1,433 research outputs found
The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe (Ed. by N Seager)
No full textThe Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position—in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook.The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works
Distributed human computation framework for linked data co-reference resolution
No full textDistributed Human Computation (DHC) is a technique used to solve computational problems by incorporating the collaborative effort of a large number of humans. It is also a solution to AI-complete problems such as natural language processing. The Semantic Web with its root in AI is envisioned to be a decentralised world-wide information space for sharing machine-readable data with minimal integration costs. There are many research problems in the Semantic Web that are considered as AI-complete problems. An example is co-reference resolution, which involves determining whether different URIs refer to the same entity. This is considered to be a significant hurdle to overcome in the realisation of large-scale Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we propose a framework for building a DHC system on top of the Linked Data Cloud to solve various computational problems. To demonstrate the concept, we are focusing on handling the co-reference resolution in the Semantic Web when integrating distributed datasets. The traditional way to solve this problem is to design machine-learning algorithms. However, they are often computationally expensive, error-prone and do not scale. We designed a DHC system named iamResearcher, which solves the scientific publication author identity co-reference problem when integrating distributed bibliographic datasets. In our system, we aggregated 6 million bibliographic data from various publication repositories. Users can sign up to the system to audit and align their own publications, thus solving the co-reference problem in a distributed manner. The aggregated results are published to the Linked Data Cloud
The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe
No full textThe Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author’s life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position—in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The volume ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, expert contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works
External interventions and the duration of civil wars
No full textThe authors combine an empirical model of external intervention, with a theoretical model of civil war duration. Their empirical model of intervention allows them to analyze civil war duration, using"expected"rather than"actual"external intervention as an explanatory variable in the duration model. Unlike previous studies, they find that external intervention is positively associated with the duration of civil war. They distinguish partial third-party interventions that extend the length of war, from multilateral"peace"operations, which have a mandate to restore peace without taking sides - and which typically take place at war's end, or at least when both sides have agreed to a cease-fire. In a future paper, the authors will examine whether partial third-party interventions - whatever their effect on a war's duration - increase the risk of war's recurrence. If that proves true, then even if interventions reduce the length of civil war, they may do so at the cost of further destabilizing the political system, and sowing the seeds of future rebellion.Children and Youth,Peace&Peacekeeping,Post Conflict Reconstruction,Post Conflict Reconstruction,International Affairs,Post Conflict Reconstruction,Social Conflict and Violence,Peace&Peacekeeping,Post Conflict Reconstruction,International Affairs
The front-end of IsoDAR
No full textThe Isotope Decay-At-Rest (IsoDAR) experiment is a cyclotron based neutrino oscillation exper- iment that is capable of decisively searching for low-mass sterile neutrinos. This paper outlines two new approaches that the IsoDAR collaboration are pursuing in order to increase the amount of H + 2 captured in the cyclotron through innovations in the design of the front-end. A new dedicated multicusp ion source (MIST-1) is currently being commissioned and tested at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at MIT. Based on previous results from this type of ion source, we ex- pect to be able to achieve an H+₂ current density that will be sufficient for the IsoDAR experiment. We also discuss the results of a new investigation into using a radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ) as a high-efficiency buncher to improve the injection efficiency into the cyclotron.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1505858)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1626069
Status of anadromous salmonids in Oregon coastal basins
No full textThomas E. Nickelson, Jay W. Nicholas, Alan M. McGie, Robert B. Lindsay, Daniel L. Bottom (Research and Development Section, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife), and Rodney J. Kaiser, Steven E. Jacobs (Ocean Salmon Management, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife).This archived document is maintained by the State Library of Oregon as part of the Oregon Documents Depository Program. It is for informational purposes and may not be suitable for legal purposes.Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-81).Mode of access: Internet from the Oregon Government Publications Collection.Text in English
Ethnic identity, political identity and ethnic conflict: simulating the effect of congruence between the two identities on ethnic violence and conflict
No full textThis thesis outlines and presents an alternative hypothetical process to the emergence of ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflicts, rather than being dependent upon pre-existing 'ancient hatreds', are instead the result of a congruence between ethnic and political identity which grants individuals the ability to use ethnicity to identify and eliminate political threats. This hypothesis is formed by the examination of three case studies of ethnic conflict: Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Croatia. This hypothesis is then formalised and tested using an agent based simulation in which agent interactions are dependent upon ethnic and political identity and the congruence between the two. As predicted there was a strong positive correlation between how accurately ethnic identity reflected political identity and the level of ethnically motivated violence in the simulation, although the relationship was not linear. Furthermore the effect of a shift in congruence was found to be roughly comparable to the effect of initialising agents with a moderate level of pre-existing ethnic antagonism
Daniel Pink's Motivation
No full textDaniel Pink is a successful author of books on motivation, career and business. His books have been translated into 34 languages of the world, in addition, Daniel is a great orator and his speech at the TED Global in Oxford in 2009 is still one of the best video among the many inspiring, enlightening and budorashivshih consciousness speeches delivered at the events held under the auspices of TED.This theory assumes that the main drive which powers human behavior is the drive to respond to rewards and punishments in our environment. As Pink notes, this suggests “human beings aren’t much different from horses that the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick.” Many managers believe that the best way to motivate employees to high results is a monetary reward, bonuses for the result or other “carrots”. It turns out, is not so simple. Daniel Pink argues convincingly that the motivation system, based only on the remuneration for results, was not just useless, but in some cases directly harms both employees and the company. There is a need to focus on the natural desire of every human excellence, skill and independence and to hire only those people who have strong internal motivatio
Curbside buses and the transformation of the intercity bus industry
No full textSince the late 1990s, a new type of intercity transportation has transformed travel in many American cities. This new travel option has not come from revolutionary technological innovation, large-scale infrastructure investment, or long-term planning efforts. Rather, the new travel option is the intercity bus, a mode that had been in decline for decades. After roughly fifty years of steady decline in ridership, intercity buses are suddenly the fastest growing intercity mode in the United States. This growth is due to curbside intercity buses, which pick up and drop off passengers on city street corners rather than in bus terminals. This seemingly small change in operations is at the heart of the dramatic growth in intercity bus travel. On the Northeast Corridor alone, intercity bus travel has more than doubled between 1997 and 2007 from three and a half million to over seven million trips. This research looks beyond the growth in ridership to unpack what these changes mean for the passengers on these buses, for the public at large, for competing intercity providers, and for regulators and local transportation planners. This dissertation poses three broad research questions. First, how and why do passengers choose to take curbside buses? Second, who uses curbside buses and how are these buses influencing their travel behavior? Third, how are curbside buses changing both the intercity bus industry and how have city planners responded to the problems associated with an influx of curbside intercity buses on city streets?Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Nicholas Klei
Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe’s Politics at the Hanoverian Succession
No full textIn this essay, Nicholas Seager argues for re-attributing two pamphlets to Daniel Defoe: A Secret History of One Year (1714) and Memoirs of the Conduct of Her Late Majesty and Her Last Ministry (1715). These works, published shortly after the Hanoverian succession, were excluded from Defoe’s canon by Furbank and Owens on the grounds that the writing was poor in quality. A closer review of the external and internal evidence, however, points to Defoe as the author of these occasional political tracts, which reveal his attempts to attenuate what he perceived as the harmful effects of government by a single-party ministry
- …
