In Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), J. M. Coetzee stages a doubling of voices in a number of ways on both fictional and meta-fictional levels. It occurs between one novel and the other, co-opting ¡§lectures¡¨ from yet a third work of his (The Lives of Animals, 1999) into the sequence to further complicate this practice of doubling. It also happens between characters that cross over from one work into another, between Elizabeth Costello who visits herself on Paul, in Slow Man, as the latter¡¦s ¡§author¡¨ and saving angel, and Paul, the slow man himself who tries to wean himself from such abstruse claims. Such a joint motif of crossing-over, resistance, and further attempts at claiming control makes a strong case against the integrity of generic and identity boundaries ¡V boundaries that traditional novels mostly adhere to in their stories. Together, in the sequence, however, these acts of transgression tend to double back upon one another, so much so that doubling practically becomes the main plot. This thesis examines how such a motif of doubling enhances the volume of voices that are too often muffled behind the loud insistence on limits and identity. It looks into the ¡§debates¡¨ between the generic forms in which the novels are written, namely narratives, essays, lectures and letters. Taking these debates into account, this thesis asks the fundamental question of how the characters ¡§communicate,¡¨ and what the value of ¡§communication¡¨ is when it produces only the effect of ¡§the hazard of language.¡¨ This may well be exactly the ultimate ¡§value¡¨ of the motif of doubling in this sequence, namely that by rubbing one voice against another, these novels succeed in giving shape and body to the ¡§countervoices¡¨ that lie checked under the human ethical bond of language. It takes a he and a she, a man who is looking for care and a writer who thinks she has the right cure to offer in writing, to construe the real conflicts between one man¡¦s cure and a woman¡¦s offer of care. Between the search for cure and the offer of care, there lies the true gap of beings that cannot be bridged. They can be crossed and crossed over at best, and it is the purpose of this thesis to count, to illustrate and to fathom some of these gaps of beings, and, as Coetzee tries to do, albeit in his typical self-reflexive mode of writing, to imagine the imaginary with which a cross-over is possible by way of writing.

In recent years, the music has become more popular due to the evolution of the technology. Various kinds of music around us become more complexity and huge. This explosive growth in the music has generated the urgent need for new techniques and tools that can intelligently and automatically transform the music into useful information, and classify the music into correct music groups precisely. The rhythm query is the fundamental technique in music genre classification and content-based retrieval, which are crucial to multimedia applications. Recently, Christodoulakis et al. has proposed the CIRS algorithm that can be used to classify music duration sequences according to rhythms. In the CIRS algorithm, a rhythm is represented by a sequence of ¡§Quick¡¨ (Q) and ¡§Slow¡¨ (S) symbols, which corresponds to the (relative) duration of notes, such that S = 2Q. In order to classify music by rhythms, the CIRS algorithm locates the MaxCover which is the maximum-length substring of the music duration sequence, which can be covered (overlapping or consecutively) by the rhythm query continuously. During the matching step, one S symbol in the rhythm query can be regarded as two consecutive Q symbols in the duration sequence, but the two consecutive Q symbols in the rhythm query can not be combined as one S symbol in the duration sequence. This definition causes the difficulty for designing the algorithm. The CIRS algorithm contains four steps and repeat Steps 2, 3, and 4 to get local MaxCover for each different duration value of the music duration sequence. Finally, the global MaxCover is computed. We observe that it will generate unnecessary results repeatedly among Steps 2, 3, and 4. Therefore, in this thesis, to avoid repeatedly processing Steps 2, 3, and 4 for each different duration value, we propose the JMC (Jumping-by-MaxCover) algorithm which provides a pruning strategy to find the MaxCover incrementally, resulting in the reducing of the processing cost. In fact, we can make use of the relationship between the MaxCover MX founded by a different duration value X, and use the duration sequences cut by such a different duration value X to reduce the unnecessary process for the other different duration value Y , where Y < X. To make use of this property to reduce the processing time, we propose a cut-sequence structure and update it incrementally to compute the final global MaxCover. In this way, we can skip many steps and find the same answer of the CIRS algorithm. From our simulation results, we show that the running time of the JMC algorithm could be shorter than that of the CIRS algorithm. When the largest different duration value is uniformly distributed in the duration sequence, the running time can be reduced hugely, which is the best case of our proposed JMC algorithm.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

The participants in this qualitative study were parents of children in grades 1-3 who attended an elementary school in a low-income, predominantly Latino urban neighborhood. The children were identified as struggling readers through teacher nomination and standardized assessments, and they received reading and writing intervention through an in-school pullout program and through a once-a-week, afterschool University-sponsored tutoring program. The purpose of this study was to gather the views of parents about their children's experiences in literacy learning and intervention, parents’ perspective of their role in their child’s literacy learning, as well as the ways parents described their child as a literacy learner. Fourteen parents were interviewed regarding literacy practices in their homes, views of school literacy instruction, need for information on helping their children at home, and suggestions for improving home-school connections. Follow-up / text

