7,285 research outputs found
Social justice required : Youth at the margins, churches and social cohesion in South Africa
Abstract: The divides within South African society remain stark, also for youth born after apartheid officially ended in 1994. At the same time, adherence to a faith tradition is statistically high among South Africans, and faith-based organisations (FBOs), an umbrella term including but not limited to churches, also have high levels of youth participation. Scholars have identified positive connotations between FBOs, civil society, social welfare and social care. Within this broader context, and based on qualitative interviews and focus group data, this article explores how young people in two South African communities experience isolation and separation in their everyday life and how they perceive the role of churches, in particular, in strengthening or weakening this sense of marginalisation. On a theoretical level, the article reflects on how two dimensions of social cohesion relate to one another in young peopleâs everyday life. The first dimension comprises of aspects such as participation, diversity and trust, whereas the second relates to justice and equity. Special attention is given to the relationship between the two dimensions of social cohesion in the context of local churches. We argue that the experiences and perceptions of the interviewed young people support the view promoted by some scholars that, for social cohesion to actualise in society, issues related to social justice must be addressed. Furthermore, churches could play a more central role in doing so â at least more so than what appears to currently be the case
Solving the stationary Liouville equation via a boundary element method
Intensity distributions of linear wave fields are, in the high frequency
limit, often approximated in terms of flow or transport equations in phase
space. Common techniques for solving the flow equations for both time dependent
and stationary problems are ray tracing or level set methods. In the context of
predicting the vibro-acoustic response of complex engineering structures,
reduced ray tracing methods such as Statistical Energy Analysis or variants
thereof have found widespread applications. Starting directly from the
stationary Liouville equation, we develop a boundary element method for solving
the transport equations for complex multi-component structures. The method,
which is an improved version of the Dynamical Energy Analysis technique
introduced recently by the authors, interpolates between standard statistical
energy analysis and full ray tracing, containing both of these methods as
limiting cases. We demonstrate that the method can be used to efficiently deal
with complex large scale problems giving good approximations of the energy
distribution when compared to exact solutions of the underlying wave equation
Analysis of refractive endpoint differences between directional and non-directional projection screens
Analysis of refractive endpoint differences between directional and non-directional projection screen
Defining student learning experience through blended learning
This paper aims to explore the benefits of Blended Learning towards students' learning experiences at an offshore campus of an Australian university located in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. At the university campus, the Blended Learning practice in use is the displacement of content. Content displacement refers to a portion of the learning content and activities for a course being delivered online via the Learning Management System. Learning not only happens in face-to-face sessions at a given time but is extended to online spaces as well, happening anywhere at any time at students' preference. The focus of this research is its usefulness and effectiveness in promoting interactions between students and their peers, their teachers, and course materials. An online survey, which was designed based on a set of validated questions, was used to collect data from sixty-six students enrolled in eight Blended Learning courses. The analysis of the survey results provides empirical evidence to the claim that students' perception of their learning experiences at the university was beneficially impacted as a result of the Blended Learning environment in each of their classes. Specifically, factor analysis using oblique rotation method identifies a clear factor structure across survey questions, representing four dimensions of benefits: Engagement, Flexibility of learning, Online learning experience, and Self-confidence. In addition, significant differences between the clusters on these factors indicate that students vary in their responses towards the benefits of Blended Learning and their experience with a Blended Learning approach
Scaling Analysis of Chiral Phase Transition for Two Flavors of Kogut-Susskind Quarks
Report is made of a systematic scaling study of the finite-temperature chiral
phase transition of two-flavor QCD with the Kogut-Susskind quark action based
on simulations on (=8, 12 and 16) lattices at the quark mass of
and 0.01. Our finite-size data show that a phase
transition is absent for , and quite likely also at .
The scaling behavior of susceptibilities as a function of is consistent
with a second-order transition at . However, the exponents deviate from
the O(2) or O(4) values theoretically expected.Comment: Talk presented by M. Okawa at the International Workshop on ``
LATTICE QCD ON PARALLEL COMPUTERS", 10-15 March 1997, Center for
Computational Physics, University of Tsukuba. 7 LaTeX pages plus 5 postscript
figures, uses espcrc2.st
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Genome-Scale Promoter Engineering by Coselection MAGE
Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) employs short oligonucleotides to scarlessly modify genomes. However, insertions of >10 bases are still inefficient, but can be improved substantially by selection of highly modified chromosomes. Here, we describe Co-Selection MAGE (CoS-MAGE) to optimize biosynthesis of aromatic amino acid derivatives by combinatorially inserting multiple T7 promoters simultaneously into 12 genomic operons. Promoter libraries can be quickly generated to study gain-of-function epistatic interactions in gene networks
HI 21cm imaging of a nearby Damped Lyman-alpha system
We present Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) HI 21cm emission images of
the z=0.009 damped Lyman-alpha (DLA) absorber towards the QSO HS 1543+5921. The
DLA has been earlier identified as a low surface brightness galaxy SBS 1543+593
at an impact parameter of ~ 400 pc to the QSO line of sight. The extremely low
redshift of the absorber allows us to make spatially resolved images of the
21cm emission; besides the HI mass, this also enables us to determine the
velocity field of the galaxy and, hence, to estimate its dynamical mass.
