Hearing the voices of young women: interpreting teenage pregnancy narratives individually and collectively.

Teenage pregnancy has been the subject of policy development over the lifetime of the current British government. Viewed from an overwhelmingly negative standpoint, young parenthood is recognised as a feature of impoverished communities while policies focus on technical and educational „solutions‟ to reduce the levels of conceptions to under-eighteens in these areas. This thesis aims to explore the processes which lead to early pregnancy and parenthood, informed by a narrative research perspective. Guided by the noted absence in the literature of research that attends to the contextualised experiences of young women who become pregnant, this research was undertaken to listen to the experiences of a small group of young women within individual interviews. The research question asked what the meaning of pregnancy was for young women who had become pregnant at an age considered „early‟. The analysis of qualitative material obtained from two research sites found that childhood experiences and individual adversity were the structuring features of most of the narratives obtained from the young women who had become pregnant. The narratives related to motherhood were interpreted as having a temporal quality, that is to say that the dimension of time was relevant to the behaviour of the young women in that they appeared to be „in a hurry‟ in relation to becoming romantically attached and achieving pregnancy, even where pregnancy was not actively planned or desired at that time. Furthermore, the narratives revealed a highly restorative aspect to pregnancy and motherhood that was connected to overcoming earlier adversity and childhood experiences, where sufficient support was available. In conclusion, these temporal and restorative aspects appear to be in dynamic relation to each other and suggest a meaning for early pregnancy and parenthood for young women that is at odds with current policy directions

Provenance history of a Late Triassic-Jurassic Gondwana margin forearc basin, Murihiku Terrane, North Island, New Zealand: petrographic and geochemical constraints

The Murihiku Terrane in the North Island was a forearc basin adjacent to a volcanic arc along the eastern margin of Gondwana during the Mesozoic. The rocks that infill the basin are mainly volcaniclastic sandstones and mudstones, often turbiditic, with sparse shellbeds, rhyolitic tuffs, carbonaceous sandstones, plant beds, concretionary horizons, and rare thick granitoid-rich conglomerates. Petrographic studies of the rock fragments in the sandstones show that andesites are the dominant lithic type, but there is a wide range of other lithologies, including dacites, rhyolites, ignimbrites, granitoids, quartzofeldspathic mica schists, rare amphibolites, and reworked mudstones and sandstones. The sandstones are texturally and mineralogically immature and suggest deposition relatively close to a source of high relief, undergoing physical rather than chemical weathering in cool- to cold-temperate conditions. Geochemical analyses of 67 whole-rock volcaniclastic sandstones and siltstones indicate that they were derived from an active and dissected volcanic arc in a convergent margin setting built upon relatively thin continental crust. Modal petrographic data and whole-rock geochemistry both confirm that there were systematic variations with time in the composition of clastic material being supplied to the basin. From the Late Triassic to Middle Jurassic, there was a decrease in silicic volcanic material, plutonics, and metamorphics, and an increase in the supply of andesitic detritus. This was followed in the Late Jurassic by a broader range of volcanic detritus, varying from basaltic andesite to rhyolite, which may have been caused by progressive extension of the volcanic arc and thinning of the crust, a precursor to the breakup of Gondwana in the Early-Middle Cretaceous. Comparison with the Southland segment of the Murihiku Terrane in the South Island suggests that there were significant along-arc source variations, with relatively less silicic but greater andesitic and continental crust contributions in the North Island than in Southland. This may be analogous to the modern Taupo-Kermadec arc where there is a south-north along-arc transition from a continental to an oceanic arc

End-to-End QoS Support for a Medical Grid Service Infrastructure

Quality of Service support is an important prerequisite for the adoption of Grid technologies for medical applications. The GEMSS Grid infrastructure addressed this issue by offering end-to-end QoS in the form of explicit timeliness guarantees for compute-intensive medical simulation services. Within GEMSS, parallel applications installed on clusters or other HPC hardware may be exposed as QoS-aware Grid services for which clients may dynamically negotiate QoS constraints with respect to response time and price using Service Level Agreements. The GEMSS infrastructure and middleware is based on standard Web services technology and relies on a reservation based approach to QoS coupled with application specific performance models. In this paper we present an overview of the GEMSS infrastructure, describe the available QoS and security mechanisms, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with a Grid-enabled medical imaging service