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Slow sand filters (SSF) have been used to treat surface water to drinking water standards for over a century. Today many cities, including London still treat surface waters to drinking water standards, however because there are viruses that are not efficiently removed by a slow sand filter and are not killed by chlorine, communities have turned to the use of micro filtration and/or reverse osmosis to provide safe drinking water. These technologies are much more efficient if organics are removed and turbidity reduced to less than 1 Nephelometric Turbidity Units (NTU). The greenhouse industry is another potential user of slow sand filters. They are not able to recycle irrigation drainage water without it being treated to reduce bacteria, virus, and fungi. The objective of this research was to develop management strategies for SSF that specifically meet the needs of entities using SSF for pretreatment of potable water or use in a greenhouse. This data was used to test a scour system that resulted in scouring 80 percent of the organic layer in the filter and suspending the solids for 40 minutes. A conceptual design was done for a full scale SSF that took advantage of the scour and suspension data to clean the SSF at the end of a run cycle. SSF were able to consistently produce water with a turbidity less than 1 (NTU) and with the infiltration capacity of 0.27 m³m⁻². For greenhouse effluent a 1,000 square meter greenhouse that is discharging 3,600 L d⁻¹ of drainage water would require a 12.6 m² SSF, and the SSF for the community requiring treatment of 4.7 million liters per day of raw water was 730 m². The innovative cleaning system based on an air/water jet was developed to clean the SSF. Experiments were run to determine the amount of time that the solids were suspended and a scour system developed to exceed these times. The entire time for cleaning and recovery of the SSF was an average of 118 minutes for the greenhouse system and 170 minutes for the SSF serving a small community.

Properties of coherent media in the regime of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) are studied. A study of the shape and width of the EIT resonance is presented for coherent media with buffer gas. Observation of an absorption-like resonance for large one-photon detunings in a medium with buffer gas and its properties are shown. The regime of ``slow'' and ``fast'' group velocities are studied. Observation of narrow resonances with a phase broadened probe field is presented, and possible application of this regime are outlined.

No description available.

The cow/calf phase of production represents a large expense in the production of beef, and efficient beef cows use fewer resources to obtain the same outcome in a sustainable environment. The objective of study 1 was to utilize a mechanistic nutrition model to estimate metabolizable energy requirement (MER) of grazing cows based on changes in cow body weight (BW) and fatness measurements (body condition score, BCS) along with calf age and BW, as well as forage quality and quantity. In addition, an energy efficiency index (EEI), computed as MER of the cow and calf divided by calf weaning BW, was used to rank cows within a herd based on their efficiency of utilizing available forage to meet their maintenance requirements and support calf growth. Data were collected from one herd of approximately 140 Santa Gertrudis cows over a four-year period, and analyzed per calving cycle, conception to weaning. The model's estimation of EEI appears to be moderately heritable and repeatable across years, and efficient cows might have greater peak milk and be leaner. In typical feedlot diets, the rates of ruminal fermentation of highly processed grains and the hydrolysis rate of urea may not match. Asynchronous utilization of carbohydrate and protein would result in some portion of the urea unknot being utilized by the ruminal microbes and ultimately the animal. The use of slow-release urea (SRU) products offers a unique opportunity to synchronize ruminal fermentation of carbohydrate with non-protein nitrogen (NPN) release rate. Two experiments were conducted to examine the impact of source, urea or SRU, and level of dietary NPN on 1) performance and carcass characteristics and 2) N balance of finishing cattle. Steers had lower initial F:G when SRU was used as the only source of feed N (treatment 3), suggesting that SRU may replace both NPN and true protein feeds in finishing cattle diets. High levels of either NPN source had greater N intake and urinary N excretion, as well as N absorption and no major differences were observed between SRU and urea, suggesting that SRU can replace urea at different levels of N intake.

Much work has been accomplished in the preparation of life science curricular materials for average and above average students at the secondary level; however, very little has been prepared for slow learners. The number of slow learners attending the public schools is substantial enough to have encouraged many public schools to establish homogeneously grouped classes specifically for these students. With the establishment of special classes for slow learners the need for materials specifically de. signed for these students becomes apparent.In answer to this need the present research undertaking was instituted. The research focused upon the development and testing of an eight-week unit of study in life science and evolved through three phases: (1) preparation, writing, and assembly of a student text and a teacher's handbook; (2) preliminary testing during a pilot study; and (3) comprehensive testing with five classes of homogeneously grouped slow learners.