Sojourn in Ecuador

A home economics undergraduate finds teaching in Latin America an enlightening experienc

The Impact of Project Adventure on the Self Concept of Adolescents

High-risk adventure courses are a new and dynamic part of physical education programs in many parts of the country. Many studies have been completed to assess the effect of physical activities on the integration of the personality. An initial course, Outward Bound, was an outgrowth of stringent programs developed by the British Navy during World War II. Because the Navy had found their men not well prepared to handle crises or stressful situations, a solution to this problem was sought by establishing the first Outward Bound School. The specific purpose was to introduce physical challenge in its training of young men as means of developing their character. By being pushed to their physical limits within the safety of a program, the men improved greatly in their physical stamina and their determination to survive. Subsequent wartime experience established a greater survival rate for graduates of the Outward Bound School. Project Adventure, the focus of this study, is an outgrowth of Outward Bound Schools. Project Adventure was originated in Massachusetts in 1970-71. The purpose of this study was to describe the effect of participation in an advanced Project Adventure Class on the self-concept of high school students. Twelve subscales of the Tennessee Self Concept Scale were compared before and after the class and the mean differences were evaluated statistically to ascertain whether there was a significant change in: Self-Criticism, Net Conflict, Total Conflict, Total Positivity, Positive Identity, Self-Satisfaction, Behavior, Physical Self, Moral-Ethical Self, Personal Self, Family Self, and Social Self. This study was conducted at a high school during the 1979-1980 school year. Data were collected from Project Adventure classes held in the spring semester. Ninety-nine students, 36 female and 63 males from the five advanced classes served as subjects for the study. Each student had participated in a beginning Project Adventure Class, which was a prerequisite for the advanced class. Each class met five days a week for 12 days and lasted approximately 45 minutes. The classes were held at the Project Adventure area at the high school. The day before students started activities for the class, May 1, the Tennessee Self Concept Scale was given. This test was also given on May 20 after the students finished the course

Structural development of laminar flow control aircraft chordwise wing joint designs

For laminar flow to be achieved, any protuberances on the surface must be small enough to avoid transition to turbulent flow. However, the surface must have joints between the structural components to allow assembly or replacement of damaged parts, although large continuous surfaces can be utilized to minimize the number the number of joints. Aircraft structural joints usually have many countersunk bolts or rivets on the outer surface. To maintain no mismatch on outer surfaces, it is desirable to attach the components from the inner surface. It is also desirable for the panels to be interchangeable, without the need for shims at the joint, to avoid surface discontinuities that could cause turbulence. Fabricating components while pressing their outer surfaces against an accurate mold helps to ensure surface smoothness and continuity at joints. These items were considered in evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of the joint design concepts. After evaluating six design concepts, two of the leading candidates were fabricated and tested using many small test panels. One joint concept was also built and tested using large panels. The small and large test panel deflections for the leading candidate designs at load factors up to +1.5 g's were well within the step and waviness requirements for avoiding transition.The small panels were designed and tested for compression and tension at -65 F, at ambient conditions, and at 160 F. The small panel results for the three-rib and the sliding-joint concepts indicated that they were both acceptable. The three-rib concept, with tapered splice plates, was considered to be the most practical. A modified three-rib joint that combined the best attributes of previous candidates was designed, developed, and tested. This improved joint met all of the structural strength, surface smoothness, and waviness criteria for laminar flow control (LFC). The design eliminated all disadvantages of the initial three-rib concept except for unavoidable eccentricity, which was reduced and reacted satisfactorily by the rib supports. It should also result in a relatively simple low-cost installation, and makes it easy to replace any panels damaged in the field

Physical activity when riding an electric-assisted bicycle with and without cargo

