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The World at the End of the Garden: A Novella-in-Flash
No full textThis book is not available on ChesterRepAn English textile artist accompanies her husband to live in Tucson, Arizona for a year. Her world shrinks to a gated community of strangers and the view of the arroyo at the bottom of the garden. Escaping from a regime of fertility treatments and miscarriages, she learns to tolerate the heat and the snakes. With the help of Samuel, a mysterious boy who lives across the arroyo, she explores the landscape, learns its history and falls in love with Tucson’s flowers and seasonal rains. As the year passes, she pioneers a new direction for her art and, finally, accepts that she will never be a mother.
The World at the End of the Garden is a novella-in-flash about the discovery of self, the meaning of home, and the place of humans on the planet.Unfunde
Seeking ambidexterity through hyperautomation: What next for GBA logistics in their evolution from local labour entrepreneurs to global players in logistics
No full text© Association for Information Technology Trust 2024.Item not available on ChesterRep. Please click on the additional link or DOI to access the full text on the journal website.Based in the Northwest of England, GBA Logistics (GBA) is a global logistics provider focussing on the transportation of goods. Founded in 1987 as GBA Services, this family firm has transformed from being a provider of labour for local companies, to a major player within the national and international logistics sector, now ranking in the top 50 operators in the UK. Starting as a sole trader, GBA became a limited company in 2000 and now employs around 400 staff across 16 locations in the UK and Europe. Working in a highly competitive, dynamic environment, the company constantly faces the challenge of optimising its existing services whilst needing to explore new opportunities to meet the changing demands of its clients. Balancing these two opposing requirements is known as organisational ambidexterity. Part of GBA’s strategic response to this challenge, is to explore how it can employ advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to enhance its efficiency and effectiveness, whilst identifying novel ways to adapt to market conditions. The application of these emerging technologies to automate and optimise operations is known as hyperautomation. For GBA, striking a balance between offering standardisation versus a customised service to customers is increasingly crucial to its success. However, this family firm’s underlying culture of entrepreneurial spirit and adaptability together with its commitment to remain relevant and competitive in logistical services means it is keen to explore how it can exploit hyperautomation to achieve its aim of organisational ambidexterity
"Everything Has Changed" or has it? Swift's Accent Shifts
Get PDFThis public-facing interactive exhibition displays our results of our real-time sociophonetic investigation of Swift's accent in her country and pop-style music.Unfunde
The influence of IT outsourcing on organisational success and innovation
Get PDF© The Author(s) 2024.The version of record of this article, first published in [Future Business Journal], is available online at Publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s43093-024-00372-yThis study investigates the domain of IT outsourcing (ITO), focusing on its implications for organisational success or failure, and its impact on innovation. Through a comprehensive literature review, significant gaps were identified, including a lack of empirical studies assessing ITO outcomes for organisations, how ITO impacts innovation, and if an organisation’s industry impacts ITO success. In response, three research questions are formulated to address the identified gaps, leading to the creation of a novel conceptual model designed to evaluate the influence of ITO on organisations. Employing a deductive approach, the model informed a triangulation research approach, combining quantitative and qualitative data. A survey garnered responses from 112 senior IT professionals across three industries, complemented by eight interviews with senior and executive management. Findings indicate a concerning rate of perceived ITO failures and reveal that the specific industry of an organisation can affect ITO success. The study also concludes that ITO adversely impacts organisational innovation. Based on these insights, eight best practices are recommended to enhance ITO outcomes, including market research on vendor skillsets and experience, the establishment of well-structured contracts, adherence to SLAs without grace periods, shorter project durations, multi-sourcing strategies, bolstering internal IT capabilities, helping employees to understand ITO value, and rigorous governance. Acknowledging its limitations, this paper calls for future research involving broader industry representation and larger sample sizes to validate and expand upon these findings.N/
Hybrid Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata Nanocomputing Circuits
Get PDFQuantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is an emerging transistor-less field-coupled nanocomputing (FCN) approach to ultra-scale ‘nanochip’ integration. In QCA, to represent digital circuitry, electrostatic repulsion between electrons and the mechanism of electron tunnelling in quantum dots are used. QCA technology can surpass conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology in terms of clock speed, reduced occupied chip area, and energy efficiency. To develop QCA circuits, irreversible majority gates are typically used as the primary components. Recently, some studies have introduced reversible design techniques, using reversible majority gates as the main building block, to develop ultra-energy-efficient QCA circuits. However, this approach resulted in time delays, an increase in the number of QCA cells used, and an increase in the chip area occupied. This work introduces a novel hybrid design strategy employing irreversible, reversible, and partially reversible QCA gates to establish an optimal balance between power consumption, delay time, and occupied area. This hybrid technique allows the designer to have more control over the circuit characteristics to meet different system needs. A combination of reversible, irreversible, and innovative partially reversible majority gates is used in the proposed hybrid design method. We evaluated the hybrid design method by examining the half-adder circuit as a case study. We developed four hybrid QCA half-adder circuits, each of which simultaneously incorporates various types of majority gates. The QCADesigner-E 2.2 simulation tool was used to simulate the performance and energy efficiency of the half-adders. This tool provides numerical results for the circuit input/output response and heat dissipation at the physical level within a microscopic quantum mechanical model.N/
