Once upon a time in the veld: South Africa westerns in context

Historically westerns have been one of the most popular film genres in South Africa but very few features have been produced locally. In addition, the few productions that exist have not received significant attention from researchers and scholars. Thus, this study aims to contribute to South African film research by contextualizing the origin, content and distribution of western genre films conceived and produced by South African filmmakers and companies. It does so by exploring two avenues of inquiry that are intrinsically connected. First, by establishing these films' historical background in relation to the development of the South African film industry and the evolution of the western genre as a whole; and second, by determining how, or if South African ideology and culture have influenced the narrative and aesthetic structure of such films by comparison and contrast with established conventions of the genre's corpus. The study ultimately argues that, despite their popularity westerns have not been a major influence in the development of the South African film industry due to nationalist and ideological discourses that stifled the genre's growth in country, relegating it to a marginal position. The study also concludes that the narrative and aesthetic structure of all South African westerns reveal larger socio-political trends at work during their inception. In this way they function as indirect chronicles of the country's history and its relation to the world, alluding to cultural norms, popular beliefs and governmental mindsets. As such, their importance lies not in their outstanding contributions to the canon of South African production, but instead as examples of experiments in the negotiation and adaptation of national ideology, or a critique of it, utilizing cinematographic tropes

Fast gates for ion traps by splitting laser pulses

We present a fast phase gate scheme that is experimentally achievable and has an operation time more than two orders of magnitude faster than current experimental schemes for low numbers of pulses. The gate time improves with the number of pulses following an inverse power law. Unlike implemented schemes which excite precise motional sidebands, thus limiting the gate timescale, our scheme excites multiple motional states using discrete ultra-fast pulses.We use beam-splitters to divide pulses into smaller components to overcome limitations due to the finite laser pulse repetition rate. This provides gate times faster than proposed theoretical schemes when we optimize a practical setup

Discriminating different classes of biological networks by analyzing the graphs spectra distribution

The brain's structural and functional systems, protein-protein interaction, and gene networks are examples of biological systems that share some features of complex networks, such as highly connected nodes, modularity, and small-world topology. Recent studies indicate that some pathologies present topological network alterations relative to norms seen in the general population. Therefore, methods to discriminate the processes that generate the different classes of networks (e.g., normal and disease) might be crucial for the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of the disease. It is known that several topological properties of a network (graph) can be described by the distribution of the spectrum of its adjacency matrix. Moreover, large networks generated by the same random process have the same spectrum distribution, allowing us to use it as a "fingerprint". Based on this relationship, we introduce and propose the entropy of a graph spectrum to measure the "uncertainty" of a random graph and the Kullback-Leibler and Jensen-Shannon divergences between graph spectra to compare networks. We also introduce general methods for model selection and network model parameter estimation, as well as a statistical procedure to test the nullity of divergence between two classes of complex networks. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed methods by applying them on (1) protein-protein interaction networks of different species and (2) on networks derived from children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and typically developing children. We conclude that scale-free networks best describe all the protein-protein interactions. Also, we show that our proposed measures succeeded in the identification of topological changes in the network while other commonly used measures (number of edges, clustering coefficient, average path length) failed

Capital and Labor Mobility and their Impacts on Mexico’s Regional Labor Markets

This paper studies the effects of capital and labor mobility on real wages across Mexican states for the period 1997–2006. Employing dynamic panel data methods, we find: (1) strong positive effects on real wages from foreign direct investment (FDI) and from migration; (2) domestic and foreign migration provide similar wage effects; and (3) alternative partitions indicate that real wages are more sensitive to FDI-related fluctuations across states with relatively lower wages and migration levels. Overall, these results provide support that real wages respond positively to fluctuations in capital flows and labour movements as predicted from the theory

A Digital Library Framework for Biodiversity Information Systems

Biodiversity information systems (BISs) involve all kinds of heterogeneous data, which include ecological and geographical features. However, available information systems offer very limited support for managing such data in an integrated fashion. Furthermore, such systems do not fully support image content management (e.g., photos of landscapes or living organisms), a requirement of many BIS end-users. In order to meet their needs, these users - e.g., biologists, environmental experts - often have to alternate between distinct biodiversity and image information systems to combine information extracted from them. This cumbersome operational procedure is forced on users by lack of interoperability among these systems. This hampers the addition of new data sources, as well as cooperation among scientists. The approach provided in this paper to meet these issues is based on taking advantage of advances in Digital Library (DL) innovations to integrate networked collections of heterogeneous data. It focuses on creating the basis for a biodiversity information system under the digital library perspective, combining new techniques of content-based image retrieval and database query processing mechanisms. This approach solves the problem of system switching, and provides users with a flexible architecture from which to tailor a BIS to their needs. To illustrate the use of this architecture, it has been instantiated to support the creation of a BIS for fish species in a real application. The goal is to help researchers on ichthyology to identify fish specimen by using search retrieval techniques. Experimental results suggest that this new approach improves the effectiveness of the fish identification process, if compared to the tradition key-based method