Building Towards a Future in Which Urban Sanitation Leaves No One Behind

Plans to improve access to sanitation in towns and cities of the global South are hampered by multiple challenges. One is a lack of reliable information. In particular, global and national-level data often diverge from data on particular settlements, collected by inhabitants of those settlements themselves. Local data highlight the inadequacy of living conditions -- and in so doing evidence the difficulties in securing improvements. Another challenge lies in the setting of standards around acceptable sanitation. At a global level, for instance, shared sanitation is not considered part of "improved" sanitation. Yet the reality for many low-income urban populations is that communal sanitation can be hygienic, cost-effective and locally acceptable.The difficulties in reaching a consensus around data and standards point to the importance of diverse approaches to increasing and improving sanitation, including considering both on-site and off-site solutions. They also highlight how crucial it is for the planning and implementation of all such solutions to be inclusive of those often missing from global debates, such as the low-income urban groups that cannot afford substantial sanitation spending. Financial and political commitments, drawing on the circumstances and approaches articulated by low-income groups themselves, will be key to securing a future in which everyone has access to the sanitation they need

Chance and Necessity in Evolution: Lessons from RNA

The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are realized much more frequently than others), (2) the notion of shape space covering (that all typical shapes are realized in a small neighborhood of any random sequence), and (3) the notion of a neutral network (that sequences folding into the same typical shape form networks that percolate through sequence space). Neutral networks loosen the requirements on the mutation rate for selection to remain effective. The original (genotypic) error threshold has to be reformulated in terms of a phenotypic error threshold. With regard to adaptation, neutrality has two seemingly contradictory effects: It acts as a buffer against mutations ensuring that a phenotype is preserved. Yet it is deeply enabling, because it permits evolutionary change to occur by allowing the sequence context to vary silently until a single point mutation can become phenotypically consequential. Neutrality also influences predictability of adaptive trajectories in seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand it increases the uncertainty of their genotypic trace. At the same time neutrality structures the access from one shape to another, thereby inducing a topology among RNA shapes which permits a distinction between continuous and discontinuous shape transformations. To the extent that adaptive trajectories must undergo such transformations, their phenotypic trace becomes more predictable.Comment: 37 pages, 14 figures; 1998 CNLS conference; high quality figures at http://www.santafe.edu/~walte

The Design and Analysis of a Wireless LAN Relayed Frame Protocol Extension

Computing stations networked on wireless LANs (wLANs) typically have a limited range of mobility: the station must always be within an access point’s coverage area. If a station moves outside of that area, and if it is unable to locate another base station within its range to perform a handover of communication connectivity responsibility, then it will ex perience a disruption in network services until it migrates into the coverage area of another wLAN. Typical causes for such losses of service include station migration to outside of the wLAN’s coverage area, changing environmental conditions, and “holes” within the cumu lative cell coverage area of multiple access points. There could be several mobile stations simultaneously sharing the network in a wLAN. Each station may be stationary or in motion for part or all of its service life. How ever, in order to use the wLAN, it must be within service range of a access point. Theoreti cally, if a station is outside the access point’s coverage area, yet its own radio signal is within range of one of the stations which has connectivity with an access point, the isolated station could relay its network negotiations and traffic through a relay station which has direct communication with the access point. Therefore, the station nearer to the base sta tion acts as a relay point for the isolated station out of the access point’s range. In this thesis, the author proposed, the design of a MAC Frame Relaying Protocol Extension which enables this type of dynamic relaying of network frames between stations in wLANs. It requires additional logic in the networking process on both the access point and the stations involved (both relay station and the isolated station) to support the bidirec tional forwarding of network traffic, and the definition of several new message types to support relay connection setup and data exchange. Both cryptography and digital signature concepts are employed to make secure the process of establishing of a relayed network session, and the exchange of data between the end stations. To verify the validity of the protocol extension and to measure its performance, the protocol extension was implemented into an existing and widely accepted wireless network standard, IEEE 802.11. To study its effectiveness and impact on the wLAN protocol, the network simulation software, OPNET, was used. An existing model of IEEE 802.11 was enhanced with the additional logic introduced by the protocol extension. Through simulation, it is proved that the logic presented by the protocol extension is able to function. In addition, the impact to overall network performance, and the quality of service the isolated station experiences during a relayed network session were quantita tively analyzed. Through the OPNET simulation, it was found that overall wLAN perfor mance diminished a moderate amount, while the isolated station experienced a far smaller level of throughput when engaged in a relayed network session, than it did in a normal network session

Artificial intelligence based writer identification generates new evidence for the unknown scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa)

The Dead Sea Scrolls are tangible evidence of the Bible's ancient scribal culture. This study takes an innovative approach to palaeography-the study of ancient handwriting-as a new entry point to access this scribal culture. One of the problems of palaeography is to determine writer identity or difference when the writing style is near uniform. This is exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa). To this end, we use pattern recognition and artificial intelligence techniques to innovate the palaeography of the scrolls and to pioneer the microlevel of individual scribes to open access to the Bible's ancient scribal culture. We report new evidence for a breaking point in the series of columns in this scroll. Without prior assumption of writer identity, based on point clouds of the reduced-dimensionality feature-space, we found that columns from the first and second halves of the manuscript ended up in two distinct zones of such scatter plots, notably for a range of digital palaeography tools, each addressing very different featural aspects of the script samples. In a secondary, independent, analysis, now assuming writer difference and using yet another independent feature method and several different types of statistical testing, a switching point was found in the column series. A clear phase transition is apparent in columns 27-29. We also demonstrated a difference in distance variances such that the variance is higher in the second part of the manuscript. Given the statistically significant differences between the two halves, a tertiary, post-hoc analysis was performed using visual inspection of character heatmaps and of the most discriminative Fraglet sets in the script. Demonstrating that two main scribes, each showing different writing patterns, were responsible for the Great Isaiah Scroll, this study sheds new light on the Bible's ancient scribal culture by providing new, tangible evidence that ancient biblical texts were not copied by a single scribe only but that multiple scribes, while carefully mirroring another scribe's writing style, could closely collaborate on one particular manuscript

