Fragmentation and the digital city: An analysis of Vicente Luis Mora's circular 07. Las afueras

This essay juxtaposes three recent publications, Vicente Luis Mora's Circular 07. Las afueras (2007-), Kenneth Goldsmith's Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (2015), and Jorge Carrión's Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes (2016), in order to explore how contemporary digital technologies construct and fragment urban experience on a global scale. Despite their different political intentions, these three works share a common aesthetic of appropriation, unoriginal quotation, and fragmentation, as they are also all modelled after Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Just like Benjamin did with Paris, each of these works focuses on a particular Western city-Madrid, New York, and Barcelona-now being proposed as paradigmatic representations of urban experience, which is meant to mimic digital media's modularity and disintegration. Goldsmith's use of appropriation is read as a blank endorsement of digital mediation of everyday life, which sits in opposition to Carrión's and Mora's political projects. Circular 07 and Barcelona mix unoriginal writing techniques, like Goldsmith's conceptual writing, with other experimental methods to warn readers against apolitical adoption of digital technologies. Fragmentation is still proposed as the most important aesthetic form of twenty-first century writing, but these two Spanish works strive for its contextualization as a complex mechanism structured around reader/writer subjectivity. Finally, this essay ponders how to consider new reader/ writer subjectivities within the larger context of global cities in late capitalism

Federal Grants and the Problem of Financing Public Assistance

Livestock and poultry are two growing subsectors of global farming economy with an impact on the environment and thus deserving closer attention. While the farms play a major role in providing protein essential for human diets, they are also sources of significant amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Hence, the sectors need to improve their environmental performance and mitigate their negative impacts on climate. To estimate the annual GHG emissions from a dairy and poultry farm, a case study was conducted in the rural area of Bangladesh. The study has considered the supply chains of both farms while estimating the emissions.  The study also estimated the GHG emission reduction potential of a small biogas based polygeneration system aimed at providing energy services in the rural area. LCA (lifecycle assessment) has been used as the main tool while estimating the emissions

The Cool Cat

The student company barracks at Fort Devens were a wild scene of activity on this sunny Saturday morning..

Disarmament exercises addressing Karamoja’s insecurity needs peaceful tactics and local engagement

The Ugandan government is proposing a new disarmament campaign in its Karamoja region to address rising insecurity and cattle theft. But the experience of the previous disarmament campaign highlights the need for community engagement and scrutiny over methods. Saum Naungiro discusses the recent history of Karamoja’s violence and the challenges for a sustainable solution

The Karamojong women and extreme insecurity

Research assistant Saum Nangiro discusses how she, Julian Hopwood and Holly Porter explored the way justice and security systems work in relation to women and children in the Karamoja region in Northeast Uganda

Host and symbiont genetic contributions to fitness in a Trichogramma-Wolbachia symbiosis.

The fitness effects associated with Wolbachia infection have wide-ranging ecological and evolutionary consequences for host species. How these effects are modulated by the relative influence of host and Wolbachia genomes has been described as a balancing act of genomic cooperation and conflict. For vertically transmitted symbionts, like cytoplasmic Wolbachia, concordant host-symbiont fitness interests would seem to select for genomic cooperation. However, Wolbachia's ability to manipulate host reproductive systems and distort offspring sex ratios presents an evolutionary conflict of interest with infected hosts. In the parthenogenesis-inducing (PI) form of Wolbachia found in many haplodiploid insects, Wolbachia fitness is realized through females and is enhanced by their feminization of male embryos and subsequent parthenogenetic reproduction. In contrast, as long as Wolbachia is not fixed in a population and sexual reproduction persists, fitness for the host species is realized through both male and female offspring production. How these cooperating and competing interests interact and the relative influence of host and Wolbachia genomes were investigated in the egg parasitoid Trichogramma kaykai, where Wolbachia infection has remained at a low frequency in the field. A factorial design in which laboratory cultures of Wolbachia-infected T. kaykai were cured and re-infected with alternative Wolbachia strains was used to determine the relative influence of host and Wolbachia genomes on host fitness values. Our results suggest fitness variation is largely a function of host genetic background, except in the case of offspring sex ratio where a significant interaction between host and Wolbachia genomes was found. We also find a significant effect associated with the horizontal transfer of Wolbachia strains, which we discuss in terms of the potential for coadaptation in PI-Wolbachia symbioses

Adaptive Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Methods for Second and Fourth Order Elliptic Partial Differential Equations

A unified mathematical and computational framework for implementation of an adaptive discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method (FEM) is developed using the symmetric interior penalty formulation to obtain numerical approximations to solutions of second and fourth order elliptic partial differential equations. The DG-FEM formulation implemented allows for h-adaptivity and has the capability to work with linear, quadratic, cubic, and quartic polynomials on triangular elements in two dimensions. Two different formulations of DG are implemented based on how fluxes are represented on interior edges and comparisons are made. Explicit representations of two a posteriori error estimators, a residual based type and a “local” based type, are extended to include both Dirichlet and Neumann type boundary conditions on bounded domains. New list-based approaches to data management in an adaptive computational environment are introduced in an effort to utilize computational resources in an efficient and flexible manner

Peningkatan Hasil Belajar Siswa Kelas IV Melalui Pendekatan Kontekstual Pada Pokok Bahasan Daun Dan Fungsinya Di SDN Lutungan

Ide awal penelitian ini karena rendahnya pemahaman siswa pada konsep struktur daun dan fungsinya disebabkan karena dalam pembelajaran guru belum sepenuhnya melibatkan siswa secara aktif dalam mengkonstruksi pemikirannya sendiri, guru dalam mengajarkan materi hanya menggunakan dan menampilkan media gambar dari karton sehingga siswa hanya sebatas menyimak dan menyaksikan media gambar yang ditampilkan guru tanpa melihat secara langsung untuk apa konsep itu diajarkan.Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk meningkatkan pemahaman konsep struktur daun dan fungsinya. Jenis penelitian ini adalah penelitian tindakan kelas yang dilaksanakan bersiklus setiap siklus meliputi 4 tahap yaitu perencanaan, pelaksanaan, observasi, dan refleksi.Data penelitian ini adalah data aktivitas dan hasil belajar. Data diperoleh dengan observasi dan tes.dan catatan lapangan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa ada peningkatan yang berarti.Baik pada aktivitas guru maupun aktivitas siswa dan evaluasi belajar. Peningkatan itu Berdasarkan hasil siklus 1, dari nilai yang diperoleh siswa dipresentasikan secara keseluruhan dengan nilai rata rata kelas 6,4 sedangkan ketuntasan belajar 55%. Makahasil tes formatif tindakan siklus II nilai rata rata kelas 8,07 dan ketuntasan belajar 100%. Dari data hasil penilaian siswa menunjukan bahwa penggunaan pendekatan kontekstual pada pokok bahasan daun dan fungsinya dapat meningkatkan hasil belajar siswa. Kata Knci: Pendekatan Kontekstual, hasil belajar daun dan fungsiny