The Force Awakens: the Individualistic and Contemporary Heroine

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is not the hero’s journey as George Lucas previously conceptualized it. Instead, the story line of The Force Awakens leads me to believe that it creates a new iteration of the hero myth. It follows the contemporary heroine’s journey while conforming to the essential construct of the hero monomyth. First, the contemporary heroine’s journey focuses primarily on the greater good and secondarily on her own personal journey, which is the converse of the traditional hero’s journey. Second, the contemporary heroine’s self is awakened and called to adventure in a different way than the traditional hero. Third, the traditional hero receives guidance on his journey, while the contemporary heroine pushes ahead alone, striving to save her society from despair

Performance Investigation of MIMO Based CO-OFDM FSO Communication Link for BPSK, QPSK and 16-QAM under the Influence of Reed Solomon Codes

The MIMO based CO-OFDM FSO communication system is emerging as a promising approach to meet the future bandwidth requirements for seamless communication. The atmosphere being the propagation medium is a major hindrance in wide-scale acceptability of FSO technology. For seamless and error-free transmission and reception of data, a novel concept of MIMO integrated with RS code is proposed in this paper. The system performance of an RS 64 (RS (255,127)) coded MIMO-based CO-OFDM FSO communication link was investigated using BPSK, QPSK and 16-QAM under the combined effects of geometric losses, path losses and atmospheric attenuations at a hitherto un-investigated data rate of 40 Gbps and a link distance of 5 km. The modified gamma-gamma distribution was used for modeling a moderately turbulent channel. With link length varying over a range of 1 to 5 km, error correction was maximum in 16-QAM as compared to BPSK and QPSK, with 150 to 167 corrected errors. In terms of PAPR, PSK was more apt than QAM, but with a compromise in BER. The geometric losses were reduced with link length due to an increase in error correction capability for all three modulation cases, with the least losses occurring in 16-QAM. At the target bit error rate (BER), the signal to noise ratio (SNR) required for BPSK and QPSK was higher by 3.98 dB and 6.14 dB compared to 16-QAM

The power of positive campaign in the Delhi elections

The Aam Aadmi Party’s success in the Delhi elections last week has been attributed to a number of factors. Here, Payal Kamat explores their positive campaign tactics, which contrasted with the negative messaging deployed by the BJP

Looking beyond elections: political communications for a thriving democracy

Last year’s Lok Sabha elections saw the highest ever turnout of 66.38%, which served as a reminder of how vibrant India’s democracy is today. However, there remains a communications vacuum between elections writes Payal Kamat. She argues citizen participation in urban areas in particular needs to be made more systematic through an effective political communications model

Youth Entrepreneurship – The role of Entrepreneurship in Opportunity Development in UK job market

“We must develop strategies that give young people everywhere a real chance to find decent and productive work which will allow them to become independent and responsible young citizens” -Kofi Annan, UN Secretary- General, International Youth Dar (2003) (Ref: Arzeni. S and Mitra. J, 2008) UK has high rate of unemployment among young people. Entrepreneurship has been increasingly recognised as a source of creating jobs and empowerment, but not much attempts have been made to look it from the viewpoint of creating livelihood through entrepreneurial activities. It can also be looked upon as a tool for employing youth during recession and under severe unemployment in UK. Young people can forge a livelihood through creating an enterprise which further leads to many economic and social opportunities. Joblessness acts a push factor which propels youth to become ‘necessity entrepreneurs’ (GEM 2005). Entrepreneurship is considered as an innovative methodology to integrate youth into today’s labour market. It is accepted as an important means, an additional strategy to create jobs, improve livelihood and make young people economically independent (Schoof. U, 2006). The main aim of the report is thus to stimulate the benefits of youth entrepreneurship as a career, further on understanding the obstacles, role of mentoring in entrepreneurship and the policies and programmes to support it in UK. The report, therefore, draws the data from a variety of sources upon which the analysis is based

Computerized Evaluatution of Microsurgery Skills Training

The style of imparting medical training has evolved, over the years. The traditional methods of teaching and practicing basic surgical skills under apprenticeship model, no longer occupy the first place in modern technically demanding advanced surgical disciplines like neurosurgery. Furthermore, the legal and ethical concerns for patient safety as well as cost-effectiveness have forced neurosurgeons to master the necessary microsurgical techniques to accomplish desired results. This has lead to increased emphasis on assessment of clinical and surgical techniques of the neurosurgeons. However, the subjective assessment of microsurgical techniques like micro-suturing under the apprenticeship model cannot be completely unbiased. A few initiatives using computer-based techniques, have been made to introduce objective evaluation of surgical skills. This thesis presents a novel approach involving computerized evaluation of different components of micro-suturing techniques, to eliminate the bias of subjective assessment. The work involved acquisition of cine clips of micro-suturing activity on synthetic material. Image processing and computer vision based techniques were then applied to these videos to assess different characteristics of micro-suturing viz. speed, dexterity and effectualness. In parallel subjective grading on these was done by a senior neurosurgeon. Further correlation and comparative study of both the assessments was done to analyze the efficacy of objective and subjective evaluation

A place at the table 安樂茶飯

Socially conscious chefs and restaurateurs are transforming the restaurant model to give back to society or shine a spotlight on important issues while delivering delicious dishes. 關心社會的廚師和餐廳老闆正在改變餐廳的經營模式，期望在為大眾提供美味佳餚之餘，同時能夠回饋社會，或引起大眾對重要社會議題的關注