212 research outputs found
A physically based approach to simulate sub-grid snow depth and ground surface temperature distribution
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Questioning modern time with Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin
No full textFour texts from Arendt and Benjamin are the scene of our thinking. We enact the question of time as a refusal to abide by the modern conception of time, where the present is the only ground of the real. We argue for a notion of time, in which all that-has-been is considered a site of real experience.
Firstly we discuss Arendt's book On Revolution. Through issues such as history, the eventful and revolt we show the usefulness of the question of time to further our understanding. Secondly in Arendt's 'What is Freedom', freedom is discussed beyond the private individual, as a matter of plurality, of living together. The question of time shows freedom grounded beyond the individual's present, in the historical time of plurality.
With Benjamin's essay 'On some motifs in Baudelaire' we show poetry as a challenge to the symbolic environment of the commodity world. Poetry appears as a keeper of our relation to the time of memory and language that precedes us. In Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility', we distinguish art from technology through the question of time. Art's experience
involves an active relation with what-has-been, with past generations; it challenges the technological way of relating to the world that destroys the depth of human expenence.
Finally, Arendt and Benjamin are presented together, stressing their use of history and tradition to address the problems of modernity. Their effort to think the eventful is related to their negation of historical progression. From the question of time, their thinking teaches us a form of critique that denies the preconception of presence as being the totality of the real. Under their gaze presence is revealed as a changing surface under the sway of history, of time
Building scale in community impact investing through nonfinancial performance measurement
No full textThe measurement of nonfinancial performance is becoming increasingly important in the community impact investing industry, where individuals and institutions actively deploy capital in low-income domestic markets for both financial and social returns. Quality data ensure that the creation of jobs, construction of community facilities, financing of affordable housing, and other benefits that characterize the sector are delivered cost-effectively and transparently. This paper discusses the limited practice and future direction of nonfinancial performance measurement by revisiting four key questions: ; 1. Does nonfinancial performance measurement really matter for investors? ; 2. If it does matter, is nonfinancial performance measurement even possible? ; 3. If nonfinancial performance is possible to measure, what form should it take? ; 4. How will nonfinancial performance measurement increase community impact investing? ; The paper examines the barriers to a more robust regime of nonfinancial performance measurement and posits both that innovation in the sector ought to be driven by the discrete but explicit needs and demands of investors, and that greater accountability has a special role to play in making disclosure more attractive. The report concludes that nonfinancial performance measurement directly informs the investment process and is essential to growing community impact investing because it provides latent sources of capital with market-level information on the tradeoffs between financial and social return. Although the industry is unlikely to discover the “silver bullet” of nonfinancial performance measurement in the near future, there is reason to be hopeful: measurement strategies can – and will – converge through private- and public-sector innovation.Community development
Jews and gender in British literature 1815-1865.
No full textPhDThis thesis examines the variety of relationships between Jews and gender in early
to mid-nineteenth century British literature, focussing particularly on representations
of and by Jewish women. It reconstructs the social, political and literary context in
which writers produced images and narratives about Jews, and considers to what
extent stereotypes were reproduced, appropriated, or challenged. In particular it
examines the ways in which questions of gender were linked to ideas about religious
or racial difference in the Victorian period.
The study situates literary representations of Jews within the context of
contemporary debates about the participation of the Jews in the life of the modern
state. It also investigates the ways in which these political debates were gendered,
looking in particular at the relationship between the cultural construction of
femininity and English national identity.
It first considers Victorian culture's obsession with Rebecca, the Jewess created in
Walter Scott's influential novel Ivanhoe (1819). It examines Rebecca's refusal to
convert to Christianity in the context of Scott's discussion of racial separatism and
modern national unity.
Evangelical writers like Annie Webb, Amelia Bristow and Mrs Brendlah were
prolific literary producers, and preoccupied with converting Jewish women.
Particularly during the 18'40s and 1850s, evangelical writing provided an important
forum for the construction and consolidation of women's national identity.
Grace Aguilar's writing was an attempt to understand Jewish identity within the
terms of Victorian domestic ideology. In contrast, Celia and Marion Moss, in their
historical romances, offered narratives of female heroism and national liberation,
drawing on the contemporary debate about slavery.
