150 research outputs found
Confronting the Future: The Effects of the Repatriation Program on a New Generation of Burundi Refugees
The goals of this paper are threefold: to
provide context for the voluntary repatriation
program for Burundirefugees in
Tanzania; to considersome assumptions
inherent within it; and to describe some
of the effects of the plan on refugees,
particularly on members of the younger
generation. The views are based upon
preliminary data analysis and should be
considered as such
Governance, Security and Culture: Assessing Africaâs Youth Bulge
Although Africa has a youth-dominated population, African government policies are often not youth-centered and African governments and their international supporters are frequently under-informed about the priorities of most youth. Reliance on the âyouth bulge and instability thesisâ leads to distorted assessments of everyday realities. Examination of the lives, priorities, and cultural contexts of African youth, and the cases of youth in Rwanda and Burundi in particular, shows that the nature of relations between the state and massive populations of young, marginalized, and alienated citizens directly impacts the governance, security, and development prospects of African nations
Real-Time Reconfigurable Adaptive Speech Recognition Command and Control Apparatus and Method
An adaptive speech recognition and control system and method for controlling various mechanisms and systems in response to spoken instructions and in which spoken commands are effective to direct the system into appropriate memory nodes, and to respective appropriate memory templates corresponding to the voiced command is discussed. Spoken commands from any of a group of operators for which the system is trained may be identified, and voice templates are updated as required in response to changes in pronunciation and voice characteristics over time of any of the operators for which the system is trained. Provisions are made for both near-real-time retraining of the system with respect to individual terms which are determined not be positively identified, and for an overall system training and updating process in which recognition of each command and vocabulary term is checked, and in which the memory templates are retrained if necessary for respective commands or vocabulary terms with respect to an operator currently using the system. In one embodiment, the system includes input circuitry connected to a microphone and including signal processing and control sections for sensing the level of vocabulary recognition over a given period and, if recognition performance falls below a given level, processing audio-derived signals for enhancing recognition performance of the system
Africa 2060: good news from Africa, April 16, 2010
This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Conference Series, As the keystone event of a research program called âAfrica 2060,â the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University
convened a conference on April 16, 2010 called Africa 2060: Good News from
Africa. The program featured more than a dozen expert panelists from Boston
University and across the world, and the approximately 100 participants
included many African scholars and citizens from the continent who contributed
to lively and well-informed discussion. The Pardee Center conference was
co-sponsored by Boston Universityâs Africa Studies Center (ASC), the African
Presidential Archives & Research Center (APARC), and the Global Health &
Development Center (GHDC).This report provides commentary reflecting upon and information pertaining to the substance of
the conference. An introductory overview looks at the major issues discussed at the event, which
are placed within the larger literature on Africaâs future. Four short essays prepared by Boston
University graduate students provide readers with more specific reflections and highlights of
each conference session and the main issues discussed by panelists. The final section presents
analyses of key trends and projections related to societal, economic, and governance issues for
Africa and a commentary on what this information tells us about the drivers that will determine
the continentâs future
Mode-Coupling Approximations, Glass Theory and Disordered Systems
We discuss the general link between mode-coupling like equations (which serve
as the basis of some recent theories of supercooled liquids) and the dynamical
equations governing mean-field spin-glass models, or the dynamics of a particle
in a random potential. The physical consequences of this interrelation are
underlined. It suggests to extend the mode-coupling approximation to
temperatures well below the freezing temperature, in which aging effects become
important. In this regime we suggest some new experiments in order to test a
non-trivial prediction of the Mode-Coupling picture, which is a generalized
relation between the short () and long () time regimes.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figs., uuencoded ps fil
âBuying a pathâ: rethinking resistance in Rwanda
In this essay, I tell the story of Jean-Baptiste, the president of a motorcycle taxi driversâ co-operative, and his struggle against the machinations of certain high officials in Kigali City Council. Crucial to this story is the way in which Jean-Baptisteâs attempts to retain his position in the face of powerful opposition pit certain agencies of Rwandaâs party state against others. I use this ethnographic narrative to question the way in which much scholarship on popular resistance in Rwanda, drawing on Scottâs simplified opposition between the powerful and the powerless, opposes âordinary Rwandansâ to âthe stateâ as monolithic entities with opposed interests. Theorising Jean-Baptisteâs story in terms of Rwandan idioms of relative power and influence, I suggest that such a Manichean view of power and resistance in Rwanda oversimplifies social realities. I propose instead a model of power and resistance that sees the state as a field of capacities and possible relationships that it presents for certain people, where âpathsâ to influence and security may by âboughtâ â especially, but not exclusively, by those who are âstrongâ and âhighâ
Measurement of the cosmic ray spectrum above eV using inclined events detected with the Pierre Auger Observatory
A measurement of the cosmic-ray spectrum for energies exceeding
eV is presented, which is based on the analysis of showers
with zenith angles greater than detected with the Pierre Auger
Observatory between 1 January 2004 and 31 December 2013. The measured spectrum
confirms a flux suppression at the highest energies. Above
eV, the "ankle", the flux can be described by a power law with
index followed by
a smooth suppression region. For the energy () at which the
spectral flux has fallen to one-half of its extrapolated value in the absence
of suppression, we find
eV.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
Energy Estimation of Cosmic Rays with the Engineering Radio Array of the Pierre Auger Observatory
The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is part of the Pierre Auger
Observatory and is used to detect the radio emission of cosmic-ray air showers.
These observations are compared to the data of the surface detector stations of
the Observatory, which provide well-calibrated information on the cosmic-ray
energies and arrival directions. The response of the radio stations in the 30
to 80 MHz regime has been thoroughly calibrated to enable the reconstruction of
the incoming electric field. For the latter, the energy deposit per area is
determined from the radio pulses at each observer position and is interpolated
using a two-dimensional function that takes into account signal asymmetries due
to interference between the geomagnetic and charge-excess emission components.
The spatial integral over the signal distribution gives a direct measurement of
the energy transferred from the primary cosmic ray into radio emission in the
AERA frequency range. We measure 15.8 MeV of radiation energy for a 1 EeV air
shower arriving perpendicularly to the geomagnetic field. This radiation energy
-- corrected for geometrical effects -- is used as a cosmic-ray energy
estimator. Performing an absolute energy calibration against the
surface-detector information, we observe that this radio-energy estimator
scales quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy as expected for coherent
emission. We find an energy resolution of the radio reconstruction of 22% for
the data set and 17% for a high-quality subset containing only events with at
least five radio stations with signal.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
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