842 research outputs found
\u3ci\u3eWith Roberts to Candahar, a tale of the third Afghan war\u3c/i\u3e
Fiction - about the first Anglo-Afghan wa
Developing, deploying and assessing usage of a movie archive system among students of film studies
This paper describes our work in developing a movie browser application for students of Film Studies at our University. The aim of our work is to address the issues that arise when applying conventional user-centered design techniques from the usability engineering field to build a usable application when the system incorporates novel multimedia tools that could be potentially useful to the end-users but have not yet been practiced or deployed. We developed a web-based system that incorporates features as identified from the students and those features from our novel video analysis tools, including scene detection and classification. We deployed the system, monitored usage and gathered quantitative and qualitative data. Our findings show those expected patterns and highlighted issues that need to be further investigated in a novel application development. A mismatch between the usersâ wishes at the interviews and their actual usage was noted. In general, students found most of the provided features were beneficial for their studies
Developing a MovieBrowser for supporting analysis and browsing of movie content
There is a growing awareness of the importance of system evaluation directly with end-users in realistic environments, and as a result some novel applications have been deployed to the real world and evaluated in trial contexts. While this is certainly a desirable trend to relate a technical system to a real user-oriented perspective, most of these efforts do not involve end-user participation right from the start of the development, but only after deploying it. In this paper we describe our research in designing, deploying and assessing the impact of a web-based tool that incorporates multimedia techniques to support movie analysis and browsing for students of film studies. From the very start and throughout the development we utilize methodologies from usability engineering in order to feed in end-user needs and thus tailoring the underlying technical system to those needs. Starting by capturing real usersâ current practices and matching them to the available technical elements of the system, we deployed an initial version of our system to University classes for a semester during which we obtained an extensive amount of rich usage data. We describe the process and some of the findings from this trial
Topological Entanglement of Polymers and Chern-Simons Field Theory
In recent times some interesting field theoretical descriptions of the
statistical mechanics of entangling polymers have been proposed by various
authors. In these approaches, a single test polymer fluctuating in a background
of static polymers or in a lattice of obstacles is considered. The extension to
the case in which the configurations of two or more polymers become non-static
is not straightforward unless their trajectories are severely constrained. In
this paper we present another approach, based on Chern--Simons field theory,
which is able to describe the topological entanglements of two fluctuating
polymers in terms of gauge fields and second quantized replica fields.Comment: 16 pages, corrected some typos, added two new reference
Barriers to student engagement in clubs and societies: a social capital perspective
In 2018/19, John Moores Studentsâ Union embarked on a âground clearingâ exercise to determine the barriers students face when engaging, or trying to engage, with a student-led sports club or society. An online survey to students revealed several barriers: difficulty in âfitting inâ, costs, time, geography, and communication. This paper reflects on the outcomes of the survey and offers an interpretive lens based on the ideas of social capital, as espoused by Pierre Bourdieu and Robert D. Putnam
Topological interactions in systems of mutually interlinked polymer rings
The topological interaction arising in interlinked polymeric rings such as
DNA catenanes is considered. More specifically, the free energy for a pair of
linked random walk rings is derived where the distance between two segments
each of which is part of a different ring is kept constant. The topology
conservation is imposed by the Gauss invariant. A previous approach (M.Otto,
T.A. Vilgis, Phys.Rev.Lett. {\bf 80}, 881 (1998)) to the problem is refined in
several ways. It is confirmed, that asymptotically, i.e. for large
where is average size of single random walk ring, the effective
topological interaction (free energy) scales .Comment: 16 pages, 3 figur
Entangled Polymer Rings in 2D and Confinement
The statistical mechanics of polymer loops entangled in the two-dimensional
array of randomly distributed obstacles of infinite length is discussed. The
area of the loop projected to the plane perpendicular to the obstacles is used
as a collective variable in order to re-express a (mean field) effective theory
for the polymer conformation. It is explicitly shown that the loop undergoes a
collapse transition to a randomly branched polymer with .Comment: 17 pages of Latex, 1 ps figure now available upon request, accepted
for J.Phys.A:Math.Ge
Venus/Mercury swingby with Venus capsule. Preliminary science objectives and experiments for use in advanced mission studies
Venus/Mercury swingby with Venus capsule - preliminary science objectives and experiments for use in advanced mission studie
On Abelian Multi-Chern-Simons Field Theories
In this paper a class of multi-Chern-Simons field theories which is relevant
to the statistical mechanics of polymer systems is investigated. Motivated by
the problems which one encounters in the treatment of these theories, a general
procedure is presented to eliminate the Chern-Simons fields from their action.
In this way it has been possible to derive an expression of the partition
function of topologically linked polymers which depends explicitly on the
topological numbers and does not have intractable nonlocal terms as it happened
in previous approaches. The new formulation of multi-Chern-Simons field
theories is then used to remove and clarify some inconsistencies and
ambiguities which apparently affect field theoretical models of topologically
linked polymers. Finally, the limit of disentangled polymers is discussed.Comment: 18 pages, plain LaTe
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Latitudinal gradients in butterfly population variability are influenced by landscape heterogeneity
The variability of populations over time is positively associated with their risk of local extinction. Previous work has shown that populations at the high-latitude boundary of speciesâ ranges show higher inter-annual variability, consistent with increased sensitivity and exposure to adverse climatic conditions. However, patterns of population variability at both high- and low-latitude species range boundaries have not yet been concurrently examined. Here, we assess the inter-annual population variability of 28 butterfly species between 1994 and 2009 at 351 and 18 sites in the United Kingdom and Catalonia, Spain, respectively. Local population variability is examined with respect to the position of the speciesâ bioclimatic envelopes (i.e. whether the population falls within areas of the âcoreâ climatic suitability or is a climatically âmarginalâ population), and in relation to local landscape heterogeneity, which may influence these range location â population dynamic relationships. We found that butterfly species consistently show latitudinal gradients in population variability, with increased variability in the more northerly UK. This pattern is even more marked for southerly distributed species with âmarginalâ climatic suitability in the UK but âcoreâ climatic suitability in Catalonia. In addition, local landscape heterogeneity did influence these range location â population dynamic relationships. Habitat heterogeneity was associated with dampened population dynamics, especially for populations in the UK. Our results suggest that promoting habitat heterogeneity may promote the persistence of populations at high-latitude range boundaries, which may potentially aid northwards expansion under climate warming. We did not find evidence that population variability increases towards southern range boundaries. Sample sizes for this region were low, but there was tentative evidence, in line with previous ecological theory, that local landscape heterogeneity may promote persistence in these retracting low-latitude range boundary populations
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