729 research outputs found

    Negotiating Heritage and Energy Conservation: an ethnography of domestic renovation

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    What is the relationship between energy efficiency and old buildings? While a large body of research exists on the buildings science and technology of retro-fit, relatively little attention has focused on the social practices and assumptions that shape how and whether these technologies are practically applied. The paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of building professionals, planners and home-owners involved in the renovation and retrofit of buildings of attributed historic value. These perspectives highlight how the value of the past is negotiated in a range of socially specific ways, in relation to ideas about climate change and energy efficiency. It is argued that people’s understandings of the past shape specific understandings of ‘acceptable change’ and that the meaning and value of old buildings is itself transformed in relation to these concerns

    Remains of the Future: rethinking space and time of ruination through the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana

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    Walking around the township of New Senchi, Ghana, the ghost of the original plan is still faintly discernible in linear rows of crumbling, single-story houses.1 Constructed to resettle people displaced by a large hydroelectric power scheme in the 1960s, the town was at the vanguard of postindependence visions of national development and embodied the high-modern aspirations of the time (see J. Scott 1998). Original plans show the spatial zoning of industrial and residential use. Architects’ drawings depict rows of bungalows fronted by manicured lawns and fringed by neatly clipped hedges. Artists’ impressions of interiors show flushing toilets and modern kitchens. I am accompanied by Eric, an unemployed primary-school teacher in his early thirties. Although born after the 1960s, he has a vivid sense of the project’s promised futures and describes these as we walk: officials told resettlers that well-paid jobs would be created through the industries that would develop, catalyzed by the cheap and plentiful power supplied by the nearby Akosombo dam; subsistence farming would be transformed through mechanization and industrialization; infrastructure—including railways, paved roads, and a nearby airport—would be built

    Visual onset expands subjective time

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    We report a distortion of subjective time perception in which the duration of a first interval is perceived to be longer than the succeeding interval of the same duration. The amount of time expansion depends on the onset type defining the first interval. When a stimulus appears abruptly, its duration is perceived to be longer than when it appears following a stationary array. The difference in the processing time for the stimulus onset and motion onset, measured as reaction times, agrees with the difference in time expansion. Our results suggest that initial transient responses for a visual onset serve as a temporal marker for time estimation, and a systematic change in the processing time for onsets affects perceived time

    Ranking of multidimensional drug profiling data by fractional-adjusted bi-partitional scores

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    Motivation: The recent development of high-throughput drug profiling (high content screening or HCS) provides a large amount of quantitative multidimensional data. Despite its potentials, it poses several challenges for academia and industry analysts alike. This is especially true for ranking the effectiveness of several drugs from many thousands of images directly. This paper introduces, for the first time, a new framework for automatically ordering the performance of drugs, called fractional adjusted bi-partitional score (FABS). This general strategy takes advantage of graph-based formulations and solutions and avoids many shortfalls of traditionally used methods in practice. We experimented with FABS framework by implementing it with a specific algorithm, a variant of normalized cut—normalized cut prime (FABS-NC′), producing a ranking of drugs. This algorithm is known to run in polynomial time and therefore can scale well in high-throughput applications

    Personal, Political, Pedagogic: Challenging the binary bind in archaeological teaching, learning and fieldwork

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    yesIn this paper we consider how we can undercut the various binaries of gender and sexuality in archaeological practice, and particularly in our teaching. We argue that taking an assemblage theory approach enables us to look at the multiplicity of identities of those practicing archaeology as different and intersecting assemblages that bring one another into being through their connections at different scales. In particular, we examine how this approach can be applied to archaeological pedagogy and how this in turn enables us to move away from modern binary distinctions about sex and gender identities from the "bottom up", fostering an approach in our students that will then go on to be developed in professional practice
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