Navigating Cape Town: A Poetic Cartography

Cape Town has long been the site of conflicts over urban space. This study explored the potentials of a place-based poetry workshop as a tool for critically engaging with the urban environment. With the assistance of a well-established local poet, the researcher facilitated a poetry workshop that brought three young and emerging poets to contested public spaces including District Six, Company Gardens, and Church Square. After the workshop, poets submitted their writing to the researcher, who compiled and narrated a poem that showcased the voices of these poets while drawing attention to salient ideas evoked by the poets’ work. The researcher also wrote reflexively during the entire research process and included reflexive writing samples in the book of poetry that contained the longer narrative poem. The poetry written by participants and researchers alike, as well as the researcher’s observations from the workshop, indicate tremendous potential for place-based poetry workshop methodology. Participants engaged in a critical, self-reflexive process in which they learned about their own identities in relation to contested public space. Their poetry represented a form of democratized, interdisciplinary qualitative research, producing knowledge marked by critical engagement with memory and a focus on human and geographic bodies. The group writing process allowed participants to find commonalities that transcended their differences in identity and illuminated a common ownership of history and public space. This methodology shows promise as a tool for personal and social change in any urban locale, and should be adopted by researchers, activists, and artists alike

Characterization of optical interconnects

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-75).Interconnect has become a major issue in deep sub-micron technology. Even with copper and low-k dielectrics, parasitic effects of interconnects will eventually impede advances in integrated electronics. One technique that has the potential to provide a paradigm shift is optics. This project evaluates the feasibility of optical interconnects for distributing data and clock signals. In adopting this scheme, variation is introduced by the detector, the waveguides, and the optoelectronic circuit, which includes device, power supply and temperature variations. We attempt to characterize the effects of the aforementioned sources of variation by designing a baseline optoelectronic circuitry and fabricating a test chip which consists of the circuitry and detectors. Simulations are also performed to supplement the effort. The results are compared with the performance of traditional metal interconnects. The feasibility of optical interconnects is found to be sensitive to the optoelectronic circuitry used. Variation effects from the devices and operating conditions have profound impact on the performance of optical interconnects since they introduce substantial skew and delay in the otherwise ideal system.by Shiou Lin Sam.S.M

