Impure Memory, Imperfect Justice: A Comparison of Post-Repression Fiction Across the South Atlantic

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Ethobehavioral Studies of Fear, Sex, and Biological Rhythms

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Indefinite determiner introducing definite referent: a special use of 'yi 'one' + classifier' in Chinese

The indefinite determiner yi 'one'+ classifier' is the most approximate to an indefinite article, like the English a, in Chinese. It serves all the functions characteristic of representative stages of grammaticalization from a numeral to a generalized indefinite determiner as elaborated in the literature. It is established in this paper that the Chinese indefinite determiner has developed a special use with definite expressions, serving as a backgrounding device marking entities as of low thematic importance and unlikely to receive subsequent mentions in ensuing discourse. 'yi+ classifier' in the special use with definite expressions displays striking similarities in terms of semantic bleaching and phonological reduction with the same determiner at the advanced stage of grammaticalization characterized by uses with generics, nonspecifics and nonreferentials. An explanation is offered in terms of an implicational relation between nonreferentiality and low thematic importance which characterize the two uses of the indefinite determiner. While providing another piece of evidence in support of the claim that semantically nonreferentials and entities of low thematic importance tend to be encoded in terms of same linguistic devices in language, findings in this paper have shown how an indefinite determiner can undergo a higher degree of grammaticalization than has been reported in the literature-it expands its scope to mark not only indefinite but also definite expressions as semantically nonreferential and/or thematically unimportant. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Injury and frequency of use of playground equipment in public schools and parks in Brisbane, Australia

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the frequency of use of play equipment in public schools and parks in Brisbane, Australia, and to estimate an annual rate of injury per use of equipment, overall and for particular types of equipment. Methods: Injury data on all children injured from playground equipment and seeking medical attention at the emergency department of either of the two children's hospitals in the City of Brisbane were obtained for the years 1996 and 1997. Children were observed at play on five different pieces of play equipment in a random sample of 16 parks and 16 schools in the City of Brisbane. Children injured in the 16 parks and schools were counted, and rates of injury and use were calculated. Results: The ranked order for equipment use in the 16 schools was climbing equipment (3762 uses), horizontal ladders (2309 uses), and slides (856 uses). Each horizontal ladder was used 2.6 times more often than each piece of climbing equipment. Each horizontal ladder was used 7.8 times more than each piece of climbing equipment in the sample of public parks. Slides were used 4.6 times more than climbing equipment in parks and 1.2 times more in public schools. The annual injury rate for the 16 schools and 16 parks under observation was 0.59/100000 and 0.26/100000 uses of equipment, respectively. Conclusions: This study shows that annual number of injuries per standardized number of uses could be used to determine the relative risk of particular pieces of playground equipment. The low overall rate of injuries/100000 uses of equipment in this study suggests that the benefit of further reduction of injury in this community may be marginal and outweigh the economic costs in addition to reducing challenging play opportunities.

Avoidance of obstacles in the absence of visual awareness

The spatial character of our reaching movements is extremely sensitive to potential obstacles in the workspace. We recently found that this sensitivity was retained by most patients with left visual neglect when reaching between two objects, despite the fact that they tended to ignore the leftward object when asked to bisect the space between them. This raises the possibility that obstacle avoidance does not require a conscious awareness of the obstacle avoided. We have now tested this hypothesis in a patient with visual extinction following right temporoparietal damage. Extinction is an attentional disorder in which patients fail to report stimuli on the side of space opposite a brain lesion under conditions of bilateral stimulation. Our patient avoided obstacles during reaching, to exactly the same degree, regardless of whether he was able to report their presence. This implicit processing of object location, which may depend on spared superior parietal-lobe pathways, demonstrates that conscious awareness is not necessary for normal obstacle avoidance.

