The sense in humour : a personal exploration of humour in the teaching of adults : some questions and tentative answers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in Adult Education at Massey University

This thesis is a personal exploration of the potential applications of humour in the teaching of adults. I have provided some questions and tentative answers about the use of humour in the facilitation of adult learning. Having recognised the value of humour in my own teaching practice, I have examined the ways in which humour, when applied appropriately, can promote creative thinking by enhancing the processes of knowing, perceiving and discovering. Adult learning has been said to be a means of gaining knowledge and skills, a way to satisfy learner needs and a process of critical self-reflection that may lead to transformation. Adult education can involve challenging periods of transformation and students may require assistance to overcome inhibitions, behaviours and beliefs about themselves their culture and learning. In this thesis I have sought to explore how humour, manifesting itself in verbal, written and visual formats, may be a valuable pedagogical tool to address such issues. One of the purposes of this thesis is to contribute to knowledge in teaching practice by demonstrating that the systematic and informed introduction of humour into individual teaching strategics may provide a more people-centred climate which addresses individual and group learning needs from the perspective of teacher and student

Source Reconstruction as an Inverse Problem

Inverse Problem techniques offer powerful tools which deal naturally with marginal data and asymmetric or strongly smoothing kernels, in cases where parameter-fitting methods may be used only with some caution. Although they are typically subject to some bias, they can invert data without requiring one to assume a particular model for the source. The Backus-Gilbert method in particular concentrates on the tradeoff between resolution and stability, and allows one to select an optimal compromise between them. We use these tools to analyse the problem of reconstructing features of the source star in a microlensing event, show that it should be possible to obtain useful information about the star with reasonably obtainable data, and note that the quality of the reconstruction is more sensitive to the number of data points than to the quality of individual ones.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. To be published in "Microlensing 2000, A New Era of Microlensing Astrophysics", eds., J.W. Menzies and P.D. Sackett, ASP Conference Serie

The Toeplitz algebra of a Hilbert bimodule

Suppose a C*-algebra A acts by adjointable operators on a Hilbert A-module X. Pimsner constructed a C*-algebra O_X which includes, for particular choices of X, crossed products of A by Z, the Cuntz algebras O_n, and the Cuntz-Krieger algebras O_B. Here we analyse the representations of the corresponding Toeplitz algebra. One consequence is a uniqueness theorem for the Toeplitz-Cuntz-Krieger algebras of directed graphs, which includes Cuntz's uniqueness theorem for O_\infty.Comment: AMS-LaTeX, 22 pages; originally posted an old version by mistak

Whole-grain foods and chronic disease: evidence from epidemiological and intervention studies

Cereal-based foods are key components of the diet and they dominate most food-based dietary recommendations in order to achieve targets for intake of carbohydrate, protein and dietary fibre. Processing (milling) of grains to produce refined grain products removes key nutrients and phytochemicals from the flour and although in some countries nutrients may be replaced with mandatory fortification, overall this refinement reduces their potential nutritional quality. There is increasing evidence from both observational and intervention studies that increased intake of less-refined, whole-grain (WG) foods has positive health benefits. The highest WG consumers are consistently shown to have lower risk of developing CVD, type 2 diabetes and some cancers. WG consumers may also have better digestive health and are likely to have lower BMI and gain less weight over time. The bulk of the evidence for the benefits of WG comes from observational studies, but evidence of benefit in intervention studies and potential mechanisms of action is increasing. Overall this evidence supports the promotion of WG foods over refined grain foods in the diet, but this would require adoption of standard definitions of 'whole grain' and 'whole-grain foods' which will enable innovation by food manufacturers, provide clarity for the consumer and encourage the implementation of food-based dietary recommendations and public health strategies

