68 research outputs found

    Passionfruit growing guide - Second edition

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    This edition of 'The passionfruit growing guide' is a substantial update of the first edition, which was published in 2006. Each chapter deals with a specific aspect of the development and management of a passionfruit plantation. This guide is intended for use by prospective, new and established growers and addresses all aspects of passionfruit growing, from site selection and planning through to harvesting and marketing the fruit. It provides practical advice and propogation, fertilising, irrigation, and pest disease and control. Also, it includes information on varieties of passionfruit, financial budgets, chemicals registered for use on passionfruit and useful contacts

    Explaining temporal patterns in street robbery

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    This thesis is concerned with explaining spatio-temporal patterns in street robbery through the lens of environmental criminology. The research question ‘what makes a place criminogenic for street robbery at some times and not others?’ is used to frame seven hypotheses. These centre on some of the features of the natural and built environment that can be considered criminogenic (i.e. crime producing). Specifically, the hypotheses test the time-varying influence of darkness, weather conditions, and the use of land by different groups of victims. Through a variety of statistical methods, and data analyses at various micro-units of analysis, it is shown that all of these environmental features are associated with temporal patterns in police recorded street robbery in the Strathclyde area of Scotland. The findings from this research can be summarised as follows: 1) Aggregation bias is a threat to research on crime and place when micro-temporal patterns are ignored. 2) Seasonal patterns in robbery in the study area are (partly) driven by the condition of darkness. 3) Weather features exert their influence on the robbery event differentially over different seasons, days of the week and hours of day. 4) Spatio-temporal patterns in street robbery are related to facility types that are socially relevant to particular victim occupations. 5) Variations in levels of robbery seem to be strongly coupled to time periods where discretionary activities are prevalent. The micro-level approach taken in this thesis generates nuanced findings that elicit fresh insight into the characteristics of settings where street robbery concentrates. Consequently, this facilitates theorising on the mechanisms underpinning spatio-temporal concentrations in robbery. Crucially, the findings have tangible practical value in informing crime prevention activities that can be used to reduce robbery victimisation

    Governing the Mexican drug war : a political geography of public security and the organisation of everyday violence

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    PhD ThesisTo make a contribution to the literature on governmentality and space, this thesis asks how does the War on Drugs (WoD) in Mexico produce spaces within which individual subjects are formed and controlled? More specifically, it demonstrates how the spatial organization of the northern border city of Tijuana and the aims of the WoD constitute distinctive identity formations and policing practices. Thus, the thesis advances the understanding of how urban space in Mexico has been imagined as a battlefield, shaping the territorial deployment of federal security personnel, and the military policing of strategic urban centres. To make this contribution, the thesis focuses on three concepts that are at the core of the analysis of governmentality: government, power, and space. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis and four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, the everyday intimate spaces of the WoD ground the analysis of key geographical imaginaries and the spatial practices of security personnel and ordinary residents of Tijuana. Overall, the thesis underscores the centrality of controlling urban spaces for the WoD, showing how this has been achieved from individual households to the streets. In drawing attention to the spatiality of the WoD, the thesis thus offers a critical account of how entire territories and groups of people in Mexico, irrespective of their social class or ethnicity, have become subjects of an overarching project to discipline and kill.Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologí

    Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

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    Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

    A Century of Violence in a Red City

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    In A Century of Violence in a Red City Lesley Gill provides insights into broad trends of global capitalist development, class disenfranchisement and dispossession, and the decline of progressive politics. Gill traces the rise and fall of the strong labor unions, neighborhood organizations, and working class of Barrancabermeja, Colombia, from their origins in the 1920s to their effective activism for agrarian reforms, labor rights, and social programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Like much of Colombia, Barrancabermeja came to be dominated by alliances of right-wing politicians, drug traffickers, foreign corporations, and paramilitary groups. These alliances reshaped the geography of power and gave rise to a pernicious form of armed neoliberalism. Their violent incursion into Barrancabermeja's civil society beginning in the 1980s decimated the city's social networks, destabilized life for its residents, and destroyed its working-class organizations. As a result, community leaders are now left clinging to the toothless discourse of human rights, which cannot effectively challenge the status quo. In this stark book, Gill captures the grim reality and precarious future of Barrancabermeja and other places ravaged by neoliberalism and violence

    Above the noise and the glory : tiers of propaganda in great war literature

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    Above the Noise and the Glory: Tiers of Propaganda in Great War Literature illuminates the literary responses of Rupert Brooke, Mary Borden, Alice-Dunbar Nelson and Willa Cather to the manner in which the threat to one\u27s cultural community, as well as personal and physical landscape, transforms a nation\u27s, and even a world\u27s, people from a state of complacency or purposelessness to one of jingoistic fervor. Prompted and inspired by personal, political and cultural forces, these writers mobilized early twentieth-century private citizens\u27 spirits of nationalistic pride and solidarity. Individual chapters place within historical and literary contexts how war propaganda, particularly British and American propaganda from 1914 to 1919, is composed of four stages, each stage choreographed to produce a certain response within the individual. Brooke, Borden, Dunbar-Nelson and Cather, through their writing and active involvement both on the war and home fronts, enter the domain of war in all four stages of the propaganda cycles constructed herein by superimposing a domestic landscape onto a military landscape. In individually defining as well as responding to modes of propaganda, which originated in World War I, but still persist today, these writers are vital to our understanding of how literature not only reflects our history, but shapes it as well

    Ciaran Carson

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    Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson’s writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson’s imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson’s work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary representations of space
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