9 research outputs found
FROM RESILIENCE TO RELIANCE. STATE DISRUPTION OF TRADITIONAL FLOOD MITIGATION STRATEGIES
No full textNakon azijskog oceanskog tsunamija 2004. godine vlada indijskog Saveznog teritorija Pondicherry započela je opsežnu obnovu ribarskih zajednica Paṭṭaṇavara. U sklopu toga projekta poduzela je izgradnju više od 7000 kuća u zajednicama koje su stradale, ili bi mogle stradati. U mnogim slučajevima premjestila je ribarska sela s obalnih područja u predjele u unutrašnjosti, koje je smatrala “sigurnijima” i rezistentnijima na poplave. Prisilna preseljenja zajednica ugroženih poplavama na prostore koje je odabrala vlada imala su i nepredviđene posljedice, među kojima nastanak kratkoga spoja u tradicionalnim mehanizmima ublažavanja sezonskih poplava. Time su se u rubnim zajednicama, ionako već podložnima vremenskim nepogodama, zapravo izazvale sezonske poplave i stvorila se njihova rastuća ovisnost o vladinim programima pomoći.This paper interrogates how Paṭṭaṇavar fisher communities in the Union Territory of Pondicherry, India, imagine their relationship to their environment and examines what the author calls their “flood imaginary”, or traditional mechanisms for understanding, mitigating and coping with seasonal flood. The Paṭṭaṇavar flood imaginary will be put into conversation with GoPY (Government of Pondicherry) efforts to rehabilitate tsunami-affected communities and the development ideologies upon which such projects are based. The author critiques the stark shift from traditional coping mechanisms to government-mandated “improvement” strategies and argues instead for a policy that integrates external expertise with local/traditional knowledge
Bridging the gap between social tagging and semantic annotation: E.D. the Entity Describer
No full textSemantic annotation enables the development of efficient computational methods for analyzing and interacting with information, thus maximizing its value. With the already substantial and constantly expanding data generation capacity of the life sciences as well as the concomitant increase in the knowledge distributed in scientific articles, new ways to produce semantic annotations of this information are crucial. While automated techniques certainly facilitate the process, manual annotation remains the gold standard in most domains. In this manuscript, we describe a prototype mass-collaborative semantic annotation system that, by distributing the annotation workload across the broad community of biomedical researchers, may help to produce the volume of meaningful annotations needed by modern biomedical science. We present E.D., the Entity Describer, a mashup of the Connotea social tagging system, an index of semantic web-accessible controlled vocabularies, and a new public RDF database for storing social semantic annotations
Increased Carotid Thickness in Subjects with Recently-Diagnosed Diabetes from Rural Cameroon
No full textPMCID: PMC3423396This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Tactile Learning: The Making of an Attitude
No full textThere is an interesting case in the history of dock building along the River Liffey that is illustrative of the relevance of one’s background in shaping one’s perceptual horizon and thus the manner in which the environment is attended to and the design process is undertaken. History documents that the acclaimed Scottish engineer John Rennie (1761 -1821) was author of the three docks built eastward of the Custom House in Dublin. This trio consists of the original dock, or Revenue Dock, completed 1796 (now in-filled), as well as George’ s Dock and the Inner Basin, both built by 1824. Yet the first dock was actually designed and constructed in tandem with the Custom House by James Gandon (1743 - 1823). Though this fact is clearly recorded by Mulvany in his biographical work on Gandon, and tentatively acknowledged much later by McParland, the record of citation evidence has slowly mutated across nearly two centuries to accommodate an altered perception of the increasingly specialized roles of engineer and architect. What is clear, from Rennie’s well kept business records, is that once awarded the contract to build the two additional docks and associated warehouses by the Commissioners of Custom and Excise in 1814, Rennie was in a position to assess the condition of the original Revenue Dock in late October of 1820 in an attempt to estimate the cause for its failure . Based on this assessment , three sides of this original dock in addition to its entrance channel were to be largely rebuilt, following Rennie’s untimely death in 1821, by resident engineer John Aird (1760 - 1832) under the supervision of Thomas Telford (1757 - 1834) by 1822. Presumably the subsequent rebuilding of substantial portions of the Revenue Dock are responsible for the muddied record of authorship. Regardless, there remains substantial documentation that attests to both Gandon’s role in the design of this first dock, as well as the significant differences between Rennie’s and Gandon ’s approach to the design of these structures
Teachers' experiences in implementing inclusive education policy in Papua New Guinea: A study of two primary schools in the National Capital District.
