MUSLIM COLLEGE STUDENTS AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

This study explores the nature of civic engagement of Muslim college students in the United States. The Community of Practice Theory is used as a conceptual structure to explore the relation between meaning, practice, identity and organization for Muslim students active in civic engagement through campus-based Muslim Student organizations. Pluralism, as shared values that combine different people and advocates wider civic participation, was adopted as part of the conceptual framework to see how the Muslim students think, serve, learn, and develop throughout the process of engagement on campus and in the local community. Particular attention is paid to the impacts of Islamophobia on the one hand and campus initiatives for diversity and inclusion on the other. The study uses a mixed method design to uncover multiple dimensions of civic engagement of the Muslim students. In the first part of the study, a close-ended survey completed by fifty Muslim students on three Midwestern college campuses with active Muslim Student Associations (MSA) explored the domains, types, and intensity of civic engagement. In the subsequent qualitative field research, interviews of 12 members of the three MSAs explored the purposes, goals, effects, values, and aims of civic engagement from personal and organizational perspectives. The qualitative design also included field observations of MSA meetings and activities. The study found that Muslim students’ engagement in civic practices is driven by religious, national, and conditional factors. Islam is the moral compass that incentivizes and guides their social and service activities on campus and in the local community. Through different aspects of practice, Muslim students affirm their presence as American citizens and encounter the negative discourses and images circulated about their faith identity. Engagement in the organization opens up ways for the Muslim students to establish constructive relations with non-Muslims, create connection and collaboration between the campus and the local community of Muslims, grow civically, and develop various leadership skills

Metabolic Enzyme Activities of Benthic Zoarcids off the Coast of California

OCN 499 - Undergraduate Thesi

Estonian ninth graders' personality traits and motivational variables interrelations and associations with graded performance : master's thesis

http://www.ester.ee/record=b4054972*es

AUS-ACCESS4EU: Supporting EU Access to Australian Research Programmes

ACCESS4EU projects aim to increase the European research community’s awareness of opportunities to participate in research, technological development and innovation (RTDI) programmes in industrialised partner countries outside the EU

AUS-ACCESS4EU Newsletter

The AUS-ACCESS4EU newsletter details a number of ACCESS4EU projects in a two year programme to raise awareness of the current research and development landscape in Australia

High-energy sources at low radio frequency : the Murchison Widefield Array view of Fermi blazars

This is the accepted version of the following article: Giroletti, M. et al., A&A, 588 (2016) A141, which has been published in final form at DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201527817. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with the EDP Sciences self-archiving policies.Low-frequency radio arrays are opening a new window for the study of the sky, both to study new phenomena and to better characterize known source classes. Being flat-spectrum sources, blazars are so far poorly studied at low radio frequencies. We characterize the spectral properties of the blazar population at low radio frequency compare the radio and high-energy properties of the gamma-ray blazar population, and search for radio counterparts of unidentified gamma-ray sources. We cross-correlated the 6,100 deg^2 Murchison Widefield Array Commissioning Survey catalogue with the Roma blazar catalogue, the third catalogue of active galactic nuclei detected by Fermi-LAT, and the unidentified members of the entire third catalogue of gamma-ray sources detected by \fermilat. When available, we also added high-frequency radio data from the Australia Telescope 20 GHz catalogue. We find low-frequency counterparts for 186 out of 517 (36%) blazars, 79 out of 174 (45%) gamma-ray blazars, and 8 out of 73 (11%) gamma-ray blazar candidates. The mean low-frequency (120--180 MHz) blazar spectral index is $\langle \alpha_\mathrm{low} \rangle=0.57\pm0.02$: blazar spectra are flatter than the rest of the population of low-frequency sources, but are steeper than at $\sim$GHz frequencies. Low-frequency radio flux density and gamma-ray energy flux display a mildly significant and broadly scattered correlation. Ten unidentified gamma-ray sources have a (probably fortuitous) positional match with low radio frequency sources. Low-frequency radio astronomy provides important information about sources with a flat radio spectrum and high energy. However, the relatively low sensitivity of the present surveys still misses a significant fraction of these objects. Upcoming deeper surveys, such as the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-Sky MWA (GLEAM) survey, will provide further insight into this population.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

An Ultra diffuse Galaxy in the NGC 5846 group from the VEGAS survey

Many ultra diffuse galaxies (UDGs) have now been identified in clusters of galaxies. However, the number of nearby UDGs suitable for detailed follow-up remain rare. Our aim is to begin to identify UDGs in the environments of nearby bright early-type galaxies from the VEGAS survey. Here we use a deep g band image of the NGC 5846 group, taken as part of the VEGAS survey, to search for UDGs. We found one object with properties of a UDG if it associated with the NGC 5846 group, which seems likely. The galaxy, we name NGC 5846$\_$UDG1, has an absolute magnitude of M$_g$ = -14.2, corresponding to a stellar mass of $\sim$10$^8$ M$_{\odot}$. It also reveals a system of compact sources which are likely globular clusters. Based on the number of globular clusters detected we estimate a halo mass that is greater than 8$\times$10$^{10}$ M$_{\odot}$ for UDG1.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in A&

An Enhanced Ipv6 Anycast Routing Protocol Using Protocol Independent Multicast-Sparse Mode With Mobile Ipv6