Phytochemical Analysis and In Vivo Antimalarial Activities of Ethyl Acetate Fraction of Spilanthes filicaulis on Mice Subjected to Plasmodium berghei
Get PDFMalaria airs a life-threatening risk in Tropical African countries, stemming from infection by Plasmodium species. This region is richly endowed by nature with a wealth of diverse and largely unexplored plants that hold the potential for managing this protozoan parasite. The currently accessible over-the-counter drugs for disease management often present affordability challenges for the average person, exacerbated by the parasite’s increasing resistance to them. This study investigated the phytoconstituents present in the ethyl acetate fraction of Spilanthes filicaulis (EFSF) and explored the antimalarial effects of EFSF on mice infected with Plasmodium berghei.UnfundedAAM added 06/09/2024
The Nineteenth-Century Female Sex Worker in Britain and France: The Representation of Stereotypes in Visual and Literary Cultures
No full textThis thesis examines the subversion of stereotypes by the nineteenth-century female sex worker in Britain and France in visual and literary cultures. It uncovers the methods working-class women employed to escape the legal, medical, and cultural restrictions which arose from the Régime des Moeurs, Solicitation Laws, Contagious Diseases Acts, and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. I explore how sex workers could evade detection and criminalisation by evading stereotypes regarding their clothing, body, and behaviour. I argue the women’s carefully considered identity became an unforeseen and overlooked source of contagion for a society that sought to criminalize and ostracize the sex worker as a conduit of vice and venereal disease. Section 1 explores how sex workers manipulated clothing to transgress social boundaries and avoid police detection. I investigate how and why sex workers were able to manipulate clothing to reclaim personal agency. The section evaluates how sex worker stereotypes became morally contagious toward the rest of society. Section 2 focuses on the sex worker’s body to determine how the women were able to avoid corporeal stereotypes surrounding their weight, skin, cosmetics, perfume, and hair. I examine how the body could be manipulated to meet physical ideals of femininity created by the middle and upper class. However, I also identify the limits of stereotype subversion particularly concerning the fate of the fictional sex worker and her untimely demise. Section 3 investigates the stereotypes surrounding sex workers’ behaviour focusing on their manners, habits, and titles. It reveals how sex workers were constantly performing whether they altered their habits, recited middle- and upper-class mannerisms, or improved their etiquette and education. I primarily focus on male representations of the female sex worker in British and French literature; British texts include Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884), and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893). French texts include Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880), and The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), Joris Karl Huysmans’s Marthe (1876), and Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias (1848). I also reference several short stories and novels by French and British authors, draw from contextual resources including courtesan memoirs, newspaper reports, medical essays and social commentaries, and artwork to demonstrate the prevalence of sex worker stereotypes. The thesis concludes by determining the extent to which sex workers could reclaim personal agency by subverting stereotypes
The Menstrual Cycle in Professional Women’s Football: A Subjective and Objective Exploration of Player Health, Wellbeing, and Performance
No full textQuick, quick, slow: Making time for sustainable photography practices in contemporary higher education
Get PDF© 2024 The Author(s). International Journal of Art & Design Education published by National Society for Education in Art and Design and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.As environmental awareness grows, so do questions about the environmental impact of photography, in particular traditional film development and processing, which includes the use of plastics, gelatine and other environmentally harmful chemicals notwithstanding water usage and waste. Pioneering practice and research into sustainable alternatives to conventional processes has quickly established, supported by organisations such as The Sustainable Darkroom (n.d.). Students in Higher Education are environmentally aware and prepared to take action to mitigate their impacts where possible (Blake et al 2013). As such, there is a coalescence of perceptions within and beyond the classroom which asks to be addressed in the curriculum.
This paper draws upon the research project Under a Green Light: a darkroom for the future which investigated how university darkroom practices can pivot toward more environmentally friendly methods. The paper describes the learning environment of the darkroom as a space of slowness, immersion and experimentation and the pedagogic value of this for photography students. The paper argues that incorporating environmental awareness into day-to-day teaching through systemic changes to process and practice, rather than through short term curriculum interventions, contributes to transformative learning experiences and promotes positive long-term change.UnfundedAAM removed and archived 25/10/2024. VoR uploaded to CR 25/10/2024
The Power of Many
Get PDFOpening statement on activist photography and feminist activism for Isuse 6 of We See magazine.Unfunde
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