No full textPapua New Guinea (PNG) endorsed its inclusive education policy entitled ‘National Special Education Policy, Plans and Guidelines’ (NSEPPG) in 1993. It is one of the essential documents that PNG formulated in connection to international trends such as the 1990 World Declaration on Education for All and the 1994 Salamanca Statement that advocate that regular schools should accommodate all children regardless of their physical, intellectual, social, emotional, linguistic or other conditions to receive education along with their able bodied peers (Smith-Davis, 2002). The NSEPPG provides the cornerstone of how inclusive education is to be achieved across all levels of education in PNG. The PNG government began with initial plans to merge special education practices to inclusive education since 1993 when the inclusive education policy was enacted. The actual progress began in 1994.
This landmark document warranted that all children with disability that have remained excluded in regular schools are to access education in their nearby schools without any forms of discrimination. The policy proclaims that teachers’ are responsible to provide the inclusion education for all children through the regular teaching and learning process and the government promised to support the implementation processes. This study was set out to capture this moment in history in two urban primary schools in PNG and to determine the factors that have influenced the implementation of inclusive education policy.
The research gazed through Pierre Bourdieu’s three conceptual tools of habitus, field and capital as a theoretical framework to examine twelve experienced teachers’ to story their experiences via focus group and follow-up individual interviews on how they implement inclusive education policy. In correlation to Bourdieu’s concepts habits, field and capital, what teachers experienced during their teaching in the school identified key factors that least facilitated policy implementation processes. The study has recognized a disconnection between the knowledge on inclusive education and the practices of implementation in the field.
The study found that despite teachers’ having positive nurturing instinct to support children’s education in view of the Education for All agenda, they are confronted with numerous challenges and complexities as they work to embrace practices of integration and inclusion within their capacities as teachers. The study found that the challenges imposed on teachers were lack of knowledge and skills in inclusive education, large class size, lack of collaborative support system within the school and the education system along with lack of incentives.
The recommendations and the reflections put forth in this thesis offer insight into, roles of primary school teachers, school Principals, school inspectors, teacher educators and educational policy makers in general to look again into how this government innovation can better facilitated at the primary school level where vast majority of school aged children cannot be absent from education. The study suggest what teachers and policy makers can learn from the current study to look into the future of inclusive education in PNG to create a connectedness between policy and practice is no rhetoric policy proclamation to actual practice
A catalogue of cataclysmic variables from 20 years of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey with new classifications, periods, trends and oddities
No full textWe present a catalogue of 507 cataclysmic variables (CVs) observed in SDSS I
to IV including 70 new classifications collated from multiple archival data
sets. This represents the largest sample of CVs with high-quality and
homogeneous optical spectroscopy. We have used this sample to derive unbiased
space densities and period distributions for the major sub-types of CVs. We
also report on some peculiar CVs, period bouncers and also CVs exhibiting large
changes in accretion rates. We report 70 new CVs, 59 new periods, 178
unpublished spectra and 262 new or updated classifications. From the SDSS
spectroscopy, we also identified 18 systems incorrectly identified as CVs in
the literature. We discuss the observed properties of 13 peculiar CVS, and we
identify a small set of eight CVs that defy the standard classification scheme.
We use this sample to investigate the distribution of different CV sub-types,
and we estimate their individual space densities, as well as that of the entire
CV population. The SDSS I to IV sample includes 14 period bounce CVs or
candidates. We discuss the variability of CVs across the Hertzsprung-Russell
diagram, highlighting selection biases of variability-based CV detection.
Finally, we searched for, and found eight tertiary companions to the SDSS CVs.
We anticipate that this catalogue and the extensive material included in the
Supplementary Data will be useful for a range of observational population
studies of CVs.Comment: Published by MNRAS (including 2 corrections published on 7 December
2023). Includes supplementary material including machine readable versio
Optimizing Emergency Awakening to Audible Smoke Alarms: an update
No full textThis review examines research on what types of emergency signal will be the best to awaken most individuals and what can be improved. Four key areas are reviewed: (a) the characteristics of four signals; (b) how human characteristics alter arousal to different signals; (c) research comparing the effectiveness of different alarms in different sleeping populations; and (d) acoustical, methodological and theoretical implications
The role of experiential knowledge in the reproductive decision making of families genetically at risk : the case of spinal muscular atrophy
No full textThis study reports on the analysis of 59 in-depth interviews conducted with
people diagnosed with, or from families affected by, Spinal Muscular Atrophy
(SMA). It focuses on attitudes towards, and actual uses of, prenatal testing
and selective termination for SMA in reproductive decision making for this
group of people, in order to focus on the role of experiential knowledge of
SMA and its relationship to expert medical knowledge, within these highly
complex decisions.