A floor sensor system for gait recognition

This paper describes the development of a prototype floor sensor as a gait recognition system. This could eventually find deployment as a standalone system (eg. a burglar alarm system) or as part of a multimodal biometric system. The new sensor consists of 1536 individual sensors arranged in a 3 m by 0.5 m rectangular strip with an individual sensor area of 3 cm2. The sensor floor operates at a sample rate of 22 Hz. The sensor itself uses a simple design inspired by computer keyboards and is made from low cost, off the shelf materials. Application of the sensor floor to a small database of 15 individuals was performed. Three features were extracted : stride length, stride cadence, and time on toe to time on heel ratio. Two of these measures have been used in video based gait recognition while the third is new to this analysis. These features proved sufficient to achieve an 80 % recognition rate

A linearized theory method of constrained optimization for supersonic cruise wing design

A linearized theory wing design and optimization procedure which allows physical realism and practical considerations to be imposed as constraints on the optimum (least drag due to lift) solution is discussed and examples of application are presented. In addition to the usual constraints on lift and pitching moment, constraints are imposed on wing surface ordinates and wing upper surface pressure levels and gradients. The design procedure also provides the capability of including directly in the optimization process the effects of other aircraft components such as a fuselage, canards, and nacelles

Academic Support at Leeds Metropolitan Library

Leeds Metropolitan’s Library Academic Support Stream is made up of Academic Librarians and Information Services Librarians who provide academic support to the university’s six faculties. The team use innovative methods of working together to engage students and enhance their experience. The team only formed a year ago so this is a good time to reflect on our success so far. The library service at Leeds Met is continually developing and offers new challenges and opportunities for staff providing library academic support. Innovation has even become part of our new name – ‘Libraries and Learning Innovation’. We still offer all the traditions types of library academic support, but there is an increasing emphasis on finding innovative ways of supporting students and publicising what we can offer. This year the Library Academic Support Stream won a University Attitude Character and Talents Award for Future Focus

Vision-Based Production of Personalized Video

In this paper we present a novel vision-based system for the automated production of personalised video souvenirs for visitors in leisure and cultural heritage venues. Visitors are visually identified and tracked through a camera network. The system produces a personalized DVD souvenir at the end of a visitor’s stay allowing visitors to relive their experiences. We analyze how we identify visitors by fusing facial and body features, how we track visitors, how the tracker recovers from failures due to occlusions, as well as how we annotate and compile the final product. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Father Conmee\u27s Dublin : the urban pastoral of Wandering Rocks

This paper has two theses: the first is that Jonathan Swift\u27s A Description of the Morning is a source for the Wandering Rocks chapter in Ulysses; the second is that the pastoral convention used in the poem manifests itself in Wandering Rocks through Father Conmee and reveals his inability to comprehend the problems of working-class Dublin. The introduction defines terms and methodologies used to construct the argument; two central concepts are what has historically constituted the pastoral and Louis Althusser\u27s definitions of ideology and interpellation in his essay, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. The introduction also establishes a foundation for the relationship between Swift and Joyce with support such as previous scholarship, Joyce\u27s notes in Swift\u27s biography, and thematic links between their texts. Chapter one is a close textual comparison between A Description of the Morning and Wandering Rocks. I argue that there are four effects that Joyce borrowed from the poem: a mechanic simultaneity of action; an objective rendering of detail that misleads readers; images and characters that Joyce develops into scenarios; and the repetition of particular sound effects. Evidence from both texts is offered in support of al claims and culminates in perhaps the most significant affinity between the two works: the paralysis of the city. Chapter two argues that Swift and Joyce restore the element of social protest to pastoral that had been excised in the Renaissance. For example, the incongruity between form and content in the poem makes evident that sentimentalizing the lives of poor people only dismisses real hardship. In Joyce\u27s chapter Father Conmee views the unemployment and poverty of Dublin through a pastoral perspective that renders them idyllic. Using Althusser\u27s conception of ideology and interpellation, I argue that Conmee maintains his ideologically dominant position through the interpellations of other Dubliners and Joyce\u27s text, and Dubliner’s defer to Father Conmee because he is in a position to define them