28,027 research outputs found
Domestic Imperialism: The reversal of Fanon
BSTRACT
Frantz Fanon’s works have been invaluable in the analysis of colonies and the
colonized subject’s mentality therein, but an analysis of the colonial power
itself has been largely left to the wayside. The aim of this paper is to explicate
a key element of Fanon’s theoretical framework, the metropolis/periphery
dichotomy, then, using the writings of Huey P. Newton and Stokely
Carmichael, among others, show its reversal within the colonial power. I
will analyze this reversal in three ways: first, the reversal of the relationship
between, and the roles of, the metropolis and periphery; second, the role of
police and the differences between the colonial police and the police within
the colonial power; and third, the modified role of prisons within the
colonial power
Generating and evaluating a novel genetic resource in wheat in diverse environments
The principal objective of the project is to develop composite cross populations of wheat based on a wide range of key parent varieties. The parents will be selected partly on past knowledge of successful performance in terms of yield, quality and disease resistance and partly on the basis of molecular ancestry to try to ensure as wide range of diversity as possible. Following parental inter-crossing in all possible combinations, progeny population samples will be exposed to a range of widely different agricultural environments and systems through several seasons of, largely, natural selection. Performance of the population samples will be compared at different stages against both the parents grown as pure stands and as physical mixtures.
Our objective is to increase the sustainability and competitiveness of organic and other extensive farming systems by developing genetically diverse wheat populations that will respond rapidly to on-farm selection for improved productivity and yield. It is well established that modern varieties of wheat perform poorly under the conditions and management options encountered in organic farming systems. This is due to a number of factors including poor competition against weeds, narrow resistance against pests and disease, inability to efficiently utilise soil bound nutrients and the lack of genetic flexibility to buffer against environmental variation. To develop a conventional, new wheat breeding programme, from start to release of adapted varieties, would take many years. The approach we propose can deliver this material quickly. This will be achieved through the production of appropriate composite-cross populations of winter wheat.
The research will provide material adapted to basic organic conditions that can then be further selected on-farm. This will also be of benefit to non-organic farms as the populations will posses broad resistance to pests and disease and improved competitive ability against weeds, so minimising the need for crop protection inputs. The research will deliver a unique insight into the evolution of genetically diverse wheat populations, under a diverse range of environments, which will allow the elucidation of gene x environment interactions. In addition, it will provide information on the characters of winter wheat that confer improved productivity under a diversity of environmental conditions. Samples of the resulting winter wheat composite cross populations will be placed in the gene bank at the John Innes Centre.
Overall objective:
To increase the sustainability and competitiveness of both non-organic and organic farming systems by developing genetically diverse wheat populations that will respond rapidly to on-farm selection for improved productivity and yield.
1. To generate six distinct, highly heterogeneous composite-cross populations of winter wheat for further development and selection. The populations will comprise; one with parental material selected for good milling potential, one with parents selected for high yield potential and one comprising both sets of parent material. Each of these populations will then be split to either include or exclude heritable male sterility.
2. To evaluate the performance and evolution of composite-cross populations over time under a diverse range of environmental conditions and identify characteristics that confer improved productivity in these environments.
3. To track the genetic changes that accompany selection, so providing a better understanding of the assemblages of traits that underlie improved productivity in diverse environments.
4. To provide genetically diverse crop material for further selection by farmers and as a resource for future publicly funded research.
5. To disseminate the results to the scientific community and industr
Pioneer 10 Jupiter atmospheric definition results: A summary
The various entry probes for measuring outer planetary atmospheric compositions are discussed. Considered are chemical components and physical accumulation processes observable by spectroscopic studies, as well as pressure gauges, temperature gauges, accelerometers, nephelometers, and visible and infrared sensors for determining abundances
The large-scale structure of the solar wind
The large-scale structure of the solar wind is reviewed on the basis of experimental space measurements acquired over approximately the last decade. The observations cover the fading portion of the last solar cycle up through the maximum of the present cycle. The character of the interplanetary medium is considered from the viewpoint of the temporal behavior of the solar wind over increasingly longer time intervals, the average properties of the various solar wind parameters and their interrelationships. Interplanetary-terrestrial relationships and the expected effects of heliographic lattitude and radial distance are briefly discussed
New techniques for the detection and capture of micrometeoroids
In order to understand the origin and distribution of the biogenic elements and their compounds in the solar system, it will be necessary to study material from many classes of objects. Chemical, elemental, and isotopic measurements of returned samples of comets, asteroids, and possibly extrasolar system dust clouds would provide information on a particularly important class: the primitive objects. Extraterrestrial micron-sized particles in the vicinity of Earth are one source of such materials that might otherwise be inaccessible. The Space Station appears to be an eminently suitable platform from which to collect and detect these various particles. The primary challenge, however, is to collect intact, uncontaminated particles which will be encountered at tens of kilometers per seconds. A concept for a micrometeoroid detector that could be deployed from the Space Station was developed which uses a large area detector plate implanted with acoustic transducers. A concept of a nondestructive micrometeoroid collector for the Space Station was also developed. Particles collected would then be returned to Earth for subsequent analysis
"Rewiring" Filterbanks for Local Fourier Analysis: Theory and Practice
This article describes a series of new results outlining equivalences between
certain "rewirings" of filterbank system block diagrams, and the corresponding
actions of convolution, modulation, and downsampling operators. This gives rise
to a general framework of reverse-order and convolution subband structures in
filterbank transforms, which we show to be well suited to the analysis of
filterbank coefficients arising from subsampled or multiplexed signals. These
results thus provide a means to understand time-localized aliasing and
modulation properties of such signals and their subband
representations--notions that are notably absent from the global viewpoint
afforded by Fourier analysis. The utility of filterbank rewirings is
demonstrated by the closed-form analysis of signals subject to degradations
such as missing data, spatially or temporally multiplexed data acquisition, or
signal-dependent noise, such as are often encountered in practical signal
processing applications
Skellam shrinkage: Wavelet-based intensity estimation for inhomogeneous Poisson data
The ubiquity of integrating detectors in imaging and other applications
implies that a variety of real-world data are well modeled as Poisson random
variables whose means are in turn proportional to an underlying vector-valued
signal of interest. In this article, we first show how the so-called Skellam
distribution arises from the fact that Haar wavelet and filterbank transform
coefficients corresponding to measurements of this type are distributed as sums
and differences of Poisson counts. We then provide two main theorems on Skellam
shrinkage, one showing the near-optimality of shrinkage in the Bayesian setting
and the other providing for unbiased risk estimation in a frequentist context.
These results serve to yield new estimators in the Haar transform domain,
including an unbiased risk estimate for shrinkage of Haar-Fisz
variance-stabilized data, along with accompanying low-complexity algorithms for
inference. We conclude with a simulation study demonstrating the efficacy of
our Skellam shrinkage estimators both for the standard univariate wavelet test
functions as well as a variety of test images taken from the image processing
literature, confirming that they offer substantial performance improvements
over existing alternatives.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, slight formatting changes; submitted for
publicatio
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