Experiential knowledge has been described in the literature as knowledge
derived from experience, whether ‘embodied’ (i.e. sensory) or ‘empathetic’
(i.e. based on the experiences of others). Experiential knowledge has
frequently been positioned as being in opposition to, or even conflicting with,
medical knowledge, particularly by feminists and disability rights supporters,
for whom the tensions between experiential knowledge and medical
knowledge have political significance. However, this research found the
relationship between expert and experiential knowledge to be both fluid and
dynamic, which had important implications for the way in which SMA was
conceptualised, understood and responded to by families living with it.
Whilst participants’ accounts of SMA were thoroughly grounded in their day-to-day realities with the condition, this knowledge always existed in and
through a relationship with expert medical knowledge of SMA.
The inherent uncertainties within and between experiential and expert
knowledge, and the ways of conceptualising SMA that emerged from them,
however, rather than alleviating, instead contributed to, and heightened, some
of the social, ethical and moral dilemmas these families experienced around
reproductive decision making. Indeed, many participants became trapped
within these ways of knowing SMA and the internal contradictions they
contained, whilst for others, the strategic privileging of one form of
knowledge as ‘authentic’ over the other became the only way to escape some
of these dilemmas, and clarify where their reproductive responsibilities lay
ОСНОВЫ ПРИМЕНЕНИЯ ЗАРУБЕЖНОЙ СИСТЕМЫ ОЦЕНКИ КОНДИЦИИ КРУПНОГО РОГАТОГО СКОТА МОЛОЧНОГО НАПРАВЛЕНИЯ ПРОДУКТИВНОСТИ «BODY CONDITION SCORE (BCS)»
No full textLast century has become the start for many developed countries of the world in doing research devoted to designing methodology for estimating body condition scoring. This indicator has been explored for being applied as an efficient instrument used for managing technological processes of milk producing. The research explores dairy cattle and cows condition by means of BCS criterion. The author uses descriptive comparative analysis (analytical and synthetical comparison of different sources); the paper analyzes methodics of BCS and its registration, speaks about possible ways of BCS data usage on increasing milk productivity and feeding cows in their different stages of ovary cycle. Comparative analysis considers similarities and differences in peculiarities of economic application national (GOST) and foreign (BSC) estimation of dairy cattle condition. BSC is a semiquantitative criterion of point non-instrumental estimation od dairy cattle. It is rather cheap and simple method of control, optimization, automatization of industrial processes and veterinary service at dairy farms. Controlling of cow condition according to the system of BSC is expected to increase milk productivity, enhance natural and genetic animal potential and further intensification of the industry.С 50-х гг. ХХ в. в большинстве развитых стран мира активно проводятся научные исследования, посвященные разработке методик оценки кондиции крупного рогатого скота (англ. Body Condition Scoring) и изучению возможностей использования данного показателя (BCS) в качестве эффективного инструмента управления технологическими процессами при производстве молока-сырья. Объектом исследования в статье выступает крупный рогатый скот молочного направления продуктивности, предметом исследования является оценка кондиции коров по системе BCS и ее применение в практике зоотехнии. Путем использования описательного сравнительного анализа (аналитико-синтетического сравнения различных источников) в статье анализируются методики проведения BCS и ее регистрации, излагаются возможные пути использования данных BCS в работе по повышению молочной продуктивности и организации кормления коров в различные периоды полового цикла. С применением сравнительно-сопоставительного анализа рассматриваются сходства и различия в особенностях хозяйственного использования отечественной (ГОСТ) и зарубежной (BCS) систем оценки кондиции молочного скота. Представляя собой полуколичественный показатель субъективной (балльной) неинструментальной оценки кондиции молочного скота, BCS оказался дешевым и простым в использовании средством контроля, оптимизации, а с недавнего времени - автоматизации производственных процессов, а также зооветеринарного обслуживания поголовья на молочно-товарных фермах. Широкое внедрение регулярной оценки и учета кондиции коров по системе BCS в комплексе с другими производственными показателями призвано увеличить молочную продуктивность, способствовать наиболее полному раскрытию природно-генетического потенциала животных, дальнейшей интенсификации отрасли
