922 research outputs found
Women of fire, women of the robe: subjectivities of charismatic Christianity and normative Islam in Java, Indonesia
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University.This dissertation examines the ways changing Muslim-Christian relations and new gendered norms constitute the identities of orthodox Muslims and charismatic Christians in Java, Indonesia. The research is based on 12 months of fieldwork between 2009 and 2010 in the multi-religion city of Salatiga. Working with two middle-class Pentecostal congregations, with memberships of 400 and 150 individuals respectively, as well as two middle-class Muslim woman's Koranic sermon groups that involved about 70 households each, this research expands the ongoing discussion of gender politics and religious movements in modern pluralistic societies, and suggests we re-examine religious identities through the lens of inter-religious relations, particularly the role of women in them.
The dissertation begins with ethnographic scenes where women and Christians figure prominently in Muslim-majority public rituals, in order to highlight the centrality of women and minorities in constructing religious pluralism. Chapter 1 presents a history of religious diversity in Java, and argues that over the last three decades, the children of Javanist Muslims have become brthodox Muslims, while the offspring of mainline Protestants have become born-again Christians. Chapter 2 elaborates on the transformation of Salatiga's landscape by the proliferation of worship facilities and ascendant inter-religious tensions. Building on this foundation, Chapter 3 focuses on women and neighborhood sociality. Here I argue that an unexpected outcome of recent religious change has been women's expanded public roles and a re-alliance of traditionalist and modernist Muslims in the presence of a strong Christian minority. Chapter 4 explains Muslim women's choices of embracing veiling and de-legitimizing polygamy in the context of cultural change, and demonstrates the social and political nature of the changing interpretations of religious knowledge. Chapter 5 turns to Christians' congregational lives, and illustrates the Pentecostal training of "sacrificial agency" among both men and women in order to fulfill "successful families." Finally, Chapter 6 examines the routine interactions between Muslim and born-again Christian women, and discusses their unequal social footings in Salatiga's pluralism. In conclusion, this dissertation contends that pluralism in Salatiga involves unequal power relations and dialectical negotiations between religious communities, in which gendered identities and cross-religious relations are integral components of religious subjectivity
Coordinate-space calculation of the window observable for the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to
The `intermediate window quantity' of the hadronic vacuum polarization
contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon allows for a
high-precision comparison between the data-driven approach and lattice QCD. The
existing lattice results, which presently show good consistency among each
other, are in strong tension with the data-driven determination. In order to
check for a potentially common source of systematic error of the lattice
calculations, which are all based on the time-momentum representation (TMR), we
perform a calculation using a Lorentz-covariant coordinate-space (CCS)
representation. We present results for the isovector and the connected
strange-quark contributions to the intermediate window quantity at a reference
point in the plane, in the continuum and infinite-volume limit,
based on four different lattice spacings. Our results are in good agreement
with those of the recent TMR-based Mainz-CLS publication.Comment: 35 pages, 6 figures, 6 table
Coordinate-space calculation of QED corrections to the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to
As several lattice collaborations agree on the result for the window quantity
of the hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) contribution to , whilst
being in tension with the calculation using the dispersive approach, further
effort is needed in order to pin down the cause for this difference. Here we
want to focus on the isospin breaking corrections to the leading order HVP. In
many lattice applications, the photon propagator is treated stochastically;
however, by analogy with the hadronic light-by-light contribution (HLbL) to
, we suggest a coordinate-space approach to the HVP at
next-to-leading order. We present a calculation of the two diagrams of the
(2+2) topology at unphysical pion mass, where we apply a Pauli-Villars
regularization for the extra photon propagator in the diagram that is
UV-divergent. We compare the UV-finite diagram to the pseudoscalar exchange
contributions calculated from a vector-meson dominance model.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, Proceedings of the The 40th
International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2023), July 31st -
August 4th, 2023, Fermi National Accelerator Laborator
Bis(3,5-dicarboxybenzoato-κ2 O,O′)(1,10-phenanthroline-κ2 N,N′)cadmium(II)
The molecule of the title compound, [Cd(C9H5O6)2(C12H8N2)], has crystallographic twofold rotation symmetry. The CdII atom, located on the twofold axis, assumes a CdO4N2 distorted octahedral coordination geometry. In the crystal structure, the molecules link to each other by O—H⋯O and C—H⋯O hydrogen bonding to form a three-dimensional supramolecular network
S-allylcysteine Improves Blood Flow Recovery and Prevents Ischemic Injury by Augmenting Neovasculogenesis.
