Home under siege: Bab al-Hara, televising morality and everyday life in the Levant

This PhD research investigates the role of television in representing the past and constructing an idealized society using a case study of a phenomenal Ramadan drama series, Bab el-Hara. The television drama, a Syrian production, was funded by the pan-Arab satellite conglomerate, the MBC group, and it is set in a fictitious Damascus of the 1930s under the French Mandate. The series, airing its seventh season in Ramadan, 2015, succeeded in achieving pan-Arab fame and gave a boost to the “Damascene Milieu” drama genre. The study approaches this television phenomenon ethnographically, looking at the fiction's implicatedness in the everyday life of viewers and makers in Damascus and in Beirut, through a multi-sited approach investigating content, context and agency, engaging in questions on space, morality and patriotism. The objective is to investigate audiences, text and makers as distinct yet connected sites of meaning. This context based analysis of Bab al-Hara takes place against the backdrop of 2010/2011; the liminal state of a Levant entering deeper into a complex local, regional and international power struggle. The everyday life of Bab al-Hara’s viewers was characterized by a general sense of loss and mistrust, and an unclear and threatened future. Contrastingly, Bab al-Hara provided the nostalgic promise of ontological security, grounded as it was in the courtyard houses of Old Damascus. The Damascene courtyard house constituted the spatial anchor for an idealized moral past, an ahistorical Damascusfocused Arab cultural history, and an imagination of the domestic as sovereign. It thus promoted a view of the neighbourly, the city and the country as a system based on kin, or the family, as the frame in which to understand the collectivity. Bab al-Hara's cultural, moral and spatial telos, a fusion of religious and nationalist worldviews, amongst others, is negotiated by Bab al-Hara’s viewers. The older generation, with situated experience of the social relations during the 1930s, and the younger generation that is appreciative of the virility of the “real” Bab al-Hara man that they no longer encounter in their everyday life. The multiple generational readings in regard to the absent idealized strength and authority, became a dominant reading in relation to chastity and unity as two idealized values that are necessary to conserve, but that are facing serious challenges in the everyday. Bab al-Hara idealizes a moral domestic society that is set in the past and it aims to advance a discourse on unity and patriotism. In so doing, however, it only exposes the weakness of the national project. The Syrian social upheaval in 2011 shows how unity and patriotism as the binaries to sectarianism and treason, have not succeeded in protecting the inner domain of the house from external invasions or internal divisions. In fact, accusations of treason, instead of forcing the outsider to the outside and building solidarity within, accentuates mistrust between the insiders and reveals the power and the limits of t h e Bab al-Hara imaginary of a kin based collectivity, and the omnipresence of imperialism

Proximal Multitask Learning over Networks with Sparsity-inducing Coregularization

In this work, we consider multitask learning problems where clusters of nodes are interested in estimating their own parameter vector. Cooperation among clusters is beneficial when the optimal models of adjacent clusters have a good number of similar entries. We propose a fully distributed algorithm for solving this problem. The approach relies on minimizing a global mean-square error criterion regularized by non-differentiable terms to promote cooperation among neighboring clusters. A general diffusion forward-backward splitting strategy is introduced. Then, it is specialized to the case of sparsity promoting regularizers. A closed-form expression for the proximal operator of a weighted sum of $\ell_1$-norms is derived to achieve higher efficiency. We also provide conditions on the step-sizes that ensure convergence of the algorithm in the mean and mean-square error sense. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the strategy

Quantum Electro and Chromodynamics treated by Thompson's heuristic approach

In this work we apply Thompson's method (of the dimensions and scales) to study some features of the Quantum Electro and Chromodynamics. This heuristic method can be considered as a simple and alternative way to the Renormalisation Group (R.G.) approach and when applied to QED-lagrangian is able to obtain in a first approximation both the running coupling constant behavior of alpha(mu) and the mass m(mu).The calculations are evaluated just at d_c=4, where d_c is the upper critical dimension of the problem, so that we obtain the logarithmic behavior both for the coupling alpha and the excess of mass Delta m on the energy scale mu. Although our results are well-known in the vast literature of field theories,it seems that one of the advantages of Thompson's method, beyond its simplicity is that it is able to extract directly from QED-lagrangian the physical (finite) behavior of alpha(mu) and m(mu), bypassing hard problems of divergences which normally appear in the conventional renormalisation schemes applied to field theories like QED. Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is also treated by the present method in order to obtain the quark condensate value. Besides this, the method is also able to evaluate the vacuum pressure at the boundary of the nucleon. This is done by assumming a step function behavior for the running coupling constant of the QCD, which fits nicely to some quantities related to the strong interaction evaluated through the MIT-bag model.Comment: RevTex, 25 pages, no figure

AA-cation control of magnetoelectric quadrupole order in AA(TiO)Cu4_4(PO4_4)4_4 (AA = Ba, Sr, and Pb)

