Extending conceptualisations of the diversity and value of extracurricular activities: a cultural capital approach to graduate outcomes

This report presents the findings from the research project Extending conceptualisations of the diversity and value of extra curricular activities: a cultural capital approach to graduate outcomes. Very little research has directly addressed the question of what constitutes extra-curricular activities (ECA), the extent to which students engage in ECA, and how students experience and conceptualise benefits from their engagement. Nor is there research that looks at how staff understand ECA. This research sought to address these questions from a cultural capital approach. Traditionally conceived ECA include campus-based cultural and sporting activities and volunteering. An awareness is required of the fact that many students work for economic reasons, continue their faith and caring activities, and continue to live at home. The researchers were interested in the possible differential recognition and valuing of activities undertaken by different groups of students. This research explores issues of inter-generational capital that might shape both the capacities to participate and how students understood the benefits

Assessing the contribution of shallow and deep knowledge sources for word sense disambiguation

Corpus-based techniques have proved to be very beneficial in the development of efficient and accurate approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD) despite the fact that they generally represent relatively shallow knowledge. It has always been thought, however, that WSD could also benefit from deeper knowledge sources. We describe a novel approach to WSD using inductive logic programming to learn theories from first-order logic representations that allows corpus-based evidence to be combined with any kind of background knowledge. This approach has been shown to be effective over several disambiguation tasks using a combination of deep and shallow knowledge sources. Is it important to understand the contribution of the various knowledge sources used in such a system. This paper investigates the contribution of nine knowledge sources to the performance of the disambiguation models produced for the SemEval-2007 English lexical sample task. The outcome of this analysis will assist future work on WSD in concentrating on the most useful knowledge sources

A self-managing infrastructure for ad-hoc situation determination

Automatically determining the situation of an ad-hoc group of people and devices within a smart environment is a significant challenge in pervasive computing systems. Current approaches often rely on an environment expert to correlate the situations that occur with the available sensor data, while other machine learning based approaches require long training periods before the system can be used. This paper presents a novel approach to situation determination that attempts to overcome these issues by providing a reusable library of general situation specifications that can be easily extended to create new specific situations, and immediately deployed without the need of an environment expert. The architecture of an accompanying situation determination infrastructure is provided, which autonomously optimises and repairs itself in reaction to changes or failures in the environment

An economics systems analysis of land mobile radio telephone services

The economic interaction of the terrestrial and satellite systems is considered. Parametric equations are formulated to allow examination of necessary user thresholds and growth rates as a function of system costs. Conversely, first order allowable systems costs are found as a function of user thresholds and growth rates. Transitions between satellite and terrestrial service systems are examined. User growth rate density (user/year/sq km) is shown to be a key parameter in the analysis of systems compatibility. The concept of system design matching the price/demand curves is introduced and examples are given. The role of satellite systems is critically examined and the economic conditions necessary for the introduction of satellite service are identified

Melting and differentiation in Venus with a cold start: A mechanism of the thin crust formation

Recent works argue that the venusian crust is thin: less than 10-30 km. However, any convective model of Venus unavoidably predicts melting and a fast growth of the basaltic crust, up to its maximum thickness of about 70 km limited, by the gabbro-eclogite phase transition. The crust is highly buoyant due to both its composition and temperature and it is problematic to find a mechanism providing its effective recycling and thinning in the absence of plate tectonics. There are different ways to solve this contradiction. This study suggests that a thin crust can be produced during the entire evolution of Venus if Venus avoided giant impacts

Crucial Dependence of ``Precarious'' and ``Autonomous'' phi^4s Upon the Normal-ordering Mass

Using the Gaussian wave-functional approach with the normal-ordering renormalization prescription, we show that for the (3+1)-dimensional massive lambda phi^4 theory, ``precarious'' and ``autonomous'' phi^4s can exist if and only if the normal-ordering mass is equal to the classical masses at the symmetrc and asymmetric vacua, respectively.Comment: 6 pages, no figures, Revtex file, accepted for publication in Mod. Phys. Lett.

Telecommunication service markets through the year 2000 in relation to millimeter wave satellite systems

NASA is currently conducting a series of millimeter wave satellite system market studies to develop 30/20 GHz satellite system concepts that have commercial potential. Four contractual efforts were undertaken: two parallel and independent system studies and two parallel and independent market studies. The marketing efforts are focused on forecasting the total domestic demand for long haul telecommunications services for the 1980-2000 period. Work completed to date and reported in this paper include projections of: geographical distribution of traffic; traffic volume as a function of urban area size; and user identification and forecasted demand

From Loop Groups to 2-Groups

We describe an interesting relation between Lie 2-algebras, the Kac-Moody central extensions of loop groups, and the group String(n). A Lie 2-algebra is a categorified version of a Lie algebra where the Jacobi identity holds up to a natural isomorphism called the "Jacobiator". Similarly, a Lie 2-group is a categorified version of a Lie group. If G is a simply-connected compact simple Lie group, there is a 1-parameter family of Lie 2-algebras g_k each having Lie(G) as its Lie algebra of objects, but with a Jacobiator built from the canonical 3-form on G. There appears to be no Lie 2-group having g_k as its Lie 2-algebra, except when k = 0. Here, however, we construct for integral k an infinite-dimensional Lie 2-group whose Lie 2-algebra is equivalent to g_k. The objects of this 2-group are based paths in G, while the automorphisms of any object form the level-k Kac-Moody central extension of the loop group of G. This 2-group is closely related to the kth power of the canonical gerbe over G. Its nerve gives a topological group that is an extension of G by K(Z,2). When k = +-1, this topological group can also be obtained by killing the third homotopy group of G. Thus, when G = Spin(n), it is none other than String(n).Comment: 40 page