5,450 research outputs found
Development and evaluation of an attractive self-marking ovitrap to measure dispersal and determine skip oviposition in Aedes albopictus(Diptera: Culicidae) field populations
No full textAedes albopictus (Skuse) is a container-breeding species with considerable public health importance. To date, Ae. albopictus oviposition behavior has been assessed in outdoor conditions, but only with laboratory-reared specimens. In outdoor large-cage and field studies, we used an attractive self-marking ovipositional device to assess Ae. albopictus skip oviposition behavior. In field studies, 37 wild Ae. albopictus that visited an attractive self-marking ovisite were subsequently captured at a sticky ovitrap within a 4-d period. Because the average Ae. albopictus gonotrophic period is 4.5–6 d, the wild-caught Ae. albopictus visited at least two oviposition sites within a single gonotrophic period. This provided field-based indirect evidence of skip oviposition. The mean distance traveled (MDT) during the 20-d evaluations ranged from 58 to 78?m. The maximum observed distance traveled was 149?m, which was the outer edge of our trapping ability. As populations of Ae. albopictus increased, the MDT during the 4- and 20-d post-marking period increased significantly. Additional observations of wild-marked and captured Aedes triseriatus (Say) are discusse
The pragmatic constructions of Deleuze, Guattari and Miles Davis
No full textThe aim of the following investigation is two-fold. Firstly, the project takes as its focus the growing corpus of secondary literature written on the work of the French philosophers and theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose work has generated a great deal of
interest in recent years and a proportionate amount of controversy. Much of this controversy can be attributed to simplifications and misunderstandings on the part of
commentators who have in some instances neglected to approach Deleuze and Guattari with sufficent rigour and care, resulting in the perpetuation of so many misunderstandings regarding their work.
Secondly, the project will seek to redress some of these misunderstandings by recourse to a pragmatic embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts and ideas through a case-study based on the life and work of the African-American jazz musician Miles Davis. In attempting to provide a new and challenging case as the basis for this investigation, the overriding aim is to assess the pragmatic remit of Deleuze and Guattari's thought, in terms of aesthetics, ethics and politics, whilst remaining sensitive to the potential limitations and dangers of their project
Evaluating Research Impact through Open Access to Scholarly Communication
No full textScientific research is a competitive business – in order to secure funding, promotion and tenure researchers must demonstrate their work has impact in their field. To maximise impact researchers undertake high priority research, aim to get results first, and publish in the highest impact journals. The Internet now presents a new opportunity to the scholarly author seeking higher impact: s/he can now make their work instantly accessible on the Web through author self-archiving. This growing body of open access literature (coupled with new publishing models that make journals available for-free to the reader) maximises research impact by maximising the number of people who can read it, and making it available sooner. Open access also provides a new opportunity for bibliometric research. This thesis describes the relatively recent phenomenon of open access to research literature, tools that were built to collect and analyse that literature, and the results of analyses of the effect of open access and its effect on author behaviour. It shows that articles self-archived by authors receive between 50-250% more citations, that rapid pre-printing on the Web has dramatically reduced the peak citation rate from over a year to virtually instant and how citation-impact – now widely used for evaluation – can be expanded to include a new web metric of download impact
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Number 3 in the North Texas Military Biography and Memoir Series
No full textJames M. Davis is a retired businessman who lives in Midland, Texas, with his wife of over six decades, Jean. He served on active duty in the U.S. Army Air Forces for more than two and a half years during World War II, and then in the Air Force reserves until 1961. David L. Snead, the editor, is an associate professor of history at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia and is the author of The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War and George E. Browne: An American Doughboy in World War I
Reconciling Versioning and Context in Hypermedia Structure Servers
No full textContextual structure servers and versioning servers share a similar goal in allowing different views on a stored structure according to the viewer’s perspective. In this paper we argue that a generic contextual model can be used to facilitate versioning. In order to prove our hypothesis we have drawn on our experiences with OHP-Version to extend FOHM’s contextual model
Addressing Interoperability in Open Hypermedia: the Design of the Open Hypermedia Protocol
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The long-wavelength view of GG Tau A: rocks in the ring world
