5,640 research outputs found
Prisons, pipelines, and pedagogy: Diary of the birth of a behind-bars college program Part 2
The second in a two-part series on beginning a college program for prisoners
Northern Mali: the things we assume
Events have developed quickly these last days and weeks in Mali, as fast as an all terrain vehicle can drive in the sand, basically. And although electronic media can go faster than four wheel drives, they can only go as fast as the rumours they feed on. Elsewhere, I have argued that in following events in the Sahara, everything is shrouded in a haze of dust. Nothing is known with certainty, all depends on rumour and a form of hearsay known as ‘the Tuareg telegraph’ that can only be interpreted with deep inside knowledge of the Saharan world.[1] I shall be honest, I can no longer rightly claim to have that deep inside knowledge, it is too long ago since I was last in the Azawad.[2] But the same goes for the vast majority of journalists and Sahara watchers now active, which leads me to plead here for extreme prudence in the analysis of the current situation in Northern Mali, a prudence that is often ignored in favour of tempting speculations. Here I would like to address a few of these pieces of speculative analysis with the single goal of asking for more prudence because precipitous judgements can have grave consequences for the future denouement of the conflict
Problems with interpretation of He ground state
The continuum of He nucleus is studied theoretically in a three-body
He++ model basing on the recent information concerning He
spectrum [Golovkov, \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. C \textbf{76}, 021605(R)
(2007)]. The He ground state (g.s.) candidate with structure
for new g.s. energy of He is predicted to be at about
MeV. The peak in the cross section associated with this state may be
shifted to a lower energy (e.g. MeV) when He is populated in
reactions with Li due to peculiar reaction mechanism. Formation of the
low-energy ( keV) ``alternative'' ground state with structure
is highly probable in He in the case of considerable
attraction (e.g. fm) in the s-wave He channel, which properties are
still quite uncertain. This result either questions the existing experimental
low-energy spectrum of He or place a limit on the scattering length in
He channel, which contradicts existing data.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures, 1 tabl
A Pragmatic Study of Female and Male Discourse Use on Facebook
La comunicación virtual es un campo de estudio muy interesante e innovador que analiza las distintas estrategias comunicativas empleadas en este tipo de discurso que difieren de las empleadas en la comunicación verbal. Este trabajo empieza revisando investigaciones precedentes en este tema para posteriormente analizar, desde un punto de vista pragmático, las diferencias del uso del discurso femenino y masculino en Facebook, sin caer en una perspectiva sexista. El problema principal en este estudio ha sido intentar establecer dicha comparación. Para poder acometer este estudio, recurrimos primero al análisis descriptivo de un corpus creado con discursos reales sacados de la propia red social, para elaborar un cuestionario Likert de 5 puntos, y poder realizar asà un estudio experimental que nos permitiera probar si los marcadores textuales utilizados por hombres y mujeres difieren en sus respectivos discursos. Los resultados revelaron una diferencia estadÃsticamente significativa entre ambos tipos de discursos al comunicarse en Facebook. Sin embargo, también obtuvimos algunos resultados inesperados en relación al uso de los marcadores discursivos utilizados por el grupo de mujeres jóvenes que eran muy parecidos a los utilizados por los hombres en ambas condiciones, tanto en los jóvenes como en los adultos. Por esta razón, la conclusión es que existen rasgos distintivos en los usos discursivos femeninos y masculinos, aunque en el caso de las mujeres jóvenes su discurso parece estar cambiando, puesto que se asemeja cada vez más al discurso masculino. No obstante, serÃa necesario llevar a cabo una investigación sobre el cambio discursivo de las mujeres jóvenes para tratar de establecer sus causas.Virtual communication is an interesting and innovative field study which analyses the communicative strategies used in this type of discourse, different from the ones used in face-to-face communication. This work first reviews some previous research on the topic to then analyse from a pragmatic perspective the differences between female and male discoursre uses on Facebook, without succumbing to a sexist perspective. To carry out this analysis, we resorted to a corpus made with real conversations from Facebook to elaborate a 5-pint Likert scale, and so conduct an experimental survey to test whether women and men actually use different discourse markers in their respective discourses. The results revealed that there was a statistically significant distinction in the female and male discourse use when communicating on Facebook. However, some unexpected results were also obtained regarding the discourse markers used by women in the female young adult group condition, which were very similar to those used by men in both the young adult and adult condition. Hence, the conclusion is that there are distinctive features of both female and male discourse use that allow us to identify the two different gender identities, though young women’s discourse use seems to be changing and increasingly resembling to the male discourse. Further research is needed to shed some more light on the change of discourse use found in young women to try to determine its causes.31 páginas y anex
