171 research outputs found
Where are the mothers? Interrogating maternal mortality as a violation of the rights to life and health : a Nigerian and Ethiopian perspective
No full textA Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Dr. Salah Hammad, Faculty of Law, Addis Ababa University, AddisThesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa))--University of Pretoria, 2009.The author argues that maternal mortality can easily be avoided and that the right to health and life is as much a developmental issue as it is one of human rights. Focuses on the maternal mortality ratio and relevant laws protecting women’s right to life and health in Nigeria and Ethiopia.http://www.chr.up.ac.za/Centre for Human RightsLL
Breaking Dichotomies: Counter-Narratives in the Spoken Word Poetry of Suheir Hammad
No full textThis article analyzes the spoken word poetry of the Palestinian-American author, Suheir Hammad, who attempts to deconstruct dichotomies between Arabs and Americans and to create a concept of transnational humanness. Through cultural criticism, Hammad reverses the process of Othering when she humanizes Palestinians and detaches suffering from national belonging. Her creative resistance represents a renegotiation of Americaness and its relation to Islam and Arabs, and opens up de-nationalized spaces of comparison
“Challenging the Authority of Religious Interpretation in Saudi Arabia::The Transformation of Suhaila Zain al-Abedin Hammad
No full textTaking as its starting point that a male monopoly is a problem in the recognition of Islamic religious authority, especially in matters related to women, this chapter discusses the possibilities for challenging this monopoly. The author argues that it is necessary to create alternative sources of authority from within the realm of religious scholarship through women scholars laying direct claim to the interpretation of sacred texts. Al Fassi uses the works and experiences of the Saudi scholar, Suhaila Zain al-Abedin Hammad, as a specific example for this approach. Hammad, an accomplished religious scholar, has worked tirelessly through her writing, both in books and her weekly newspaper column, to address difficult issues in Islamic law, to rethink the use of weak hadiths, and to critique Saudi legal rulings. The chapter also considers the intense backlash against her work and her impact on Saudi public opinion. © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Dina El Omari, Juliane Hammer and Mouhanad Khorchide; individual chapters, the contributors
TRACTORS FOR CANEFIELDS IN SUDAN
No full textTillage operations for sugarcane production in Sudan are basically as they were in the late
seventies of last century despite of changes in tillage concepts and machinery management
practices. Tractor power for adopted operations ranged from 108 to 325 kW (145 - 435hp) for
heavy draught and from 60 to 78 kW (80 -105 hp) for low draught. A matched tractorimplement
system taking into consideration factual field data and principles for good machinery
management practice was conceived to reduce power for heavy tillage to 93 kW and to 60 kW
for light operation. This is expected to reduce capital investment on tractors to 19.2% of that for
the present flee
How can potatoes be smartly cultivated with biochar as a soil nutrient amendment technique in Atlantic Canada?
No full textThe question if biochar is a suitable soil nutrient amendment for potato cultivation in the Atlantic Canada is yet to be answered. The objective of this study was to answer this question. Three replicates of twelve lysimeters, each 8000 cm2, were packed with an Atlantic Canada representative soil to cultivate potatoes with four treatments of soil amendments (T1 = control [no added nutrients], T2 = B [biochar], T3 = F [synthetic fertilizer @ recommended NPK], and T4 = B + F [biochar + recommended NPK]) under a completely randomized block design with factorial arrangements. Chemical analyses of soils were conducted for physical, hydrological, and chemical (including concentration of macro- and micro-nutrients) prior to and after the completion experiments to evaluate soil fertility and its resulting effects on crop yield. The biochar amendment improved soil micro- and macro-nutrients. Soil organic matter, pH, and cation exchange capacity (ECE) significantly increased by application of biochar. The maximum potato yield of 30,467.4 kg h−1 was achieved by the combined application of biochar and synthetic fertilizer as this combination resulted in the maximum net benefit (– 2621.49 ha−1. It is therefore concluded that biochar amendment of soils resembling to that of the Atlantic Canada representative soil used in this study, with a mix of recommended NPK for, can formulate a smart precision farming nutrient management technique for this region subject to the field trials and replicate experimental treatments for more than three times
Examination and Exploration of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of Two Immigrant-owned Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Greater Vancouver, Canada
No full textAlthough CSR has attracted attention from large enterprises, there have not been a lot of research studies focusing on the CSR efforts by small and medium enterprises, let alone those owned by immigrants. In this action research, the author examines and explores CSR efforts by two immigrant-owned small and medium enterprises in Greater Vancouver, Canada.
This action research aims to study: (1) SME’s perspectives on CSR, (2) the factors influencing SME’s CSR perspectives, and (3) how SMEs implement CSR. The study reveals that owners and employees of SME’s are aware of CSR, but have varied perspectives due to ambiguous CSR definitions and different backgrounds and experiences. Some unique factors identified which influence SME’s CSR perceptions include a high similarity among SME owners and employees, and the SME owners’ family education in early childhood, life experiences, and personal beliefs.
The author follows closely what Coghlan and Brannick (2010) has defined regarding the requirements of action research as guideline for evaluating details of this Action Research. Also, to analyze a huge volume of data collected from dialogues among participants, in this thesis, the thematic analysis had been applied as the method for interpreting data. Using thematic analysis to categorize seemingly unrelated data into different themes the researcher was able to utilize all qualitative data collected from action research and to gain knowledge under each theme (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
The two SMEs are in two different industries, tutoring and renovation, which affected the SMEs’ CSR implementation approaches. They served their customers in different ways, namely, educating grade-school students to achieve better academic performance for Company A and helping property owners to renovate and improve
their living places for Company B. On the other hand, there were common aspects of their CSR implementations, such as customers, environment, and society. Although seeking higher profits seems to be a good rationale for inducing firms to execute CSR for better customer satisfaction and loyalty, the author found that the SMEs participating in this core action research did not consider profit as a main concern when they made business decisions.
