Pottery is king: bevel rim bowls and power in early urban societies of the ancient Near East

This thesis is about how material objects, specifically ceramics, are used to create and perpetuate political power of the ruling class. My research will demonstrate how bevel rim bowls were a form of structural violence in the Uruk/Protoliterate period Mesopotamia by forcing the people to create the very vessels they needed to obtain their rations. These vessels were widely used throughout the region, and as of yet their exact function is unknown. The Uruk period in Mesopotamia was a time of great change. Large urban centers were being formed and people were coming together in a new way to live in cities. A ceramic analysis of the bowls found in the region will help to determine their social and political importance

Frederik Holst. Ethnicization and Identity Construction in Malaysia. Routledge Malaysian Studies Series. New York: Routledge. 2012.

Book review

Direct Current Auditory Evoked Potentials During Wakefulness, Anesthesia, and Emergence from Anesthesia

Direct current auditory evoked potentials (DC-AEPs) are a sensitive indicator of depth of anesthesia in ani-mals. However, they have never been investigated in humans. To assess the potential usefulness of DC-AEPs as an indicator of anesthesia in humans, we performed an explorative study in which DC-AEPs were recorded during propofol and methohexital anesthesia in hu-mans. DC-AEPs were recorded via 22 scalp electrodes in 19 volunteers randomly assigned to receive either propofol or methohexital. DC-AEPs were evoked by binaurally presented 2-s, 60-dB, 800-Hz tones; meas-urements were taken during awake baseline, anesthesia, and emergence. Statistical analysis included analy-sis of variance and discriminant analysis of data acquired during these three conditions. About 500 ms after stimulus presentation, DC-AEPs could be ob-served. These potentials were present only during base-line and emergence—not during anesthesia. Statistically significant differences were found between baseline and anesthesia and between anesthesia and emergence. In conclusion, similar effects, as reported in animal studies of anesthetics on the DC-AEPs, could be observed in anesthetized humans. These results dem-onstrate that DC-AEPs are potentially useful in the assessment of cortical function during anesthesia and might qualify the method for monitoring anesthesia in humans

I\u27d Rather Play the Saxophone : Conflicts in Identity Between Vietnamese Students and Their Parents

Members of the Vietnamese community in Lincoln, Nebraska range in time of resettlement, background and experience in adjustment to their new home. The impact of cultural change and education on the Vietnamese youth in this community is of particular importance. The Vietnamese youth are under-examined in the areas of adjustment and identity formation. The effects of cultural conflict have profound impact on the future of Vietnamese youth. The following study presents an examination of the variables that may affect Vietnamese youth, specifically culture and education as factors in ethnic identity formation. It also presents how these factors can affect the relationship between students and parents

GUIDE: Parallel library-centric application design by a generic scientific simulation environment

Techniques for library-centric application design have already proven to be very useful in the past. The current gain in computer performance is shifted towards the utilisation of multi-core processors which extends the importance of this type of application design in the field of scientific computing, which also poses new difficulties. A parallel generic scientific simulation environment has been developed to ease this transition from single-core to multi-core systems without additional development activity

Discriminating signal from background using neural networks. Application to top-quark search at the Fermilab Tevatron

The application of Neural Networks in High Energy Physics to the separation of signal from background events is studied. A variety of problems usually encountered in this sort of analyses, from variable selection to systematic errors, are presented. The top--quark search is used as an example to illustrate the problems and proposed solutions.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, psfi

Determination of alpha_s from scaling violations of truncated moments of structure functions

We determine the strong coupling alpha_s(M_Z) from scaling violations of truncated moments of the nonsinglet deep inelastic structure function F_2. Truncated moments are determined from BCDMS and NMC data using a neural network parametrization which retains the full experimental information on errors and correlations. Our method minimizes all sources of theoretical uncertainty and bias which characterize extractions of alpha_s from scaling violations. We obtain alpha_s(M_Z) = 0.124 +0.004-0.007 (exp.) + 0.003- 0.004 (th.).Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, latex with epsfig; neural network parametrization available from http://sophia.ecm.ub.es/f2neura

Enhancing the top signal at Tevatron using Neural Nets

We show that Neural Nets can be useful for top analysis at Tevatron. The main features of $t\bar t$ and background events on a mixed sample are projected in a single output, which controls the efficiency and purity of the $t\bar t$ signal.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures (not included and available from the authors), Latex, UB-ECM-PF 94/1