2,001 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Doing food security in practice: seeds, seed banking and preparations for the future
This thesis is about the banking of the seeds of food plants. It considers the practices and politics of that banking in order to understand its contribution to future food security scenarios. The thesis expands upon existing literature to provide new analytical and empirical insights into the preservation of biological materials. It does so by examining how practices undertaken in seed bank settings function to make seeds into materials of use to food security practitioners; an outcome which is achieved by the incorporation of banked seed into the framework of plant genetic resources. The thesis also contributes to knowledge on food security, by examining the function of those plant genetic resources within the food security milieu. First, the temporalities engendered by seed banking are analysed. Here, it is argued that seed banking assists in enhancing food security by acting as a mechanism which folds the plant genetic resource materials of the past and future together through work undertaken in the present. Second, the material politics of plant genetic resource preservation in a food security setting are explored, and a case is made for a framework by which seed may be banked "well"; a framework which is hinged on seed materiality. Overall, the thesis makes two key claims. First, that food security should not be regarded as a state that can be reached, but rather as an ongoing process of strengthening the food system as a whole. Second, that seeds must be regarded as materials with agency in seed banking practice, agency which impacts upon the practice of seed banking itself and on the wider political setting of that practice
Recommended from our members
Smart Cities and M<sup>3</sup>: Rapid Research, Meaningful Metrics and Co-Design
The research described in this paper is undertaken under the banner of the smart city, a concept that captures the way urban spaces are re-made by the incursion of new technology. Much of smart is centred on converting everyday activities into data, and using this data to generate knowledge mediated by technology. Ordinary citizens, those that may have their lives impacted by the technology, usually are not properly involved in the ‘smartification’ process. Their perceptions, concerns and expectations should inform the conception and development of smart technologies at the same extent. How to engage general public with smart cities research is the central challenge for the Making Metrics Meaningful (MMM) project. Applying a rapid participatory method, ‘Imagine’ over a five-month period (March – July) the research sought to gain insights from the general public into novel forms of information system innovation. This brief paper describes the nature of the accelerated research undertaken and explores some of the themes which emerged in the analysis. Generic themes, beyond the remit of an explicit transport focus, are developed and pointers towards further research directions are discussed. Participatory methods, including engaging with self- selected transport users actively through both picture creation and programmatically specific musical ‘signatures’ as well as group discussion, were found to be effective in eliciting users’ own concerns, needs and ideas for novel information systems
Religion as practices of attachment and materiality: the making of Buddhism in contemporary London
This article aims to explore Buddhism’s often-overlooked presence on London’s urban landscape, showing how its quietness and subtlety of approach has allowed the faith to grow largely beneath the radar. It argues that Buddhism makes claims to urban space in much the same way as it produces its faith, being as much about the practices performed and the spaces where they are enacted as it is about faith or beliefs. The research across a number of Buddhist sites in London reveals that number of people declaring themselves as Buddhists has indeed risen in recent years, following the rise of other non-traditional religions in the UK; however, this research suggests that Buddhism differs from these in several ways. Drawing on Baumann’s (2002) distinction between traditionalist and modernist approaches to Buddhism, our research reveals a growth in each of these. Nevertheless, Buddhism remains largely invisible in the urban and suburban landscape of London, adapting buildings that are already in place, with little material impact on the built environment, and has thus been less subject to contestation than other religious movements and traditions. This research contributes to a growing literature which foregrounds the importance of religion in making contemporary urban and social worlds
Using Big Data Technologies for HEP Analysis
The HEP community is approaching an era were the excellent performances of
the particle accelerators in delivering collision at high rate will force the
experiments to record a large amount of information. The growing size of the
datasets could potentially become a limiting factor in the capability to
produce scientific results timely and efficiently. Recently, new technologies
and new approaches have been developed in industry to answer to the necessity
to retrieve information as quickly as possible to analyze PB and EB datasets.
Providing the scientists with these modern computing tools will lead to
rethinking the principles of data analysis in HEP, making the overall
scientific process faster and smoother.
In this paper, we are presenting the latest developments and the most recent
results on the usage of Apache Spark for HEP analysis. The study aims at
evaluating the efficiency of the application of the new tools both
quantitatively, by measuring the performances, and qualitatively, focusing on
the user experience. The first goal is achieved by developing a data reduction
facility: working together with CERN Openlab and Intel, CMS replicates a real
physics search using Spark-based technologies, with the ambition of reducing 1
PB of public data in 5 hours, collected by the CMS experiment, to 1 TB of data
in a format suitable for physics analysis.
