20,247 research outputs found
Building body identities - exploring the world of female bodybuilders
This thesis explores how female bodybuilders seek to develop and maintain a viable sense of self despite being stigmatized by the gendered foundations of what Erving Goffman (1983) refers to as the 'interaction order'; the unavoidable presentational context in which identities are forged during the course of social life. Placed in the context of an overview of the historical treatment of women's bodies, and a concern with the development of bodybuilding as a specific form of body modification, the research draws upon a unique two year ethnographic study based in the South of England, complemented by interviews with twenty-six female bodybuilders, all of whom live in the U.K. By mapping these extraordinary women's lives, the research illuminates the pivotal spaces and essential lived experiences that make up the female bodybuilder. Whilst the women appear to be embarking on an 'empowering' radical body project for themselves, the consequences of their activity remains culturally ambivalent. This research exposes the 'Janus-faced' nature of female bodybuilding, exploring the ways in which the women negotiate, accommodate and resist pressures to engage in more orthodox and feminine activities and appearances
Embodying entrepreneurship: everyday practices, processes and routines in a technology incubator
The growing interest in the processes and practices of entrepreneurship has
been dominated by a consideration of temporality. Through a thirty-six-month
ethnography of a technology incubator, this thesis contributes to extant
understanding by exploring the effect of space. The first paper explores how
class structures from the surrounding city have appropriated entrepreneurship
within the incubator. The second paper adopts a more explicitly spatial analysis
to reveal how the use of space influences a common understanding of
entrepreneurship. The final paper looks more closely at the entrepreneurs within
the incubator and how they use visual symbols to develop their identity. Taken
together, the three papers reject the notion of entrepreneurship as a primarily
economic endeavour as articulated through commonly understood language and
propose entrepreneuring as an enigmatic attractor that is accessed through the
ambiguity of the non-verbal to develop the ‘new’. The thesis therefore contributes
to the understanding of entrepreneurship and proposes a distinct role for the non-verbal in that understanding
Underwater optical wireless communications in turbulent conditions: from simulation to experimentation
Underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) is a technology that aims to apply high speed optical wireless communication (OWC) techniques to the underwater channel. UOWC has the potential to provide high speed links over relatively short distances as part of a hybrid underwater network, along with radio frequency (RF) and underwater acoustic communications (UAC) technologies. However, there are some difficulties involved in developing a reliable UOWC link, namely, the complexity of the channel. The main focus throughout this thesis is to develop a greater understanding of the effects of the UOWC channel, especially underwater turbulence. This understanding is developed from basic theory through to simulation and experimental studies in order to gain a holistic understanding of turbulence in the UOWC channel.
This thesis first presents a method of modelling optical underwater turbulence through simulation that allows it to be examined in conjunction with absorption and scattering. In a stationary channel, this turbulence induced scattering is shown to cause and increase both spatial and temporal spreading at the receiver plane. It is also demonstrated using the technique presented that the relative impact of turbulence on a received signal is lower in a highly scattering channel, showing an in-built resilience of these channels. Received intensity distributions are presented confirming that fluctuations in received power from this method follow the commonly used Log-Normal fading model. The impact of turbulence - as measured using this new modelling framework - on link performance, in terms of maximum achievable data rate and bit error rate is equally investigated.
Following that, experimental studies comparing both the relative impact of turbulence induced scattering on coherent and non-coherent light propagating through water and the relative impact of turbulence in different water conditions are presented. It is shown that the scintillation index increases with increasing temperature inhomogeneity in the underwater channel. These results indicate that a light beam from a non-coherent source has a greater resilience to temperature inhomogeneity induced turbulence effect in an underwater channel. These results will help researchers in simulating realistic channel conditions when modelling a light emitting diode (LED) based intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) UOWC link.
