‘Becoming somebody in the future’: Exploring undergraduate Students’ Self-articulated Goals to develop a measure of Students’ Quality of Life in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Quality of life (QoL) measures are useful in international development as they can be used to generate locally grounded and individualised understandings of people’s lives in contexts of social, economic and political uncertainty. Although the last decade has witnessed growth in research on urban youth goals and experiences in sub-Saharan Africa, studies which measure their QoL are surprisingly few despite suggestions from research in psychology that goal achievement contributes to QoL. This thesis develops a contextually grounded measure of urban undergraduate students’ QoL, defined as the gap between important goals and satisfaction with achievement, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. It draws on goals, satisfaction and weighted QoL (based on subtracting goal satisfaction from importance), which are operationalised using a goals-satisfaction framework. The study uses a mixed methods design with data collected through interviews, focus group discussions and a students’ QoL scale (SQOLS) instrument which taps into goals and satisfaction. The data was analysed using a partial grounded theory approach, and descriptive and inferential statistics. The goals identified through the qualitative analysis were developed into four categories: becoming somebody, making it in life, having valuable relationships and having a voice. When operationalised as items, the goals were endorsed as important, while satisfaction with their achievement was lower. Principal components analysis found a three factor structure for goals. This factor structure had good fit in confirmatory factor analysis using both goals and QoL items. The QoL measure correlated negatively with a measure of life satisfaction, indicating that it captures the extent to which students’ lives fall short of their desired states. The findings of the study suggest that items generated through qualitative work with educated urban youth can be used to develop a valid measure of their QoL while at the same time providing contextually grounded understandings of their lives

Discrimination of fish oil and mineral oil slicks on sea water

Fish oil and mineral oil slicks on sea water can be discriminated by their different spreading characteristics and by their reflectivities and color variations over a range of wavelengths. Reflectivities of oil and oil films are determined using a duel beam reflectance apparatus

A posteriori error estimation for stochastic static problems

To solve stochastic static field problems, a discretization by the Finite Element Method can be used. A system of equations is obtained with the unknowns (scalar potential at nodes for example) being random variables. To solve this stochastic system, the random variables can be approximated in a finite dimension functional space - a truncated polynomial chaos expansion. The error between the exact solution and the approximated one depends not only on the spatial mesh but also on the discretization along the stochastic dimension. In this paper, we propose an a posteriori estimation of the error due to the discretization along the stochastic dimension.This work is supported by the program MEDEE funded by the Nord Pas de Calais council and the European Community

Mac Lane method in the investigation of magnetic translation groups

Central extensions of the three-dimensional translation group T=Z^3 by the unitary group U(1) (a group of factors) are considered within the frame of the Mac~Lane method. All nonzero vectors t in T are considered to be generators of T. This choice leads to very illustrative relations between the Mac~Lane method and Zak's approach to magnetic translation groups. It is shown that factor systems introduced by Zak and Brown can be realized only for the unitary group U(1) and for some of its finite subgroups.Comment: 8 pages, 1 fig. in text, romp_sty.tex attached at the beginning Presented at 28 Symp. on Math. Phys., Torun 2-6 Dec 199

New package for Belleville spring permits rate change, easy disassembly

A spring package, with grooves to hold the spring washers at the inner and outer edges, reduces hysteresis to a minimum. Three-segment retainers permit easy disassembly so that the spring rate can be changed

Is the Plasma Within Bubbles and Superbubbles Hot or Cold?

I review what is known about the temperature of the plasma within stellar wind bubbles and superbubbles. Classical theory suggests that it should be hot, with characteristic temperatures of order a million degrees. This temperature should be set by the balance between heating by the internal termination shocks of the central stellar winds and supernovae, which expand at thousands of km/s, and cooling by conductive evaporation of cold gas off the shell walls. However, if the hot interior gas becomes dense enough due to evaporation or ablation off of interior clouds, it will cool in less than a dynamical time, leading to a cold interior. The observational evidence appears mixed. On the one hand, X-ray emission has been observed from both stellar wind bubbles and superbubbles. On the other hand, no stellar wind bubble or superbubble has yet been observed emitting at the rate predicted by the classical theory: they are either too faint or too bright, by up to an order of magnitude. Alternate explanations have been proposed for the observed emission, including off-center supernova remnants hitting the shell walls of superbubbles, and residual emission from highly-ionized gas out of coronal equilibrium. Furthermore, the structures of post-main sequence stellar wind bubbles, expanding into what are presumably old stellar wind bubbles, appear in at least some cases to show that the bubble interior is cold, not hot. (The classical example of this is NGC 6888.) What is the actual state of bubble and superbubble interiors?Comment: 7 pages, 1 figures, to be published in Astrophysical Plasmas: Codes, Models and Observations, RMxAA Conf Ser, 2000. Requires rmaa.cl