Benjamin Disraeli's construction of a "tough version of Jewish identity was a
response both to the contemporary stereotype of the feminised Jew and to the debate
about Jewish emancipation. It also drew on the virile ideology of the Young England
movement of the 1840s
The discovery of SycO reveals a new function for type three secretion effector chaperones
No full textThe Type Three Secretion (T3S) system is a device used by many Gram-negative pathogens that allows bacteria to deliver effector proteins straight into the eukaryotic cell cytosol. These effectors interfere with various signaling pathways to subvert the host cell functions. The secretion machinery of the T3S system consist of a basal body spanning the bacterial inner and outer membrane followed by a stiff hollow needle outside the bacterium. The fully assembled secretion apparatus constitute a continuous hollow conduit that connects the bacteria to the eukaryotic target cell. After cell contact, virulence proteins -called effectors- are injected directly into the cytosol of the host cell via the T3S apparatus. Several effectors of the T3S system require the assistance of specific cytosolic chaperones to be efficiently exported. There are three classes of T3S chaperones. Effector proteins are assisted by Class I chaperones. Although Class I chaperones are well characterized, their main function is still a matter of controversy. In this thesis, we demonstrate that orf155 encodes a specific chaperone for the effector YopO that we called SycO. We showed that SycO enhances YopO secretion in vitro and is required for translocation of YopO into infected cells. By pulldown assay we demonstrated that residues 20 to 77 of YopO are required and sufficient for SycO binding. Using crosslinking experiments and size exclusion chromatography analysis, we determined the stoichiometry of purified SycO and YopO-SycO complexes. SycO alone forms dimers in solution and the YopO-SycO complex has a 1:2 stoichiometry. These results suggested that SycO is a typical chaperone of the Class I. YopO is a serine/theronine kinase that interacts with Rho and Rac and disrupts the cytoskeleton of the target cells. YopO has been shown to localize at the cell plasma-membrane. By transfection of YopO-EGFP hybrid proteins into HEK293T cells, we demonstrated that the chaperone-binding domain (CBD) coincides with the membrane localization domain of YopO. Nevertheless, the CBD was not needed for the kinase activity of YopO. By ultracentrifugation, we also showed that the CBD causes YopO aggregation in the bacteria, when SycO does not cover it. Further, we show that the CBD of YopE and YopT also caused aggregation in the bacteria in the absence of SycE and SycT respectively. YopE, YopT and T3S effectors in other systems also act at the membrane of the eukaryotic host cell. We propose a new hypothesis concerning the role of T3S chaperones. The sub-cellular localization domain of effectors is aggregation-prone and creates the need for a chaperone inside bacteria. We propose that masking such aggregation-prone localization domains may be a general function for type III effector chaperones
Structure-Preserving Hyper-Reduction Methods for the Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations
No full textIn this master thesis several novel DEIM formulations are proposed that enable the construction of non-linearly stable hyper-reduced order models (hROMs) of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The hROMs have the same mass, momentum and energy conservation properties as the previously proposed ROM, but they do not suffer of prohibitively expensive computational scaling when the number of POD modes is increased. The first of the proposed methods is the least-squares discrete empirical interpolation method (LSDEIM), which is based on a constrained minimization. The second method is the Sherman-Morrisson discrete empirical interpolation method (SMDEIM), which applies a rank-one correction to the conventional DEIM to conserve energy. The third method is the decoupled least-squares discrete empirical interpolation method (DLSDEIM), which is a generalization of the LSDEIM that allows increasing the size of the measurement space. All methods result in structure-preserving DEIM formulations that have an equivalent computational scaling as the conventional DEIM, but provide provably stable, structure-preserving hROMs. Furthermore, the use of the principal interval decomposition (PID) in the construction of the reduced and DEIM spaces is considered to beat the Kolmogorov barrier
Eidoporisminae Esben-Petersen 1917
No full textSubfamily Eidoporisminae Esben-Petersen, 1917: 3 Original combination: Eidoporismus pulchellus Esben-Petersen, 1917: 4 Current combination: Eidoporismus pulchellus Esben-Petersen, 1917 Type locality: [“ Sydney”], Australia, New South Wales (state), Sydney (city) (3°51’54”S, 151°12’35”E). Holotype ♀ (by monotypy) with labels: (Fig. 1) Condition of type: good condition, meso- and metathorax glued on the pin, apex of right hindwing damaged. Missing parts: left flagellomeres, apical right flagellomeres. Comments: Esben-Petersen (1917) incorrectly attributed Eidoporismus to Kr̹ger (in litt.) when describing E. pulchellus. The author mentioned that the specimen was collected by Tillyard (Robert “Robin” John Tillyard), who was his friend and also forwarded to him a small lot of interesting material (see introduction of Esben-Petersen 1917). The specimen was part of Tillyard’s collection, which was donated to the NHM by Mrs Patricia “Pattie” Tillyard in 1939.Published as part of Martins, Caleb Califre & Price, Benjamin W., 2020, An annotated and illustrated catalogue of the Osmylidae collection (Neuroptera) at the Natural History Museum, London, pp. 1-61 in Zootaxa 4883 (1) on pages 8-9, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.4883.1.1, http://zenodo.org/record/429604
John Wallis
No full textReading, writing, and doing mathematics in turbulent times, John Wallis (1616–1703) became the Savilian Professor of Geometry in unpromising circumstances, but held that position for longer than any other. Taking seriously the founder’s injunctions to study, edit, and publish the ancient mathematical texts, as well as to teach mathematics, he also enjoyed a long career as a robust and combative mathematical author. In this chapter we consider Wallis’s achievements as a reader, writer, and shaper of mathematics in the early modern world. In the long history of the Savilian professorships at Oxford, John Wallis’s tenure of the Geometry chair is unique
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