This essay analyses the life of Joyce, the protagonist in “Somewhere in England”, the fourth section of Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips, using an intersectional feminist perspective. It attempts to show how patriarchy, classism, and racism intersect to shape Joyce’s life and to limit her possibilities. The essay argues that at the beginning, Joyce is too naïve to fully understand the power structures prevailing in her society, and therefore, she is different from those around her. However, she successively experiences not only patriarchal oppression but also class and race oppressions. The result is that Joyce accepts her social position when she understands that it is difficult for an individual woman to challenge the intersected multiple oppressions of the capitalist, supremacist, patriarchal society.

The father in Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips is a character burdened by guilt due to his implication in his children’s enslavement. He can be considered a supernatural being since his character transcends time. He is also connected to a supernatural essence called the “many-tongued chorus” that can be seen to represent the people of the African diaspora. The father is desperately trying to communicate with his children, and to the people of the African diaspora, but to no avail. He can, however, be interpreted as having a healing function. This essay explores this function. It analyzes how the father tries to heal the people of the African diaspora’s loss of ‘home’ and identity by looking at what he conveys in the prologue and the epilogue. The concepts of displacement, colonized minds, and roots and routes within postcolonialism is used for this purpose.

The Diploma Thesis is composed of two parts: text-based and project-based. Text-based part deals with universal use of border crossings. Most of the border crossings is in private ownership, therefore it is not known how it will be used in the future. Deputies of villages, districts and local authorities were approached because some of the border crossings lie within their competence. The intention of the private owners was discovered. The project-part deals with particular border crosing between the Czech Republic and the Slovakia Republic – Starý Hrozenkov. Zlín district is interested in reconstructing of the mentioned border crossing. A project dealing with the future purpose of the rest area, such as building a gass station, a restaurant, a relaxation zone and a space for checking vehicles, was suggested within the technical study.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / For pedestrians and autonomous vehicles (AVs) to co-exist harmoniously and safely in the real-world, AVs will need to not only react to pedestrian actions, but also anticipate their intentions. In this thesis, we propose to use rich visual and pedestrian-environment interaction features to improve pedestrian crossing intention prediction from the ego-view.We do so by combining visual feature extraction, graph modeling of scene objects and their relationships, and feature encoding as comprehensive inputs for an LSTM encoder-decoder network. Pedestrians react and make decisions based on their surrounding environment, and the behaviors of other road users around them. The human-human social relationship has al-ready been explored for pedestrian trajectory prediction from the bird’s eye view in stationary cameras. However, context and pedestrian-environment relationships are often missing incurrent research into pedestrian trajectory, and intention prediction from the ego-view. To map the pedestrian’s relationship to its surrounding objects we use a star graph with the pedestrian in the center connected to all other road objects/agents in the scene. The pedestrian and road objects/agents are represented in the graph through visual features extracted using state of the art deep learning algorithms. We use graph convolutional networks, and graph autoencoders to encode the star graphs in a lower dimension. Using the graph en-codings, pedestrian bounding boxes, and human pose estimation, we propose a novel model that predicts pedestrian crossing intention using not only the pedestrian’s action behaviors(bounding box and pose estimation), but also their relationship to their environment. Through tuning hyperparameters, and experimenting with different graph convolutions for our graph autoencoder, we are able to improve on the state of the art results. Our context-driven method is able to outperform current state of the art results on benchmark datasetPedestrian Intention Estimation (PIE). The state of the art is able to predict pedestrian crossing intention with a balanced accuracy (to account for dataset imbalance) score of 0.61, while our best performing model has a balanced accuracy score of 0.79. Our model especially outperforms in no crossing intention scenarios with an F1 score of 0.56 compared to the state of the art’s score of 0.36. Additionally, we also experiment with training the state of the art model and our model to predict pedestrian crossing action, and intention jointly. While jointly predicting crossing action does not help improve crossing intention prediction, it is an important distinction to make between predicting crossing action versus intention.

Relocation the road II/380 Moutnice – Borkovany is designed for higher traffic load centers municipalities Těšany and Moutnice, increase driving safety in the community and increase traffic flow. Part of Master´s thesis is the connection of intersecting roads 2. and 3. clases and connections to existing transport infrastructure. Relocation the road II/380 is made in three variants. Better alternative is developed in more detail. Relocation is designed in the category S7,5/70.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第20880号 / 理博第4332号 / 新制||理||1622(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科数学・数理解析専攻 / (主査)教授 堤 誉志雄, 教授 上 正明, 教授 宍倉 光広 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

