8,667 research outputs found

    The Colston Statue: What Next? ‘We are Bristol’ History Commission - Full Report

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    In the summer of 2021, the ‘We are Bristol’ History Commission consulted with the public about the future of the Colston statue and the Colston plinth. People had a chance to see the statue and learn about its history in a temporary display at the M Shed museum, as well as view the display online. Alongside the display was a survey that invited people from Bristol and beyond to share their views on a number of questions. Almost 14,000 people filled out the survey. The Mayor asked the History Commission to review the consultation and offer a number of recommendations in the light of it. This report summarizes the findings and also suggests what might happen next

    Educating Sub-Saharan Africa:Assessing Mobile Application Use in a Higher Learning Engineering Programme

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    In the institution where I teach, insufficient laboratory equipment for engineering education pushed students to learn via mobile phones or devices. Using mobile technologies to learn and practice is not the issue, but the more important question lies in finding out where and how they use mobile tools for learning. Through the lens of Kearney et al.’s (2012) pedagogical model, using authenticity, personalisation, and collaboration as constructs, this case study adopts a mixed-method approach to investigate the mobile learning activities of students and find out their experiences of what works and what does not work. Four questions are borne out of the over-arching research question, ‘How do students studying at a University in Nigeria perceive mobile learning in electrical and electronic engineering education?’ The first three questions are answered from qualitative, interview data analysed using thematic analysis. The fourth question investigates their collaborations on two mobile social networks using social network and message analysis. The study found how students’ mobile learning relates to the real-world practice of engineering and explained ways of adapting and overcoming the mobile tools’ limitations, and the nature of the collaborations that the students adopted, naturally, when they learn in mobile social networks. It found that mobile engineering learning can be possibly located in an offline mobile zone. It also demonstrates that investigating the effectiveness of mobile learning in the mobile social environment is possible by examining users’ interactions. The study shows how mobile learning personalisation that leads to impactful engineering learning can be achieved. The study shows how to manage most interface and technical challenges associated with mobile engineering learning and provides a new guide for educators on where and how mobile learning can be harnessed. And it revealed how engineering education can be successfully implemented through mobile tools

    Hunting Wildlife in the Tropics and Subtropics

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    The hunting of wild animals for their meat has been a crucial activity in the evolution of humans. It continues to be an essential source of food and a generator of income for millions of Indigenous and rural communities worldwide. Conservationists rightly fear that excessive hunting of many animal species will cause their demise, as has already happened throughout the Anthropocene. Many species of large mammals and birds have been decimated or annihilated due to overhunting by humans. If such pressures continue, many other species will meet the same fate. Equally, if the use of wildlife resources is to continue by those who depend on it, sustainable practices must be implemented. These communities need to remain or become custodians of the wildlife resources within their lands, for their own well-being as well as for biodiversity in general. This title is also available via Open Access on Cambridge Core

    Balancing the urban stomach: public health, food selling and consumption in London, c. 1558-1640

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    Until recently, public health histories have been predominantly shaped by medical and scientific perspectives, to the neglect of their wider social, economic and political contexts. These medically-minded studies have tended to present broad, sweeping narratives of health policy's explicit successes or failures, often focusing on extraordinary periods of epidemic disease viewed from a national context. This approach is problematic, particularly in studies of public health practice prior to 1800. Before the rise of modern scientific medicine, public health policies were more often influenced by shared social, cultural, economic and religious values which favoured maintaining hierarchy, stability and concern for 'the common good'. These values have frequently been overlooked by modern researchers. This has yielded pessimistic assessments of contemporary sanitation, implying that local authorities did not care about or prioritise the health of populations. Overly medicalised perspectives have further restricted historians' investigation and use of source material, their interpretation of multifaceted and sometimes contested cultural practices such as fasting, and their examination of habitual - and not just extraordinary - health actions. These perspectives have encouraged a focus on reactive - rather than preventative - measures. This thesis contributes to a growing body of research that expands our restrictive understandings of pre-modern public health. It focuses on how public health practices were regulated, monitored and expanded in later Tudor and early Stuart London, with a particular focus on consumption and food-selling. Acknowledging the fundamental public health value of maintaining urban foodways, it investigates how contemporaries sought to manage consumption, food production waste, and vending practices in the early modern City's wards and parishes. It delineates the practical and political distinctions between food and medicine, broadly investigates the activities, reputations of and correlations between London's guild and itinerant food vendors and licensed and irregular medical practitioners, traces the directions in which different kinds of public health policy filtered up or down, and explores how policies were enacted at a national and local level. Finally, it compares and contrasts habitual and extraordinary public health regulations, with a particular focus on how perceptions of and actual food shortages, paired with the omnipresent threat of disease, impacted broader aspects of civic life