We obtain a total HI mass of ~ 1.4x10^9 Msun, considerably smaller than the
value of M*(HI) determined from blind 21cm emission surveys. This continues the
trend of low HI mass in all low redshift DLAs for which HI emission
observations have been attempted. We also find that the QSO lies behind a
region of low local HI column density in the foreground galaxy. This is
interesting in view of suggestions that DLA samples are biased against high HI
column density systems. The dynamical mass of the galaxy is found to be Mdyn ~
5x10^9 Msun.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&
TRECVID 2004 experiments in Dublin City University
In this paper, we describe our experiments for TRECVID 2004 for the Search task. In the interactive search task, we developed two versions of a video search/browse system based on the FĂschlĂĄr Digital Video System: one with text- and image-based searching (System A); the other with only image (System B). These two systems produced eight interactive runs. In addition we submitted ten fully automatic supplemental runs and two manual runs.
A.1, Submitted Runs:
⢠DCUTREC13a_{1,3,5,7} for System A, four interactive runs based on text and image evidence.
⢠DCUTREC13b_{2,4,6,8} for System B, also four interactive runs based on image evidence alone.
⢠DCUTV2004_9, a manual run based on filtering faces from an underlying text search engine for certain queries.
⢠DCUTV2004_10, a manual run based on manually generated queries processed automatically.
⢠DCU_AUTOLM{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}, seven fully automatic runs based on language models operating over ASR text transcripts and visual features.
⢠DCUauto_{01,02,03}, three fully automatic runs based on exploring the benefits of multiple sources of text evidence and automatic query expansion.
A.2, In the interactive experiment it was confirmed that text and image based retrieval outperforms an image-only system. In the fully automatic runs, DCUauto_{01,02,03}, it was found that integrating ASR, CC and OCR text into the text ranking outperforms using ASR text alone. Furthermore, applying automatic query expansion to the initial results of ASR, CC, OCR text further increases performance (MAP), though not at high rank positions. For the language model-based fully automatic runs, DCU_AUTOLM{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}, we found that interpolated language models perform marginally better than other tested language models and that combining image and textual (ASR) evidence was found to marginally increase performance (MAP) over textual models alone. For our two manual runs we found that employing a face filter disimproved MAP when compared to employing textual evidence alone and that manually generated textual queries improved MAP over fully automatic runs, though the improvement was marginal.
A.3, Our conclusions from our fully automatic text based runs suggest that integrating ASR, CC and OCR text into the retrieval mechanism boost retrieval performance over ASR alone. In addition, a text-only Language Modelling approach such as DCU_AUTOLM1 will outperform our best conventional text search system. From our interactive runs we conclude that textual evidence is an important lever for locating relevant content quickly, but that image evidence, if used by experienced users can aid retrieval performance.
A.4, We learned that incorporating multiple text sources improves over ASR alone and that an LM approach which integrates shot text, neighbouring shots and entire video contents provides even better retrieval performance. These findings will influence how we integrate textual evidence into future Video IR systems. It was also found that a system based on image evidence alone can perform reasonably and given good query images can aid retrieval performance
Detection of Ly\beta auto-correlations and Ly\alpha-Ly\beta cross-correlations in BOSS Data Release 9
The Lyman- forest refers to a region in the spectra of distant quasars
that lies between the rest-frame Lyman- and Lyman- emissions.
The forest in this region is dominated by a combination of absorption due to
resonant Ly and Ly scattering. When considering the 1D Ly
forest in addition to the 1D Ly forest, the full statistical
description of the data requires four 1D power spectra: Ly and
Ly auto-power spectra and the Ly-Ly real and imaginary
cross-power spectra. We describe how these can be measured using an optimal
quadratic estimator that naturally disentangles Ly and Ly
contributions. Using a sample of approximately 60,000 quasar sight-lines from
the BOSS Data Release 9, we make the measurement of the one-dimensional power
spectrum of fluctuations due to the Ly resonant scattering. While we
have not corrected our measurements for resolution damping of the power and
other systematic effects carefully enough to use them for cosmological
constraints, we can robustly conclude the following: i) Ly power
spectrum and Ly-Ly cross spectra are detected with high
statistical significance; ii) the cross-correlation coefficient is
on large scales; iii) the Ly measurements are contaminated by the
associated OVI absorption, which is analogous to the SiIII contamination of the
Ly forest. Measurements of the Ly forest will allow extension of
the usable path-length for the Ly measurements while allowing a better
understanding of the physics of intergalactic medium and thus more robust
cosmological constraints.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures; matches version accepted by JCA
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