9,787 research outputs found

    Is gender a learned performance or a performance based on previous sporting experiences? A comparative case study of female university football and rugby athletes in the east midlands

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    Gender inequality still exists and participation rates within different sports which are adjudged to be masculine or feminine. Previous studies have outlined how gender in sport is contested. However, few studies have attempted to draw a comparison between two sports. Using a Bourdieusian framework, the principal aim of the present study was to explore how playing a masculine sport informs an agent’s construction of femininity in University level football and rugby. An understanding of how participants negotiated the gendered sporting practices and gendering of their bodies was sought. Participants were recruited based on a purposive sampling method where in total, 30 athletes (15 footballers and 15 rugby players) completed a questionnaire. Of this initial sample, 5 participants from each group took part in an unstructured group interview. Both questionnaires and interviews were analysed using the three stage qualitative analysis procedure: data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing; interviews were transcribed and coded using axial thematic analysis. Both rugby and football players faced similar gendered discriminatory experiences from schools, peers and in some cases strong sexist ideologies from teachers. However, due to the hyper masculinity associated within rugby, players faced considerable resistance from external sources - particularly from peers. The development of a specific embodied and gendered habitus within the field of rugby, in particular, and football was described. The findings increases current knowledge regarding female participation within the sports and offers insight into why participation differs between the two sports thus highlight ways to engage more females in these sports

    Private Graphon Estimation for Sparse Graphs

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    We design algorithms for fitting a high-dimensional statistical model to a large, sparse network without revealing sensitive information of individual members. Given a sparse input graph GG, our algorithms output a node-differentially-private nonparametric block model approximation. By node-differentially-private, we mean that our output hides the insertion or removal of a vertex and all its adjacent edges. If GG is an instance of the network obtained from a generative nonparametric model defined in terms of a graphon WW, our model guarantees consistency, in the sense that as the number of vertices tends to infinity, the output of our algorithm converges to WW in an appropriate version of the L2L_2 norm. In particular, this means we can estimate the sizes of all multi-way cuts in GG. Our results hold as long as WW is bounded, the average degree of GG grows at least like the log of the number of vertices, and the number of blocks goes to infinity at an appropriate rate. We give explicit error bounds in terms of the parameters of the model; in several settings, our bounds improve on or match known nonprivate results.Comment: 36 page

    Generalized cover ideals and the persistence property

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    Let II be a square-free monomial ideal in R=k[x1,,xn]R = k[x_1,\ldots,x_n], and consider the sets of associated primes Ass(Is){\rm Ass}(I^s) for all integers s1s \geq 1. Although it is known that the sets of associated primes of powers of II eventually stabilize, there are few results about the power at which this stabilization occurs (known as the index of stability). We introduce a family of square-free monomial ideals that can be associated to a finite simple graph GG that generalizes the cover ideal construction. When GG is a tree, we explicitly determine Ass(Is){\rm Ass}(I^s) for all s1s \geq 1. As consequences, not only can we compute the index of stability, we can also show that this family of ideals has the persistence property.Comment: 15 pages; revised version has a new introduction; references updated; to appear in J. Pure. Appl. Algebr

    Knot concordance in homology cobordisms

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    Let C^Z\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\mathbb{Z}} denote the group of knots in homology spheres that bound homology balls, modulo smooth concordance in homology cobordisms. Answering a question of Matsumoto, the second author previously showed that the natural map from the smooth knot concordance group C\mathcal{C} to C^Z\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\mathbb{Z}} is not surjective. Using tools from Heegaard Floer homology, we show that the cokernel of this map, which can be understood as the non-locally-flat piecewise-linear concordance group, is infinitely generated and contains elements of infinite order.Comment: 28 pages, 16 figure

    Revealing Network Structure, Confidentially: Improved Rates for Node-Private Graphon Estimation

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    Motivated by growing concerns over ensuring privacy on social networks, we develop new algorithms and impossibility results for fitting complex statistical models to network data subject to rigorous privacy guarantees. We consider the so-called node-differentially private algorithms, which compute information about a graph or network while provably revealing almost no information about the presence or absence of a particular node in the graph. We provide new algorithms for node-differentially private estimation for a popular and expressive family of network models: stochastic block models and their generalization, graphons. Our algorithms improve on prior work, reducing their error quadratically and matching, in many regimes, the optimal nonprivate algorithm. We also show that for the simplest random graph models (G(n,p)G(n,p) and G(n,m)G(n,m)), node-private algorithms can be qualitatively more accurate than for more complex models---converging at a rate of 1ϵ2n3\frac{1}{\epsilon^2 n^{3}} instead of 1ϵ2n2\frac{1}{\epsilon^2 n^2}. This result uses a new extension lemma for differentially private algorithms that we hope will be broadly useful

    DCU at the TREC 2008 Blog Track

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    In this paper we describe our system, experiments and re- sults from our participation in the Blog Track at TREC 2008. Dublin City University participated in the adhoc re- trieval, opinion finding and polarised opinion finding tasks. For opinion finding, we used a fusion of approaches based on lexicon features, surface features and syntactic features. Our experiments evaluated the relative usefulness of each of the feature sets and achieved a significant improvement on the baseline
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