Health characteristics of older Australian dietary supplement users compared to non-supplement users

The aim of this study was to measure the prevalence of dietary and health supplement use among Australians aged 65 years and over, and to contrast the health differences between supplement users and non-supplement users. Data was obtained from 1,263 randomly selected older Australians, who provided general demographic data, in addition to information related to their health, symptoms experienced and uses of medication, including dietary supplements. Supplement use was reported by 43% of the sample (52% of females and 35% of males). This investigation has revealed distinct differences in the health profile of older supplement users compared to non-users. Although there was no difference in the number of visits to medical doctors or self-rated health status between supplement users and non-supplement users, supplement users were more likely to report arthritis and osteoporosis, and experience more symptoms and consume more medication than non-supplement users. In contrast, there was a reduced likelihood of taking a supplement for those with hypertension and by those using blood pressure medication and heart tablets. These results suggest that older dietary supplement users may benefit from education and professional advice to assist them make appropriate and informed choices, particularly if they expect these preparations to attenuate their health concerns.

A methodology for analysis of sugarcane productivity trends - 2. Comparing variety trials with commercial productivity

Previous research has reported both agreements and serious anomalies in relationships between production attributes of sugarcane varieties in variety trials (VTs) and commercial production (CP). This paper examines VT and CP data for tonnes of cane per hectare (TCH) and sugar content (CCS). Data, analysed by REML, included 107 VTs and 54 CP mill years for 9 varieties from the mill districts of Mulgrave, Babinda, and Tully for harvest years 1982-99. Important consistencies included high TCH of Q152, high CCS of Q117 and Q120, and low CCS of H56-752. Significant anomalies existed with respect to TCH for Q113, Q117, Q120, Q122, Q138, and H56-752 and to CCS for Q113 and Q124. Investigation of these anomalies was assisted by access to independent REML analyses of CP data for 65692 individual Tully cane blocks from 1988 to 1999 and by the knowledge of persons familiar with the preferential uses of varieties by farmers. Minor anomalies were due to limited year or mill area data. Q124 TCH was deemed to be decreased and its CCS increased by severe disease in Babinda CP in the extremely wet 1998 and 1999 seasons. Other serious anomalies have credible but unsubstantiated explanations. The most convincing, for Q113, Q117, Q138, and H56-752, are that these varieties were deployed unevenly with regard to late season harvesting, predominant use or avoidance on high fertility soils, or use confined to low fertility sandy soils, respectively. Uneven deployment results in confounding of these effects in the varietal CP statistics at mill area level. It is concluded that VTs cannot be enhanced to anticipate or evaluate most effects of uneven deployment. They give adequate predictions of relative CP performance for varieties deployed evenly across confounding influences. Routine analyses of individual block CP data would be useful and enhanced by addition of relevant information to the block records.

Making media work in space: An interdisciplinary perspective on media and communication requirements for current and future space communities

As humans expand into space communities will form. These have already begun to form in small ways, such as long-duration missions on the International Space Station and the space shuttle, and small-scale tourist excursions into space. Social, behavioural and communications data emerging from such existing communities in space suggest that the physically-bounded, work-oriented and traditionally male-dominated nature of these extremely remote groups present specific problems for the resident astronauts, groups of them viewed as ‘communities’, and their associated groups who remain on Earth, including mission controllers, management and astronauts’ families. Notionally feminine group attributes such as adaptive competence, social adaptation skills and social sensitivity will be crucial to the viability of space communities and in the absence of gender equity, ‘staying in touch’ by means of ‘news from home’ becomes more important than ever. A template of news and media forms and technologies is suggested to service those needs and enhance the social viability of future terraforming activities.

Hyperspace geography: Visualizing fitness landscapes beyond 4D

Human perception is finely tuned to extract structure about the 4D world of time and space as well as properties such as color and texture. Developing intuitions about spatial structure beyond 4D requires exploiting other perceptual and cognitive abilities. One of the most natural ways to explore complex spaces is for a user to actively navigate through them, using local explorations and global summaries to develop intuitions about structure, and then testing the developing ideas by further exploration. This article provides a brief overview of a technique for visualizing surfaces defined over moderate-dimensional binary spaces, by recursively unfolding them onto a 2D hypergraph. We briefly summarize the uses of a freely available Web-based visualization tool, Hyperspace Graph Paper (HSGP), for exploring fitness landscapes and search algorithms in evolutionary computation. HSGP provides a way for a user to actively explore a landscape, from simple tasks such as mapping the neighborhood structure of different points, to seeing global properties such as the size and distribution of basins of attraction or how different search algorithms interact with landscape structure. It has been most useful for exploring recursive and repetitive landscapes, and its strength is that it allows intuitions to be developed through active navigation by the user, and exploits the visual system's ability to detect pattern and texture. The technique is most effective when applied to continuous functions over Boolean variables using 4 to 16 dimensions.

