Engaging Processes of Sense-Making and Negotiation in Contemporary Timor-Leste

The articles in this special issue build on past ethnographic inquiries and focus on political and social change since Timor-Leste independence. One of the things we have found particularly exciting about researching post-independent Timor-Leste has been to carry out fieldwork in a context where not just researchers, but also our informants, are caught up in processes of sense-making of determining what kind of place Timor-Leste as an independent nation is becoming. The reality of ethnographic research in such a context is far different from, as Ferguson (1999, 208) has it, the archetypal image of the anthropologist dropped into the middle of a cultural homogenous village community where the researcher acquires from local informants a degree of cultural fluency. Rather, while we as researchers have tried to learn about Timor-Leste, our informants, as citizens of a new nation, have been absorbed in a parallel process of learning, deliberating and at times contesting what kind of place Timor-Leste as an independent nation is, and should become in the future (see Kammen 2009). In other words, making sense of independent Timor- Leste has, over the past decade, been a project that preoccupies Timorese citizens as much as the foreign researcher. This issue addresses some of these processes of sense-making and negotiation; and highlights the ambiguities and paradoxes, while stressing the heterogeneity and unpredictability of contemporary Timor-Leste

Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act (Qld) : disclosure, cooling-off and marketeers

The Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act 2000 commenced on 1 July 2001. Significant changes have now been made to the Act by the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Amendment Act 2001 (“the amending Act”). The amending Act contains two distinct parts. First, ss 11-19 of the amending Act provide for increased disclosure obligations on real estate agents, property developers and lawyers together with an extension of the 5 business day cooling-off period imposed by the original Act to all residential property (other than contracts formed on a sale by auction). These provisions are expected to commence on 29 October 2001. The remaining provisions of the amending Act provide for increased jurisdiction and powers to the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Tribunal (“the Tribunal”) enabling the Tribunal to deal with claims against marketeers. These provisions commenced on the date of assent (21 September 2001)

The Warburg Dance Movement Library-The WADAMO Library: A Validation Study

The Warburg Dance Movement Library is a validated set of 234 video clips of dance movements for empirical research in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience of action perception, affect perception and neuroaesthetics. The library contains two categories of video clips of dance movement sequences. Of each pair, one version of the movement sequence is emotionally expressive (Clip a), while the other version of the same sequence (Clip b) is not expressive but as technically correct as the expressive version (Clip a). We sought to complement previous dance video stimuli libraries. Facial information, colour and music have been removed, and each clip has been faded in and out. We equalised stimulus length (6 seconds, 8 counts in dance theory), the dancers’ clothing and video background and included both male and female dancers, and we controlled for technical correctness of movement execution. The Warburg Dance Movement Library contains both contemporary and ballet movements. Two online surveys (N = 160) confirmed the classification into the two categories of expressivity. Four additional online surveys (N = 80) provided beauty and liking ratings for each clip. A correlation matrix illustrates all variables of this norming study (technical correctness, expressivity, beauty, liking, luminance, motion energy)

Mortality in organic free-range chickens and molecular characterization of the involved pathogens

Longitudinal investigations on causes of mortality were carried out at one organic layer farm with four flocks of Lohman Brown and Lohman White chickens producing table eggs. All flocks were housed separately. One flock of each breed were followed from September 2001 to August 2002. Post mortem examinations were performed on a total of 16% of the dead chickens over the entire period. Of these 346 (96%) of the Lohmann Brown and 315 (91%) of the Lohmann White chickens were subjected for bacteriology. High mortality rates, 91% and 63% were observed in Lohman Brown and Lohman White chickens, respectively and were found to be due to infections with mainly Pasteurella multocida, Erysipelothix rhusiopathia and Escherichia coli. E. rhusiopathia, P. multocida and E. coli were isolated from 46%, 19% and 17%, respectively of the Lohmann Brown chickens. In the flock of Lohmann White chickens P. multocida and E. coli were isolated from 46% and 15%, respectively while E. rhusiopathia was not recorded. P. multocida and E. rhusiopathia isolates were characterized by Restriction Endonuclease Analysis (REA), Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP) and Pulse Field Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE). It was demonstrated that all the P. multocida isolates were genotypic identical over time. The E. rhusiopathia isolates obtained were also identical. It was concluded that the outbreaks caused by P. multocida and E. rhusiopathia were clonal and these two pathogens may cause severe losses in free-range chickens

Isotropic magnetometry with simultaneous excitation of orientation and alignment CPT resonances

