3,167 research outputs found
The Voluntary Association in The Slum
1 / Voluntary Associations in a Zone of Transition
This report is a study of formal voluntary associations in a zone of transition. It seeks information on the various kinds of voluntary organizations to be found in such an area, the characteristics of the members, the manner in which people become affiliated with organizations, and the functions that organizations serve for their members. The specific associations studied include such diverse groups as a neighborhood improvement council, an old-age club, and various children\u27s associations. In this study such groups fall under the province of voluntary associations. That such groups are found in a zone of transition warrants special attention because it has been common to assume that formal associations are nonexistent or at a minimum in the slum, an assumption which has an important bearing on theory in urban sociology and ecology,
This study was initiated with the knowledge that groups had been formed in an interstitial area through the efforts of a community organizer. The organizations created through his efforts provided a focus for the problem, and the membership of these groups provided a major portion of the universe studied. Thus, it was known prior to the study that there were persons belonging to voluntary associations in the area. It was assumed, however, that an extensive network of organizational participation could be found in the area independent of the affiliations created by the professional community organizer. This assumption was borne out readily. A cursory examination of the total membership for the city of such diverse organizations as the YWCA, Boy Scouts, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and so forth, indicated that many of the persons who were members of these groups also inhabited the area mapped out for study.
Were the members of formal organizations in the slum similar to their counterparts who lived in the suburbs? For instance, were they likely to have relatively high educational achievement, to be Protestant rather than Catholic in faith, and be voters more often than nonvoters? Such questions were posed at the inception of the study. Still other questions concerned the similarities and differences between persons who became members of organizations created by the community organizer and persons living in the same slum area but affiliated with other voluntary associations. And in a different vein, did children who belonged to associations come from families where their parents had a tradition of association, or was parental affiliation incidental to a child\u27s participation? To answer such questions and to formulate hypotheses for testing, this inquiry drew heavily from studies dealing with voluntary associations. The relation of such studies to the present work will be noted shortly
A Domain Specific Approach to High Performance Heterogeneous Computing
Users of heterogeneous computing systems face two problems: firstly, in
understanding the trade-off relationships between the observable
characteristics of their applications, such as latency and quality of the
result, and secondly, how to exploit knowledge of these characteristics to
allocate work to distributed computing platforms efficiently. A domain specific
approach addresses both of these problems. By considering a subset of
operations or functions, models of the observable characteristics or domain
metrics may be formulated in advance, and populated at run-time for task
instances. These metric models can then be used to express the allocation of
work as a constrained integer program, which can be solved using heuristics,
machine learning or Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) frameworks. These
claims are illustrated using the example domain of derivatives pricing in
computational finance, with the domain metrics of workload latency or makespan
and pricing accuracy. For a large, varied workload of 128 Black-Scholes and
Heston model-based option pricing tasks, running upon a diverse array of 16
Multicore CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs platforms, predictions made by models of both
the makespan and accuracy are generally within 10% of the run-time performance.
When these models are used as inputs to machine learning and MILP-based
workload allocation approaches, a latency improvement of up to 24 and 270 times
over the heuristic approach is seen.Comment: 14 pages, preprint draft, minor revisio
Seeing Shapes in Clouds: On the Performance-Cost trade-off for Heterogeneous Infrastructure-as-a-Service
In the near future FPGAs will be available by the hour, however this new
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) usage mode presents both an opportunity and
a challenge: The opportunity is that programmers can potentially trade
resources for performance on a much larger scale, for much shorter periods of
time than before. The challenge is in finding and traversing the trade-off for
heterogeneous IaaS that guarantees increased resources result in the greatest
possible increased performance. Such a trade-off is Pareto optimal. The Pareto
optimal trade-off for clusters of heterogeneous resources can be found by
solving multiple, multi-objective optimisation problems, resulting in an
optimal allocation of tasks to the available platforms. Solving these
optimisation programs can be done using simple heuristic approaches or formal
Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) techniques. When pricing 128 financial
options using a Monte Carlo algorithm upon a heterogeneous cluster of Multicore
CPU, GPU and FPGA platforms, the MILP approach produces a trade-off that is up
to 110% faster than a heuristic approach, and over 50% cheaper. These results
suggest that high quality performance-resource trade-offs of heterogeneous IaaS
are best realised through a formal optimisation approach.Comment: Presented at Second International Workshop on FPGAs for Software
Programmers (FSP 2015) (arXiv:1508.06320
Information Technology Sourcing Across Cultures: Preparing Leaders for Cross-Cultural Engagements and Implementing Best Practices with Cultural Sensitivity