    Description assistée d'un environnement intelligent en réalité augmentée

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    Les technologies d'assistance modernes offrent d'augmenter, de maintenir ou d'améliorer les capacités fonctionnelles d'une personne avec incapacités. Parmi ces technologies, les environnements intelligents favorisent effectivement le maintien à domicile des personnes âgées. Pourtant, les taux d'abandon des technologies d'assistance sont aujourd'hui élevés. L'absence d'inclusion de l'utilisateur dans la construction et la personnalisation de ces technologies est fortement pointée du doigt par la littérature. Un système fait soi-même (Do-it-Yourself) centré sur le partage et où l'utilisateur conçoit lui-même son assistance est donc à privilégier. Cette thèse s'intéresse à développer les interactions entre l'humain et l'intelligence artificielle pour la description assistée d'environnements intelligents personnalisés selon les habitudes du résident. Le but est de déterminer les interfaces et le langage à adopter pour favoriser l'échange entre un descripteur humain, expert des besoins du résident, et une intelligence artificielle, experte des environnements intelligents. Les habitudes que le descripteur doit transmettre au système d'assistance sont spatialisées par définition, elles prennent place à des endroits spécifiques de l'environnement, avec des objets spécifiques de cet environnement et à des moments précis. La réalité augmentée s'inscrit ainsi parfaitement dans cette approche puisqu'elle permet d'ancrer dans le monde réel les éléments virtuels représentant l'environnement et les habitudes dans celui-ci. Les habitudes que le descripteur détaille sont également spécifiques à la façon de faire du résident tandis que les connaissances des environnements intelligents de l'intelligence artificielle proposée sont davantage génériques. Aussi, un langage compréhensible par l'humain et assez puissant pour représenter à la fois ces concepts spécifiques et génériques est nécessaire. Les ontologies, base de données sémantiques, répondent à ces besoins grâce à leur représentation textuelle et au raisonnement ontologique qui permet de définir le niveau d'abstraction adéquat pour l'échange. En combinant la réalité augmentée à la sémantique, le conseiller virtuel de description assistée des environnements intelligents présenté dans cette thèse accompagne le descripteur dans la spécification des habitudes du résident. De plus, en agrégeant l'expérience acquise avec l'ensemble des descriptions précédentes, ce conseiller fournit des conseils en temps-réel pour favoriser l'idéation. Ce conseiller virtuel a été testé auprès d'experts et de proches aidants. Les résultats obtenus confirment que le conseiller virtuel proposé permet la description de l'environnement et des activités, notamment grâce à ses interactions intuitives et naturelles. Les habitudes numérisées avec le conseiller virtuel pourraient à terme permettre à l'environnement intelligent de mieux comprendre les besoins de son résident et de s'y adapter

    Patterns of subspecies diversity in the giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis (L. 1758): comparison of systematic methods and their implications for conservation policy

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    This thesis examines the subspecific taxonomic status of the giraffe and considers the role of formal taxonomy in the formulation of conservation policy. Where species show consistent. geographically structured phenotypic variation such geographic patterns may indicate selective forces (or other population-level effects) acting. upon local populations. These consistent geographic patterns may be recognised formally as subspecies and may be of interest in single or multi-species biodiversity or biogeography studies for delimiting areas of conservation priority. Subspecies may also be used in the formulation of management policies and legislation. Subspecies are, by definition, allopatric. This thesis explicitly uses methodology of systematic biology and phylogenetic reconstruction to investigate patterns of variation between geographic groups. The taxonomic status of the giraffe is apposite for review. The species provides three independent data sets that may be analysed quantitatively for geographic structure; pelage patterns, morphology and genetics. Museum specimens. grouped according to geographic origin, were favoured for study as more than one type of data was often available for an individual. Population aggregation analysis of forty pelage pattern characters maintained six separate subspecies, while agglomerating some neighbouring populations into a subspecies. A 'traditional' morphometric approach, using multivariate statistical analysis of adult skull measurements, was complemented by a geometric morphometric approach; landmarkrestricted eigenshape analysis. Four morphologically distinct groups were recognised by both morphological analyses. Phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA control region sequences indicates five major cIades. Nested cIade analysis identifies population fragmentation, range expansion and genetic isolation by distance as contributing to the genetic structure of the giraffe. The results of the analyses show remarkable congruence. These results are discussed in terms of the formulation of conservation policy and the differing requirements of'blological and legal classification systems. The value of a formal taxonomic framework to the recognition, and subsequent conservation, of biodiversity is emphasised
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