The effect of manuka honey on enterobacteria

Manuka honey (Leptospermum scoparium) produced in New Zealand has been shown to exhibit substantial antibacterial activity against a broad range of pathogens causing wound infection, and is being used in wound management with excellent results. This activity is due to both hydrogen peroxide and non-peroxide components. Manuka honey, however, may not be useful for treating bacterial gastroenteritis because the gastrointestinal environment may be unfavourable to the antibacterial action, and because a sufficiently high concentration for effectiveness may not be achieved. The research in this thesis is set out to evaluate in vitro the efficacy of manuka honey as an antibacterial agent against enterobacteria, taking into consideration some factors that may be involved in the gastrointestinal environment. Because some gastrointestinal bacteria (Campylobacter spp., Helicobacter pylori, Lactobacillus spp. and Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis) are not aerophilic, a cheap yet acceptable gas generating system alternative to the commercial gaspack counterpart was sought for use in this study. Various alternatives were compared for their performance. The spirits burn method was chosen for cultivating microaerobes and some anaerobes because of its comparable performance to that of commercial systems in terms of the growth of bacterial species, and because of the ease of use and the low cost. In the first part of this thesis, the susceptibility of gastrointestinal bacteria against manuka honey was investigated by determining the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) using a standardised manuka honey. Throughout the research, a manuka honey with median level non-peroxide antibacterial activity (equivalent to that of 16.5% phenol) was used, except that Campylobacter spp. were assayed with a more potent manuka honey equivalent to 29.4% phenol. The measured sensitivity of bacteria showed that manuka honey is significantly more effective than artificial honey (a mixture sugars as in honey), indicating that osmolarity is not the only factor that is responsible for the antibacterial activity of the honey. It was found that some species of bacteria e.g. Campylobacter spp. are exceptionally sensitive to manuka honey (both MIC and MBC are about 1% honey solution), whereas most other gastrointestinal pathogens have MIC and MBC values in the range 5-10% honey other than Enterobacter and Pseudomonas which were in the range 10-17%. Bifidobacterium, lactobacilli and enterococci appear to be more tolerant to the honey (MIC: 9.36-14.29%; MBC: greater than or equal to 13.3%) than most other species are. The difference in efficacy between the honey with and without hydrogen peroxide removed was also studied, and it was found that both hydrogen peroxide and the non-peroxide components contribute to the bacteriostatic and bactericidal activity of the honey. Because oxygen is required for hydrogen peroxide to be produced in honey, the role that oxygen plays in the antibacterial activity of manuka honey was investigated by analysing the susceptibility data obtained under both aerobic and anaerobic conditions using facultative anaerobes. Manuka honey appeared to be a more potent bacteriostatic agent against most species of bacteria in the absence of oxygen, whereas a relatively higher concentration of manuka honey solution was required to kill some bacteria under anaerobic conditions. This may partially be due to the atmosphere having also affected the metabolism, and hence the growth, of bacteria. Therefore, the activity of manuka honey would not necessary decline in the intestinal environmental atmosphere. To investigate how long it takes for manuka honey to kill bacteria, time-to-kill studies were conducted by monitoring the survival of bacteria in manuka honey. It is found that it takes a 20% solution of manuka honey with a medium-level activity more than 6 h to kill 90% of the cells of most of the species tested if the bacterial cells are kept in contact with the honey. This suggests that manuka honey is not rapidly bactericidal, and that it is unlikely to be possible to fully eradicate a bacterial gut infection by ingesting a small amount of manuka honey for a short period. It was found that probiotics can survive in the 20% honey solution for more than 12 h. The pharmacodynamics of the antibacterial activity of manuka honey were studied to investigate the survival and the re-growth of bacteria after they had been treated with honey. It was revealed that after being exposed to manuka honey for a short term (1 h), the growth of most enteropathogens is slowed for approximately 2-4 h before it gets back to a full rate. The assays of this postantibiotic effect also showed that the latency in the re-growth after being exposed to honey is not proportional to the MIC, MBC or time-to-kill profiles. Finally, the efficacy of manuka honey on bacteria was studied under conditions simulating the environment in the stomach and intestines. The tested bacteria were unable to grow under the acidic conditions as in the stomach, so whether or not the honey had any antibacterial activity under these conditions could not be determined. Under the conditions simulating the intestinal environment, the results demonstrated that the antibacterial activity of manuka honey is slightly decreased in the mildly alkaline conditions of the intestine (pH 7.5). In the presence of pancreatin and bile at the same pH, the activity of manuka honey was found to decrease by more than 50%. This suggests that pancreatin and bile in the gut may negatively affect the efficacy of the antibacterial activity of manuka honey in vivo. This indicates that although ingested manuka honey may still have some antibacterial action when in the gut, the antibacterial activity would be different from that which is usually examined with sensitivity studies in vitro. Gastroenteritis has generally been treated with oral rehydration solution (ORS) that consists of carbohydrates and electrolytes. Manuka honey could be used instead of the usual carbohydrate component of ORS and would provide additional bioactivities such as antibacterial activity and stimulation of growth of probiotics, which would make the honey rehydration solution more beneficial to patients with gastroenteritis than is the traditional ORS. After some initial investigation to find the most appropriate dosage and frequency of doses, a clinical trial may be warranted

Experimentation and Scientific Inference Building in the Study of Hominin Behavior through Stone Artifact Archaeology