The two SMEs have been running since the late 90’s without formal CSR rules. During the action research projects, suitable CSR rules for each firm were created by the author and the participants from the companies collaboratively. In addition, results generated from this core action research are actionable knowledge which can be applied by other SME owners and researchers. Furthermore, the author argues that profits should not be the only objective for businesses since aspects such as corporate reputation and brand equity are also critically important. Firms need to balance all goals from a long-term perspective instead of focusing on short-run profits alone. Therefore, a profit optimization approach, considering all relevant goals, is more appropriate than simply pursuing profit maximization
Operator-Based Modeling and Inversion: An Operator Approach to the Forward and Inverse Scattering Problems
No full textThe seismic method has many applications. It is important in the critical sector of energy. Besides being used in imaging oil and gas reservoirs, it is also utilized in other sectors of energy such as geothermal energy exploration and development. It also plays a role in extracting other resources such as minerals or in the process of monitoring CO2 sequestration to reduce the carbon footprint of humankind. While seismic waves can occur naturally, their study gives insight in analysing the occurrence of and mitigating risks related to earthquakes. As far as active-source seismic is concerned: seismic images make it possible to see what is in the subsurface with minimal expensive and invasive operations such as drilling unnecessary holes in the subsurface — similar to what medical professionals use ultrasound or X-ray images for. Several methods have been proposed to analyze seismic data. A popular method nowadays is full waveform inversion (FWI), for instance, which attempts to fit all the recorded waveformwith amodel. This process solves, in fact, a very complicated highly non-linear inverse problem. Another process that uses such inversion process, but which tries to separate classes of parameters to reduce non-linearity, is joint migration inversion (JMI), in which scattering properties of the subsurface are separated from the propagation properties of seismicwaves. Currently those two methods, FWI and JMI, are generally model-dependent — that is they have been formulated to fit specific physics model such as isotropic acoustic media, transversally isotropic media with or without absorption. Hence, they would tend to have biases towards those particular models. Another paradigmis the so-called data-driven paradigm, or data-adaptive paradigm, and since it is formulated in terms of operators, one could also refer to it as operatorbased. Since it contains less biases towards a particular physics model or require no detailed knowledge of model parameters, beforehand, some also refer to it as modelindependent, as it does not need to force the data to fit a specific model, rather the process adapts to the model contained within the data. A process such as surface-related multiple elimination follows this paradigm. Another process, which is also shown in this dissertation, separates the surface multiples scattering-order-by-scattering-order without the need to assume a specific physics model. The process is referred to as scattering order decomposition. So, this dissertation looks into the problem of extending the inversion process to the model-independent or the operator-based paradigm. This dissertation looks first into the theoretical underpinning of this problem, where integral representations are used to study it. These representations are divided into four categories: first model-based representations are derived and presented as directional and non-directional. So, it places in context those theories. Next, the operator-based representations are also divided into directional and non-directional. Finally, four representations are derived, in this dissertation, which have the potential for applications in modeling, inversion and various seismic data analysis processes. Modeling is needed before any inversion since the inverse problem is ill-posed or illconditioned and hence no unique solutions exist but rather preconditioned or regularized solutions to these problems are normally used. Moreover, the inverse problem uses modeling iteratively and also back-projects the data residuals with the forward modeling mechanism. Therefore, the next chapters study operator generation and the subsequent modeling of wavefields with these derived operators...ImPhys/Medical Imagin
Inside the British Council Collection
No full textA four-minute film, produced to mark the 90th anniversary of the British Council in 2024 and to increase understanding of the British Council Collection (its 9000 works of modern and contemporary art). The film features Annebella Pollen, author of the 2024 book Art Without Frontiers: The Story of the British Council, Visual Art and a Changing World; Emma Dexter, Director of the British Council Collection; curator Hammad Nasar and artist Larry Achiampong
Drift Reduction for Monocular Visual Odometry of Intelligent Vehicles Using Feedforward Neural Networks
No full textIn this paper, an approach for reducing the drift in monocular visual odometry algorithms is proposed based on a feedforward neural network. A visual odometry algorithm computes the incremental motion of the vehicle between the successive camera frames, then integrates these increments to determine the pose of the vehicle. The proposed neural network reduces the errors in the pose estimation of the vehicle which results from the inaccuracies in features detection and matching, camera intrinsic parameters, and so on. These inaccuracies are propagated to the motion estimation of the vehicle causing larger amounts of estimation errors. The drift reducing neural network identifies such errors based on the motion of features in the successive camera frames leading to more accurate incremental motion estimates. The proposed drift reducing neural network is trained and validated using the KITTI dataset and the results show the efficacy of the proposed approach in reducing the errors in the incremental orientation estimation, thus reducing the overall error in the pose estimation.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.Team Manon Ko
Augmented Full Wavefield Modeling - An Iterative Directional Modeling Scheme for Inhomogeneous Media
No full textWe derive a representation theorem for modeling directional wavefields using reciprocity theorem of the convolution-type. A Neumann series expansion of the representation yields a series that is similar to that of Bremmer. A generalized Neumann series is also derived similar to that used for solving the non-directional Lippmann-Schwinger representation. An example shows how the series can model each scattering order separately for inhomogeneous media. This could potentially be useful in imaging and inverse problems.ImPhys/Acoustical Wavefield Imagin
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