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Studies in astronomy education have shown that socio-cultural factors combine with everyday human experience to create learning difficulties that are unique to this field. The history of astronomy also shows a complex link between science and religion. The foundations of modern astronomy lie in religious beliefs and practices, but over time, in the West, as science grew ever more powerful in explaining the apparently mechanistic processes of nature, the beliefs and understanding associated with scientific explanations came into conflict with those of the Christian church. In Africa, Western religious and scientific beliefs were brought by the missionaries, and imposed onto already existing beliefs systems. From colonial times to the present, Western knowledge has been privileged over local knowledge in African formal schooling. Little recognition has been given to the learning difficulties that may be caused in situations where the knowledge system taught at school is different to that imbibed through home and culture. The difficulties of epistemic access have been highlighted through the development of socio-cultural constructivist theories of learning. This study, which is based on the sociocultural constructivist theories of cultural border crossing and collateral learning, represents an investigation of the learning difficulties experienced by South African first year university students who study a compulsory course in basic astronomy called 'The Earth in Space'. The sample was thus a convenience sample, made up of 191 students who took the course between 2000 and 2004. The investigation was carried out using a pre-instruction questionnaire to record the precourse knowledge of the students. The questions that were asked focused on knowledge related to some of the key concepts in basic astronomy, such as an understanding of the nature of stars, the rotation and revolution of the earth and the phases of the moon. These questions had the dual purpose of benchmarking South African students' knowledge of the scientific explanations for these phenomena against similar international studies, as well as establishing the prevalence of cultural or traditional ideas held by these students. After the course had been completed, a post instruction questionnaire was used to establish students’ views on the difficulties they had experienced in learning in the course. This was followed up by semi-structured interviews with 25 of the students. The data obtained from the questionnaires were analysed using two methods: the first used a deductive coding system where the students’ responses were allocated to chosen categories, i.e. whether they conformed to the explanations of Western Modern Science or to cultural knowledge and beliefs, or both. The second method used a computer software programme, Atlas.ti, where each statement made by the student was recorded and coded, leading to an inductive, fine-grained analysis of their responses. The results from the pre-instruction questionnaire indicated that South African students display similar poor levels of knowledge in this field, to students from other Western and non-Western countries. The explanation for this lies in the fact that understanding the scientific explanations requires the ability to think abstractly, and to be able to construct complex mental models, in situations where the processes involved run counter to normal daily experience. However, the explanations given by the South African students also indicated that there were epistemological and ontological issues, related to conflicting beliefs in terms of culture and religion, which exacerbated the barriers to border crossing in this field. However, the data indicated that students did not find it as difficult to cross the barriers created by cultural or traditional beliefs as those caused by fundamentalist Christian beliefs. The biggest obstacle to learning related to conflict between creationist and scientific accounts of the formation of the Earth and Universe. While this is not unusual, as shown by studies carried out in the United States, where religious students are also affected by the apparent conflict between Christianity and science, the most significant finding of this study related to the existence and extent of this conflict in Black African students. In post-1994 South Africa, the revision of the national education system has resulted in a science curriculum that recognizes 'other ways of knowing'. These refer specifically, however, to Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) rather than religious beliefs. The curriculum does not acknowledge that African ontology is religious. It also does not recognize the duality of this ontology in terms of African Traditional Religion and Christianity, which is the stated religion of the majority of Black South Africans. The findings of this study indicate that because of the nature of African philosophy, religious ways of knowing need to be explicitly acknowledged as one of the 'other ways of knowing'. Such acknowledgement by science teachers and lecturers would help to prevent these different knowledge systems from being discarded or compartmentalized, which was found to lead either to the promotion of scientism, or to the preclusion of meaningful engagement with science.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of bicycle crossings and follow up on previousstudies with new data on speeds, ability to travel unhindered and accident statistics. With theintroduction of the new definition of bicycle crossing from 2014, motor vehicle drivers had to yieldfor cyclists who are traveling on, or are approaching, the bicycle crossing. The area at theintersection should also be speed-proofed to 30 km/h. The introduction meant that new behaviorswere required by both cyclists and motor vehicle drivers at these types of intersections.The report is consists of three parts; a short literature study with an international outlook, adocument analysis of accidents and bicycle crossings in Sweden as well as on site measurementsexecuted at bicycle crossings in Gävle. The literature study briefly presents some of the mostcommon speed-limiting measures to present an overview of the types of measures that can be usedto speed-proof bicycle crossings. It also presents other countries' accident statistics as well as howthey handle the problems of bicycle prioritization at crossings. The document analysis is based onthe STRADA and RDT database in order to, through a GIS software, link accidents to bicycle crossingsand thus be able to analyze how the accidents have developed over time. This analysis is made bothwith a national average and a more thorough study of the municipality of Malmö. In the on sitemeasurements executed in Gävle, the speeds of the motor vehicles on approach to bicycle crossingswere examined and the yielding behavior was studied ocularly. The measurements were carried outin two separate locations with different conditions, one with relatively high traffic flow and a plateaubump as a speed-proofing measure and one with lower flow and bus pad as a speed-proofingmeasure.It turns out that the number of accidents related to bicycle crossings has decreased in Sweden, whilethe degree of injury for these accidents has also decreased. Malmö stands out in the statistics due tothe fact that the number of accidents related to bicycle crossings has increased at the same time asthe degree of injury for the accidents has decreased. The data also shows that accidents at bicyclecrossings adjacent to roundabouts are over-represented. It is therefore proposed that bicyclecrossings adjacent to roundabouts should be avoided. The on site measurements in Gävle showedthat the speeds had decreased sharply at the site with the bus pad and that the yielding behaviorchanged after the introduction of the bicycle crossing. At the second location, with the plateaubump, the speeds have already converged and are approaching their limit values while the yieldingbehavior has improved slightly. Finally, it is concluded that bus pads have better velocity suppressioneffects than the plateau pad and that the consequential effects of a well-designed speed-proofingmeasurement can reduce the degree of injury and increased yielding.