2,209 research outputs found

    Women's domestic labor in colonial Kenya: prostitution in Nairobi, 1909—1950

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    African Studies Center Working Paper No. 3

    Cars out of place : Vampires, technology, and labor in East and Central Africa

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    African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 16 August 1993This essay is about things that never happened. The African vampires discussed here are not the undead, but men and occasionally women specifically employed--as firemen in East Africa and game rangers in Central Africa--to capture Africans and extract their blood. Such vampires were said to exist throughout much of East and Central Africa; they were a specifically colonial phenomena and were first noted in the late 'teens and early 1920s. In the colonial versions of these stories, most vampires were black men supervised on the job by white men, but in postcolonial versions who works for whom has become unclear. Although it seems plausible that these stories originated in botched medical procedures done in too great haste during World War I, establishing their source does not account for their meaning thirty years later, or their power, or the passion with which they were retold and withheld. Stories in which colonial employees drained Africans of their blood may reveal more than the vivid imagination of their narrators; they disclose the concerns and anxieties of people at a specific time and place

    Data fusion for a multi-scale model of a wheat leaf surface: a unifying approach using a radial basis function partition of unity method

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    Realistic digital models of plant leaves are crucial to fluid dynamics simulations of droplets for optimising agrochemical spray technologies. The presence and nature of small features (on the order of 100μm\mathrm{\mu m}) such as ridges and hairs on the surface have been shown to significantly affect the droplet evaporation, and thus the leaf's potential uptake of active ingredients. We show that these microstructures can be captured by implicit radial basis function partition of unity (RBFPU) surface reconstructions from micro-CT scan datasets. However, scanning a whole leaf (20cm220\mathrm{cm^2}) at micron resolutions is infeasible due to both extremely large data storage requirements and scanner time constraints. Instead, we micro-CT scan only a small segment of a wheat leaf (4mm24\mathrm{mm^2}). We fit a RBFPU implicit surface to this segment, and an explicit RBFPU surface to a lower resolution laser scan of the whole leaf. Parameterising the leaf using a locally orthogonal coordinate system, we then replicate the now resolved microstructure many times across a larger, coarser, representation of the leaf surface that captures important macroscale features, such as its size, shape, and orientation. The edge of one segment of the microstructure model is blended into its neighbour naturally by the partition of unity method. The result is one implicit surface reconstruction that captures the wheat leaf's features at both the micro- and macro-scales.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figure

    Imagining the highway:Anticipating infrastructural and environmental change in Belize

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    This article examines the social and political, as well physical, construction of infrastructure, by attending to the implications of a highway yet to be built. In southern Belize, where the development of rural road networks figures strongly in historical narratives of political and environmental change, the recent paving of a major domestic highway has had distinctive implications for livelihoods and land rights among the predominantly Maya population of rural Toledo district. At the time of research, a plan for a new paved highway to the Guatemalan border animated longstanding debates over territoriality, environment and development, even as the details remained elusive. Bringing political ecology into conversation with attention to the perception of sensory environments, and the affective power of anticipation, I argue for extending anthropological conversations about infrastructure to encompass the meanings and consequences of imagined infrastructures for the ways people encounter, experience and enact social and environmental change

    Jet energy measurement with the ATLAS detector in proton-proton collisions at root s=7 TeV

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    The jet energy scale and its systematic uncertainty are determined for jets measured with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 7TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 38 pb-1. Jets are reconstructed with the anti-kt algorithm with distance parameters R=0. 4 or R=0. 6. Jet energy and angle corrections are determined from Monte Carlo simulations to calibrate jets with transverse momenta pT≥20 GeV and pseudorapidities {pipe}η{pipe}<4. 5. The jet energy systematic uncertainty is estimated using the single isolated hadron response measured in situ and in test-beams, exploiting the transverse momentum balance between central and forward jets in events with dijet topologies and studying systematic variations in Monte Carlo simulations. The jet energy uncertainty is less than 2. 5 % in the central calorimeter region ({pipe}η{pipe}<0. 8) for jets with 60≤pT<800 GeV, and is maximally 14 % for pT<30 GeV in the most forward region 3. 2≤{pipe}η{pipe}<4. 5. The jet energy is validated for jet transverse momenta up to 1 TeV to the level of a few percent using several in situ techniques by comparing a well-known reference such as the recoiling photon pT, the sum of the transverse momenta of tracks associated to the jet, or a system of low-pT jets recoiling against a high-pT jet. More sophisticated jet calibration schemes are presented based on calorimeter cell energy density weighting or hadronic properties of jets, aiming for an improved jet energy resolution and a reduced flavour dependence of the jet response. The systematic uncertainty of the jet energy determined from a combination of in situ techniques is consistent with the one derived from single hadron response measurements over a wide kinematic range. The nominal corrections and uncertainties are derived for isolated jets in an inclusive sample of high-pT jets. Special cases such as event topologies with close-by jets, or selections of samples with an enhanced content of jets originating from light quarks, heavy quarks or gluons are also discussed and the corresponding uncertainties are determined. © 2013 CERN for the benefit of the ATLAS collaboration

    Measurement of the inclusive and dijet cross-sections of b-jets in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

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    The inclusive and dijet production cross-sections have been measured for jets containing b-hadrons (b-jets) in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements use data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 34 pb^-1. The b-jets are identified using either a lifetime-based method, where secondary decay vertices of b-hadrons in jets are reconstructed using information from the tracking detectors, or a muon-based method where the presence of a muon is used to identify semileptonic decays of b-hadrons inside jets. The inclusive b-jet cross-section is measured as a function of transverse momentum in the range 20 < pT < 400 GeV and rapidity in the range |y| < 2.1. The bbbar-dijet cross-section is measured as a function of the dijet invariant mass in the range 110 < m_jj < 760 GeV, the azimuthal angle difference between the two jets and the angular variable chi in two dijet mass regions. The results are compared with next-to-leading-order QCD predictions. Good agreement is observed between the measured cross-sections and the predictions obtained using POWHEG + Pythia. MC@NLO + Herwig shows good agreement with the measured bbbar-dijet cross-section. However, it does not reproduce the measured inclusive cross-section well, particularly for central b-jets with large transverse momenta.Comment: 10 pages plus author list (21 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version published in European Physical Journal

    Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

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    This paper presents measurements of the W+μ+νW^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu and WμνW^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13

    Observation of associated near-side and away-side long-range correlations in √sNN=5.02  TeV proton-lead collisions with the ATLAS detector

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    Two-particle correlations in relative azimuthal angle (Δϕ) and pseudorapidity (Δη) are measured in √sNN=5.02  TeV p+Pb collisions using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements are performed using approximately 1  μb-1 of data as a function of transverse momentum (pT) and the transverse energy (ΣETPb) summed over 3.1<η<4.9 in the direction of the Pb beam. The correlation function, constructed from charged particles, exhibits a long-range (2<|Δη|<5) “near-side” (Δϕ∼0) correlation that grows rapidly with increasing ΣETPb. A long-range “away-side” (Δϕ∼π) correlation, obtained by subtracting the expected contributions from recoiling dijets and other sources estimated using events with small ΣETPb, is found to match the near-side correlation in magnitude, shape (in Δη and Δϕ) and ΣETPb dependence. The resultant Δϕ correlation is approximately symmetric about π/2, and is consistent with a dominant cos⁡2Δϕ modulation for all ΣETPb ranges and particle pT

    Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

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    A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results
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