This research exercised a mixed method exploratory sequential design inquiry into the topical area of leadership behaviors and cross-cultural awareness that permeate successful global information technology (IT) outsource alliances. When IT is aligned with an entity\u27s objectives, strategic technology leadership is actively engaged in governance, infrastructure architecture, planning, and cross-cultural collaboration. Bilateral contracting foster and forge interactive organizational cultures however, the advent of right shoring has introduced cultural complexity for IT leadership roles born of national, international, and sub-culture global dimensions. This research surfaced significant variations in IT professional opinions as to the leadership practices, cultural compatibility and service fulfillment performance factors in IT outsourcing alliances. The variations in response levels exceeded my expectation and raised my cultural awareness that when cross-cultural differences exist in global IT outsourcing alliance operations, virtual team members must accept such differences with applied cultural sensitivity. Also, while task-related conflicts may help to surface different perspectives and viewpoints and provide opportunities for exploring innovation, relationship and process conflicts may affect team cohesiveness and have negative influences on team performances regardless of adhering to agreed governance principles. To produce the proper group member interaction across cultures, individuals must reflectively monitor their sensitivity to combinations of internally diverse and potentially contested ways of acting to create highly distinctive and desirable group behavior across cultural clusters. This research demonstrates the strength of the situating cultural theory, applies it to specific domains of globally distributed IT service operations and contributes to literature by generating an in-depth understanding of cultural influences on global IT alliances. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at Ohio Link ETD Center, http://www.ohiolink.edu/et
Biological Studies on Various Strains of Trypanosoma Avium
The purpose of this study was to further investigate avian trypanosomids, relative to the Magpie, Steller\u27s Jay, and Sparrowhawk, and to initiate work for a newer aspect of trypanosome study; the effects of radiation upon trypanosome growth in vitro
Spontaneous Isotropy Breaking: A Mechanism for CMB Multipole Alignments
We introduce a class of models in which statistical isotropy is broken
spontaneously in the CMB by a non-linear response to long-wavelength
fluctuations in a mediating field. These fluctuations appear as a gradient
locally and pick out a single preferred direction. The non-linear response
imprints this direction in a range of multipole moments. We consider two
manifestations of isotropy breaking: additive contributions and multiplicative
modulation of the intrinsic anisotropy. Since WMAP exhibits an alignment of
power deficits, an additive contribution is less likely to produce the observed
alignments than the usual isotropic fluctuations, a fact which we illustrate
with an explicit cosmological model of long-wavelength quintessence
fluctuations. This problem applies to other models involving foregrounds or
background anisotropy that seek to restore power to the CMB. Additive models
that account directly for the observed power exacerbate the low power of the
intrinsic fluctuations. Multiplicative models can overcome these difficulties.
We construct a proof of principle model that significantly improves the
likelihood and generates stronger alignments than WMAP in 30-45% of
realizations.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure
Testable polarization predictions for models of CMB isotropy anomalies
Anomalies in the large-scale CMB temperature sky measured by WMAP have been
suggested as possible evidence for a violation of statistical isotropy on large
scales. In any physical model for broken isotropy, there are testable
consequences for the CMB polarization field. We develop simulation tools for
predicting the polarization field in models that break statistical isotropy
locally through a modulation field. We study two different models: dipolar
modulation, invoked to explain the asymmetry in power between northern and
southern ecliptic hemispheres, and quadrupolar modulation, posited to explain
the alignments between the quadrupole and octopole. For the dipolar case, we
show that predictions for the correlation between the first 10 multipoles of
the temperature and polarization fields can typically be tested at better than
the 98% CL. For the quadrupolar case, we show that the polarization quadrupole
and octopole should be moderately aligned. Such an alignment is a generic
prediction of explanations which involve the temperature field at recombination
and thus discriminate against explanations involving foregrounds or local
secondary anisotropy. Predicted correlations between temperature and
polarization multipoles out to l = 5 provide tests at the ~ 99% CL or stronger
for quadrupolar models that make the temperature alignment more than a few
percent likely. As predictions of anomaly models, polarization statistics move
beyond the a posteriori inferences that currently dominate the field.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figures; published in PRD; references adde
Physical activity, academic and developmental measures in older primary school-children:A principal components analysis
Relationships between physical activity variables, developmental measures, socio-economic status, academic test scores, perceptual-motor tests and gender were examined for 261 year-six primary school students (137 females) with mean age = 12.3 years, SD = 0.3. Characteristics of child development were examined to identify those aspects most weighted towards academic performance. An exploratory principal components analysis with varimax rotation was undertaken. Principal components analysis showed that 59% of the variance in the data-set could be explained by four sub-types. Scores for perception of verticality of a rod against a tilted frame and for frontal plane semi-tandem dynamic postural stability loaded with scores for reading, writing, numeracy and socio-economic status on the first sub-type called the “Academic-Cognitive” component accounted for 22.24% of total variance with an eigenvalue of 3.3. Other components with Eigenvalues > 1 were “Pubescent Development”, “Fitness, Strength and Body Mass” and “Physical Activity and Motor Coordination”. The grouping of perceptual-motor and postural coordination tests with academic scores suggests possibilities for activities having synergy with academic performance and suggests further investigation to ascertain the extent of the associations
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