838 research outputs found
Coping with traumatic memories: second world war veterans' experiences of social support in relation to the narrative coherence of war memories
No full textThis paper reports a qualitative study that used narrative analysis to explore how social support helps many armed-services veterans cope with traumatic memories.The analysis was carried out on two levels, that of narrative form (level of narrative coherence), argued to be indicative of reconciliation, and narrative content(themes of social support), which allowed exploration of the types of social support experienced by veterans with coherent, reconciled and incoherent narratives.Ten British male Second World War veterans were interviewed regarding their war experiences, presence of traumatic memories, and experiences of social support from comrades, family and society. Different patterns of support were qualitatively related to coherent, reconciled and incoherent narratives. Veteranswith coherent narratives were no less likely to have experienced traumatic events than those with reconciled or incoherent narratives, but they reported more positiveperceptions of their war experience and of the war’s outcomes, more positive experiences of communication with family in later life, and more positive perceptionsof societal opinion. The results are discussed in relation to how veteranscan be supported by family and friends to reconcile their traumatic memories, thus to lessen the burden in later life when vital support resources may be unavailable
Also By The Same Author: AKTiveAuthor, a Citation Graph Approach to Name Disambiguation
No full textThe desire for definitive data and the semantic web drive for inference over heterogeneous data sources requires co-reference resolution to be performed on those data. In particular, name disambiguation is required to allow accurate publication lists, citation counts and impact measures to be determined. This paper describes a graph-based approach to author disambiguation on large-scale citation networks. Using self-citation, co-authorship and document source analyses, AKTiveAuthor clusters papers, achieving precision of 0.997 and recall of 0.818 over a test group of eight surname clusters
DEVELOPMENTAL TRAIT EVOLUTION IN TRILOBITES
No full textWe performed a tree-based analysis of trilobite postembryonic development in a sample of 60 species for which quantitative data
on segmentation and growth increments between putative successive instars are available, and that spans much of the temporal,
phylogenetic, and habitat range of the group. Three developmental traits were investigated: the developmental mode of trunk
segmentation, the average per-molt growth rate, and the conformity to a constant per-molt growth rate (Dyar’s rule), for which
an original metric was devised. Growth rates are within the normal range with respect to other arthropods and show overall
conformity to Dyar’s rule. Randomization tests indicate statistically significant phylogenetic signal for growth in early juveniles
but not in later stages. Among five evolutionary models fit via maximum likelihood, one in which growth rates vary independently
among species, analogous to Brownian motion on a star phylogeny, is the best supported in all ontogenetic stages, although a
model with a single, stationary peak to which growth rates are attracted also garners nontrivial support. These results are not
consistent with unbounded, Brownian-motion-like evolutionary dynamics, but instead suggest the influence of an adaptive zone.
Our results suggest that developmental traits in trilobites were relatively labile during evolutionary history
A standing ovation for Nigel: An informal study
No full textThis article analyses a series of emails thanking Nigel for his stewardship of JASSS and the characteristics of their authors. It identifies a correlation between two measures of author activity in social simulation research, but no pattern between these activity measures and the email timing. Instead, the sequence suggests a classic standing ovation effect.</p
The Writer Walking the Dog: Creative Writing Practice and Everyday Life
No full textCreative writing happens in and alongside the writer’s everyday life, but little attention has been paid to the relationship between the two and the contribution made by everyday activities in enabling and shaping creative practice. The work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold supports the argument that creative writing research must consider the bodily lived experience of the writer in order fully to understand and develop creative practice. Dog-walking is one activity which shapes my own creative practice, both by its influence on my social and cultural identity and by providing a time and space for specific acts instrumental to the writing process to occur. The complex socio-cultural context of rural dog-walking may be examined both through critical reflection and creative work. The use of dog-walking for reflection and unconscious creative thought is considered in relation to Romantic models of writing and walking through landscape. While dog-walking is a specific activity with its own peculiarities, the study provides a case study for creative writers to use in developing their own practice in relation to other everyday activities from running and swimming to shopping, gardening and washing up
Semiometrics: Applying Ontologies across Large-Scale Digital Libraries
No full textAs large-scale digital libraries become more available and complete, not to mention more numerous, it is clear there is a need for services that can draw together and perform inference calculations on the metadata produced. However, the traditional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) model, while efficiently constructed and optimised for many business structures, does not necessarily cope well with issues of concurrent data updates and retrieval at the scale of hundreds of thousands of papers. At the same time the growth of RDF and the increasing interest in Semantic Web technologies perhaps begins to present a viable alternative at a scalable, practical level. This paper considers a specific application of large-scale metadata analysis and conducts scalability tests using real-world data. It concludes that RDF technologies are both a scalable and performance-realistic alternative to traditional RDBMS approaches. It also shows that for relationship-based queries on large-scale metadata stores, RDF technologies can significantly out-perform traditional RDBMS approaches by allowing both retrieval and updating of data in a timely manner
Detection of Cognitive Features from Web Resources in Support of Cultural Modeling and Analysis
No full textThe World Wide Web serves as a valuable source of culture-relevant information, which can be used to support cultural modeling and analysis activities. Part of the challenge in exploiting the Web as a source of culture-relevant information relates to the need to detect and extract information about beliefs, attitudes, and values from a variety of different resources. The Web thus features a rich variety of information resources, and these are seldom categorized with respect to the dimensions in which cultural analysts are interested. Exploiting the Web as a source of culture-relevant information therefore requires techniques and approaches that enable cultural analysts to extract relevant information and organize extracted content in various ways. In this paper, we outline an approach to assist cultural analysts in the extraction and organization of relevant information. We show techniques that can be used to extract information about the attitudes, beliefs, and values of individuals, and how this data can, in turn, be used to support cultural modeling and analysis
Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred History of Energy Use
No full textFire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. © 2014, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved
K-theory for group C*-algebras
No full textThese notes are based on a lecture course given by the first author in the Sedano Winter School on K-theory held in Sedano, Spain, on January 22-27th of 2007. They aim at introducing K-theory of C*-algebras, equivariant K-homology and KK-theory in the context of the Baum-Connes conjectur
Pneumatic battery : a chemical alternative to pneumatic energy storage
No full textThesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2012.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 51).Pneumatic power is traditionally provided by compressed air contained in a pressurized vessel. This method of energy storage is analogous to an electrical capacitor. This study sought to create an alternative pneumatic device, the pneumatic battery, that would be analogous to an electrical battery. A pneumatic battery allows energy to be stored chemically in a Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) solution and released when the solution decomposes, producing oxygen gas. This decomposition is sped up with the aid of a platinum catalyst. A mechanical negative feedback system regulates the exposure of the catalyst, allowing the battery to generate a user specified pressure at its outlet. The prototype produced was observed to generate an outlet pressure of up to 470 kPa (68 psi) and is theoretically capable of generating up to 689 kPa (100 psi) with a volumetric energy density greater than that of conventional compressed air tanks.by Nigel Kojimoto.S.B
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