Statistical methods for fine-grained retail product recognition
In recent years, computer vision has become a major instrument in automating retail processes with emerging smart applications such as shopper assistance, visual product search (e.g., Google Lens), no-checkout stores (e.g., Amazon Go), real-time inventory tracking, out-of-stock detection, and shelf execution. At the core of these applications lies the problem of product recognition, which poses a variety of new challenges in contrast to generic object recognition. Product recognition is a special instance of fine-grained classification. Considering the sheer diversity of packaged goods in a typical hypermarket, we are confronted with up to tens of thousands of classes, which, particularly if under the same product brand, tend to have only minute visual differences in shape, packaging texture, metric size, etc., making them very difficult to discriminate from one another. Another challenge is the limited number of available datasets, which either have only a few training examples per class that are taken under ideal studio conditions, hence requiring cross-dataset generalization, or are captured from the shelf in an actual retail environment and thus suffer from issues like blur, low resolution, occlusions, unexpected backgrounds, etc. Thus, an effective product classification system requires substantially more information in addition to the knowledge obtained from product images alone. In this thesis, we propose statistical methods for a fine-grained retail product recognition. In our first framework, we propose a novel context-aware hybrid classification system for the fine-grained retail product recognition problem. In the second framework, state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks are explored and adapted to fine-grained recognition of products. The third framework, which is the most significant contribution of this thesis, presents a new approach for fine-grained classification of retail products that learns and exploits statistical context information about likely product arrangements on shelves, incorporates visual hierarchies across brands, and returns recognition results as "confidence sets" that are guaranteed to contain the true class at a given confidence leve
Analogs of Martian eolian features in southwestern Egypt
Emphasis was placed on the morphology and patterns of streaks in the Uweinat region, the relationship of topography to streak patterns, and correlation of field and laboratory studies of the desert surface sediments with color and tonal variations seen from orbit. The research objectives were to provide the necessary groundtruth information on terrestrial eolian features in order to properly interpret the orbital data and to use the interpretations as a basis for investigation of Martian eolian features
Earth observations and photography experiment: Summary of significant results
Observation and photographic data from the Apollo Soyuz Test Project are analyzed. The discussion is structured according to the fields of investigation including: geology, desert studies, oceanography, hydrology, and meteorology. The data were obtained by: (1) visual observations of selected Earth features, (2) hand-held camera photography to document observations, and (3) stereo mapping photography of areas of significant scientific interest
The Tuareg: between armed uprising and drought
he recent Tuareg uprising in Mali under the banner of the MNLA has raised concerns over stability and safety in the region, with much attention focussed on the Libya and AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) ‘connections’. The framing of the conflict in terms of international security and political (in)stability elsewhere obscures the causes, considerations and implications on a local level. Here we will try to discuss the conflict from a Tuareg perspective, estimating the impact of local, international and national concerns on the chances for peace or lasting conflict
Static deflection control of flexible beams by piezo-electric actuators
This study deals with the utilization of piezo-electric actuators in controlling the static deformation of flexible beams. An optimum design procedure is presented to enable the selection of the optimal location, thickness and excitation voltage of the piezo-electric actuators in a way that would minimize the deflection of the beam to which these actuators are bonded. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the application of the developed optimization procedure in minimizing the structural deformation of beams of different materials when subjected to different loading and end conditions using ceramic or polymeric piezo-electric actuators. The results obtained emphasize the importance of the devised rational procedure in designing beam-actuator systems with minimal elastic distortions
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