Since the beginning of prehistoric archaeology, various methods and approaches have been developed to describe and explain stone artifact variability. However, noticeably less attention has been paid to the ontological nature of stone artifacts and the adequateness of the inferential reasoning for drawing archaeological interpretations from these artifacts. This dissertation takes a scientific perspective to rethink critically the ways that current lithic approaches generate knowledge about past hominin behavior from stone artifacts through experimentation (Chapter 2), and further, to explore the use of controlled experiments and uniformitarian principles for deriving inferences. The latter is presented as two case studies about Late Pleistocene Neanderthal behavior in southwestern France (Chapter 3 & 4). Archaeological reasoning is inescapably analogical, and archaeological knowledge is bound to be established on the basis on modern observations. However, simplistic treatments of archaeological analogs often result in inferences of questionable validity. In this dissertation, it is argued that greater attention is required to consider the implication of experimental design, variable control, and analogic reasoning in the construction of archaeological inference from stone artifacts. It is argued that the ability to move beyond the constraint of modern analogs in archaeological knowledge production lies in the use of uniformitarian principles that operate independently from the research questions archaeologists wish to evaluate. By examining the uniformitarian connection between platform attributes and flake morphology, the first case study explores how the production of unretouched flakes can be altered in ways that increase their relative utility, as reflected in the ratio of edge length to mass. Application of this relationship to Middle Paleolithic assemblages shows two modes of flake production pattern, possibly related to different ways Neanderthal groups managed the utility of transported tool-kits. The second case study applies a geometric model to assess the lithic cortex proportion in the Middle Paleolithic study assemblages. An excess or deficit of cortex relative to artifact volume provides an indication of possible artifact transport to or from the assemblage locality. Results show correlation between assemblage cortex proportions and paleoenvironmental conditions, suggesting possible shifts in Neanderthal artifact transport pattern and land use during the late Pleistocene

REALISTIC SIMULATED MODEL FOR TESTING AND DEVELOPING A VEHICLE

A computing system may create a realistic simulated model of a driving experience based on sensor data from a sensor system and interconnection mechanisms among automotive entities (e.g., a simulated entity, a real-world entity, etc.) for testing and developing a vehicle. The computing system may represent a platform for converging human-driven and autonomous vehicle simulations (e.g., interoperation between heterogeneous automotive entities) to simulate movement of vehicles in the realistic simulated model. For example, the computing system may allow the swapping of an emulated physical vehicle with a different simulated vehicle (e.g., a prototype vehicle) in the realistic simulated model while producing the same validation results. The computing system may include an information system that stores the repositories for the sensor data and/or metadata (e.g., based on the sensor data) and automotive entities. The information system may also provide a user interface (UI) with functionality for enabling a user (e.g., a vendor testing a prototype vehicle) to initialize and execute realistic simulated models. For example, the information system may enable the user to perform various functions with respect to the realistic simulated model, including, but not limited to, changing the simulation speed of (e.g., slowing time flow, increasing time flow, etc.), configuring, creating, editing, monitoring, analyzing, importing, exporting, starting, pausing, skipping, rewinding, and/or repeating the realistic simulated model

GENERATIVE SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE ORACLE

A system may assist the development-to-deployment workflow by presenting information about the architecture of a software system in real-time to facilitate understanding of the architecture. The system may analyze metadata collected from the software system to extract information about the code dependency and performance of at least a portion of the software system from end-to-end. In some examples, the system may predict the results of software testing based on the extracted information, which may help with identifying redundant testing that can be omitted from the development-to-deployment workflow

Impact of Specialization on Recruiter Productivity in the Staffing Industry

The United States Staffing industry has seen tremendous growth since the 1990s, eclipsing $150 billion in market share in 2019. While the magnitude of the staffing industry seems large, the amount of competition has increased exponentially. As a result, industry leaders have begun to look for new ways to adjust their recruiter development to increase market share. It has become imperative for staffing companies to adopt a dedicated specialized delivery model to differentiate themselves. This research seeks to understand the impact of specialization on recruiter performance. By analyzing recruiter-level panel data from an IT staffing company, we found that a specialization model had a positive yet statistically insignificant impact on recruiter productivity. With 2021 being the adoption year, the true effect may only be partially captured because the economy was not fully open due to COVID-19. Further, the real impact of a specialization model could take a few years to materialize. Therefore, we expect to observe a much more significant influence in subsequent years if the data becomes available