No full textWe present the first detection of GG Tau A at centimetre wavelengths, made with the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager Large Array at a frequency of 16 GHz (λ = 1.8 cm). The source is detected at >6 σrms with an integrated flux density of S16GHz = 249 ± 45 µJy. We use these new centimetre-wave data, in conjunction with additional measurements compiled from the literature, to investigate the long-wavelength tail of the dust emission from this unusual protoplanetary system. We use an MCMC-based method to determine maximum likelihood parameters for a simple parametric spectral model and consider the opacity and mass of the dust contributing to the microwave emission. We derive a dust mass of Md ~ 0.1 Msun, constrain the dimensions of the emitting region and find that the opacity index at λ > 7 mm is less than unity, implying a contribution to the dust population from grains exceeding ~4 cm in size. We suggest that this indicates coagulation within the GG Tau A system has proceeded to the point where dust grains have grown to the size of small rocks with dimensions of a few centimetres. Considering the relatively young age of the GG Tau association in combination with the low derived disc mass, we suggest that this system may provide a useful test case for rapid core accretion planet formation models
Confirmation Bias and the Open Access Advantage: Some Methodological Suggestions for the Davis Citation Study
No full text: Davis (2008) analyzes citations from 2004-2007 in 11 biomedical journals. For 1,600 of the 11,000 articles (15%), their authors paid the publisher to make them Open Access (OA). The outcome, confirming previous studies (on both paid and unpaid OA), is a significant OA citation Advantage, but a small one (21%, 4% of it correlated with other article variables such as number of authors, references and pages). The author infers that the size of the OA advantage in this biomedical sample has been shrinking annually from 2004-2007, but the data suggest the opposite. In order to draw valid conclusions from these data, the following five further analyses are necessary: (1) The current analysis is based only on author-choice (paid) OA. Free OA self-archiving needs to be taken into account too, for the same journals and years, rather than being counted as non-OA, as in the current analysis. (2) The proportion of OA articles per journal per year needs to be reported and taken into account. (3) Estimates of journal and article quality and citability in the form of the Journal Impact Factor and the relation between the size of the OA Advantage and journal as well as article “citation-bracket” need to be taken into account. (4) The sample-size for the highest-impact, largest-sample journal analyzed, PNAS, is restricted and is excluded from some of the analyses. An analysis of the full PNAS dataset is needed, for the entire 2004-2007 period. (5) The analysis of the interaction between OA and time, 2004-2007, is based on retrospective data from a June 2008 total cumulative citation count. The analysis needs to be redone taking into account the dates of both the cited articles and the citing articles, otherwise article-age effects and any other real-time effects from 2004-2008 are confounded. Davis proposes that an author self-selection bias for providing OA to higher-quality articles (the Quality Bias, QB) is the primary cause of the observed OA Advantage, but this study does not test or show anything at all about the causal role of QB (or of any of the other potential causal factors, such as Accessibility Advantage, AA, Competitive Advantage, CA, Download Advantage, DA, Early Advantage, EA, and Quality Advantage, QA). The author also suggests that paid OA is not worth the cost, per extra citation. This is probably true, but with OA self-archiving, both the OA and the extra citations are free
Rewriting history : postmodern and postcolonial negotiations in the fiction of J.G. Farrell, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie
No full textThis thesis is a study of the rewriting of history in the work of four novelists: J. G. Farrell, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. I argue that their work occupies a particular position that is both within contemporary British fiction, yet at one remove from it.
Their work is situated within the context of critiques of history that are the source of a conflict between postmodernism and postcolonialism. I suggest that each writer engages with postmodemist aesthetics often in an attempt to produce critical histones that bear witness to the voices of those hitherto silenced in conventional historiography. However, these novelists remain anxious as to the potential consequences of mobilising postmodernist models of history, particularly as to the problems this creates concerning historical reference. The thesis aims to
identify the range of related attitudes to postmodernist critiques of history at this particular juncture of contemporary fiction in English.
I approach the specific position of the novelists under study through Homi Bhabha's work on the confluence of the postmodern and the postcolonial, focusing in particular on his suggestion that the postmodem refutation of Western epistemology enables a postcolonial space where a new range of histories emerge. Because each writer works between at least two cultures, and primarily within Britain, they negotiate from within received epistemology in an attempt to locate a space at its boundaries where conventional forms of knowledge no longer have efficacy. However, in contrast to Bhabha, these writers struggle to reach this space and remain sceptical as to the usefulness of postmodernism in making available new forms of
historiography. Ultimately, their work enables a critique of current ways of theorising the relationship between the postmodem and the postcolonial in literary studies
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