7,786 research outputs found
Drug Misuse: Taking a Narrative Approach as a Means of Exploring ‘Self-Change’
In this paper I explore the personal narrative of Jennifer; a woman who for the
past ten years had been using ‘hard’ drugs. When interviewed Jennifer had
been ‘sentenced’ to take part in an enforced treatment programme which aimed
to facilitate ‘self-change’. The concept of ‘self-change’ would appear to
convey a particular understanding of transitions, and changes in behaviour,
rooted in assumptions around motivation, cognition and internal forces. In the
research reported here the way in which someone ‘storied’ into a narrative of
‘self-change’ metaphorically represents her progress will be explored
Direct measurement of carbon-14 in carbon dioxide by liquid scintillation counting
Liquid scintillation counting technique is applied to the direct measurement of carbon-14 in carbon dioxide. This method has high counting efficiency and eliminates many of the basic problems encountered with previous techniques. The technique can be used to achieve a percent substitution reaction and is of interest as an analytical technique
Making sense?: The support of dispersed asylum seekers
Reforms of the system around the accommodation and support needs of asylum seekers entering the United Kingdom (UK), during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have meant that the support of asylum seekers has largely moved away from mainstream social work to be based within dedicated asylum support teams. This article investigates how the workers engaged as asylum support workers understand and make sense of their participation in the support of asylum seekers dispersed across the UK. By drawing upon qualitative research with asylum support workers this paper looks at how such workers make sense of their roles and how the ‘support’ of asylum seekers is conceived. The paper concludes that by working within this political and controversial area of work, workers are constantly finding ways to negotiate their support role within a dominant framework of control
Hypertableau Reasoning for Description Logics
We present a novel reasoning calculus for the description logic SHOIQ^+---a
knowledge representation formalism with applications in areas such as the
Semantic Web. Unnecessary nondeterminism and the construction of large models
are two primary sources of inefficiency in the tableau-based reasoning calculi
used in state-of-the-art reasoners. In order to reduce nondeterminism, we base
our calculus on hypertableau and hyperresolution calculi, which we extend with
a blocking condition to ensure termination. In order to reduce the size of the
constructed models, we introduce anywhere pairwise blocking. We also present an
improved nominal introduction rule that ensures termination in the presence of
nominals, inverse roles, and number restrictions---a combination of DL
constructs that has proven notoriously difficult to handle. Our implementation
shows significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art reasoners on
several well-known ontologies
An improved single-step lysis protocol to measure luciferase bioluminescence in Plasmodium falciparum
This report describes the optimization and evaluation of a simple single-step lysis protocol to measure luciferase bioluminescence from genetically modified Plasmodium falciparum. This protocol utilizes a modified commercial buffer to improve speed of assay and consistency in the bioluminescence signal measured by reducing the manipulation steps required to release the cytoplasmic fraction. The utility of this improved assay protocol is demonstrated in typical assays that explore absolute and temporal gene expression activity
Practical Reasoning for Very Expressive Description Logics
Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms
mainly characterised by constructors to build complex concepts and roles from
atomic ones. Expressive role constructors are important in many applications,
but can be computationally problematical. We present an algorithm that decides
satisfiability of the DL ALC extended with transitive and inverse roles and
functional restrictions with respect to general concept inclusion axioms and
role hierarchies; early experiments indicate that this algorithm is well-suited
for implementation. Additionally, we show that ALC extended with just
transitive and inverse roles is still in PSPACE. We investigate the limits of
decidability for this family of DLs, showing that relaxing the constraints
placed on the kinds of roles used in number restrictions leads to the
undecidability of all inference problems. Finally, we describe a number of
optimisation techniques that are crucial in obtaining implementations of the
decision procedures, which, despite the worst-case complexity of the problem,
exhibit good performance with real-life problems
Recent development in organic scintillators
Discussion on recent developments of organic scintillators includes studies of organic compounds that form glass-like masses which scintillate and are stable at room temperature, correlations between molecular structure of organic scintillators and self-quenching, recently developed fast scintillators, and applications of liquid-scintillation counters
Combining Rewriting and Incremental Materialisation Maintenance for Datalog Programs with Equality
Materialisation precomputes all consequences of a set of facts and a datalog
program so that queries can be evaluated directly (i.e., independently from the
program). Rewriting optimises materialisation for datalog programs with
equality by replacing all equal constants with a single representative; and
incremental maintenance algorithms can efficiently update a materialisation for
small changes in the input facts. Both techniques are critical to practical
applicability of datalog systems; however, we are unaware of an approach that
combines rewriting and incremental maintenance. In this paper we present the
first such combination, and we show empirically that it can speed up updates by
several orders of magnitude compared to using either rewriting or incremental
maintenance in isolation.Comment: All proofs contained in the appendix. 7 pages + 4 pages appendix. 7
algorithms and one table with evaluation result
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