The second goal is achieved by implementing multiple physics use-cases in
Apache Spark using as input preprocessed datasets derived from official CMS
data and simulation. By performing different end-analyses up to the publication
plots on different hardware, feasibility, usability and portability are
compared to the ones of a traditional ROOT-based workflow
Recommended from our members
Reply to: New Meta- and Mega-analyses of Magnetic Resonance Imaging Findings in Schizophrenia: Do They Really Increase Our Knowledge About the Nature of the Disease Process?
This work was supported by National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering Grant No. U54EB020403 (to the ENIGMA consortium)
Search for charged Higgs decays of the top quark using hadronic tau decays
We present the result of a search for charged Higgs decays of the top quark,
produced in collisions at 1.8 TeV. When the charged
Higgs is heavy and decays to a tau lepton, which subsequently decays
hadronically, the resulting events have a unique signature: large missing
transverse energy and the low-charged-multiplicity tau. Data collected in the
period 1992-1993 at the Collider Detector at Fermilab, corresponding to
18.70.7~pb, exclude new regions of combined top quark and charged
Higgs mass, in extensions to the standard model with two Higgs doublets.Comment: uuencoded, gzipped tar file of LaTeX and 6 Postscript figures; 11 pp;
submitted to Phys. Rev.
Inclusive jet cross section in collisions at TeV
The inclusive jet differential cross section has been measured for jet
transverse energies, , from 15 to 440 GeV, in the pseudorapidity region
0.10.7. The results are based on 19.5 pb of data
collected by the CDF collaboration at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The data
are compared with QCD predictions for various sets of parton distribution
functions. The cross section for jets with GeV is significantly
higher than current predictions based on O() perturbative QCD
calculations. Various possible explanations for the high- excess are
discussed.Comment: 8 pages with 2 eps uu-encoded figures Submitted to Physical Review
Letter
Measurement of the Bottom-Strange Meson Mixing Phase in the Full CDF Data Set
We report a measurement of the bottom-strange meson mixing phase \beta_s
using the time evolution of B0_s -> J/\psi (->\mu+\mu-) \phi (-> K+ K-) decays
in which the quark-flavor content of the bottom-strange meson is identified at
production. This measurement uses the full data set of proton-antiproton
collisions at sqrt(s)= 1.96 TeV collected by the Collider Detector experiment
at the Fermilab Tevatron, corresponding to 9.6 fb-1 of integrated luminosity.
We report confidence regions in the two-dimensional space of \beta_s and the
B0_s decay-width difference \Delta\Gamma_s, and measure \beta_s in [-\pi/2,
-1.51] U [-0.06, 0.30] U [1.26, \pi/2] at the 68% confidence level, in
agreement with the standard model expectation. Assuming the standard model
value of \beta_s, we also determine \Delta\Gamma_s = 0.068 +- 0.026 (stat) +-
0.009 (syst) ps-1 and the mean B0_s lifetime, \tau_s = 1.528 +- 0.019 (stat) +-
0.009 (syst) ps, which are consistent and competitive with determinations by
other experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Phys. Rev. Lett 109, 171802 (2012
Search for supersymmetry in events with b-quark jets and missing transverse energy in pp collisions at 7 TeV
Results are presented from a search for physics beyond the standard model
based on events with large missing transverse energy, at least three jets, and
at least one, two, or three b-quark jets. The study is performed using a sample
of proton-proton collision data collected at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the CMS
detector at the LHC in 2011. The integrated luminosity of the sample is 4.98
inverse femtobarns. The observed number of events is found to be consistent
with the standard model expectation, which is evaluated using control samples
in the data. The results are used to constrain cross sections for the
production of supersymmetric particles decaying to b-quark-enriched final
states in the context of simplified model spectra.Comment: Submitted to Physical Review
Interaction of the gp120 V1V2 loop with a neighboring gp120 unit shields the HIV envelope trimer against cross-neutralizing antibodies
Structure–function analysis and mathematical modeling reveal insight into the mechanisms through which conserved HIV-1 gp120 epitopes are masked in the HIV-1 envelope trimer
- …