Gap Year Saviours - An Analysis of the Role of Race in an Advertisement for Development Volunteering

The issues of race and ethnicity are taboo in the realm of development. By critically analysing a representation of race and ethnicity in an advertisement for an international development agency, this paper seeks to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. The paper examines the reduction of the racial identity through the process of stereotyping, the commodification of vulnerable children from the devloping world through the hidden language of race and the construction of the development worker as a ‘white saviour’ through the depiction of volunteers as ‘rescuers’. The aim of this paper is not to simply dismiss the actions of development workers as inherently racist; rather it concludes that race and development are inextricably linked. A discussion of this relationship is necessary to break its taboo in development praxis

Novel methods for multi-view learning with applications in cyber security

Modern data is complex. It exists in many different forms, shapes and kinds. Vectors, graphs, histograms, sets, intervals, etc.: they each have distinct and varied structural properties. Tailoring models to the characteristics of various feature representations has been the subject of considerable research. In this thesis, we address the challenge of learning from data that is described by multiple heterogeneous feature representations. This situation arises often in cyber security contexts. Data from a computer network can be represented by a graph of user authentications, a time series of network traffic, a tree of process events, etc. Each representation provides a complementary view of the holistic state of the network, and so data of this type is referred to as multi-view data. Our motivating problem in cyber security is anomaly detection: identifying unusual observations in a joint feature space, which may not appear anomalous marginally. Our contributions include the development of novel supervised and unsupervised methods, which are applicable not only to cyber security but to multi-view data in general. We extend the generalised linear model to operate in a vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space implied by an operator-valued kernel function, which can be tailored to the structural characteristics of multiple views of data. This is a highly flexible algorithm, able to predict a wide variety of response types. A distinguishing feature is the ability to simultaneously identify outlier observations with respect to the fitted model. Our proposed unsupervised learning model extends multidimensional scaling to directly map multi-view data into a shared latent space. This vector embedding captures both commonalities and disparities that exist between multiple views of the data. Throughout the thesis, we demonstrate our models using real-world cyber security datasets.Open Acces

The ends of slavery in Barotseland, Western Zambia (c.1800-1925)

This thesis is primarily an attempt at an economic history of slavery in Barotseland, the Lozi kingdom that once dominated the Upper Zambezi floodplain, in what is now Zambia’s Western Province. Slavery is a word that resonates in the minds of many when they think of Africa in the nineteenth century, but for the most part in association with the brutalities of the international slave trades. In the popular imagination and academia, the functions and significance of slavery in Central Africa have received scant attention. Moreover, Central African bondage, in the form of ‘lineage’ or ‘domestic’ slavery, has long been considered more benign than that practised elsewhere on the continent. For too long have these assumptions, rooted in both colonial and functionalist misunderstandings, clouded our understanding of the realities of slavery in pre-colonial Central Africa. One of the central purposes of this thesis therefore is to demonstrate not only the inapplicability of this outmoded paradigm to Barotseland, but of its blanket application to Central Africa as a whole. The thesis is presented in three substantive parts. In the first, following the introduction, a methodological chapter reflects on the challenges involved in researching slavery. That is followed by a historiographical survey, which locates the thesis within a broader intellectual landscape. The second part commences with a study of the ecology of the Upper Zambezi and its floodplain, the heartland of the pre-colonial kingdom, elucidating geology, climate, flora and fauna, before reflecting on the interactions of environment and human agency in the history of the region’s peoples. The chapter following traces the evolution of the Lozi state and the political history of the kingdom up to the 1870s, developing the argument that slavery was central to the turbulent nineteenth-century in the floodplain. The subsequent chapter, on the place of slavery in Lozi society, continues the argument, presenting a new understanding of the meaning of Lozi slavery. The third part of the thesis consists of three consecutive narrative chapters. The first of these opens in 1878. Besides charting a time of intrigue and rebellion and early colonial intrusions, it explores in depth the development of a vast programme of public works with the view to foregrounding both the economic significance of Lozi slavery and its fundamentally exploitative nature. The second narrative chapter begins in 1897, on the eve of the colonial era, and follows the events which led to the formal abolition of slavery in 1906 and the shifting balance of personal, political and economic power which underpinned it. The final chapter charts the slow decline of slavery over the next two decades. The long persistence of Lozi slavery, it is here argued, speaks volumes for its former centrality to both the Lozi economy and to Lozi understandings of their society and themselves

A4_2 How Many Lies Could Pinocchio Tell?

The 1940 animated lm `Pinocchio' tells the story of a puppet who, having been brought magically to life, finds that his nose grows whenever he tells a lie. In this paper, we attempt to determine the effect that this growth might have on Pinocchio's balance. By comparing Pinocchio's apparent size to that of his creator, Geppetto, we estimate his approximate dimensions. We then examine the rate of growth of his nose as shown in the film and calculate the displacement of his centre of mass from its original position after each successive lie he tells. Based on this, we then determine that the maximum number of lies Pinocchio can tell without compromising his balance is five

A4_7 Would The Odyssey Fly?

The feasibility of the Odyssey being used as a hot air balloon is assessed. The buoyancy force required to lift the Odyssey off the ground is calculated to be 7.051 ×10^6 N , meaning the density of the heated air inside the balloon would need to be -14.97 kgm −3 . This means the Odyssey would not be able to fly, if it were acting as a hot air balloon

A4_3 The Great Flood

The Great Flood is a biblical event, said to have occured to cleanse the Earth. The magnitude of this flood and the disasterous affect it would have are explored and it is found 3.875 × 10 18 m 3 of water is needed to fill the Earth to the height of Mount Everest. It is found the temperature of the Earth would increase greatly due to the lower albedo of the planet and the increase in greenhouse gases

A4_1 How Hungry Was The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

The very hungry caterpillar follows the story of a caterpillar on its journey from hatching to becoming a butterfly. Over the course of a week the caterpillar eats through a variety of foods, by approximating the caterpillar as a sphere the final mass of the caterpillar was calculated to be 1849g with a radius of 68.3mm.By extrapolating data of the mass of butterflies versus their wing length, the wing length of the butterfly created by the caterpillar was calculated to be 55m, approximately the same size as a Boeing 747 [6]

A4_8 How To Float

In this paper, we resolve the vertical forces acting on a 70 kg person to determine that if their lungs are entirely full of helium gas they would feel between 5.24 - 8.73 grams lighter; this is assuming that their surroundings are at a temperature of 20 ◦C and at a pressure of 1 atm. Taking the density of a human body to be 1010 kgm−3 [1], we also calculate that in order to be lifted upwards in air, they must inhale a volume of 129 m3 of helium gas. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of inhaling helium gas as a means to achieve the ability to reach suspension in air.

A4_9 Buffalo Wings

'Buffalo wings' are a popular type of fried chicken wings. In this paper we examine the differencein size between these wings and the hypothetical wings that an actual buffalo would need in orderto be able to fly. Using a fixed wing approximation, we determine that to produce suffcient lift abuffalo would need a pair of wings 31 times larger than those of a chicken, or 31 separate pairs ofchicken-sized wings