Every Picture Tells a Story: Visual Alternatives to Oral Tradition in Ponam Society

Those concerned with recording the history, the culture, and the tradition of village societies seek the sources of their information in the spoken word. Historians, folklorists, and anthropologists have sat down with their informants, pencil and paper in hand, and have urged them to talk. After all, these are the people and societies without history, the people and societies that do not produce written accounts that might contain the answers to the questions posed by investigators. These researchers have benefited from a change that has been taking place in western scholarship, unevenly in different disciplines, over the past quarter-century: the revaluation of the sources of tradition and local knowledge, a revaluation that elevates oral sources and oral traditions in relation to their written counterparts. In our own field, anthropology, evidence of this change is found in the growing interest in ethnohistory and ethnopoetics, part of a general turn toward more cultural concerns. This shift shows an increasing awareness that oral studies have a logic and validity of their own, that they are not merely inferior cousins to the study of written sources. Indeed, some scholars who espouse this viewpoint have theorized that the emergence of writing was not an unalloyed good, a leap out of the darkness (e.g. Goody 1977; Ong 1971). Instead, it comes to take on elements of a fall, as the spread of writing is associated with the growth of an oppressive state

Improvements in Microboiling Device Design

Small ribbon heaters (10 μm - 20 μm wide) have been used for many years to study the formation of microbubbles in liquids when short voltage pulses are applied. This thesis describes improvements in the device design with an emphasis on smaller and more sensitive heaters. I used a novel method of creating 250 nanometer wide heaters to keep both the fabrication time and costs as low as possible by using a focused ion beam to create the heaters from a set of larger devices. Ribbon heaters are usually fabricated on a thin SiO2 layer on a silicon wafer which acts as a large heat sink whose effect becomes more pronounced the smaller the heater width. Suspending the heaters on a thin membrane dramatically increased their sensitivity in microboiling experiments. The suspended devices required the development of a very low stress platinum deposition process

Data Analysis Processes and Techniques for Validation of Wearable Technology: An Example

Topics in Exercise Science and Kinesiology Volume 3: Issue 1, Article 10, 2022. With wearable technology growing in popularity and sophistication, there remains a need to determine the validity of these devices by independent observers. Validation studies of wearable technology can involve large amounts of data, with data preparation techniques that are not always clearly established. This can make attempts to reproduce the results difficult and does not allow researchers to gain guidance in how to perform their own analyses if they wanted to perform a similar study. Therefore, this paper details the process that was utilized to prepare and analyze the accuracy of several heart rate monitors during mountain biking and can be used as a possible guide to researchers looking to perform similar analyses. We also detail the software used and discuss possible alternatives

Limits of Environmental Understanding: Action and Constraint

Some recent influential work on understandings of the environment identifies what can be called a “Modern” view, which sees the environment in impersonal, objective terms, as separated from the Modern individual. That work also tends to ignore the ways that people’s actions regarding their environment can be constrained by external factors and can result in a modification of people’s initial views of the environment or the adoption of additional views. This article looks at some environmental activists in Jamaica to suggest that people with Modern backgrounds can have a non-Modern view of their surroundings, and to illustrate the ways that their actions regarding the environment can lead them to complicate their understandings of their surroundings

Lanczos-based Low-Rank Correction Method for Solving the Dyson Equation in Inhomogenous Dynamical Mean-Field Theory

Inhomogeneous dynamical mean-field theory has been employed to solve many interesting strongly interacting problems from transport in multilayered devices to the properties of ultracold atoms in a trap. The main computational step, especially for large systems, is the problem of calculating the inverse of a large sparse matrix to solve Dyson's equation and determine the local Green's function at each lattice site from the corresponding local self-energy. We present a new efficient algorithm, the Lanczos-based low-rank algorithm, for the calculation of the inverse of a large sparse matrix which yields this local (imaginary time) Green's function. The Lanczos-based low-rank algorithm is based on a domain decomposition viewpoint, but avoids explicit calculation of Schur complements and relies instead on low-rank matrix approximations derived from the Lanczos algorithm, for solving the Dyson equation. We report at least a 25-fold improvement of performance compared to explicit decomposition (such as sparse LU) of the matrix inverse. We also report that scaling relative to matrix sizes, of the low-rank correction method on the one hand and domain decomposition methods on the other, are comparable.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, 24th Annual CSP Workshop, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, submitted to Physics Procedia. New version has some of the References correcte

Developing Leadership Dispositions for Preparing Urban School Leaders in Chronically Low-Performing Schools

This study originated as an institutionally sponsored research residency conducted using utilization-focused evaluation (Patton, 2008) to investigate the nature of dispositional changes in candidates pursuing National Louis University’s M.Ed. and Ed.S. degrees leading to educational leadership (EDL) state certification in one large urban school district in a Southern state. The EDL program organized learning objectives intending to develop a specific knowledge base, an operational competency set, and, as this study’s focus, leadership dispositions related to preparing assistant principals and principals to lead effectively in chronically low-performing (CLP) schools. The inquiry cross-analyzed data at the intersection of the graduate program’s disposition-related learning objectives with 13 leadership dispositions identified in The Haberman Educational Foundation Star Urban Administrator Pre-Screener. EDL program faculty administered the pre-screener to EDL program candidates twice, yielding 187 matched pairs in pre-program and post-program administrations. Statistical analyses yielded a significant difference (improvement) in overall Haberman scores at the .01 alpha level, as well as an effect size considered (Cohen, 1969) to be a medium effect size. Faculty triangulated the data with interviews of alumni and faculty with experience in leading CLP schools, who affirmed that focus on leadership dispositions serves an important developmental role in an EDL program. The study appears to validate the measurable presence and dynamic changes in EDL candidate dispositions as an element of a graduate program focused on developing effective leaders of CLP schools

Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away from It All?

Anthropologists have paid substantial attention to the environment and to tourism. However, they have paid less attention to their conjunction in ecotourism. This article focuses on Western ecotourism in relatively poor countries, approaching it as an expression of certain important Western values concerning the natural world and the people who live there. It places ecotourism within its broader political-economic context--neoliberalism and the institutions that reflect it, which foster its spread in the countries in question. Ecotourism may be seen as an exercise in power that can shape the natural world and the people who live in it in ways that contradict some of the values that it is supposed to express

Determining Training Needs for Cloud Infrastructure Investigations using I-STRIDE

As more businesses and users adopt cloud computing services, security vulnerabilities will be increasingly found and exploited. There are many technological and political challenges where investigation of potentially criminal incidents in the cloud are concerned. Security experts, however, must still be able to acquire and analyze data in a methodical, rigorous and forensically sound manner. This work applies the STRIDE asset-based risk assessment method to cloud computing infrastructure for the purpose of identifying and assessing an organization's ability to respond to and investigate breaches in cloud computing environments. An extension to the STRIDE risk assessment model is proposed to help organizations quickly respond to incidents while ensuring acquisition and integrity of the largest amount of digital evidence possible. Further, the proposed model allows organizations to assess the needs and capacity of their incident responders before an incident occurs.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, 5th International Conference on Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime; Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime, pp. 223-236, 201