Anycast routing is an efficient routing mechanism that enables the network to choose the nearest and most appropriate server very quickly. However, IPv6 Anycast is not used widely in practice yet, and there are many reasons for this. Firstly, IPv6 Anycast does not have its own standard protocol because anycast builds its anycast membership tree like multicast does but unlike multicast it sends only to one of the groups using unicast mechanism. The other problem is that IPv6 Anycast mechanism could not provide stateful connections between the sender and the receiver because the sender always change the receiver based on the metric or the distance. In this thesis a new IPv6 anycast routing protocol is developed to provide a stateful communication between the anycast sender and the receiver. Protocol Independent Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) has been chosen to establish the new IPv6 anycast mechanism because of many similar properties between multicast and anycast. A new variable is proposed in the routing table called Best Metric Factor (BMF) to describe the status of the receiver (free or Busy). This factor is used to decide the appropriate receiver to choose, the advantage of the proposed design can be observed easily when there are multi-anycast senders sending their traffic to the appropriate receiver at the same time. Next we improve the mechanism by building a direct connection between the anycast sender and the anycast receiver using route optimization by mapping the objects in Mobile IPv6 to the objects in the proposed mechanism. This is because there are many similar properties between Mobile IPv6 and the proposed design. The proposed mechanism has been shown to achieve a good performance with multi-anycast senders and can provide a stateful communication between the sender and the appropriate receiver

Ethnic differences in adipogenesis and the role of alkaline phosphatase in the control of adipogenesis in human preadipocytes and 3T3-L1 cells

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, 2004Alkaline phosphatase (ALP) is a ubiquitously expressed enzyme, that has been shown to play a role in cell differentiation and organogenesis. One study has also demonstrated ALP activity in rat adipocytes. The purpose of the present study was therefore to determine whether ALP is expressed in preadipocytes and what role it may have in adipogenesis. ALP activity was detected in the murine preadipocyte cell line, 3T3-L1, and in human preadipocytes isolated from mammary tissue, and from subcutaneous abdominal fat depots. In all the cell types studied ALP activity increased in parallel with adipogenesis. In the 3T3 -L1 cell line the tissue- non -specific ALP inhibitors, levamisole and histidine inhibited ALP activity, and adipogenesis, whereas the tissue specific ALP inhibitor Phe- Gly-Gly did not inhibit ALP or adipogenesis. In human preadipocytes, histidine inhibited adipogenesis and ALP activity, whereas levamisole inhibited adipogenesis, but did not block ALP activity in intact cells. However, levamisole did inhibit ALP activity by 50% in cell extracts. Levamisole was able to inhibit adipogenesis in human preadipocytes. The tissue specific ALP inhibitor, Phe Gly Gly, did not inhibit ALP activity or adipogenesis in human preadipocytes. ALP activity and adipogenesis, were compared in preadipocytes isolated from mammary tissue taken from black (13) and white (15) female subjects. Both ALP activity and adipogenesis, were lower in white compared to black female subjects. iii Immunocytochemical, analysis of the 3T3-L1 cell line and human preadipocytes demonstrated that ALP activity was restricted to the lipid droplets of these cells. ALP activity was also measured in serum samples obtained from 100 African subjects (74 females and 26 males) of varying BMI. ALP activity was found to be higher in obese than lean subjects, whereas, the other liver enzymes or products measured in serum were not. In fact these variables correlated to varying degrees with waist-hip ratio, whereas ALP levels did not. This suggest that liver function is predominantly influenced by abdominal obesity whereas serum ALP levels are more influenced by overall body adiposity. In conclusion, ALP, may be involved in the control of adipogenesis, in the 3T3- L1 preadipocyte cell line and in human preadipocytes isolated from mammary adipose tissue and subcutaneous abdominal adipose tisssue. The presence of ALP activity in lipid droplets in 3T3-L1 cells and human preadipocytes, and the ability of ALP inhibitors to block adipogenesis strongly suggest that ALP plays a role in the control of adipogenesis.IT201

Homogeneous metallicities and radial velocities for Galactic globular clusters. II. New CaT metallicities for 28 distant and reddened globular clusters

Although the globular clusters in the Milky Way have been studied for a long time, a significant fraction of them lack homogeneous metallicity and radial velocity measurements. In an earlier paper we presented the first part of a project to obtain metallicities and radial velocities of Galactic globular clusters from multiobject spectroscopy of their member stars using the ESO Very Large Telescope. In this paper we add metallicities and radial velocities for a new sample of 28 globular clusters, including in particular globular clusters in the MW halo and the Galactic bulge. Together with our previous results, this study brings the number of globular clusters with homogeneous measurements to $\sim 69$ \% of those listed in the W. Harris' catalogue. As in our previous work, we have used the CaII triplet lines to derive metallicities and radial velocities. For most of the clusters in this study, this is the first analysis based on spectroscopy of individual member stars. The metallicities derived from the CaII triplet are then compared to the results of our parallel study based on spectral fitting in the optical region and the implications for different calibrations of the CaII triplet line strengths are discussed. We also comment on some interesting clusters and investigate the presence of an abundance spread in the globular clusters here. A hint of a possible intrinsic spread is found for NGC 6256, which therefore appears to be a good candidate for further study.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic