Pseudo Focal Points Along Lorentzian Geodesics and Morse Index

Given a Lorentzian manifold (M,g), a geodesic gamma in M and a timelike Jacobi field Y along gamma, we introduce a special class of instants along gamma that we call Y-pseudo conjugate (or focal relatively to some initial orthogonal submanifold). We prove that the Y-pseudo conjugate instants form a finite set, and their number equals the Morse index of (a suitable restriction of) the index form. This gives a Riemannian-like Morse index theorem. As special cases of the theory, we will consider geodesics in stationary and static Lorentzian manifolds, where the Jacobi field Y is obtained as the restriction of a globally defined timelike Killing vector field.

Implementation and role of device management Solutions to the end users

This research is based on consumer complaints with respect to recently purchased consumer electronics. This research document will investigate the instances of development and device management as a tool used to aid consumer and manage consumer’s mobile products in order to resolve issues in or before the consumers is aware one exists. The problem at the present time is that mobile devices are becoming very advanced pieces of technology, and not all manufacturers and network providers have kept up the support element of End users. As such, the subject of the research is to investigate how device management could possibly be used as a method to promote research and development of mobile devices, and provide a better experience for the consumer. The wireless world is becoming increasingly complex as revenue opportunities are driven by new and innovative data services. We can no longer expect the customer to have the knowledge or ability to configure their own device. Device Management platforms can address the challenges of device configuration and support through new enabling technologies. Leveraging these technologies will allow a network operator to reduce the cost of subscriber ownership, drive increased ARPU (Average Revenue per User) by removing barriers to adoption, reduce churn by improving the customer experience and increase customer loyalty. DM technologies provide a flexible and powerful management method but are managing the same device features that have historically been configured manually through call centers or by the end user making changes directly on the device. For this reason DM technologies must be treated as part of a wider support solution. The traditional requirement for discovery, fault finding, troubleshooting and diagnosis are still as relevant with DM as they are in the current human support environment yet the current generation of solutions do little to address this problem. In the deployment of an effective Device Management solution the network operator must consider the integration of the DM platform, interfacing with many areas of the business, supported by knowledge of the relationship between devices, applications, solutions and services maintained on an ongoing basis. Complementing the DM solution with published device information, setup guides, training material and web based tools will ensure the quality of the customer experience, ensuring that problems are completely resolved, driving data usage by focusing customer education on the use of the wireless service In this way device management becomes a tool used both internally within the network or device vendor and by the customer themselves, with each user empowered to effectively manage the device without any prior knowledge or experience, confident that changes they apply will be relevant, accurate, stable and compatible. The value offered by an effective DM solution with an expert knowledge service will become a significant differentiator for the network operator in an ever competitive wireless market. This research document is intended to highlight some of the issues the industry faces as device management technologies become more prevalent, and offers some potential solutions to simplify the increasingly complex task of managing devices on the network, where device management can be used as a tool to aid customer relations and manage customer’s mobile products in order to resolve issues before the user is aware one exists. The research is broken down into the following, Customer Relationship Management, Device management, the role of knowledge with the DM, Companies that have successfully implemented device management, and the future of device management and CRM. And it also consists of questionnaires aimed at technical support agents and mobile device users. Interview was carried out with CRM managers within support centre to further the evidence gathered. To conclude, the document is to consider the advantages and disadvantages of device management and attempt to determine the influence it will have over customer support centre, and what methods could be used to implement it.

About Collaboration, Interaction, and the Negotiation of Meaning in Synchronous Written Chats in L2-German

Open Access

The effects of attitudes and personality traits on mode choice

We hypothesise that differences in people's attitudes and personality traits lead them to attribute varying importance to environmental considerations, safety, comfort, convenience and flexibility. Differences in personality traits call be revealed not only in the individuals' choice of transport, but also in other actions of their everyday lives-such as how much they recycle, whether they take precautions or avoid dangerous pursuits. Conditioning on a set of exogenous individual characteristics, we use indicators of attitudes and personality traits to form latent variables for inclusion in an, otherwise standard, discrete mode choice model. With a sample of Swedish commuters, we find that both attitudes towards flexibility and comfort, as well as being pro-environmentally inclined, influence the individual's choice of mode. Although modal time and cost still are important, it follows that there are other ways, apart from economic incentives, to attract individuals to the, from society's perspective, desirable public modes of transport. Our results should provide useful information to policy-makers and transportation planners developing sustainable transportation systems.

Transport and tourism : a weak symbiosis. An introduction to the special issue

“Tourism’s very existence depends on transport. Still, researchers in transportation and logistics do not show much interest in tourism whereas travel and tourism researchers pay more attention to accessibility than to transport.” These were the opening sentences of the call for papers for the TTRA European Chapter Conference “Transport and Tourism: Challenges, Issues and Conflicts” held in Rotterdam and Breda, The Netherlands from 22 to 24 April 2009.

Negotiating collective and individual agency : a qualitative study of young women's reproductive health in rural India

The societal changes in India and the available variety of reproductive health services call for evidence to inform health systems how to satisfy young women's reproductive health needs. Inspired by Foucault's power idiom and Bandura's agency framework, we explore young women's opportunities to practice reproductive agency in the context of collective social expectations. We carried out in-depth interviews with 19 young women in rural Rajasthan. Our findings highlight how changes in notions of agency across generations enable young women's reproductive intentions and desires, and call for effective means of reproductive control. However, the taboo around sex without the intention to reproduce made contraceptive use unfeasible. Instead, abortions were the preferred method for reproductive control. In conclusion, safe abortion is key, along with the need to address the taboo around sex to enable use of "modern" contraception. This approach could prevent unintended pregnancies and expand young women's agency.

Protocols between programs and proofs

In this paper we describe a new protocol that we call the Curry-Howard protocol between a theory and the programs extracted from it. This protocol leads to the expansion of the theory and the production of more powerful programs. The methodology we use for automatically extracting “correct” programs from proofs is a development of the well-known Curry-Howard process. Program extraction has been developed by many authors, but our presentation is ultimately aimed at a practical, usable system and has a number of novel features. These include 1. a very simple and natural mimicking of ordinary mathematical practice and likewise the use of established computer programs when we obtain programs from formal proofs, and 2. a conceptual distinction between programs on the one hand, and proofs of theorems that yield programs on the other. An implementation of our methodology is the Fred system. As an example of our protocol we describe a constructive proof of the well-known theorem that every graph of even parity can be decomposed into a list of disjoint cycles. Given such a graph as input, the extracted program produces a list of the (non-trivial) disjoint cycles as promised.

Measuring Ultrasonic Communication Between Mouse Pups and Adult Mother Mice

Measuring ultrasonic communication provides us with a way to study parental influence on animals. In this study I measured the ultrasonic communication between mouse pups and two maternal females, one of which who had given birth to the pups and the other had raised them. I found that there was no significant difference between the amount of noise expressed by pups in response to each the biological mother and foster mother test groups. Mouse pups call to maternal females regardless of genetic relatedness. Communication in mice may be a more complicated model because of their communal nature.

You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me: Covenant in Faith and History

In this paper I have attempted to explore "covenant" in faith and history, as it extends throughout the entire framework of the Bible and the entire history of the people who produced it. With such a monstrous topic, a comprehensive analysis of the material could take a lifetime to do it justice. Therefore, I have taken a very specific approach to the material in order to investigate the evolution of covenant from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) to the Christian Scriptures (New Testament). I have made every effort to approach this thesis as a text-based, non-doctrinal discussion. However, having my own religious convictions, it has, at times, been difficult to recognize and escape my biases. Nevertheless, I am confident that this final product is, for the most part, objective and free from dogmatism. Of course, I have brought my own perspective and understanding to the material, which may be different from the reader's, so there may be matters of interpretation on which we differ, but c 'est fa vie in the world of religious dialogue. The structure of this paper is symmetrical: Part I examines the traditions of the Torah and the Prophets; Part II, the Gospels and Paul's letters. I have balanced the Old Testament against the New Testament (the Torah against the Gospels; the Prophets against Paul) in order to give approximately equal weight to the two traditions, and establish a sense of parallelism in the structure of my overall work. A word should also be said about three matters of style. First, instead of the customary Christian designation of time as B.C. or A.D., I have opted to use the more modem B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) notations. This more recent system is less traditional; however, more acceptable in academic and, certainly, more appropriate for a non-doctrinal discussion. Second, in the body of this paper I have chosen to highlight several texts using a variety of colors. This highlighting serves (1) to call the reader's attention to specific passages, and (2) to compare the language and imagery of similar texts. All highlighting has been added to the texts at my own discretion. Finally, the divine name, traditionally vocalized as "Yahweh," is a verbal form of the Hebrew "to be," and means, approximately, "I am who I am." This name was considered too holy to pronounce by the ancient Israelites, and, the word adonai ("My LORD") was used in its stead. In respect of this tradition, I have left the divine name in its original Hebrew form. Accordingly, should be read as "the LORD" throughout this paper. All Hebrew and Greek translations, where they occur, are my own. The Greek translations are based on the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible.

Scriptural Archeology: Excavating the Presence of Women in the Torah

Women's roles in religious history have been traditionally described in terms of their relation and value to men. The normative religious texts provide an androcentric perspective on the gender relationships within the early community, the growth of Judaism in "Jacob's House" and the monotheistic worship of God. Yet these literary representations omit an entire half of the experience of the Jewish community: the perspective and participation of women. As Judith Plaskow argues extensively in Standing Again at Sinai, women are defined not in her own terms or in her own voice, but by her relationship and value to men through the androcentric vocabulary of the Torah. This statement is textually illustrated by the authorial and editorial presentation of women and their place in ancient Israelite society in the Torah. As Judaism grew increasingly androcentric in its leadership, women were increasingly reduced to marginal figures in the community by authorial and editorial revisions. Yet the participation of women of ancient Israel is not lost. Instead, the presence of women is buried beneath the androcentric presentation of the early Judaic community, waiting to be excavated by historical and scriptural examination. The retelling of the past is influenced by the present; memory is not static but takes on different shapes depending on the focus of concentration. However, tradition greatly influences the interpretation of religious history as well. In the book of Genesis, the literature emphasizes the divine appointment of male figures such as Abraham the father of the covenant and Jacob who is renamed and claimed by God as "Israel," placing them at the center of Jewish history. As a result, the other figures in these biblical narratives are described in relation to the patriarchs, those male bearers of the covenant, by their service or their value to him. Women are at the bottom of this hierarchy. Although female figures of exceptional quality are noted in later chronicles, such as Ruth, Deborah and Miriam, it is the very nature of their exception that highlights the androcentric editorial focus of the Torah. I agree with Peggy Day, whose own scriptural examination in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, makes the important distinction between the literary representation and the reality of ancient Israelite culture: they are not coextensive nor equivalent. Although the text represents the culture of ancient Israel as male dominated from the time of Abraham, this presentation omits the perspective of half of the population-the women. By beginning at the point of realization that women did exist and were active in their culture, and placing aside the androcentric perspective of the text and its editors, the reality of women's place in ancient Israel may be determined. Through this new perspective, the women of the Torah will emerge as the archetypes of strength, leadership and spiritual insight to provide Jewish women of the present with female, ancestral role models and a foundation for their gender's heritage, a more complete understanding of the partial record of Jewish history recorded in the Torah. Those stories that appear as the exception of women's presence will unveil an exceptional presence. As Tamar Frankiel eloquently states in The Voice of Sarah, "the women we call our 'Mothers'-Sarah, Rivkah (Rebekah), Rachel, and Leah-are not merely mothers, any more than the 'Fathers'-Abraham, Isaac and Jacob-are merely fathers "(Frankiel 5).

Impact of the 1980 election on ideological liberal organizations

Throughout this section, I sought to establish a nexus between interest group theory and empirical observations. This in turn, would provide the framework from which I would set forth a series of hypotheses concerning the impact of the deviating 1980 elections on ideological liberal organizations. What I found in fact, was not just a link but a near perfect correlation between theory and practice, each reinforcing the other and pointing to the same ineluctable conclusion: The upshot of the Reagan/New Right landslide of 1980 was a dramatic renaissance of American liberalism. A renaissance so pervasive that ideological liberal organizations stand to benefit tremendously in terms of sustaining membership and raising funds. Moreover, it promises to facilitate the formation of liberal lobbying coalitions and enhance their capacity to cultivate grass roots support.