Background: Regular physical activity provides several health benefits, and active transport is a convenient way to implement physical activity in everyday life. However, bikes’ lack of possibilities to carry cargo is a limitation. E-cargo bikes can help overcome barriers to cycling and increase levels of active transport while still providing the option to carry cargo such as groceries and children. As such, E-cargo bikes have a greater potential for being a substitute for cars, but relevance is not known as no study has assessed the energy expenditure and time used using E-cargo bikes with considerable cargo. Objectives: The aim of this study is to compare time spent riding and exercise intensity when (1) riding an electric-assisted bicycle with cargo (30 kg) and without cargo and (2) driving a car. Method: This study has a randomised crossover design. Eleven participants (six women) were recruited through convenience sampling. The participants traversed through a 4.5 km route with three different forms of transportation: an electricassisted bicycle (E-bike) with 30 kg cargo, an E-bike without cargo, and a car. Oxygen uptake was measured with a portable oxygen analyser (Metamax 3B), and time spent cycling was measured on site by the test leader using a stopwatch. Results: Riding an E-bike with cargo was slightly slower than riding an E-bike without cargo (11.8 vs. 11.1 min, p = 0.017) and driving a car (8.8 min, p = 0.002). There was no significant difference in exercise intensity between E-bikes with and without cargo but riding an E-bike with cargo entailed significantly higher exercise intensity compared to driving a car [4.9 metabolic equivalents of task (METs) vs. 1.4 METs, p ≤ 0.001]. Conclusions: E-biking with cargo was rather similar in time spent and exercise intensity to E-biking without cargo, and not much slower than driving a car. Using E-cargo bikes, therefore, appears a good alternative to driving a car when in need of carrying things such as grocery bags and children, resulting in increasing physical activity and, at the same time, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.publishedVersio

Weathering relationships: the intra-action of people with climate in Himalayan India

Weather – cold, wet, hot and windy – pervades life, material and social. So present and obvious as to provide a challenge for research, material though ephemeral too, weather breaks boundaries and refuses categorisation. While night becomes day, the cold season warms up over weeks and annual patterns are changing on a scale of years, practices in the face of weather transitions are themselves shifting. Based on ten months of fieldwork in the small village of Gau in the Pahari Indian Himalayas this thesis interrogates the saliencies and permeations of weather in people’s lives. It investigates how people intra-act (Barad 2007) with the weather, though practices, infrastructures and relationships with others. My approach argues for the validity of weather as a means by which to learn about socio-material lives. Pahari villagers live and act within the weather that moves around them. They are subject to, but also modify, their thermal environment. Through housing, clothing and tools such as the fire and the fan they affect the impact of the weather as it meets their bodies, but also daily patterns of movement are coloured by weather considerations. This work views weather in relation to health practices (such as refraining from working during the rain so as not to fall ill), for care of others (such as domestic bovines), for house-building and hospitable relationship-building among neighbours, for negotiation of landslide-fraught access roads to elsewhere and for understandings of pollution in the air. This focus on weather is intended to connect dots for people working on climate change, both within and beyond anthropology, and to contribute to discussions in areas including human-animal relations, health and illness and housing

Stitchprofiles.uio.no: analysis of partly melted DNA conformations using stitch profiles

In this study, we describe a web server that performs computations on DNA melting, thus predicting the localized separation of the two strands for sequences provided by the users. The output types are stitch profiles, melting curves, probability profiles, etc. Stitch profile diagrams visualize the ensemble of alternative conformations that DNA can adopt with different probabilities. For example, a stitch profile shows the possible loop openings in terms of their locations, sizes, probabilities and fluctuations at a given temperature. Sequences with lengths up to several tens or hundreds of kilobase pairs can be analysed. The tools are freely available at

Merging the physical properties of DNA with genomic annotations in Ensembl

On a DNA sequence, we attach information about its features and attributes, and this kind of information is called annotations. Over the past few years there has been a development to gather and group annotations to a central service, so that scientists will be able to compare all kinds of annotations. Comparisons are performed with the aim of identifying related biological features. Ensembl is such an annotation centre, and this thesis addresses the issue of integrating an annotation made by the stitch profile algorithm into Ensembl. This stitch profile algorithm is a novel way of calculating the different conformations corresponding to a DNA melting profile, i.e. modeling of the physical attributes of the DNA double helix, so that it becomes easier to see what state the DNA molecule is in. We then analyze the how accurately the stitch profiles correlate to the annotations in Ensembl

Jeg skal aldri ta noen vaksiner, ikke over mitt lik: En kvalitativ analyse av vaksineskeptikeres manglende tillit

