and arts-based approach, I examined students’ metaphorical constructions of their college experiences and the sensory language and information informing those constructions. By engaging participants in a multimodal process to re-see their experience through connoisseurship and criticism, I explored the following research questions: How do students metaphorically structure their college experience? What sensory language do college students use to describe the metaphorical dimensions of their college experience? How does sensory information shape the metaphorical structuring of their college experience? Through conversations centered on participant-generated images and chosen sensory language, I identified five complex metaphors that represented participants’ constructions of their college experience: college is an unwieldy package; college is up, forward, and out; college is current and future nostalgia; college is a prism; and college is a movie and peers are the soundtrack. By considering these themes, it may be possible for educators to better partner with diverse learners to design personally meaningful experiences that support student development and success. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu)

    African American Masculinities in Ann Petry’s Oeuvre

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    This dissertation articulates how Ann Petry challenges the traditional notions about African American masculinities and redefines them with more positive and progressive attributes in her works. It probes the ways Petry’s black male characters face oppression, stereotypes, and systemic barriers, in relation to American hegemonic masculinity and (black) femininity. As black men, they are in the process of being permanently constructed due to the intersecting power of race, gender, class, and other categories on personal, social, and state levels in a context specific manner. I implement an intersectional reading method to analyze Petry’s constructions of African American masculinities, enhanced by a two-step strategy of identify-by-explaining categories and asking the other question about their constitutive and overlapping dynamics. This dissertation also addresses Petry’s underrepresented role in subverting the socially constructed and maintained stereotypes about African American masculinities and proposes two reasons for it. Firstly, there is an actual interplay between reinforcing and subverting stereotypes in Petry’s novels and short stories, which I regard as part of an evaluation of her oeuvre. On the one hand, she depicts stereotypical African American male characters in “Like a Winding Sheet” (1945), The Street (1946), and “In Darkness and Confusion” (1947) in order to revisit and refine the violent and sexually driven black masculine stereotypes. On the other, she represents black male characters as racially-conscious and diverse in “Solo on the Drums” (1947), The Narrows (1953), and “The New Mirror” (1965) to maintain her non-essentialist and progressive definitions of black masculinities. Secondly, reading Petry on the periphery of protest fiction – epitomized in the works of black male authors such as Richard Wright – overshadows her divergent aesthetics and impedes her contribution to the advancement of mid-century African American fiction. By depicting black male characters from the perspective of a female author, this dissertation showcases how Petry modifies the male-dominated modes of representation of black masculinities. The critique of Petry’s representations of African American masculinities, thus, expands outside the male vs. female dichotomy and repositions her beyond the confinements of protest novel aesthetics

    Volume 45: Full Issue

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    Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 50th Anniversary Edition: Becoming a Polytechni

    A corpus-based investigation into lexicogrammatical incongruity and its relation to irony

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    Presented is a corpus-based investigation into the lexicogrammatical features of irony. A common understanding of irony is of a trope in which the dictum and the implicatum are seen as incongruous. I argue that patterns of lexicogrammatical incongruity can reflect this incongruity at the pragmatic level. Additionally, a bottom-up examination of authentic examples of ironic utterances can reveal common lexicogrammatical patterns. This study attempts to readdress the paucity of linguistic studies into irony by focusing on real-world examples of irony as a source of data. Examples of irony were taken from two irony-rich discourse environments and ironic examples were extracted using an independent framework of irony. Commonalities of patterning were first identified, and then interrogated across the two DIY corpora, as well as two general corpora, in order to measure both frequency (raw/t-score) and fixedness. Finally, a deeper examination of the concordance lines revealed whether such patterns carry an ironic force. Three significant findings are presented. Firstly, the study explores lexicogrammatical patterns of collocation concerning multiple hedging: that is, two or more lexical items which ostensibly have a hedging function, yet often frame strong evaluative or rhetorical statements. Secondly, I present patterns of collostruction in which the progressive aspect colligates with cognition verbs. It is the lexicogrammatical incongruity within these patterns that is often a source of irony. Usage of these phrases does not, however, guarantee that the statement will always be ironic. Yet, when compared within larger general corpora, these patterns demonstrate high tendencies of pragmatic characteristics related to irony. Therefore, the final results chapter argues that such patterns can be considered as having ironic priming. Identification and awareness of such patterns may help audiences in accurately reaching ironic interpretations. More practically, these patterns may also help NLP methodology by building upon previous attempts of automated irony detection to create more robust algorithms. Furthermore, there are wider implications to what corpus linguistic methodology can explore in regard to connections between pragmatics and lexicogrammar

    USA Rail Planner: A user-focused web-scraping solution for rail travel planning in the United States

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    Planning a cross-country train journey in the United States can be a time-consuming process. The USA Rail Planner, presented in this thesis, provides travelers an easy way to plan a multi-city rail trip to any of the destinations served by Amtrak trains in the United States. The manual work of searching the Amtrak website and inputting information into a spreadsheet is no longer necessary. By interfacing with the website, information can be parsed by the application quickly and presented to the user in a simpler, ordered, and less cluttered format, allowing them to make educated decisions in their trip planning process. Dynamic route maps, detailed train information, and many other planning features are present in the application. Quality-of-life additions, such as train timetables, city tourism pages, and local transit connections, make the application well-rounded in the tourism and travel domains. Furthermore, this user-centered Python-based application that employs web scraping and other modern software technologies provides an efficient and easy way to create an itinerary which can be exported later. User study results (N=12) show that the USA Rail Planner is significantly better than existing methods, reducing the time to create an itinerary by 47% and it was the preferred method for all but one participant

    Postmodern Classicism: A Practice-Based Investigation

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    This thesis establishes a critical framework for a grassroots literary genre, postmodern classicism (pomoclassicism), which was founded by myself and Stephen Spencer II circa 2010. Postmodernism here signifies the intellectual and cultural concerns which were tantamount at the latter half of the twentieth century, and by extension, classical writing simply refers to that which was apparently before the postmodern, in a heuristic sliding scale oriented around canonicity and nostalgia. A portfolio of creative writing accompanies critical efforts at engaging with and describing the foundational assumptions of the western canon, from which much of the creative work is appropriated. My research writing is grounded in a reformulation of the early modern notion of canonical literature (circa 1700): ‘eternal life’ through literary preservation, which is itself the paradoxical material upon which the ‘canon’ is founded. This theme is taken up in the oeuvre of Goethe. Goethe’s writing relies on the paradoxical reconciliation of opposites known to the author as ‘polarity, ’ and influences how Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka understand canonical literature itself. Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kafka’s use of appropriation has influenced my own creative work, which includes redaction writing, erasure, and other forms of narrative appropriation. Kafka will be shown to have taken up the theme of ‘polarity’ in his own literary writing, as examined by Benjamin and Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, I will draw upon the critical writing of Sabina Spielrein, whose concepts of simultaneous creation and destruction and erotic fusion are the conceptual core of my own poetic approach, and who provides a Nietzschean critique of the early modern notion of ‘eternity.
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