Theory Uncertainties for Higgs and Other Searches Using Jet Bins

Bounds on the Higgs mass from the Tevatron and LHC are determined using exclusive jet bins to maximize sensitivity. Scale variation in exclusive fixed-order predictions underestimates the perturbative uncertainty for these cross sections, due to cancellations between the perturbative corrections leading to large K factors and those that induce logarithmic sensitivity to the jet-bin boundary. To account for this, we propose that scale variation in the fixed-order calculations should be used to determine theory uncertainties for inclusive jet cross sections, whose differences yield exclusive jet cross sections. This yields a theory correlation matrix for the jet bins such that the additional uncertainty from large logarithms due to the jet boundary cancels when neighboring bins are added. This procedure is tested for H + 0, 1 jets, WW + 0 jets, and W + 0, 1, 2 jets, and found to be generally applicable. For a case where the higher-order resummation of the jet boundary corrections is known, we show that this procedure yields fixed-order uncertainties which are theoretically consistent with those obtained in the resummed calculation.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures; v2: journal versio

N-Jettiness: An Inclusive Event Shape to Veto Jets

Jet vetoes are essential in many Higgs and new-physics analyses at the LHC and Tevatron. The signals are typically characterized by a specific number of hard jets, leptons, or photons, while the backgrounds often have additional jets. In such cases vetoing undesired additional jets is an effective way to discriminate signals and background. Given an inclusive event sample with N or more jets, the veto to have only N energetic jets defines an "exclusive" N-jet cross section. This strongly restricts the phase space of the underlying inclusive N-jet cross section and causes large double logarithms in perturbation theory that must be summed to obtain theory predictions. Jet vetoes are typically implemented using jet algorithms. This yields complicated phase-space restrictions and one often relies on parton-shower Monte Carlos, which are limited to leading-logarithmic accuracy. We introduce a global event shape "N-jettiness", tau_N, which is defined for events with N signal jets and vanishes in the limit of exactly N infinitely narrow jets. Requiring tau_N << 1 constrains radiation between the N signal jets and vetoes additional undesired jets. This provides an inclusive method to veto jets and to define an exclusive N-jet cross section that can be well-controlled theoretically. N-jettiness yields a factorization formula with inclusive jet and beam functions.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, v2: typos corrected, journal versio

The Beam Thrust Cross Section for Drell-Yan at NNLL Order

At the LHC and Tevatron strong initial-state radiation (ISR) plays an important role. It can significantly affect the partonic luminosity available to the hard interaction or contaminate a signal with additional jets and soft radiation. An ideal process to study ISR is isolated Drell-Yan production, pp -> X l+l- without central jets, where the jet veto is provided by the hadronic event shape beam thrust tau_B. Most hadron collider event shapes are designed to study central jets. In contrast, requiring tau_B << 1 provides an inclusive veto of central jets and measures the spectrum of ISR. For tau_B << 1 we carry out a resummation of alpha_s^n ln^m tau_B corrections at next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic order. This is the first resummation at this order for a hadron-hadron collider event shape. Measurements of tau_B at the Tevatron and LHC can provide crucial tests of our understanding of ISR and of tau_B's utility as a central jet veto.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, v2: journal versio

Dissecting Soft Radiation with Factorization

An essential part of high-energy hadronic collisions is the soft hadronic activity that underlies the primary hard interaction. It includes soft radiation from the primary hard partons, secondary multiple parton interactions (MPI), and factorization-violating effects. The invariant mass spectrum of the leading jet in $Z$+jet and $H$+jet events is directly sensitive to these effects, and we use a QCD factorization theorem to predict its dependence on the jet radius $R$, jet $p_T$, jet rapidity, and partonic process for both the perturbative and nonperturbative components of primary soft radiation. We prove that the nonperturbative contributions involve only odd powers of $R$, and the linear $R$ term is universal for quark and gluon jets. The hadronization model in PYTHIA8 agrees well with these properties. The perturbative soft initial state radiation (ISR) has a contribution that depends on the jet area in the same way as the underlying event, but this degeneracy is broken by dependence on the jet $p_T$. The size of this soft ISR contribution is proportional to the color state of the initial partons, yielding the same positive contribution for $gg\to Hg$ and $gq\to Zq$, but a negative interference contribution for $q\bar q\to Z g$. Hence, measuring these dependencies allows one to separate hadronization, soft ISR, and MPI contributions in the data.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, v2: PRL version, text rearrange