Gender identity and the rituals of food in a Jordanian community

This article is an ethnographic exploration of the way that young women use food to reconfigure their social relationships within a context of cultural change. Based on 16 months of fieldwork in southern Italy, I describe the symbolic power of food within this social context to underscore how women continually negotiate their social relations and identities through their daily food practices. I argue that the refusal of food enables individuals to disconnect from others and alter social relations, while sustained practices of refusing to eat (i.e., anorexia) become vehicles of self-transformation and meaning-making. Through an in-depth analysis of women's disordered eating experiences, I show how disordered eating practices are rooted in tensions and conflicts embedded in social relations rather than in ideals of beauty or phobias about fat. The findings advocate considering disordered eating behaviors from a perspective that emphasizes an individual's social position and relatedness to others.     

"大昆明区"空间规划面临的机遇和挑战

本文针对昆明的发展特征及面临的挑战,引入了一种全覆盖的综合规划方法来从整体上协调空间的各种职能及保护自然潜力.对大昆明区采用基于GIS的区域模型模拟了这些政策和方法的潜在影响力.结果显示,污染减少、土地利用成本和基础设施的建设成本降低,同时城市的竞争力提高.     

Metal Decontamination of Soil, Sediment, and Sewage Sludge by Means of Transition Metal Chelant [S,S]-EDDS

The biodegradable strong transition metal chelant [S,S] stereoisomer of ethylenediamine disuccinate was investigated for its applicability for the washing extraction of heavy metals from soil, sewage sludge, and harbor sediment. Heavy metals Pb, Zn, Cu, and Cd were extracted from authentically polluted samples by means of an ex situ washing procedure at the laboratory scale. The exposure time necessary to achieve maximum metal extraction from the authentically polluted solids used in this study was longer than that reported elsewhere with solids polluted artificially in the laboratory. Required exposure time was 1 day for the extraction of Pb, 3 days for Zn, and 6 days for Cu, irrespective of solid type. Speed and extent of metal extraction were increased by facilitating mass transfer from the solids to the liquid (e.g., by lowering calcium concentration, increasing temperature, adding fatty acid soap, and most of all, by using intermittent but intense agitation). Slightly alkaline pH was necessary to eliminate the interference by iron. This pH effect as well as observed metal selectivity was explained with a speciation model. It was feasible to achieve 70–90% extraction of Zn, Pb, and Cu from all three solids tested. These extraction efficiencies were equal or superior to those obtained with the benchmark chelants, ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid and nitrilotriacetate, provided extraction time was sufficient.     

A continuous-time delta-sigma modulator for 802.11a/b/g WLAN implemented with a hierarchical bottom-up optimization methodology

This paper presents a 3rd-order continuous-time Delta-Sigma modulator with a resolution of 10 bits for a 10 MHz signal bandwidth. It is designed in a standard 0.18 μm CMOS technology and consumes only 6 mW. After the design/selection of the topologies for the integrators, comparator and D/A converters, optimal sizing of the complete modulator was ensured by using a hierarchical bottom-up, multi-objective evolutionary design methodology. With this methodology, a set of Pareto-optimal modulator designs is generated by using Pareto-optimal performance solutions of the hierarchically decomposed lower-level subblocks. From the generated Pareto-optimal design set, a final optimal design is chosen that complies with the specifications for the 802.11a/b/g WLAN standard and has minimal power consumption.     

Tightly Secure Public-Key Cryptographic Schemes from One-More Assumptions

Journal of Computer Science and Technology - A tightly secure cryptographic scheme refers to a construction with a tight security reduction to a hardness assumption, where the reduction loss is a...