Resurgence and convergence : religion and development, with a focus on social capital among Akha in North Thailand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Philosophy in Development Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North Campus, New Zealand

This Masters thesis research aims to contribute to the fledgling body of development industry literature that seriously considers the intersect of science, religion, and development. Religion is gaining recognition as an important aspect of development processes; previous neglect of it has been cited as one reason for the failure of many development efforts. An evolutionary framework would suggest the interaction of the large human movements of religion and the development industry would inevitably include resurgence of religion, sometimes in unfamiliar forms, along with religion's convergence with development, both among societies generally as they evolve into multiple modernities, and through interactions specific to the development industry and religion. This thesis identifies and discusses these trends and interactions with reference to improving development research and practice. Having demonstrated that religion does matter for development, I go on to show how it matters in one instance. This thesis assesses the potentials and limitations of one indigenous religion's ritual practices for creating and maintaining social capital among an indicative sample group of people who have experienced dislocation resulting from development. Fieldwork using primarily qualitative methods was among Akha hilltribe people living in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, with a focus, though not exclusively, on those living in slums. Findings indicate that among city Akha. their religious ritual has lost the primary role it previously occupied in Akha villages as a social capital generator. However, further analysis suggests Akhas' religious experience predisposes them to conversion to access the social capital evident among Christian Akha in Chiang Mai, and that through this process is occurring a negotiation of convergence between Akha religion and modernising forces which will affect all Akha. I conclude that both the identified wider trends and context-specific example of religion- development interaction demonstrate the value in development practitioners and theorists moving towards understanding and applying a non-instrumental valuing of religion

Predicting User-Interactions on Reddit

In order to keep up with the demand of curating the deluge of crowd-sourced content, social media platforms leverage user interaction feedback to make decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User interactions such as likes, votes, clicks, and views are assumed to be a proxy of a content's quality, popularity, or news-worthiness. In this paper we ask: how predictable are the interactions of a user on social media? To answer this question we recorded the clicking, browsing, and voting behavior of 186 Reddit users over a year. We present interesting descriptive statistics about their combined 339,270 interactions, and we find that relatively simple models are able to predict users' individual browse- or vote-interactions with reasonable accuracy.Comment: Presented at ASONAM 201

Single pilot scanning behavior in simulated instrument flight

A simulation of tasks associated with single pilot general aviation flight under instrument flight rules was conducted as a baseline for future research studies on advanced flight controls and avionics. The tasks, ranging from simple climbs and turns to an instrument landing systems approach, were flown on a fixed base simulator. During the simulation the control inputs, state variables, and the pilots visual scan pattern including point of regard were measured and recorded

Decay channels and charmonium mass-shifts

The discovery in the last few years of the $X, Y$ and $Z$ states of the extended charmonium family has highlighted the importance of the closeness of decay channels to an understanding of these mesons. We aid this debate by illustrating a simple calculational procedure for including the effect of open and nearby closed channels.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures Revised version: (1) corrected 2 typos in Table II, (2) additional text in penultimate paragraph to clarify the calculation of mass-shifts for $\eta_c'$ and $\eta_c"$. We thank colleagues for pointing out confusing wording of previous tex

Systems simulations supporting NASA telerobotics

Two simulation and analysis environments have been developed to support telerobotics research at the Langley Research Center. One is a high-fidelity, nonreal-time, interactive model called ROBSIM, which combines user-generated models of workspace environment, robots, and loads into a working system and simulates the interaction among the system components. Models include user-specified actuator, sensor, and control parameters, as well as kinematic and dynamic characteristics. Kinematic, dynamic, and response analyses can be selected, with system configuration, task trajectories, and arm states displayed using computer graphics. The second environment is a real-time, manned Telerobotic Systems Simulation (TRSS) which uses the facilities of the Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory (ISRL). It utilizes a hierarchical structure of functionally distributed computers communicating over both parallel and high-speed serial data paths to enable studies of advanced telerobotic systems. Multiple processes perform motion planning, operator communications, forward and inverse kinematics, control/sensor fusion, and I/O processing while communicating via common memory. Both ROBSIM and TRSS, including their capability, status, and future plans are discussed. Also described is the architecture of ISRL and recent telerobotic system studies in ISRL

Research and education in management of large- scale technical programs. Appendix A - Uses and misuses of computers in urban affairs. Appendix B - Build, a community development simulation game. Appendix C - Urban simulation and gaming, preliminary experience and perspectives. Appendix D - Public attitudes toward programs of large- scale technological change, some reflections and policy prescriptions Semiannual progress report

Research and education in management of large scale technical programs - computers in urban affair

Structure of the lightest scalar meson from the 1/Nc expansion of Unitarized Chiral Perturbation Theory and Regge Theory

One-loop unitarized Chiral Perturbation Theory (UChPT) calculations, suggest a different Nc behaviour for the sigma or f_0(600) and rho(770) mesons: while the rho meson becomes narrower with Nc, as is expected for a q-qbar meson, the sigma becomes broader, and its contribution to the total cross section is less and less important. On the other hand, local duality requires a cancellation between the sigma and rho amplitudes, but if there is a different Nc behaviour for them, there is a possible contradiction between the Inverse Amplitude Method (IAM) and local duality for large Nc. However, next to next to leading order UChPT calculations suggested a subdominant q-qbar component for the sigma with a mass around 1.2 GeV. In this work, we show that this subdominant q-qbar component is indeed needed to ensure local duality.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the Hadron09 International Conference. 29th Nov-4th Dec. 2009. Tallahassee, FL, USA. 5 page

The preparation, identification and properties of chlorophyll derivatives

In the investigation of 10-hydroxy chlorophylls a and b novel techniques included modification of chromatography and the use of fully-deuterated compounds isolated from fully-deuterated autotropic algae to determine the molecular structure of the chlorophylls

Finite temperature QED3 with light fermions

Non-compact QED3 is simulated both in the quenched and unquenched cases. In particular, we investigate the restoration of chiral symmetry at finite temperature. We also compute the zero temperature spectrum of the theory, including (in the quenched case) the dynamical fermion mass. From these two set of data, one can obtain estimates for the ratio of the mass gap to the critical temperature, of particular interest for applications to high-Tc superconductivity.Comment: talk given at lattice'92, 3 LaTeX pages (using espcrc.sty), figures available upon reques