Crystallization of the C-terminal domain of the mouse brain cytosolic long-chain acyl-CoA thioesterase

The mammalian long-chain acyl-CoA thioesterase, the enzyme that catalyses the hydrolysis of acyl-CoAs to free fatty acids, contains two fused 4HBT (4-hydroxybenzoyl-CoA thioesterase) motifs. The C-terminal domain of the mouse long-chain acyl-CoA thioesterase (Acot7) has been expressed in bacteria and crystallized. The crystals were obtained by vapour diffusion using PEG 2000 MME as precipitant at pH 7.0 and 290 K. The crystals have the symmetry of space group R32 ( unit-cell parameters a = b = 136.83, c = 99.82 angstrom, gamma = 120 degrees). Two molecules are expected in the asymmetric unit. The crystals diffract to 2.4 angstrom resolution using the laboratory X-ray source and are suitable for crystal structure determination.

Lorentz invariant intrinsic decoherence

We present a Lorentz invariant extension of a previous model for intrinsic decoherence (Milburn 1991 Phys. Rev. A 44 5401). The extension uses unital semigroup representations of space and time translations rather than the more usual unitary representation, and does the least violence to physically important invariance principles. Physical consequences include a modification of the uncertainty principle and a modification of field dispersion relations, similar to modifications suggested by quantum gravity and string theory, but without sacrificing Lorentz invariance. Some observational signatures are discussed.

Festival attendance and the development of social capital

Festivals are emerging worldwide as a growing and vibrant sector of the tourism and leisure industries and are seen to have significant economic, socio-cultural, and political impacts on the destination area and host groups. While there are a number of scholars working on developing valid models to determine the economic impact of festivals on host communities, there are few studies published which focus on the social, cultural, and/or political impacts of festivals and events. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to determine the degree to which festival attendance facilitates the augmentation of social capital by drawing upon the literature from various disciplines in order to conceptualize the synergy between festivals and social capital. To achieve this, the paper will (1) examine the relevant literature on the key characteristics of ‘festivals’ as distinct from other events and (2) investigate the current uses of the notion of ‘social capital’ within the academic debates in a variety of disciplinary contexts

Spectroscopic analysis of terrestrial analogues for the interpretation of surface composition of rocky bodies in the solar system. Effects of mineral mixing and particle size. Applications to moon, mars and implications for mercury.

Among the Solar System’s bodies, Moon, Mercury and Mars are at present, or have been in the recent years, object of space missions aimed, among other topics, also at improving our knowledge about surface composition. Between the techniques to detect planet’s mineralogical composition, both from remote and close range platforms, visible and near-infrared reflectance (VNIR) spectroscopy is a powerful tool, because crystal field absorption bands are related to particular transitional metals in well-defined crystal structures, e.g., Fe2+ in M1 and M2 sites of olivine or pyroxene (Burns, 1993). Thanks to the improvements in the spectrometers onboard the recent missions, a more detailed interpretation of the planetary surfaces can now be delineated. However, quantitative interpretation of planetary surface mineralogy could not always be a simple task. In fact, several factors such as the mineral chemistry, the presence of different minerals that absorb in a narrow spectral range, the regolith with a variable particle size range, the space weathering, the atmosphere composition etc., act in unpredictable ways on the reflectance spectra on a planetary surface (Serventi et al., 2014). One method for the interpretation of reflectance spectra of unknown materials involves the study of a number of spectra acquired in the laboratory under different conditions, such as different mineral abundances or different particle sizes, in order to derive empirical trends. This is the methodology that has been followed in this PhD thesis: the single factors previously listed have been analyzed, creating, in the laboratory, a set of terrestrial analogues with well-defined composition and size. The aim of this work is to provide new tools and criteria to improve the knowledge of the composition of planetary surfaces. In particular, mixtures composed with different content and chemistry of plagioclase and mafic minerals have been spectroscopically analyzed at different particle sizes and with different mineral relative percentages. The reflectance spectra of each mixture have been analyzed both qualitatively (using the software ORIGIN®) and quantitatively applying the Modified Gaussian Model (MGM, Sunshine et al., 1990) algorithm. In particular, the spectral parameter variations of each absorption band have been evaluated versus the volumetric FeO% content in the PL phase and versus the PL modal abundance. This delineated calibration curves of composition vs. spectral parameters and allow implementation of spectral libraries. Furthermore, the trends derived from terrestrial analogues here analyzed and from analogues in the literature have been applied for the interpretation of hyperspectral images of both plagioclase-rich (Moon) and plagioclase-poor (Mars) bodies.

