Affective continuities across Muslim and Christian settings in Berlin

This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal Christian setting in Berlin, examines whether distinct and diverse religious groups can be brought into a meaningful relation with one another. It considers the methodological possibilities that might become possible or foreclose when two researchers, working in different prayer settings in the same city, use affect as a common frame of reference while seeking to establish shared affective relations and terrains that would otherwise be implausible. With two separately observed accounts of prayer gatherings in a shared urban context, we describe locally specific workings of affect and sensation. We argue that sense-aesthetic forms and patterns in our field sites are supralocal affective forms that help constitute an analytic relationality between the two religious settings

Tree of Life: A Tool for Therapeutic Growth?

This paper presents a review of the Tree of Life (ToL) — a strengths-based tool rooted in narrative therapy — as an intervention for children and young people (CYP). Originally developed to support vulnerable young people in Zimbabwe, ToL is now used to support children and adults in many countries and contexts across the world. This paper discusses key aspects of the tool, evaluates the evidence base of ToL with young people, shares the views of CYP and parents, and suggests implications for schools and educational psychology practice in the UK

Haunting Sufis and the Also-Here of Migration in Berlin

This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr, the Sufi exercise of godly remembrance. It explores how performances of religious longing broaden the moral experience of a post-migrant Berlin by offering contemporary believers critically thin zones of hypersocial contact with Islamic holy figures. Zikr emerges as a key interface of felt and material worlds: through acts of remembrance, subliminal figures and migrant inheritances are made contemporaneous while suppressed civic-political matters find a spectral, more-than-visual presence in Berlin. Sufi haunting thus achieves, amid enduring conditions of migration, a provisional positioning of the not-here and the not-now as an also-here. Such remembrance affords migrants a greater awareness of being distinctly historical as well as the critical means to look past conditions of the present

Determining Whether Female Circumcision is a Human Rights Violation

Female circumcision is a traditional practice commonly associated with culture, religion, or a mix of both. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the controversy surrounding female circumcision and determine whether this practice is justified or a violation of human rights. There are two main critiques of female circumcision as posed by the international community. The first critique is the health risks associated with the procedure and the second risk is the lack of consent within practicing communities. Due to these reasons, female circumcision is not only outlawed in most African countries with its disbandment supported by the African Union but is also internationally condemned as a human rights violation. With the extensive involvement of outsiders evaluating this cultural practice, the Western idea of human rights is criticized as an imperialistic mandate enforcing its own norms on other cultural groups. A case study of the Maasai people is examined within this paper to explain the meaning behind female circumcision, the resistance behind ending the practice and some recommendations moving forward on how to address and attempt to dismantle this practice

Microwave Drying of Hevea Rubber Latex and Total Solid Content (TSC) Determination

This paper deals with the microwave drying of the hevea rubber latex. It outlines the theoretical and experimental aspects on the effect of sample weight (5 gm to 15 gm), microwave power levels (3W/ cm3 to 10.6W/cm3) and initial TSC (25% to 60%) to the drying rate and final drying time. A series of drying curves (mass versus drying times) was generated and optimum conditions for drying were determined. A close relationship between theory and experiment has been found. The drying rate and final drying time for 5 to 15 gm samples with TSC = 39.2% at 9.3 W/cm 3 is approximately 0.07 gm/sec and 4 minutes respectively. A large amount of sample > 20 gm is avoided to prevent any explosion and sputtering of the sample during drying process. It is suggested that the optimal mass and power level are 10 gm and 9.3 W/cm 3 respectively. The experimental results clearly showed that micro were drying is very efficient for drying of fresh hevea latex as the conventional drying method needs 1 to 2 hours

Can twitter be an effective platform for political discourse in Malaysia? A Study of #PRU13

Studies show that social media play an important role in shaping political discourse. Applications of Web 2.0, particularly Twitter, are currently influencing the nature of online participation in which the audience is not merely passively reading web content, but is actually contributing to and creating the content.This study examines communication on Twitter during the 13th Malaysian General Election based on Twitter messages collected under the #PRU13 hashtag.The analyzed dataset is collected from Twitter's public timeline from May 1 to May 6, 2013.This study found lack of diversity in the discussion on Twitter sphere in which tweets that are pro-Barisan National coalition dominates the #pru13. Based on the communication patterns, however, #PRU13 constitute a multifaceted group of commenters who seek to persuade, educate, provoke and so on

Experimental study on flame propagation in a straight pipe

Flame propagation in a closed pipe with diameter 0.1 m and 5.1 m long, as well as length to diameter ratio (L/D) of 51, was studied experimentally. Hydrogen/air, acetylene/air and methane/air with stoichiometric concentration were used to observe the trend of flame propagation throughout the pipe. Experimental work was carried out at operating condition: pressure 1 atm and temperature 273 K. Results showed that all fuels are having a consistent trend of flame propagation in one-half of the total pipe length in which the acceleration is due to the piston-like effect. Beyond the point, fuel reactivity and tulip phenomenon were considered to lead the flame being quenched and decrease the overpressures drastically. The maximum overpressure for all fuels are approximately 1.5, 7, 8.5 barg for methane, hydrogen, and acetylene indicating that acetylene explosion is more severe

Convolutional Neural Network for Accurate Crowd Counting and Destiny Estimation

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Nowadays, crowd and object counting has become an important task for a variety of applications, such as traffic control, public safety, urban planning, and video surveillance. It has also become a crucial part of building a high-level monitoring system such as video surveillance and crowd analysis. In these cases, dynamic crowd monitoring and analysis is extremely important for control management and social safety. Like the other computer vision issues, crowd counting and density estimation come with various kinds of challenges such as high clutters, occlusions, non-uniform distributions of objects or people, and intra-scene and inter-scene variations in appearance. Researchers and industrial partners have attempted to design and develop many sophisticated models to address various issues that exist in crowd counting. Especially in recent years, the number of researches in the crowd counting era became overwhelming with the domination of deep-learning and Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) based models in various computer vision tasks. In this thesis, we revisit the crowd counting and propose various novel solutions to this problem. At first, we propose an Adaptive Counting Convolutional Neural Network (A-CCNN) and consider the scale variation of objects in a frame adaptively to improve the accuracy of counting. Our method takes advantages of contextual information to provide more accurate and adaptive density maps and crowd counting in a scene. Then, we focus on CNN pruning to further enhance the crowd counting models for real-time application and increase the performance of CCNN model. Thus, a new pruning strategy is proposed by considering the contributions of various filters to the final result. The filters in the original CCNN model are grouped into positive, negative, and irrelevant types. We prune the irrelevant filters, of which feature maps contain little information, and the negative filters determined by a mask learned from the training dataset. Our solution improves the results of the counting model without fine-tuning or retraining the pruned model. Finally, we propose a novel Pyramid Density-Aware Attention-based network, abbreviated as PDANet, which leverages the attention, pyramid scale feature and two branch decoder modules for density-aware crowd counting. The PDANet utilises these modules to extract different scale features, focus on the relevant information, and suppress the misleading ones. Extensive evaluations conducted on the challenging benchmark datasets well demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed models in terms of the accuracy of counting as well as generated density maps over the well-known state-of-the-art approaches