2,593 research outputs found

    'I'm so much more myself now, coming back to work' - Working class mothers, paid work and childcare

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    This paper explores the ways in which working class mothers negotiate mothering and paid work. Drawing on interviews with 70 families with pre-school children, we examine how caring and working responsibilities are conceptualised and presented in mothers' narratives. Mothers showed a high degree of commitment to paid work and, in contrast to findings from an earlier study with middle class and professional mothers, did not feel that keeping their children at home with them was always the best option for the children. We suggest that working class mothers in the labour market remain at risk of being defined as inadequate mothers because of a middle class emphasis on intense maternal engagement with the child as a key aspect of 'good' mothering

    The social geography of childcare: 'making up' the middle class child

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    Childcare is a condensate of disparate social forces and social processes. It is gendered and classed. It is subject to an excess of policy and political discourse. It is increasingly a focus for commercial exploitation. This is a paper reporting on work in progress in an ESRC funded research project (R000239232) on the choice and provision of pre-school childcare by middle class (service class) families in two contrasting London locations. Drawing on recent work in class analysis the paper examines the relationships between childcare choice, middle class fractions and locality. It suggests that on the evidence of the findings to date, there is some evidence of systematic differences between fractions in terms of values, perspectives and preferences for childcare, but a more powerful case for intra-class similarities, particularly when it comes to putting preferences into practice in the 'making up of a middle class child' through care and education

    Perceived impacts and residents\u27 support for tourism development in Port Dickson, Malaysia

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    This study evaluates the image that residents perceive of their location and its influences on their understanding of tourism impacts, and their support for the development of the tourism. The data was collected from 422 residents of Port Dickson in Malaysia and were examined by applying PLS-SEM. Results displayed a positive image of place will lead to positive perceptions of tourism development impacts leadings to residents\u27 support for tourism development. Practical implications of these outcomes are also discussed relative to tourism planning and development

    Middle class fractions, childcare and the 'relational' and 'normative' aspects of class practices

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    The emphasis in class research remains on the structural aspects of class, class processes are neglected. This paper focuses upon some relational and normative aspects of class through an examination of social divisions produced and constructed within middle class families' choices of childcare. Working with data from two contrasting settings in London (Battersea and Stoke Newington) three issues are addressed in the paper; the extent to which childcare arrangements both substantively and structurally position children differently within long term educational careers; the ways in which the use of choice in a market system of child care and education, works to produce patterns of social closure that quietly discriminate via the collectivist criterion of class and racial membership; and the ways in which child care choices also point-up and perpetuate subtle distinctions and tensions of values and lifestyle within the middle class, between class factions. Concepts drawn from the work of Bourdieu are deployed throughout

    Dealiasing techniques for high-order spectral element methods on regular and irregular grids

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    This is the final version of the article. Available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.High-order methods are becoming increasingly attractive in both academia and industry, especially in the context of computational fluid dynamics. However, before they can be more widely adopted, issues such as lack of robustness in terms of numerical stability need to be addressed, particularly when treating industrial-type problems where challenging geometries and a wide range of physical scales, typically due to high Reynolds numbers, need to be taken into account. One source of instability is aliasing effects which arise from the nonlinearity of the underlying problem. In this work we detail two dealiasing strategies based on the concept of consistent integration. The first uses a localised approach, which is useful when the nonlinearities only arise in parts of the problem. The second is based on the more traditional approach of using a higher quadrature. The main goal of both dealiasing techniques is to improve the robustness of high order spectral element methods, thereby reducing aliasing-driven instabilities. We demonstrate how these two strategies can be effectively applied to both continuous and discontinuous discretisations, where, in the latter, both volumetric and interface approximations must be considered. We show the key features of each dealiasing technique applied to the scalar conservation law with numerical examples and we highlight the main differences in terms of implementation between continuous and discontinuous spatial discretisations.This work was supported by the Laminar Flow Control Centre funded by Airbus/EADS and EPSRC under grant EP/I037946. We thank Dr. Colin Cotter for helpful discussions and Jean-Eloi Lombard for his assistance in the generation of results and figures for the NACA 0012 simulation. PV acknowledges the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for their support via an Early Career Fellowship (EP/K027379/1). SJS additionally acknowledges Royal Academy of Engineering support under their research chair scheme. Data supporting this publication can be obtained on request from [email protected]

    Construction of a Repeatable Framework for Prostate Cancer Lesion Binary Semantic Segmentation using Convolutional Neural Networks

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    Prostate cancer is the 3rd most diagnosed cancer overall. Current screening methods such as the prostate-specific antigen test could result in overdiagonosis and overtreatment while other methods such as a transrectal ultrasonography are invasive. Recent medical advancements have allowed the use of multiparametric MRI — a noninvasive and reliable screening process for prostate cancer. However, assessment would still vary from different professionals introducing subjectivity. While con-volutional neural network has been used in multiple studies to ob-jectively segment prostate lesions, due to the sensitivity of datasets and varying ground-truth established used in these studies, it is not possible to reproduce and validate the results. In this study, we executed a repeatable framework for segmenting prostate cancer lesions using annotated apparent diffusion coefficient maps from the QIN-PROSTATE-Repeatability dataset — a publicly available dataset that includes multiparametric MRI images of 15 patients that are confirmed or suspected of prostate cancer with two studies each. We used a main architecture of U-Net with batch normalization tested with different encoders, varying data image augmentation combinations, and hyperparameters adopted from various published frameworks to validate which combination of parameters work best for this dataset. The best performing framework was able to achieve a Dice score of 0.47 (0.44-0.49) which is comparable to previously published studies. The results from this study can be objectively compared and improved with further studies whereas this was previously not possible

    The contamination of the surface of Vesta by impacts and the delivery of the dark material

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    The Dawn spacecraft observed the presence of dark material, which in turn proved to be associated with OH and H-rich material, on the surface of Vesta. The source of this dark material has been identified with the low albedo asteroids, but it is still a matter of debate whether the delivery of the dark material is associated with a few large impact events, to micrometeorites or to the continuous, secular flux of impactors on Vesta. The continuous flux scenario predicts that a significant fraction of the exogenous material accreted by Vesta should be due to non-dark impactors likely analogous to ordinary chondrites, which instead represent only a minor contaminant in the HED meteorites. We explored the continuous flux scenario and its implications for the composition of the vestan regolith, taking advantage of the data from the Dawn mission and the HED meteorites. We used our model to show that the stochastic events scenario and the micrometeoritic flux scenario are natural consequences of the continuous flux scenario. We then used the model to estimate the amounts of dark and hydroxylate materials delivered on Vesta since the LHB and we showed how our results match well with the values estimated by the Dawn mission. We used our model to assess the amount of Fe and siderophile elements that the continuous flux of impactors would mix in the vestan regolith: concerning the siderophile elements, we focused our attention on the role of Ni. The results are in agreement with the data available on the Fe and Ni content of the HED meteorites and can be used as a reference frame in future studies of the data from the Dawn mission and of the HED meteorites. Our model cannot yet provide an answer to the fate of the missing non-carbonaceous contaminants, but we discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication on the journal ICARUS, "Dark and Bright Materials on Vesta" special issu
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