Effects of the Photo Narrative Process on Students' Intercultural Learning in Agriculture

Cultural heritage describes our way of life. It comes from previous generational traditions and incorporates our current constructed and natural environments, and tangible artifacts. The purpose of this study was to explore effects of the photo narrative process on students’ intercultural learning in agriculture. The photo narrative process, derived from Photovoice, combines photography and narrative expression about artifacts important to one’s way of life. Photo narrative assignments were developed for students to capture facets of their own cultural heritage, and their host country nationals’ cultural heritage, while participating on three separate study abroad programs. Archival data was collected from students’ photo narratives (i.e., course assignments to illustrate one’s cultural heritage via photo and text) in three agricultural study abroad programs. Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001) concept of visual social semiotics was used to analyze qualitative data, and Bennett’s (1986) Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity was used to measure students’ levels of intercultural competence. The results showed participants experienced frame shifts (i.e., perspective change in worldviews) from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism, as evidenced in the rhetoric of their photo narrative artifacts after participating in the photo narrative process. The photo narrative process is a valuable educational technique to change participants’ intercultural competence. Consistent with young people’s preferred communication methods (i.e., social media), the combination of image and text empowers learners through expressive communication and reflection

Probably Safe or Live

This paper presents a formal characterisation of safety and liveness properties \`a la Alpern and Schneider for fully probabilistic systems. As for the classical setting, it is established that any (probabilistic tree) property is equivalent to a conjunction of a safety and liveness property. A simple algorithm is provided to obtain such property decomposition for flat probabilistic CTL (PCTL). A safe fragment of PCTL is identified that provides a sound and complete characterisation of safety properties. For liveness properties, we provide two PCTL fragments, a sound and a complete one. We show that safety properties only have finite counterexamples, whereas liveness properties have none. We compare our characterisation for qualitative properties with the one for branching time properties by Manolios and Trefler, and present sound and complete PCTL fragments for characterising the notions of strong safety and absolute liveness coined by Sistla

Property (RD) for Hecke pairs

As the first step towards developing noncommutative geometry over Hecke C*-algebras, we study property (RD) (Rapid Decay) for Hecke pairs. When the subgroup H in a Hecke pair (G,H) is finite, we show that the Hecke pair (G,H) has (RD) if and only if G has (RD). This provides us with a family of examples of Hecke pairs with property (RD). We also adapt Paul Jolissant's works in 1989 to the setting of Hecke C*-algebras and show that when a Hecke pair (G,H) has property (RD), the algebra of rapidly decreasing functions on the set of double cosets is closed under holomorphic functional calculus of the associated (reduced) Hecke C*-algebra. Hence they have the same K_0-groups.Comment: A short note added explaining other methods to prove that the subalgebra of rapidly decreasing functions is smooth. This is the final version as published. The published version is available at: springer.co

Monitoring Partially Synchronous Distributed Systems using SMT Solvers

In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of monitoring partially synchronous distributed systems to detect latent bugs, i.e., errors caused by concurrency and race conditions among concurrent processes. We present a monitoring framework where we model both system constraints and latent bugs as Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) formulas, and we detect the presence of latent bugs using an SMT solver. We demonstrate the feasibility of our framework using both synthetic applications where latent bugs occur at any time with random probability and an application involving exclusive access to a shared resource with a subtle timing bug. We illustrate how the time required for verification is affected by parameters such as communication frequency, latency, and clock skew. Our results show that our framework can be used for real-life applications, and because our framework uses SMT solvers, the range of appropriate applications will increase as these solvers become more efficient over time.Comment: Technical Report corresponding to the paper accepted at Runtime Verification (RV) 201

Stability conditions and positivity of invariants of fibrations

We study three methods that prove the positivity of a natural numerical invariant associated to $1-$parameter families of polarized varieties. All these methods involve different stability conditions. In dimension 2 we prove that there is a natural connection between them, related to a yet another stability condition, the linear stability. Finally we make some speculations and prove new results in higher dimension.Comment: Final version, to appear in the Springer volume dedicated to Klaus Hulek on the occasion of his 60-th birthda

