Digital ethnography, resistance art and communication media in Iran

Iranian visual materials relating to the presidential election crisis have the potential to become the sites of analysis and debate for fields as diverse as history, visual history, memory and post-memory, or trauma studies. References to memory are now omnipresent in scholarly discourse and in a wider public debate: ”social memory’, “collective remembrance”, “national memory”, “public memory”, “counter memory”, “popular history making” and “lived history” jostle for attention.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Digital ethnography, resistance art, and communication media in Iran

Editorial Introduction: On June 14, 2013, Iran will again challenge its nation and nation-state. The country will confront another presidential election—an event that four years ago became a national crisis, a social catastrophe, and a traumatic memory.I have previously discussed the important role played by Iranian independent documentary filmmakers as well as urban journalists in the recording and representation of the traumatic events of the Iranian presidential crisis of 2009 (Khosronejad, 2009). However, much remains unsaid regarding the significance and function of the visual material and digital resistance art that was created and circulated on the Internet as a result of the national crisis. This collection is one of the first attempts to discuss the importance of visual resistance and protest art, its circulation via digital media, and its function in the peaceful movement that was transformed into one of the most traumatic events in the history of contemporary Iran

The Effect of Dramatized Instruction on Speaking Ability of Imam Ali University EFL Learners

Teaching language as a second or foreign language, undoubtedly, is so demanding and seeking to find methods for facilitating this prominent practice whets the appetite of any practitioner who works in this field. Research shows that using drama in the classroom as a means of teaching helps students learn socially, academically, and developmentally. This study was an attempt to determine the effect of dramatized instruction on the speaking ability of EFL learners of Imam Ali University. Sixty EFL male students at the intermediate level participated in the study. Their age range was 19-22. Two instruments were utilized in this study; pretest, and posttest.  The data were analyzed through t-test. The data analysis indicated that the mean scores of the experimental group students (M = 72.80) were significantly different (3.292; df = 58) from the control group students (M = 65.39). In other words, the experimental group outperformed the control group in the posttest significantly. Moreover, the findings indicated that dramatized instruction does have a great effect on the speaking skills. This study supported the idea of effectiveness of dramatized instruction on developing speaking skill and the teachers can help the learners at lower levels promote their speaking skill through dramatized instruction in EFL classes.

Engineering professional identity practices : Investigating use of web search in collaborative decision making

Collaborative learning and problem solving are important aspects of engineering professional practice that need to be addressed in preparing competent engineering graduates and forming their professional identities. Taking the learning as becoming a professional perspective, we illustrate the diversity of engineering practices in a collaborative decision-making episode, where students’ participation in the activity is mediated by their use of web search. We present how our development of the implied identity approach could help to understand how technology mediates collaborative sense making in relation to professional practices and identities. We illustrate this by providing examples of ways in which students use web information to justify their decision making

Effects of Presence of Waves on Shallow Estuaries Hydrodynamics

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

On the morphodynamics of a wide class of large-scale meandering rivers: Insights gained by coupling LES with sediment-dynamics

In meandering rivers, interactions between flow, sediment transport, and bed topography affect diverse processes, including bedform development and channel migration. Predicting how these interactions affect the spatial patterns and magnitudes of bed deformation in meandering rivers is essential for various river engineering and geoscience problems. Computational fluid dynamics simulations can predict river morphodynamics at fine temporal and spatial scales but have traditionally been challenged by the large scale of natural rivers. We conducted coupled large-eddy simulation (LES) and bed morphodynamics simulations to create a unique database of hydro-morphodynamic datasets for 42 meandering rivers with a variety of planform shapes and large-scale geometrical features that mimic natural meanders. For each simulated river, the database includes (i) bed morphology, (ii) three-dimensional mean velocity field, and (iii) bed shear stress distribution under bankfull flow conditions. The calculated morphodynamics results at dynamic equilibrium revealed the formation of scour and deposition patterns near the outer and inner banks, respectively, while the location of point bars and scour regions around the apexes of the meander bends is found to vary as a function of the radius of curvature of the bends to the width ratio. A new mechanism is proposed that explains this seemingly paradoxical finding. The high-fidelity simulation results generated in this work provide researchers and scientists with a rich numerical database for morphodynamics and bed shear stress distributions in large-scale meandering rivers to enable systematic investigation of the underlying phenomena and support a range of river engineering applications

Large eddy simulation of turbulence and solute transport in a forested headwater stream

The large eddy simulation (LES) module of the Virtual StreamLab (VSL3D) model is applied to simulate the flow and transport of a conservative tracer in a headwater stream in Minnesota, located in the south Twin Cities metropolitan area. The detailed geometry of the stream reach, which is _135 m long, _2.5 m wide, and _0.15 m deep, was surveyed and used as input to the computational model. The detailed geometry and location of large woody debris and bed roughness elements up to _0.1 m in size were also surveyed and incorporated in the numerical simulation using the Curvilinear Immersed Boundary approach employed in VSL3D. The resolution of the simulation, which employs up to a total of 25 million grid nodes to discretize the flow domain, is sufficiently fine to directly account for the effect of large woody debris and small cobbles (on the streambed) on the flow patterns and transport processes of conservative solutes. Two tracer injection conditions, a pulse and a plateau release, and two cross sections of measured velocity were used to validate the LES results. The computed results are shown to be in good agreement with the field measurements and tracer concentration time series. To our knowledge, the present study is the first attempt to simulate via high-resolution LES solute transport in a natural stream environment taking into account a range of roughness length scales spanning an order of magnitude: From small cobbles on the streambed (_0.1 m in diameter) to large woody debris up to _3 m long. © 2016. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved