239 research outputs found
Protestantism and anomia: A social psychological study
According to Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, religion promotes group cohesion. âThe idea of society, he noted, is the soul of religion. ... Not only does religion bind man with his fellow man, but Durkheim also emphasizes that religious participation provides meaning and psychological stability to the individualâs existence
The making of âloyalsâ and ârebelsâ: the 1880 Transkei Rebellion and the Subversion of the chieftaincies of East Griqualand, 1874-1914
In the mid-1870s, influenced by the mineral revolution in southern Africa, the Cape responsible government began to extend colonial rule over the chiefdoms that inhabited the Mthatha- Mzimkhulu region. Although white officials initially negotiated with the leadership of these chiefdoms to accept colonial rule and depended heavily on them to implement new laws, ultimately the Cape government aimed to side-line indigenous political systems and replace them with magistrates and headmen. Colonial officials mistakenly equated indigenous political structures with dictatorial chiefs whose followers were subject to their personal ambitions. In fact chiefs were part of a collective leadership and were very aware and influenced by the needs of their adherents. This work is concerned with how the chieftaincies, or indigenous political systems, of the Mthatha-Mzimkhulu region responded, survived and adapted in the face of colonialism. The chieftaincies were remarkably resilient despite the political and economic changes brought on by colonialism and capitalism and were able to retain some degree of authority amongst their followers and at times obtain recognition from the colonial state. Interactions between the chieftaincies and the colonial state were complex, fluid and ever evolving. Some leaders of chiefdoms co-operated with colonial authorities, either over particular issues at certain times or more generally over longer periods, and were considered by colonial officials to be âloyalâ. Yet, at other times they resisted the demands and changes being brought on by colonialism and were labelled as ârebelsâ. Questions of how the chieftaincies responded to colonial rule were most critical during the Transkei Rebellion of 1880, which is a central focus of this work. Some chieftaincies co-operated with and served with the colonial military forces in order to spare themselves from the economic and social disruption brought on by war and the confiscation of land by the victors. Other chieftaincies took up arms against the colonial state in an attempt to stop the increasingly unacceptable demands being made of them and to resist the negative changes that colonialism was bringing. Despite their ability to adapt, by the early years of the twentieth century hereditary leaders found themselves increasingly caught between the expectations of their followers and demands made by the colonial administration. Faced with increasing popular criticism, many leaders adapted ambiguous and shifting stances on issues concerning their followers
Simulation of phosphorus implantation into silicon with a single-parameter electronic stopping power model
We simulate dopant profiles for phosphorus implantation into silicon using a
new model for electronic stopping power. In this model, the electronic stopping
power is factorized into a globally averaged effective charge Z1*, and a local
charge density dependent electronic stopping power for a proton. There is only
a single adjustable parameter in the model, namely the one electron radius rs0
which controls Z1*. By fine tuning this parameter, we obtain excellent
agreement between simulated dopant profiles and the SIMS data over a wide range
of energies for the channeling case. Our work provides a further example of
implant species, in addition to boron and arsenic, to verify the validity of
the electronic stopping power model and to illustrate its generality for
studies of physical processes involving electronic stopping.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. See http://bifrost.lanl.gov/~reed
LMRL Gym: Benchmarks for Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) provide excellent text-generation capabilities,
but standard prompting and generation methods generally do not lead to
intentional or goal-directed agents and might necessitate considerable prompt
tuning. This becomes particularly apparent in multi-turn conversations: even
the best current LLMs rarely ask clarifying questions, engage in explicit
information gathering, or take actions now that lead to better decisions after
multiple turns. Reinforcement learning has the potential to leverage the
powerful modeling capabilities of LLMs, as well as their internal
representation of textual interactions, to create capable goal-directed
language agents. This can enable intentional and temporally extended
interactions, such as with humans, through coordinated persuasion and carefully
crafted questions, or in goal-directed play through text games to bring about
desired final outcomes. However, enabling this requires the community to
develop stable and reliable reinforcement learning algorithms that can
effectively train LLMs. Developing such algorithms requires tasks that can
gauge progress on algorithm design, provide accessible and reproducible
evaluations for multi-turn interactions, and cover a range of task properties
and challenges in improving reinforcement learning algorithms. Our paper
introduces the LMRL-Gym benchmark for evaluating multi-turn RL for LLMs,
together with an open-source research framework containing a basic toolkit for
getting started on multi-turn RL with offline value-based and policy-based RL
methods. Our benchmark consists of 8 different language tasks, which require
multiple rounds of language interaction and cover a range of tasks in
open-ended dialogue and text games
Impact of a 6-wk olive oil supplementation in healthy adults on urinary proteomic biomarkers of coronary artery disease, chronic kidney disease, and diabetes (types 1 and 2): a randomized, parallel, controlled, double-blind study
Background: Olive oil (OO) consumption is associated with cardiovascular disease prevention because of both its oleic acid and phenolic contents. The capacity of OO phenolics to protect against low-density lipoprotein (LDL) oxidation is the basis for a health claim by the European Food Safety Authority. Proteomic biomarkers enable an early, presymptomatic diagnosis of disease, which makes them important and effective, but understudied, tools for primary prevention.
Objective: We evaluated the impact of supplementation with OO, either low or high in phenolics, on urinary proteomic biomarkers of coronary artery disease (CAD), chronic kidney disease (CKD), and diabetes.
Design: Self-reported healthy participants (n = 69) were randomly allocated (stratified block random assignment) according to age and body mass index to supplementation with a daily 20-mL dose of OO either low or high in phenolics (18 compared with 286 mg caffeic acid equivalents per kg, respectively) for 6 wk. Urinary proteomic biomarkers were measured at baseline and 3 and 6 wk alongside blood lipids, the antioxidant capacity, and glycation markers.
Results: The consumption of both OOs improved the proteomic CAD score at endpoint compared with baseline (mean improvement: â0.3 for low-phenolic OO and â0.2 for high-phenolic OO; P < 0.01) but not CKD or diabetes proteomic biomarkers. However, there was no difference between groups for changes in proteomic biomarkers or any secondary outcomes including plasma triacylglycerols, oxidized LDL, and LDL cholesterol.
Conclusion: In comparison with low-phenolic OO, supplementation for 6 wk with high-phenolic OO does not lead to an improvement in cardiovascular health markers in a healthy cohort. This trial was registered at www.controlled-trials.com as ISRCTN93136746
Coherent Detector Arrays for Millimeter and Submillimeter Astronomy
Progress in many areas of astronomy requires large-area surveys and observations of
extended objects. This includes the cosmic microwave background, nearby galaxies, the
Milky Way, and regions of star-forming regions within our galaxy. The ability to carry
out such studies is critically dependent on the development of affordable high-sensitivity
focal plane arrays, for both spectral line and continuum observations. We discuss a
program for the next decade to develop such technology for ground-based and spacebased
millimeter and submillimeter astronomy. Appropriate technologies exist, but
significant effort is required to make the transition from simply replicating individual
pixels to approaching focal plane array design in an integrated fashion from feeds to
spectrometers for spectral analysis. This advance is essential to realize the full potential
of major new ground-based, suborbital, and future space facilities, and is relevant to the
RMS and EOS panels. The recommended budget for this activity is $65M
On the need for an international effort to capture, share and use crystallization screening data
Development of an ontology for the description of crystallization experiments and results is proposed
Pion-nucleus elastic scattering on 12C, 40Ca, 90Zr, and 208Pb at 400 and 500 MeV
Pion-nucleus elastic scattering at energies above the Delta(1232) resonance
is studied using both pi+ and pi- beams on 12C, 40Ca, 90Zr, and 208Pb. The
present data provide an opportunity to study the interaction of pions with
nuclei at energies where second-order corrections to impulse approximation
calculations should be small. The results are compared with other data sets at
similar energies, and with four different first-order impulse approximation
calculations. Significant disagreement exists between the calculations and the
data from this experiment
Recommended from our members
Temperature equilibration in strongly coupled plasma
A laser-driven experiment investigating electron-ion equilibration in strongly coupled plasma was performed in 1995. At that time, standard estimates for the electron-ion equilibration time were two-to-three orders of magnitude faster than observed experimentally. As a result, the electron-ion equilibration time was taken as a fitting parameter to understand the experimental results. Based upon guidance from nonequilibrium molecular dynamics mixture calculations 121 and comparison with strongly coupled resistivity experiments, we have developed a consistent binary collision model to understand the electron-ion equilibration experiment. The model has been implemented in a newly developed multi-species, multi-temperature physics code, which was used for simulation of the experiment. The resulting electron-ion exchange rate is close to the experiment, which is about three orders-of-magnitude slower than given by standard estimates, most of which is the result of a modified coulomb logarithm
- âŠ