27,734 research outputs found
Brazil: Modernity and Mobility
This essay examines the field of Brazilian mobility studies, concentrating mainly on recent (2010-2013) scholarship by Portuguese-speaking Brazilian academics published in English-language journals.
The mass demonstrations and violent protests that have erupted in Brazilian urban centres over the past one hundred years demonstrate the importance of mobility to Brazil’s traveling public. Several strikes by transport workers have occurred since 1903 and, over the past fifty years, there have been numerous passenger revolts too: in São Paulo in 1947, in Rio de Janeiro in 1974-5, and most recently in 2013, when protests over a proposed twenty centavos (eight US cents) increase in the price of a bus ticket broke out in more than a dozen cities. While Brazilians care deeply about their public transport, they also like their cars. The nation has had a love affair with the car since the 1920s that shows no sign of diminishing
Contemporary Christian radio in Britain: A new genre on the national dial
Only in the second decade of the twenty-first century has contemporary Christian radio appeared as a new genre in Britain, unlike the United States where it has long been a significant format. Responsibility for religious broadcasting in the United Kingdom was, for most of the twentieth century, fulfilled by the BBC. However, the gradual relaxation of broadcasting regulations since the 1980s and the introduction of Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) have provided openings for Christian radio stations, and since 2009 the United Kingdom has had two national stations broadcasting from mainland studios for the first time. This article explores recent developments in this genre, using primary research interviews with Christian radio broadcasters. It suggests that what started out as a way for Christians to evangelize and proselytize their message has become a radio service that broadcasts almost exclusively to converted believers. It also observes that the programming and scheduling of these stations closely resembles the speech-and-music-mix style of BBC Local Radio, implying an attempt to insert themselves directly into the mainstream of the radio spectrum
Hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems
The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a central generic problem in
computer science and artificial intelligence: it provides a common framework
for many theoretical problems as well as for many real-life applications. Soft
constraint problems are a generalisation of the CSP which allow the user to
model optimisation problems. Considerable effort has been made in identifying
properties which ensure tractability in such problems. In this work, we
initiate the study of hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems; that is,
properties which guarantee tractability of the given soft constraint problem,
but which do not depend only on the underlying structure of the instance (such
as being tree-structured) or only on the types of soft constraints in the
instance (such as submodularity). We present several novel hybrid classes of
soft constraint problems, which include a machine scheduling problem,
constraint problems of arbitrary arities with no overlapping nogoods, and the
SoftAllDiff constraint with arbitrary unary soft constraints. An important tool
in our investigation will be the notion of forbidden substructures.Comment: A full version of a CP'10 paper, 26 page
Temperature-based metallicity measurements at z=0.8: direct calibration of strong-line diagnostics at intermediate redshift
We present the first direct calibration of strong-line metallicity
diagnostics at significant cosmological distances using a sample at z=0.8 drawn
from the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey. Oxygen and neon abundances are derived
from measurements of electron temperature and density. We directly compare
various commonly used relations between gas-phase metallicity and strong line
ratios of O, Ne, and H at z=0.8 and z=0. There is no evolution with redshift at
high precision (, ). O, Ne, and H line ratios follow the same
locus at z=0.8 as at z=0 with 0.02 dex evolution and low scatter
(0.04 dex). This suggests little or no evolution in physical
conditions of HII regions at fixed oxygen abundance, in contrast to models
which invoke more extreme properties at high redshifts. We speculate that
offsets observed in the [N II]/H versus [O III]/H diagram at
high redshift are therefore due to [NII] emission, likely as a result of
relatively high N/O abundance. If this is indeed the case, then nitrogen-based
metallicity diagnostics suffer from systematic errors at high redshift. Our
findings indicate that locally calibrated abundance diagnostics based on
alpha-capture elements can be reliably applied at z1 and possibly at
much higher redshifts. This constitutes the first firm basis for the widespread
use of empirical calibrations in high redshift metallicity studies.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, accepted to Ap
Neurosyphilis presenting with papillitis
Syphilis is one of the oldest described infectious diseases in the world and is caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum[1]. Although now a rare disease, incidence is increasing with the number of diagnoses of the disease rising in England from 1688 to 2713 between 2003 and 2012 (a 61% increase)[2]. Major outbreaks of syphilis have been documented in London, Manchester, Dublin, and Brighton particularly among men who have sex with men (MSM)[3]. Diagnosis remains difficult on account of multi-system symptoms, duration of the condition, and social stigma
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