SU(2) WZW Theory at Higher Genera

We compute, by free field techniques, the scalar product of the SU(2) Chern-Simons states on genus > 1 surfaces. The result is a finite-dimensional integral over positions of ``screening charges'' and one complex modular parameter. It uses an effective description of the CS states closely related to the one worked out by Bertram. The scalar product formula allows to express the higher genus partition functions of the WZW conformal field theory by finite-dimensional integrals. It should provide the hermitian metric preserved by the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov-Bernard connection describing the variations of the CS states under the change of the complex structure of the surface.Comment: 44 pages, IHES/P/94/10, Latex fil

Optically induced damping of the surface plasmon resonance in gold colloids

The surface plasmon damping induced by high excitation of the electron gas is studied in femtosecond pump-and-probe experiments on gold colloids embedded in a sol-gel matrix. Optical excitation of single-particle interband transitions leads to a pronounced broadening of the surface plasmon line. A similar behavior is observed for resonant excitation of the surface plasmon. This broadening is the dominant optical nonlinearity of the system, and reflects the excitation-induced damping of the surface plasmon resonance. The time evolution of the damping rate follows that of the electronic scattering rate

Specifying social structures in preschool classrooms: descriptive and functional distinctions between affiliative subgroups

Preschool children attending Head Start programs (N=586, 296 boys and 290 girls, between 3 and 5 years of age, over 95% African–American) were observed to determine physical proximity to peers as well as rates of visual attention given and received. Sociometric data were used to derive peer acceptance scores, peer friendships, and sociometric status classifications. Three subgroup types (high mutual proximity (HMP), lower mutual proximity (LMP), and ungrouped children) were identified through complete linkage hierarchical clustering and chi-square procedures from the proximity data. HMP subgroups tended to be larger, to have higher sociometric acceptance scores, and children in these subgroups had more reciprocated friendships than was true for the other subgroup types. Significant within-group preferences and out-group biases were observed for both HMP and LMP subgroups using measures of visual attention and sociometric choice data, but these were more marked for HMP subgroups. Results are consistent with previous ethological studies of affiliative structures in preschool classrooms and also show that methods of data collection and analysis from social ethology and child psychology research traditions are mutually informing

FSPVDsse: A Forward Secure Publicly Verifiable Dynamic SSE scheme

A symmetric searchable encryption (SSE) scheme allows a client (data owner) to search on encrypted data outsourced to an untrusted cloud server. The search may either be a single keyword search or a complex query search like conjunctive or Boolean keyword search. Information leakage is quite high for dynamic SSE, where data might be updated. It has been proven that to avoid this information leakage an SSE scheme with dynamic data must be forward private. A dynamic SSE scheme is said to be forward private, if adding a keyword-document pair does not reveal any information about the previous search result with that keyword. In SSE setting, the data owner has very low computation and storage power. In this setting, though some schemes achieve forward privacy with honest-but-curious cloud, it becomes difficult to achieve forward privacy when the server is malicious, meaning that it can alter the data. Verifiable dynamic SSE requires the server to give a proof of the result of the search query. The data owner can verify this proof efficiently. In this paper, we have proposed a generic publicly verifiable dynamic SSE (DSSE) scheme that makes any forward private DSSE scheme verifiable without losing forward privacy. The proposed scheme does not require any extra storage at owner-side and requires minimal computational cost as well for the owner. Moreover, we have compared our scheme with the existing results and show that our scheme is practical.Comment: 17 pages, Published in ProvSec 201

A concordância entre o comportamento de base segura com a mãe nos primeiros anos de vida e os modelos internos dinâmicos no pré-escolar

Estuda-se, numa amostra que contempla dois países – Portugal e Estados Unidos da América –, a estabilidade da qualidade da vinculação, na relação mãe criança, analisando-se o comportamento de base segura na relação mãe-criança nos primeiros anos de vida e as representações mentais da criança acerca desta relação, no pré-escolar. Os participantes são 25 díades mãe-criança portuguesas e 47 díades mãe-criança americanas. Utiliza-se o Attachment Behaviour Q-Set (AQS) (Waters, 1995) para avaliar os comportamentos de base segura e, três anos mais tarde, aplica-se às crianças o Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT) (Bretherton & Ridgeway, 1990) que avalia a qualidade e a segurança das representações internas da relação de vinculação. Os resultados mostram que, nesta amostra, há uma estabilidade da vinculação entre os 2-3 anos de idade e os 5-6 anos de idade. O valor de segurança do AQS está correlacionado positiva e significativamente com a dimensão de segurança do ASCT. Nesta amostra, os modelos internos dinâmicos parecem permanecer relativamente estáveis ao longo de um período significativo de tempo