INTERNET COMO PLATAFORMA PARA LIVRE CIRCULAÇÃO DE INFORMAÇÃO DE RELEVÂNCIA SOCIAL E NOVAS POSSIBILIDADES DE COMUNICAÇÃO

O estudo aponta como a internet ampliou as possibilidades de comunicação dos cidadãos de uma forma que não era possível no período do controle e concentração dos meios broadcasting sobre a informação social, assim, oferecendo espaço para a livre circulação de informação e novas possibilidades de comunicação. Entretanto, ressalta que ainda há assimetrias tanto do ponto de vista do acesso quanto do uso da rede em todas as suas potencialidades. Verifica que o atual momento ainda é de disputas em relação à legislação que diz respeito aos direitos e deveres dos que utilizam a rede. O trabalho foi realizado por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica e documental, tendo com base autores que pesquisam sobre as áreas da Comunicação, Tecnologias Digitais, Direito à Informação Social Livre e Legislação de internet, como Cicília Peruzzo, Manuel Castells, Rousiley Maia, Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira, Tim Wu, Tim Berners-Lee, Walter Lima Junior, Wilson Gomes e Yochai Benkler. O resultado da pesquisa demonstra que no cenário brasileiro, as desigualdades socioeconômicas são fator de desigualdade tanto em relação ao acesso quanto aos usos da internet, sendo dificultador para quem desejar se apropriar com liberdade deste desenvolvimento tecnológico. Portanto, cabe ao setor público interferir com vistas à diminuição das assimetrias informativas para garantir o direito de comunicação dos brasileiros no espaço de comunicação digital conectada.

AVALIAÇÃO DA REPRODUTIBILIDADE DE PONTOS CEFALOMÉTRICOS NAS TELERRADIOGRAFIAS DIGITAIS EM NORMA LATERAL NOS FORMATOS DICOM, TIFF E JPEG

A imagem radiográfica digital adquirida pelo sistema de placa de fósforo foto ativada é normalmente visualizada no monitor do computador no formato DICOM, caracterizado pela alta resolução das imagens. Como este formato ocupa muito espaço para armazenamento, as imagens digitais são submetidas a uma compressão, que otimiza a capacidade de espaço dos computadores e reduz o tempo de transmissão pela Internet. O objetivo desse estudo foi avaliar a influência da compressão TIFF e JPEG na reprodutibilidade intra e interexaminador da marcação de pontos cefalométricos em imagens de telerradiografias em norma lateral comparadas com o formato DICOM. A amostra consistiu de 90 imagens de telerradiografias obtidas a partir de 30 indivíduos, dos quais se obteve uma radiografia digital exibida no formato DICOM. Estas imagens foram convertidas para os formatos JPEG, com Fator de Qualidade 80 e TIFF. Após o cegamento e randomização da amostra, três ortodontistas calibrados marcaram a localização de 15 pontos cefalométricos em cada imagem utilizando o sistema de coordenadas x e y. Os resultados mostraram que as marcações dos pontos cefalométricos apresentaram concordância de reprodutibilidade tanto intra como interexaminador, exceto para os pontos Go, Po, Or, B e Pog . Os diferentes formatos de arquivo mostraram resultados estatisticamente semelhantes para cada ponto e eixo aferido. As compressões JPEG e TIFF estudadas não tiveram efeito, em imagens de telerradiografias em norma lateral, na reprodutibilidade intra e interexaminadores da marcação dos pontos cefalométricos testados.(AU)