Under koronapandemien ble vaksinespørsmålet for alvor aktualisert. De aller fleste av oss måtte ta stilling til om vi skulle la oss vaksinere mot korona eller ikke. Til tross for at det er generelt er høy tillit i den norske befolkningen er det de som stiller seg kritiske til koronavaksinen og andre vaksiner. I denne studien rettes fokuset mot denne gruppen mennesker, vaksineskeptikerne. Gjennom kvalitative dybdeintervju med selverklærte vaksineskeptikere får vi i denne studien innblikk i en gruppe mennesker som det vanligvis ikke gis så mye oppmerksomhet til. Med et teoretisk rammeverk bestående av teorier om tillit til systemer og eksperter, mistillit, konspirasjonsteorier, religion og modernitet, belyses vaksineskeptikernes tanker, meninger og følelser knyttet til vaksiner. I studien kommes det frem til at vaksineskepsis kan forstås som et slags antimoderne fenomen, hvor det rettes mistillit til det moderne samfunns nøkkelinstitusjoner og hvor tilliten heller rettes mot det tradisjonelle – det religiøse og naturlige

En eksplorerende studie av prosjektgjennomføring i sivil sektor og forsvarssektoren. Hvilke faktorer fra Best Value Procurement-metoden kan bidra til effektivisering av anskaffelsesprosjekter i forsvarssektoren?

Effektivisering er i de fleste organisasjoner et stadig oppdukkende tema. Gjennom effektivisering vil ressurser kunne frigjøres og omprioriteres til kjernevirksomhet, som for Forsvaret vil bidra til økt operativ evne. Effektiv investerings- og anskaffelsesvirksomhet kan pekes på å være særlig relevant for forsvarssektoren i skrivende stund. Ukrainakrisen gjør at materiell og systemer må anskaffes fortere, og en hensiktsmessig og velfungerende anskaffelsesmetode vil være viktig for å kunne sikre operativ evne. I denne oppgaven studeres forsvarssektorens investerings- og anskaffelsesvirksomhet, og hvordan denne kan tenkes å effektiviseres gjennom problemstillingen; Hvilke faktorer fra Best Value Procurement-metoden kan bidra til effektivisering av anskaffelsesprosjekter i forsvarssektoren? Best Value Procurement (BVP) er en mindre utprøvd prosjektmetode i Norge. Gjennom metodetriangulering av litteratursøk, kvantitativ og kvalitativ metode, søkes det å finne faktorer som kan overføres til forsvarssektorens prosjektmetode PRINSIX. Gjennom innslagspunkter i Forsvarsmateriell (FMA) og Direktorat for forvaltning og økonomistyring (DFØ) har vi fått tilgang til prosjektdokumenter fra flere BVP- og PRINSIX-prosjekter. Gjennom litteratursøk er det valgt ut fire kategorier som presenterer hovedforskjellene mellom de to metodene, og disse danner grunnlaget for oppgavens drøfting. Deretter er det gjennomført en kvantitativ analyse av funksjonsbaserte krav, samt utformet to hjelpehypoteser om tidsbruk og samhandling til videre kvalitativ analyse. Det er gjennomført seks semistrukturerte dybdeintervjuer, hvor to av respondentene hadde erfaring fra BVP, to fra PRINSIX, og to med kompetanse om flere prosjektmetoder. Etter kvantitativ og kvalitativ analyse fremkommer det blant annet at det i begge prosjektmetoder oppleves tidspress og divergerende forståelse for metodene både internt i organisasjonene og mellom involverte parter. Dette leder til at det er vanskelig å være tro mot metodikken slik den er tiltenkt. Videre funn er at det i PRINSIX forekommer større grad av overspesifisering i form av høyere antall krav og detaljer enn i BVP. En årsak til dette kan være mangel på tillit til leverandør, noe som kan gå på bekostning av blant annet innovasjonskraft i forsvarssektoren. I BVP finner vi at leverandøren motiveres av større handlingsrom, og at metoden bidrar til nye løsninger da kravspesifikasjonene er færre. Et ytterligere funn er at forsvarssektorens særegenhet innebærer lange beslutningsrekker, hierarkisk struktur og kontrollbehov. Dette kan i sum utfordre effektivitet i gjennomføring av forsvarsanskaffelser. Avslutningsvis presenteres tre faktorer vi mener kan bidra til effektivisering av prosjektgjennomføring i forsvarssektoren: 1) Leverandøren er ekspert, 2) Opplæringsmøter og 3) Tilleggsverdier. Konklusjonen er videre at det er mest gjennomførbart å overføre faktorene til Kategori-2-prosjekter da disse ofte vil være av mindre omfang, risiko og usikkerhet sammenlignet med Kategori-1-prosjekter. I forlengelsen av dette trekkes nyanskaffelser frem som mer aktuelle enn oppgraderinger, da man i nyanskaffelsesprosjekter ofte vil ha flere løsningsalternativer og følgelig større handlingsrom