Developing a Portable System for Measuring Human Motor Learning

Point-to-point reaching is a commonly used paradigm in the field of human motor control. By studying how people move their arms from one location in space to another, researchers have gained insight into how the central nervous system controls and learns skilled movement. Many experimental methods that are designed to study reaching are not portable. This makes it difficult for researchers to access certain clinical populations with limited mobility or motor dysfunction. We have addressed this issue by developing a point-to-point reaching system that can capture key movement variables (e.g. speed and accuracy) yet is portable and inexpensive. We have developed this system with MATLAB software and MaKey MaKey hardware, a commercially-available, single-board microcontroller. Participants will reach with a metal stylus to and from targets on a tabletop made of aluminum foil (i.e. point-to-point reaching). Our current prototype system counts and time-stamps when the stylus touches each aluminum target, then exports these data to a continuously updating log in Microsoft Excel. In addition to the low cost and portability of this system, it allows the experimenter to adjust the reaches\u27 difficulty without modifying the data acquisition code by simply changing the size, number, and/or distance between the targets. Our next step is to pilot this system in a motor learning study in which participants repetitively reach from point to point as training

A systemic approach to translating style: a comparative study of four Chinese translations of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

The visibility of translators in translated texts has been increasingly recognised, yet research on the translator’s voice and the methodological issues concerned has remained sparse. Corpus-based methods allow only limited access to the motivation of the translator’s choices, and need to be complemented by other research tools to form a coherent methodology for investigating a translator’s style. The thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining systemic linguistics and corpus studies with sociohistorical research within a descriptive framework to study the translator’s discursive presence in the text. This approach is as yet underexplored in translation studies. My work examines four Chinese translations of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), by Hai Guan (1956), Wu Lao (1987), Li Xiyin (1987) and Zhao Shaowei (1987). The investigation concerns the rendering of transitivity, modality, direct speech and free direct thought presentation as well as the transitions of modes of point of view. It also inquires into the causes of the variation in style between the four translators. I map textual features onto specific sociocultural and ideological contexts of production in an attempt to identify correlations between them. Another objective is to test the applicability of Halliday’s transitivity model (1994) and Simpson’s model of point of view (1993) to the analysis of Chinese translated texts, and to explore possible adjustments to these models to make them serviceable for translation comparison between English and Chinese. The thesis has six chapters: (1) Theoretical approaches, methodological tools and framework, (2) Location of the texts within the sociocultural contexts, (3) Translation of the transitivity system, (4) Translation of point of view, (5) Critical analysis of individual examples and (6) Motivations for translation shifts

Ethics and social responsibility in practice: interpreters and translators engaging with and beyond the professions

Interpreting and translation are unregulated activities in most countries, yet interpreters and translators perform challenging work in sensitive domains, such as the law, medicine and social work. Other professionals working in these sectors must complete formal ethics training to qualify, then subscribe to Codes of Practice or Ethics. When they face ethical challenges in their work, they can access ongoing support. They must undertake regular refresher training in ethics. Interpreters and translators rarely have access to this sort of ethical infrastructure. This places the onus on interpreters and translators to reflect on ethical aspects of their practice, for reasons related to both professional performance and social responsibility. This contribution presents original UK-based research with one type of professional ‘clients’ who rely on interpreters and translators, social workers and social work students prior to their first work experience placement. Findings suggest that insufficient attention has been paid to such professional clients and that ethical aspects of professional communication can be compromised as a result. By framing ethics training and ongoing support in terms of social responsibility, we point to some ways in which the different professional groups might communicate and work more effectively with one another and with service users

Gamification in teaching music : case study

The study presented here aims to assess the quality of learning that occurred by the introduction of an educational application in the teaching/learning process of music education – 2nd cycle of basic education. The investigation focused on the use of a set of multimedia materials designed to provide support for instrumental practice (recorder and guitar) and backing vocals, according to the technique of the sing along. The students had access to the materials in two ways: in the first case, they were presented as an activity supervised by teacher in classroom context; in the second, students could gain access to the multimedia materials so proactive, through the Moodle platform. In this case, students were invited to participate in a game, conceived as a step-by-step journey, in which they were required to answer random questions to unlock the desired multimedia materials. The study reported in this paper adopted a methodology based on the comparative analysis of data from three groups, one in which they use the media materials under the supervision of Professor; in another were presented as a game hosted in the Moodle platform and yet another, with the function of control group, where students were taught the same programmatic content, however without recourse to a game or multimedia materials. The findings seem to point to an increase in the level of internal motivation in groups in which students used the multimedia materials, the group involved in the game seemed to develop parallel skills in other adjacent areas