31,440 research outputs found
The Arrogant Eye and the French Prohibition of the Veil
Evânia Reich presents the argument that the veil laws in France—the banning of the full-face coverings in public and the banning of the headscarf in public schools—are consistent with the emancipatory project of French Laïcité. According to this argument, the veils that Muslim women wear are symbols of their oppression, whereas French education seeks to liberate each individual and Laïcité serves as a bulwark against the creeping oppressive influence of religion. Unveiling Muslim women, then, is an act of emancipation. In this essay, I argue that the view of French secularism as an emancipatory project to free women of the oppressive mechanism of the veil is an example of what Marilyn Frye calls the “arrogant eye.” In this essay, I offer an alternative approach on the veil following Frye’s notion of the “loving eye.
Helping Students Master Concepts in Mechanics by Graphing with Spreadsheets
An example of a curricular activity to help students master concepts in mechanics is presented. Students measure positions and times of movements using calculators, and construct graphs using spreadsheets. Students learn to connect concepts in mechanics and reinforce them following a spiral approach of increasing complexity. Comments from students about the activity are also presented
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Evaluation of the Linear Relationship Between Pulse Arrival Time and Blood Pressure in ICU Patients: Potential and Limitations
A variety of techniques based on the indirect measurement of blood pressure (BP) by Pulse Transit Time (PTT) have been explored over the past few years. Such an approach has the potential in providing continuous and non-invasive beat to beat blood pressure without the use of a cuff. Pulse Arrival Time (PAT) which includes the cardiac pre-ejection period has been proposed as a surrogate of PTT, however, the balance between its questioned accuracy and measurement simplicity has yet to be established. The present work assessed the degree of linear relationship between PAT and blood pressure on 96 h of continuous electrocardiography and invasive radial blood pressure waveforms in a group of 11 young ICU patients. Participants were selected according to strict exclusion criteria including no use of vasoactive medications and presence of clinical conditions associated with cardiovascular diseases. The average range of variation for diastolic BP was 60 to 79 mmHg while systolic BP varied between 123 and 158 mmHg in the study database. The overall Pearson correlation coefficient for systolic and diastolic blood pressure was −0.5 and −0.42, respectively, while the mean absolute error was 3.9 and 7.6 mmHg. It was concluded that the utilization of PAT for the continuous non-invasive blood pressure estimation is rather limited according to the experimental setup, nonetheless the correlation coefficient performed better when the range of variation of blood pressure was high over periods of 30 min suggesting that PAT has the potential to be used as indicator of changes relating to hypertensive or hypotensive episodes
Mean field theory of assortative networks of phase oscillators
Employing the Kuramoto model as an illustrative example, we show how the use
of the mean field approximation can be applied to large networks of phase
oscillators with assortativity. We then use the ansatz of Ott and Antonsen
[Chaos 19, 037113 (2008)] to reduce the mean field kinetic equations to a
system of ordinary differential equations. The resulting formulation is
illustrated by application to a network Kuramoto problem with degree
assortativity and correlation between the node degrees and the natural
oscillation frequencies. Good agreement is found between the solutions of the
reduced set of ordinary differential equations obtained from our theory and
full simulations of the system. These results highlight the ability of our
method to capture all the phase transitions (bifurcations) and system
attractors. One interesting result is that degree assortativity can induce
transitions from a steady macroscopic state to a temporally oscillating
macroscopic state through both (presumed) Hopf and SNIPER (saddle-node,
infinite period) bifurcations. Possible use of these techniques to a broad
class of phase oscillator network problems is discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
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