Investigating on-line pornography at the University of Johannesburg

The on-line user of today has access to a vast collection of information resources. In addition, the developments in Internet and Web technologies have made it even easier for surfers to anonymously get access to on-line pornography. The purpose of this research was to investigate the extent to which access to on-line pornography at the University of Johannesburg can be managed. For the empirical part of this research 1037 questionnaires were proportionally distributed to and completed by students on all five campuses of the university. The questionnaire consisted of four sections: biographical information; university computer facility usage; university acceptable use policy; and personal experience with university computer facilities. The gender distribution for the sample was almost even, with a total of 49,4% male participants and 50,6% female, with the largest grouping of respondents (61,6%) aged between 19 years and 21 years. Of the respondents, 36,7% indicated that exposure to unsolicited pornography did not bother them. When asked to what extent students should have access to pornography, 60,5% stated 'None' while 32,6% believed that 'Restricted' access should be granted for research purposes and 6,9% believed that students should be granted 'Total' access to pornography. Results from the research will be used to manage access to on-line resources at the University of Johannesburg better

Stability and support issues in the construction of large span caverns for physics

New physics experiments, proposed to study neutrinos and protons, call for the use of large underground particle detectors. In the United States, such detectors would be housed in the US Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), sited within the footprint of the defunct Homestake Mine, South Dakota. Although the experimental proposals differ in detail, all rely heavily upon the ability of the mined and reinforced rock mass to serve as a stable host for the detector facilities. Experimental proposals, based on the use of Water Cherenkov detector technology, specify rock caverns with excavated volumes in excess of half a million cubic meters, spans of at least 50 m, sited at depths of approximately one to 1.5 kilometers. Although perhaps sited at shallower depth, proposals based on the use of Liquid Argon (LAr) detector technology are no less challenging. LAr proposals not only call for the excavation of large span caverns, but have an additional need for the safe management of large quantities (kilo-tonnes) of cryogenic liquid, including critical provisions for the fail-safe egress of underground personnel and the reliable exhaust of Argon gas in the event of a catastrophic release. These multi-year, high value physics experiments will provide the key experimental data needed to support the research of a new generation of physicists as they probe the behavior of basic particles and the fundamental laws of nature. The rock engineer must deliver caverns that will reliably meet operational requirements and remain stable for periods conservatively estimated to be in excess of twenty years. This paper provides an overview of the DUSEL site conditions and discusses key end-user requirements and design criteria likely to dominate in determining the viability of experimental options. The paper stresses the paramount importance of collecting adequate site-specific data to inform early siting, dimensioning and layout decisions. Given the large-scale of the excavation and likely timeline to construction, the paper also strongly suggests that there are exciting opportunities for the rock mechanics and engineering community to identify and efficiently integrate research components into the design and construction process

Order-Parameter Flow in the SK Spin-Glass II: Inclusion of Microscopic Memory Effects

We develop further a recent dynamical replica theory to describe the dynamics of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin-glass in terms of closed evolution equations for macroscopic order parameters. We show how microscopic memory effects can be included in the formalism through the introduction of a dynamic order parameter function: the joint spin-field distribution. The resulting formalism describes very accurately the relaxation phenomena observed in numerical simulations, including the typical overall slowing down of the flow that was missed by the previous simple two-parameter theory. The advanced dynamical replica theory is either exact or a very good approximation.Comment: same as original, but this one is TeXabl

CLAD: A Complex and Long Activities Dataset with Rich Crowdsourced Annotations

This paper introduces a novel activity dataset which exhibits real-life and diverse scenarios of complex, temporally-extended human activities and actions. The dataset presents a set of videos of actors performing everyday activities in a natural and unscripted manner. The dataset was recorded using a static Kinect 2 sensor which is commonly used on many robotic platforms. The dataset comprises of RGB-D images, point cloud data, automatically generated skeleton tracks in addition to crowdsourced annotations. Furthermore, we also describe the methodology used to acquire annotations through crowdsourcing. Finally some activity recognition benchmarks are presented using current state-of-the-art techniques. We believe that this dataset is particularly suitable as a testbed for activity recognition research but it can also be applicable for other common tasks in robotics/computer vision research such as object detection and human skeleton tracking

Finite Size Effects in Separable Recurrent Neural Networks

We perform a systematic analytical study of finite size effects in separable recurrent neural network models with sequential dynamics, away from saturation. We find two types of finite size effects: thermal fluctuations, and disorder-induced `frozen' corrections to the mean-field laws. The finite size effects are described by equations that correspond to a time-dependent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We show how the theory can be used to understand and quantify various finite size phenomena in recurrent neural networks, with and without detailed balance.Comment: 24 pages LaTex, with 4 postscript figures include

Dynamical replica theoretic analysis of CDMA detection dynamics

We investigate the detection dynamics of the Gibbs sampler for code-division multiple access (CDMA) multiuser detection. Our approach is based upon dynamical replica theory which allows an analytic approximation to the dynamics. We use this tool to investigate the basins of attraction when phase coexistence occurs and examine its efficacy via comparison with Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure

Dynamical Replica Theory for Disordered Spin Systems

We present a new method to solve the dynamics of disordered spin systems on finite time-scales. It involves a closed driven diffusion equation for the joint spin-field distribution, with time-dependent coefficients described by a dynamical replica theory which, in the case of detailed balance, incorporates equilibrium replica theory as a stationary state. The theory is exact in various limits. We apply our theory to both the symmetric- and the non-symmetric Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin-glass, and show that it describes the (numerical) experiments very well.Comment: 7 pages RevTex, 4 figures, for PR

Poly(triazolyl methacrylate) glycopolymers as potential targeted unimolecular nanocarriers

© The Royal Society of Chemistry 2019.Synthetic glycopolymers are increasingly investigated as multivalent ligands for a range of biological and biomedical applications. This study indicates that glycopolymers with a fine-tuned balance between hydrophilic sugar pendant units and relatively hydrophobic polymer backbones can act as single-chain targeted nanocarriers for low molecular weight hydrophobic molecules. Non-covalent complexes formed from poly(triazolyl methacrylate) glycopolymers and low molecular weight hydrophobic guest molecules were characterised through a range of analytical techniques-DLS, SLS, TDA, fluorescence spectroscopy, surface tension analysis-and molecular dynamics (MD) modelling simulations provided further information on the macromolecular characteristics of these single chain complexes. Finally, we show that these nanocarriers can be utilised to deliver a hydrophobic guest molecule, Nile red, to both soluble and surface-immobilised concanavalin A (Con A) and peanut agglutinin (PNA) model lectins with high specificity, showing the potential of non-covalent complexation with specific glycopolymers in targeted guest-molecule delivery.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Symmetric sequence processing in a recurrent neural network model with a synchronous dynamics

The synchronous dynamics and the stationary states of a recurrent attractor neural network model with competing synapses between symmetric sequence processing and Hebbian pattern reconstruction is studied in this work allowing for the presence of a self-interaction for each unit. Phase diagrams of stationary states are obtained exhibiting phases of retrieval, symmetric and period-two cyclic states as well as correlated and frozen-in states, in the absence of noise. The frozen-in states are destabilised by synaptic noise and well separated regions of correlated and cyclic states are obtained. Excitatory or inhibitory self-interactions yield enlarged phases of fixed-point or cyclic behaviour.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretica