18,532 research outputs found
Sacred children and colonial subsidies: The missionary performance of racial separation in Belgian Congo, 1946–1959
No full text While most Protestant missions in Belgian Congo gladly accepted the colonial state’s offer of educational subsidies in 1946, a strong emphasis on church–state separation led the American Mennonite Brethren Mission (AMBM) to initially reject these funds. In a surprising twist, however, the AMBM reversed its position in 1952. Through archival research, I demonstrate that a major factor that led the AMBM to accept subsidies was the creation and institutionalization of a racially separate ecclesial identity from that of Congolese Christians. Moreover, the development of this separate identity was closely intertwined with missionaries’ vision for a “white children’s school,” geographically separated from their work with Congolese. The enactment of white identity helped pave the way for the acceptance of subsidies, both by bringing the missionaries more strongly into the orbit of the colonial logic of domination, and by clarifying the heavy cost of failing to comply with the state’s expectations. Through this case study, I engage with the complexity of missionaries’ political role in a colonial African context by focusing on the everyday political choices by which missionaries set aside their children as sacred, by exploring how ideas about separateness were embedded into institutions, and by demonstrating how attention to the subtleties of identity performance can shed new light on major missionary decisions. </jats:p
Helping “our Canadian brothers”: Early Recollect Missiology as an Experiment in Christian Community, 1615–1629
No full textAbstract
Existing histories of the brief Franciscan Recollect mission to New France (1615–1629) tend either to overstate the assimilatory character of the Recollect missionary vision or to overlook their comprehensively political vision. Through a close re-reading of early Recollect sources, I excavate a missionary vision for cohabitation between indigenous people and French settlers that, while assimilationist in some ways, also reflected deeply a conviction of human equality, a nascent understanding of the church as a political alternative to empire, and a willingness to learn from and adapt to indigenous cultures. The Recollects’ vision was shaped at every stage by their specifically Franciscan practice of poverty. This poverty predisposed them to critique mercantile interests in the colony, shaped their appreciation of indigenous traveling companions, and made them more prone to recognize Christian equality across cultures.</jats:p
Journal of African Christian Biography: v. 7, no. 2/3 (April-July 2022) Double issue - Bilingual (English, French)
No full textIn 2019, a group of Anabaptist-Mennonite historians from around the world gathered for a symposium under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism (ISGA) in Goshen, USA. Unanimously, they affirmed that “[a]s followers of Jesus Christ our history connects us, reminds us of the Spirit’s activity among us, and calls us forward into the future.” Today, Mennonite World Conference (MWC) member churches exist in 25 countries in Africa, and African Mennonites and Brethren in Christ in 2018 made up 36% of the 2.13 million baptized Anabaptist-Mennonites worldwide.1 This special issue of the Journal of African Christian Biography, intentionally released in both English and French just prior to the July 2022 MWC Assembly in Indonesia, offers stories of the Anabaptist/Mennonite church as it took vibrant shape in Africa and became a source of renewal beyond its borders, contributing richly to a global Anabaptist movement.
At the core of this issue are seven biographies and two church histories. The stories come from western, central, eastern, and southern regions of the continent, with stronger representation from Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burkina Faso. The Christians in these stories experienced the power of the gospel as it entered into confrontation with other powers. They took courageous action to demonstrate the authenticity of their own conversion and boldly shared the good news with others both far and near
Introduction: African Mennonite stories of conversion, mission, and renewal
No full text[In 2019, a group of Anabaptist-Mennonite historians from around the world gathered for a symposium under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism (ISGA) in Goshen, USA. Unanimously, they affirmed that “[a]s followers of Jesus Christ our history connects us, reminds us of the Spirit’s activity among us, and calls us forward into the future.” Today, Mennonite World Conference (MWC) member churches exist in 25 countries in Africa, and African Mennonites and Brethren in Christ in 2018 made up 36% of the 2.13 million baptized Anabaptist-Mennonites worldwide. This special issue of the Journal of African Christian Biography, intentionally released in both English and French just prior to the July 2022 MWC Assembly in Indonesia, offers stories of the Anabaptist/Mennonite church as it took vibrant shape in Africa and became a source of renewal beyond its borders, contributing richly to a global Anabaptist movement.
The results of the Delft Systematic Deadrise Series
No full textIn the present paper the development of the Delft Systematic Deadrise Series (DSDS) is described. The DSDS has been under development for decades by now and consists of a large family of systematically varied hard chine planing monohulls, based on the original research by Clement and Blount, which have all been tested in the same speed range, changing the same parameters and using the same experimental set up. The rationale behind the DSDS is highlighted. The DSDS contains up to now some 24 different models in 350 different conditions all tested in the same speed range between Fn∇ = 0.75 and Fn∇ = 3.0. Recently there has been a new extension to the DSDS with the inclusion of more measurements on hulls with twisted bottom and rocker in the aft ship. These results are presented in this paper.In addition detailed access is facilitated to all the hull geometries used into the DSDS and to all the raw measurement data obtained during the tests by means of free access to a dedicated website.Ship Hydromechanics and Structure
Experimental and numerical investigation on the heel and drift induced hydrodynamical loads of a high speed craft
No full textIn order to provide an insight into the manoeuvring of high speed crafts, an experimental study was undertaken at the towing tank of Delft University of Technology, using a rescue vessel of the Royal Netherlands Sea Rescue Institution (KNRM).Ship Hydromechanics and Structure
Fast interfaces
No full textLi4Ti5O12 is a commonly used negative electrode material, but the origin of its fast rate capability has puzzled scientists for decades. Now, a facile Li-ion transport route featuring metastable intermediates is revealed to rationalize the fast-charging kinetics.Accepted Author ManuscriptRID/TS/Instrumenten groepRST/Storage of Electrochemical Energ
Becoming global Mennonites: the politics of catholicity and memory in a missionary encounter in Belgian Congo, 1905-1939
No full textThis dissertation examines the first three decades of a missionary encounter that began under the auspices of the Congo Inland Mission (CIM – later renamed as Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission [AIMM]) in Belgian Congo. As Africans, North Americans, and Europeans entered into relationship with each other through mission, they developed an identity as global Mennonites. They began to embrace a catholic ecclesial imagination – that is, a commitment to shared membership within the church as a political body capable of transcending competing claims of race, ethnicity, gender, or nation-state. Using both an ecclesiological lens of analysis and a global history framework, this dissertation traces the ways in which ecclesial institutions, practices, discourses, and performances functioned to support or undermine a social imagination that embraced expatriate missionaries and local believers within a single church, in both its local/congregational and trans-local manifestations.
During the period covered by the dissertation, expatriate and Congolese Mennonites struggled to define what the church was, and to determine who could participate in it and how. Factors that helped to promote a shared ecclesial imagination among Congolese and expatriate believers included an inter-denominational vision, faith mission principles and practices, Pentecostal revivalism, a Mennonite congregational polity, shared experiences of work and worship, and friendships that crossed boundaries of race and gender. However, CIM missionaries’ assertions of ethnic Mennonite control over mission strategy and structure, and their complicity with colonial labor exploitation, promoted a two-tiered understanding of the church that entrenched racial segregation and squelched the aspirations of white missionary women and Congolese evangelists. An ecclesiological lens of analysis thus offers new insights into the relationship between missions and colonial regimes, into the role of mission in American Mennonite denominational formation, and into the interactions among gender, race, and ethnicity in mission.
The dissertation traces the contested memories of early CIM “pioneers,” such as Alma Doering, Aaron and Ernestina Janzen, and L.B. and Rose Haigh, and retrieves the missional agency of the many Congolese Mennonites who worked alongside them. In this way, it both uncovers the struggles for catholicity that shaped the missionary encounter at its inception, and calls attention to the ways in which such struggles continue to play out on the terrain of memory and knowledge production, coming to light through the competing efforts and uneven ability of Congolese and North American Mennonites to tell stories about their shared past. The historical narrative at the core of the dissertation thus serves as a case study for a broader exploration of theological and historiographical themes of memory and catholicity in relation to mission. The dissertation develops an ecclesiological framework for the study of the missionary encounter in which an explicit commitment to catholicity guides the task of writing world Christian history. It identifies ways in which such an ecclesiological mode of remembering can contribute to greater unity and catholicity within the global church
An alternating frequency-time harmonic balance method for fast-slow dynamical systems
No full textThe Alternating Frequency-Time (AFT) Harmonic Balance method has been widely applied in the analysis of non-linear mechanical systems under periodic excitation. Customarily, a periodic displacement is considered as ansatz in a harmonic balance analysis. In the present work, a deviation from the latter ansatz is realized and the periodicity is assumed in the velocity, leading to a linear term in the displacement of the system. The latter approach aims to facilitate the analysis of a certain class of systems, which are characterized by a fast periodic motion and a slow non-periodic motion. The motivation of this study originates in the area of offshore engineering and more specifically in the topic of monopile installation. During vibratory pile installation, the pile is forced into the soil under the combined action of a periodic excitation at the pile top and the self-weight of the pile and the vibratory device. As a result, the pile simultaneously penetrates into the soil as a rigid body (slow motion) and vibrates in the driving frequency and its super-harmonics both as a rigid and a flexible body (fast motion). In this study, the AFT harmonic balance with the ansatz of periodic velocity is implemented in different problem cases. A set of non-linear mechanical systems are analysed, ranging from a single-degree-of-freedom to a continuum, to showcase the potential application of the method and to verify its accuracy.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Dynamics of StructuresOffshore EngineeringEngineering Structure
FAST-EDI
No full text# Fast Event-based Double Integral for Real-time Robotics (Academic Use Only)
## [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05925) | [Video: Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzrHNA97wls) | [Video: Bilibili](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qL411X7hc/?share_source=copy_web&vd_source=2483c9488f1bd3f3478cf69bfca4d49e)
Motion deblurring is a critical ill-posed problem that is important in many vision-based robotics applications. The recently proposed event-based double integral (EDI) provides a theoretical framework for solving the deblurring problem with the event camera and generating clear images at high frame-rate. However, the original EDI is mainly designed for offline computation and does not support real-time requirement in many robotics applications. In this paper, we propose the fast EDI, an efficient implementation of EDI that can achieve real-time online computation on single-core CPU devices, which is common for physical robotic platforms used in practice. In experiments, our method can handle event rates at as high as 13 million event per second in a wide variety of challenging lighting conditions. Its benefit has been demonstrated on multiple downstream real-time applications, including localization, visual tag detection, and feature matching.
## Understanding the hardware bias of event camera
[Tutorial of the bias](https://gitlab.com/inivation/inivation-docs/blob/master/Advanced configurations/User_guide_-_Biasing.md)
## Checking the hardware bias using the jAER
One can use the jAER project to get a roughly estimated contrast from the bias currents that are estimated to be generated by the on-chip bias generator bias current ratios:[jAER homepage](https://github.com/SensorsINI/jaer)
Discussion regarding the bias estimation:[discussion](https://groups.google.com/g/davis-users/c/68gp0zxTMUk/m/SpweyJKrDgAJ)
and the physical model that build to estimate the threshold:[Paper](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7962235/)
## Usage
Test env:
```
ubuntu 18.04
dv-runtime 1.6.1
dv-gui 1.6.0
```
1. download the DV and install it following the tutorial [DV install guide](https://inivation.gitlab.io/dv/dv-docs/docs/getting-started.html)
2. download the fast EDI code
```
git clone https://github.com/eleboss/fast_EDI
```
3. compile the fast EDI module
```
cd ./dv-module/fast-edi
cmake ./
make
```
then you will see the `fedi_FEDI.so`, this is the file you need to add to the dv-gui.
4. configure the DV-GUI search path
```
dv-gui
```
find the `structure - add modules - modify module search path - add path` (this path leads to `fedi_FEDI.so`, for me is `/home/eleboss/Documents/fast_EDI/dv-module/fast-edi`). Then you can add the fast edi modules to the dv-gui and wires it in this way:
5. download the test data [dataset](www.google.com), and play it.
Performance tips: You can tune the contrast or use the jAER to estimate, or use EDI to optimize an accurate contrast.
## Citation
```
@article{lin2023fast,
title={Fast Event-based Double Integral for Real-time Robotics},
author={Lin, Shijie and Zhang, Yingqiang and Huang, Dongyue and Zhou, Bin and Luo, Xiaowei and Pan, Jia},
booktitle={international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA)},
year={2023},
organization={IEEE}
}
```
</p
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