Atomic magnetometers have very high absolute precision and sensitivity to magnetic fields but suffer from a fundamental problem: the vectorial or tensorial interaction of light with atoms leads to "dead zones", certain orientations of magnetic field where the magnetometer loses its sensitivity. We demonstrate a simple polarization modulation scheme that simultaneously creates coherent population trapping (CPT) in orientation and alignment, thereby eliminating dead zones. Using $^{87}$Rb in a 10 Torr buffer gas cell we measure narrow, high-contrast CPT transparency peaks in all orientations and also show absence of systematic effects associated with non-linear Zeeman splitting.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

The Devil is in the Detail: Hints for Practical Optimisation

Finding the minimum of an objective function, such as a least squares or negative log-likelihood function, with respect to the unknown model parameters is a problem often encountered in econometrics. Consequently, students of econometrics and applied econometricians are usually well-grounded in the broad differences between the numerical procedures employed to solve these problems. Often, however, relatively little time is given to understanding the practical subtleties of implementing these schemes when faced with illbehaved problems. This paper addresses some of the details involved in practical optimisation, such as dealing with constraints on the parameters, specifying starting values, termination criteria and analytical gradients, and illustrates some of the general ideas with several instructive examples.gradient algorithms, unconstrained optimisation, generalised method of moments.

Ultraviolet downconverting phosphor for use with silicon CCD imagers

The properties and application of a UV downconverting phosphor (coronene) to silicon charge coupled devices are discussed. Measurements of the absorption spectrum have been extended to below 1000 A, and preliminary results indicate the existence of useful response to at least 584 A. The average conversion efficiency of coronene was measured to be ~20% at 2537 A. Imagery at 3650 A using a backside illuminated 800 X 800 CCD coated with coronene is presented

Classification of String-like Solutions in Dilaton Gravity

The static string-like solutions of the Abelian Higgs model coupled to dilaton gravity are analyzed and compared to the non-dilatonic case. Except for a special coupling between the Higgs Lagrangian and the dilaton, the solutions are flux tubes that generate a non-asymptotically flat geometry. Any point in parameter space corresponds to two branches of solutions with two different asymptotic behaviors. Unlike the non-dilatonic case, where one branch is always asymptotically conic, in the present case the asymptotic behavior changes continuously along each branch.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures. To be published in Phys. Rev.

Discrete time-series models when counts are unobservable

Count data in economics have traditionally been modeled by means of integer-valued autoregressive models. Consequently, the estimation of the parameters of these models and their asymptotic properties have been well documented in the literature. The models comprise a description of the survival of counts generally in terms of a binomial thinning process and an independent arrivals process usually specified in terms of a Poisson distribution. This paper extends the existing class of models to encompass situations in which counts are latent and all that is observed is the presence or absence of counts. This is a potentially important modification as many interesting economic phenomena may have a natural interpretation as a series of 'events' that are driven by an underlying count process which is unobserved. Arrivals of the latent counts are modeled either in terms of the Poisson distribution, where multiple counts may arrive in the sampling interval, or in terms of the Bernoulli distribution, where only one new arrival is allowed in the same sampling interval. The models with latent counts are then applied in two practical illustrations, namely, modeling volatility in financial markets as a function of unobservable 'news' and abnormal price spikes in electricity markets being driven by latent 'stress'.Integer-valued autoregression, Poisson distribution, Bernoulli distribution, latent factors, maximum likelihood estimation

GW correlation effects on plutonium quasiparticle energies: changes in crystal-field splitting

We present results for the electronic structure of plutonium by using a recently developed quasiparticle self-consistent $GW$ method (\qsgw). We consider a paramagnetic solution without spin-orbit interaction as a function of volume for the face-centered cubic (fcc) unit cell. We span unit-cell volumes ranging from 10% greater than the equilibrium volume of the $\delta$ phase to 90 % of the equivalent for the $\alpha$ phase of Pu. The self-consistent $GW$ quasiparticle energies are compared to those obtained within the Local Density Approximation (LDA). The goal of the calculations is to understand systematic trends in the effects of electronic correlations on the quasiparticle energy bands of Pu as a function of the localization of the $f$ orbitals. We show that correlation effects narrow the $f$ bands in two significantly different ways. Besides the expected narrowing of individual $f$ bands (flatter dispersion), we find that an even more significant effect on the $f$ bands is a decrease in the crystal-field splitting of the different bands.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 3 table