Finally, a comparison of different modulation schemes in still and turbulent water conditions is presented. Using an underwater channel emulator, it is shown that pulse position modulation (PPM) and subcarrier intensity modulation (SIM) have an inherent resilience to turbulence induced fading with SIM achieving higher data rates under all conditions. The signal processing technique termed pair-wise coding (PWC) is applied to SIM in underwater optical wireless communications for the first time. The performance of PWC is compared with the, state-of-the-art, bit and power loading optimisation algorithm. Using PWC, a maximum data rate of 5.2 Gbps is achieved in still water conditions
Detection of Hyperpartisan news articles using natural language processing techniques
Yellow journalism has increased the spread of hyperpartisan news on the internet. It is very difficult for online news article readers to distinguish hyperpartisan news articles from mainstream news articles. There is a need for an automated model that can detect hyperpartisan news on the internet and tag them as hyperpartisan so that it is very easy for readers to avoid that news. A hyperpartisan news detection article was developed by using three different natural language processing techniques named BERT, ELMo, and Word2vec. This research used the bi-article dataset published at SEMEVAL-2019. The ELMo word embeddings which are trained on a Random forest classifier has got an accuracy of 0.88, which is much better than other state of art models. The BERT and Word2vec models have got the same accuracy of 0.83. This research tried different sentence input lengths to BERT and proved that BERT can extract context from local words. Evidenced from the described ML models, this study will assist the governments, news’ readers, and other political stakeholders to detect any hyperpartisan news, and also helps policy to track, and regulate, misinformation about the political parties and their leaders
The crisis of cultural authority in museums : contesting human remains in the collections of Britain
Museums in Britain have displayed and researched human remains since the eighteenth century. However, in the last two decades human remains in collections have become subject to claims and controversies. Firstly, human remains associated with acquisition during the colonial period have become increasingly difficult to retain and have been transfered to culturally affiliated overseas indigenous groups. Secondly, a group of British Pagans have formed to make claims on ancient human remains in collections. Thirdly, human remains that are not requested by any community group, and of all ages, have become the focus of concerns expressed about their treatment by members of the profession. A discourse arguing for 'respect' has emerged, which argues that all human remains should be treated with new care. The claims made on human remains have been vigourously but differentially contested by members of the sector, who consider the human remains to be unique research objects. This thesis charts the influences at play on the contestation over human remains and examines its construction. The academic literature tends to understand changes to museums as a result of external factors. This thesis argues that this problem is influenced by a crisis of legitimacy and establishes that there are strong internal influences. Through a weak social constructionist approach I demonstrate that the issue has been promoted by influential members of the sector as part of a broader attempt to distance themselves from their foundational role, as a consequence of a crisis of cultural authority stimulated by external and internal factors. The symbolic character of human remains in locating this problem is informed by the unique properties of dead bodies and is influenced by the significance of the body as a scientific object; its association with identity work and as a site of political struggle, in the high modem period
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Enhancement Approach: Success Stories of EFL Teachers from Bangladesh and Nepal
Upgrading Urban Services Through BPL: Practical Applications for Smart Cities
Current initiatives related to smart cities in LATAM reveal an increasing interest in the improvement of cities and the wellbeing of their citizens. In addition, specific working groups have been created for this purpose. In this sense, the communication technologies set the basis for gathering, transporting, and managing the large amount of data generated in cities to provide a wide range of services. Within the many alternatives available, BPL positions as a promising technology, since smart cities can greatly benefit of its higher data rates and low latency. In addition, since the medium is already deployed and most of the assets and sensors are connected to the same medium, the cost of the communication systems will be reduced in price and simplicity. The work presents four practical applications: smart buildings, urban lighting, energy assets management and broadband access, in which the possibilities and advantages of BPL are further addressed. Finally, some conclusions and key aspects relating BPL to the success of smart cities are identified.Eusko Jaurlaritza IT-1234-19, KK-202
Sharing the Shore: Hybridity and Developing Environmentalisms in the Indiana Dunes
This thesis centers on the Indiana Dunes National Park, located in Northwestern Indiana, and the implications of this hybrid landscape on modern American environmentalism. Through secondary source research, historical analysis, and interviews with Miller Beach residents and a park ranger, this research concludes that the Indiana Dunes demonstrate an environmentalism that exists outside of the nature-culture binary. By incorporating the park into existing cities and industrial developments, the Indiana Dunes can be seen as a model for an environmental justice-driven space that diverges from the historic elitism of the National Park service. This research concludes that, while hybrid landscapes come with their own challenges, the hybridity of the Indiana Dunes ultimately points to a bright future for the National Park Service, one that makes public green space accessible and that radically rethinks what it means to be a National Park
Network Slicing for Industrial IoT and Industrial Wireless Sensor Network: Deep Federated Learning Approach and Its Implementation Challenges
5G networks are envisioned to support heterogeneous Industrial IoT (IIoT) and Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (IWSN) applications with a multitude Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Network slicing is being recognized as a beacon technology that enables multi-service IIoT networks. Motivated by the growing computational capacity of the IIoT and the challenges of meeting QoS, federated reinforcement learning (RL) has become a propitious technique that gives out data collection and computation tasks to distributed network agents. This chapter discuss the new federated learning paradigm and then proposes a Deep Federated RL (DFRL) scheme to provide a federated network resource management for future IIoT networks. Toward this goal, the DFRL learns from Multi-Agent local models and provides them the ability to find optimal action decisions on LoRa parameters that satisfy QoS to IIoT virtual slice. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework compared to the early tools
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