Ferroic magnetic quadrupole order exhibiting macroscopic magnetoelectric activity is discovered in the novel compound $A$(TiO)Cu$_4$(PO$_4$)$_4$ with $A$ = Pb, which is in contrast with antiferroic quadrupole order observed in the isostructural compounds with $A$ = Ba and Sr. Unlike the famous lone-pair stereochemical activity which often triggers ferroelectricity as in PbTiO$_3$, the Pb$^{2+}$ cation in Pb(TiO)Cu$_4$(PO$_4$)$_4$ is stereochemically inactive but dramatically alters specific magnetic interactions and consequently switches the quadrupole order from antiferroic to ferroic. Our first-principles calculations uncover a positive correlation between the degree of $A$-O bond covalency and a stability of the ferroic quadrupole order.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

The productivity of Maize (Zea mays L.) Water using efficacy and Consumptive use under different Irrigation systems

Under conditions of freshwater scarcity in Iraq, farmers are looking to adopt more effective irrigation methods compared with conventional. In 2016 and 2017, a field experiment was performed over two years to evaluate optimal irrigation method for maize Zea mays L. production using a Randomized Completely Bloke Design RCBD with five irrigation furrow treatments I0, surface drip I1, and subsurface drip with three depths of emitter 10cm I2, 20 I3, and 30cm I4 respectively. These treatments were irrigated when 50- 55% of the available water was depleted; then, a sensor system was utilized to identify the required water amount to bring the soil in the crop root area to the capacity field. The results indicated that the consumptive water use of furrow 707.91 and 689.69 mm surface drip 558.65 and 529.66 mm and subsurface drip with emitter deep at 10 cm 400.38 and 380.83 mm, 20cm 313.93 and 293.50 mm and 30cm 345.61 and 325.28 mm for 2016 and 2017 respectively. Subsurface drip irrigation increases crop yield; the greatest yield grain was optioned under the treatment subsurface drip irrigation with 20 cm emitter depth and the lowest under surface drip irrigation

Development of An Analytical Method for Design of Electromagnetic Energy Harvesters with Planar Magnetic Arrays

In this paper, an analytical method is proposed for the modeling of electromagnetic energy harvesters (EMEH) with planar arrays of permanent magnets. It is shown that the proposed method can accurately simulate the generation of electrical power in an EMEH from the vibration of a bridge subjected to traffic loading. The EMEH consists of two parallel planar arrays of 5 by 5 small cubic permanent magnets (PMs) that are firmly attached to a solid aluminum base plate, and a thick rectangular copper coil that is connected to the base plate through a set of four springs. The coil can move relative to the two magnetic arrays when the base plate is subjected to an external excitation caused by the vehicles passing over the bridge. The proposed analytical model is used to formulize the magnetic interaction between the magnetic arrays and the moving coil and the electromechanical coupling between both the electrical and mechanical domains of the EMEH. A finite element model is developed to verify the accuracy of the proposed analytical model to compute the magnetic force acting on the coil. The analytical model is then used to conduct a parametric study on the magnetic arrays to optimize the arrangement of the PM poles, thereby maximize the electrical power outputted from the EMEH. The results of parametric analysis using the proposed analytical method show that the EMEH, under the resonant condition, can deliver an average electrical power as large as 500 mW when the PM poles are arranged alternately along the direction of vibration for a peak base acceleration of 0.1 g. A proof-of-concept prototype of the EMEH is fabricated to test its performance for a given arrangement of PMs subjected to vibration in both the lab and field environments. View Full-Tex

Dynamics of diffusive rough interfaces in inhomogeneous systems

We investigate the dynamics of interfaces growth in inhomogeneous systems. The description of the kinetics is based on the mean field master equation in terms of lattice gas model. The existence of repulsive interactions between nearest-neighbour particles creates an order in the system. We show that the order extension has an influence on the localisation of the diffusive interface called "the diffusion front" which delimits disordered region from ordered one. We analyze the time evolution of diffusion fronts by dynamic scaling approach and we find that the scaling behavior of these interfaces is characterized by anomalously large exponents which agree with the experimental and theoretical results.We investigate the dynamics of interfaces growth in inhomogeneous systems. The description of the kinetics is based on the mean field master equation in terms of lattice gas model. The existence of repulsive interactions between nearest-neighbour particles creates an order in the system. We show that the order extension has an influence on the localisation of the diffusive interface called "the diffusion front" which delimits disordered region from ordered one. We analyze the time evolution of diffusion fronts by dynamic scaling approach and we find that the scaling behavior of these interfaces is characterized by anomalously large exponents which agree with the experimental and theoretical results

Leader Perspectives on Managing Suicide-related Events in Garrison

Leaders who have personally experienced the aftermath of a suicide-related event can provide important lessons and recommendations for military leadership and policymakers. This paper executes a thematic analysis of interviews with leaders, chaplains, and behavioral health providers who responded to garrison suicide-related events and explores leader decision making related to memorials, investigations, and readiness