Studies suggest that a low level of circulating human endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) is a risk factor for ischemic injury and coronary artery disease (CAD). Consumption of S-allylcysteine (SAC) is known to prevent CAD. However, the protective effects of SAC on the ischemic injury are not yet clear. In this study, we examined whether SAC could improve blood flow recovery in ischemic tissues through EPC-mediated neovasculogenesis. The results demonstrate that SAC significantly enhances the neovasculogenesis of EPCs in vitro. The molecular mechanisms for SAC enhancement of neovasculogenesis include the activation of Akt/endothelial nitric oxide synthase signaling cascades. SAC increased the expression of c-kit, β-catenin, cyclin D1, and Cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (CDK4) proteins in EPCs. Daily intake of SAC at dosages of 0.2 and 2 mg/kg body weight significantly enhanced c-kit protein levels in vivo. We conclude that dietary consumption of SAC improves blood flow recovery and prevents ischemic injury by inducing neovasculogenesis in experimental models
Dynamic feedbacks among tree functional traits, termite populations and deadwood turnover
Changes in the composition of plant functional traits may affect ecosystem processes through influencing trophic interactions. Bottom-up control by plant species through food availability to animals may vary with time. However, such dynamics and their consequences for deadwood turnover are poorly known for detrital food webs. We introduce a dynamic conceptual model of the feedback of tree functional traits, (deadwood-feeding) termite populations and deadwood decomposition. We hypothesized that tree functional diversity (in terms of a wood resource economic spectrum [WES]) supports the sustenance of termite populations via complementary food supplied through time, as deadwood varies in traits both initially across species and because of different decomposition rates. Simultaneously, driven by this temporal dynamics of food quality, the consumption of deadwood by termites should hypothetically sustain deadwood turnover in a functionally diverse forest over time. We tested our hypothesis through an 18-month termite-exclusion decomposition experiment by incubating coarse (i.e. 5 cm diameter) deadwood of 34 woody species in two subtropical forests in East China. One site still sustained a healthy population of pangolins as the keystone termite predator, whereas another had lost its pangolins due to hunting and illegal wildlife trade. The results supported our hypothesis: in the first 12 months, termites amplified the positive linear relationship between % wood mass loss and initial wood quality (WES). In contrast, between 12 and 18 months, termite-mediated consumption, and associated wood mass loss, showed a humpback relation with the initial WES. This shift in termite preference of deadwood species along the WES reflects complementary food availability to termites through time. Synthesis. Our findings imply that tree functional composition, with variation in deadwood quality through decomposition time, can help to sustain termite populations and thereby forest carbon turnover. Future studies need to test whether and how our conceptual model may apply to other detrital systems and food webs. In general, food web research would benefit from a stronger focus on temporal patterns for better understanding the interactions of basal resource functional traits and consumers on ecosystem functions
Exploring Methods for Building Dialects-Mandarin Code-Mixing Corpora: A Case Study in Taiwanese Hokkien
In natural language processing (NLP), code-mixing (CM) is a challenging task,
especially when the mixed languages include dialects. In Southeast Asian
countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Hokkien-Mandarin is the
most widespread code-mixed language pair among Chinese immigrants, and it is
also common in Taiwan. However, dialects such as Hokkien often have a scarcity
of resources and the lack of an official writing system, limiting the
development of dialect CM research. In this paper, we propose a method to
construct a Hokkien-Mandarin CM dataset to mitigate the limitation, overcome
the morphological issue under the Sino-Tibetan language family, and offer an
efficient Hokkien word segmentation method through a linguistics-based toolkit.
Furthermore, we use our proposed dataset and employ transfer learning to train
the XLM (cross-lingual language model) for translation tasks. To fit the
code-mixing scenario, we adapt XLM slightly. We found that by using linguistic
knowledge, rules, and language tags, the model produces good results on CM data
translation while maintaining monolingual translation quality.Comment: The paper was accepted by EMNLP 2022 finding
Hadronic light-by-light contribution to from lattice QCD with SU(3) flavor symmetry
We perform a lattice QCD calculation of the hadronic light-by-light
contribution to at the SU(3) flavor-symmetric point
MeV. The representation used is based on
coordinate-space perturbation theory, with all QED elements of the relevant
Feynman diagrams implemented in continuum, infinite Euclidean space. As a
consequence, the effect of using finite lattices to evaluate the QCD four-point
function of the electromagnetic current is exponentially suppressed. Thanks to
the SU(3)-flavor symmetry, only two topologies of diagrams contribute, the
fully connected and the leading disconnected. We show the equivalence in the
continuum limit of two methods of computing the connected contribution, and
introduce a sparse-grid technique for computing the disconnected contribution.
Thanks to our previous calculation of the pion transition form factor, we are
able to correct for the residual finite-size effects and extend the tail of the
integrand. We test our understanding of finite-size effects by using gauge
ensembles differing only by their volume. After a continuum extrapolation based
on four lattice spacings, we obtain , where the first error results from the uncertainties on
the individual gauge ensembles and the second is the systematic error of the
continuum extrapolation. Finally, we estimate how this value will change as the
light-quark masses are lowered to their physical values.Comment: 19 figures, 39 pages; improved references, in particular concerning
the eta exchange; no figures or results change
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