Child Witness: Autobiography, Trauma, Social Justice
Introduction
Child Witness explores the emergence of the child as a testimonial site and figure in autobiographical projects by adults who seek to represent trauma and call for justice. From Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to contemporary comics like Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life to picture book memoirs likeRuby Bridges’ Through My Eyes, authors often incorporate childhood experience as a critical feature of shaping a life story for diverse audience. These are not stories that merely recollect childhood or burnish it nostalgically. Instead, autobiographical narratives of childhood by adults mark a site where the values associated with self-representation in politics, aesthetics, and everyday life -- truth telling, the authority of experience, reliability – attach to the child and permit adult readers to connect with the authors’ larger social justice projects. The child witness -- credible, trustworthy, and vulnerable – offers authors and audience a means of connection they would not otherwise achieve. The child in the life writing projects of Jacobs, Gloeckner, and Bridges is employed as a witness to the horrors of slavery, deprivation, rape, and segregation. The child is positioned to testify to experience rather than to suffer it. The adult author recounts what the child experienced: not by ascribing naïve authenticity to the child’s voice, but by centering the childhood experience and knowledge upon which the authority of the adult autobiographer builds. Our focus on the emergence of the child witness as a testimonial figure and site reveals how authors leverage the affective power of their own childhoods to connect with diverse audiences. Autobiographical literature that uses the child witness in this way offers a pedagogical form that educates about injustice and calls for ethical witnessing and social change. It provides for new relations to emerge between authors and audiences through which previously silenced histories of personal and collective trauma are represented.
Child Witness will reveal a history of the child’s centrality to struggles for social justice, especially anti-racist, feminist, and human rights movements, and the significance within this history of autobiographical literature that connects childhood to adult activism. The book is guided by an overarching question: How does this literature disrupt the symbolic and political meanings of the child in the service of social justice and activism? Given the cultural judgments that attach to women’s autobiographical accounts, for example, how does the figure of the child and the narrative of childhood address the limits of persuasiveness and authority that damage women’s testimony? To answer these questions we chart a feminist history of life writing that foregrounds a child witness on whose behalf readers learn to demand justice.
The major theoretical intervention of the book lies in our fusion of insights from childhood studies and studies of autobiographical literature through which we reveal the centrality of the child (as witness and activist, as testimonial site and figure) in a testimonial tradition of auto/biographical work that seeks to make visible and/or remedy inequity. Child Witness takes up the child – a familiar figure in literary studies and humanitarianism alike – in order to place it in a new critical context by pulling visual and verbal forms into new proximities through feminist interdisciplinary analysis. We propose that a new formation around “the child” emerges at the intersections of life writing, children’s literature, and visual culture. Specifically, our focus on the child within the history of feminist life writing reveals new examples of how to bear witness to individual and social trauma.
Many will associate the words “witness” and “trauma” with Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s psychoanalytic and literary analyses rooted in Freud and focused on the Holocaust. Our project is rooted in a different strand of trauma studies that is based in the feminist theory and clinical practice of Judith Herman, Laura S. Brown, and others who elaborate an antiracist feminist criticism of trauma that looks at systems of inequality. Extending this work to the study of self-representation, Child Witness draws on Leigh Gilmore’s (2001, 2107) elaboration of a feminist intersectional analysis of the chronic, pervasive, and everyday quality of trauma in the lives of those who experience a range of material forms of insecurity and risk. Gilmore’s focus on testimony, everyday violence, and systemic sexism and racism is shared by other scholars who use the terms trauma and testimony without primarily referencing the work of Felman and Laub, including Judith Butler, Hillary Chute, Wendy Kozol, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Gillian Whitlock. We define trauma here as harm that unfolds over time, is hidden in plain sight, and permitted by social norms of violence against women, children, and people of color. Child Witness engages directly with how trauma structures testimony, and it does so by attending to a range of dynamic and sometimes controversial visual-verbal strategies. Our analysis of visual culture also moves us away from Felman and Laub, as we attend to how photographic portraits in the 19th century documented slavery and visualized the subject of abolition, how comics and graphic memoirs challenge the all-too-pervasive sexual abuse of girls and women, and how auto/biographical picture books about civil rights define children as political agents.
The critical term “witness” is drawn from scholarship in life writing on “human rights and narrated lives” (Smith and Schaeffer), from the analysis of race, gender, and culture in intersectional feminism, and from visual and verbal studies of ethical witnessing (Kozol; Hesford; Mirzoeff; Neary, et al). We add to previous theorizations of ethical witnessing an analysis of the child as the site and figure of testimony to the everyday trauma that the girl experiences and documents. The self-representational strategies of writers and illustrators motivate different publics to activism. We chart examples of ethical witnessing with the child at the center of autobiographical projects from slave narratives in the mid-19th century in the U.S. to contemporary memoirs and picture books. Our critical framework and archive are well-suited to each other: we document how authors use narratives and images of their own childhoods to reach diverse and often distant audiences, thereby placing familiar texts in a new critical narrative and incorporating unfamiliar texts to flesh out this history. There is no single child witness in the history we lay out; rather, autobiographers return to their childhoods and use the child as a site of testimony in a range of ways that we seek to name in each chapter. The origins and locations of meanings of childhood will shift within and among historical time periods, especially given our focus on women and girls of color. Our method is an emergent one that adapts to the flexible genre of autobiography and to the themes and strategies each author and artist employs in a text.
Our use of the term social justice is an essential element of the theoretical framework of intersectional feminism. This interdisciplinary feminist frame fits our project’s focus on situated personal experiences as a way to create new knowledge, affiliations, and forms of justice that exceed courts or other formal venues. The autobiographies in this project place the girl in a political context. Here, the child is not an innocent being to be saved; rather, women name the intersections among race, class, gender, citizenship, and other variables to highlight and resist larger systems of oppression in which the child is embedded. Autobiographers use the child as a testimonial site to create narratives and images that critically interrogate systems of meaning and intersections hidden in plain sight. These are often shocking because we are trained to read the child as vulnerable, in need of saving, immune to adult conflicts, and somehow not raced or classed. For example, Rigoberta Menchú as a girl who is Indigenous, poor, colonized, and an activist who makes claims on behalf of numerous victims of torture and murder, tells a personal life story in order to draw attention to U.S. involvement in the conflict in Guatemala. Through her use of the girl, she testifies to violence and demands justice for the victims of harm. Through this example, we can see the ways in which social justice is at the heart of intersectional feminism’s commitments to examining structures of inequity that frame how and who is heard. The feminist history of life writing we propose begins with women of color. The critical and historical trajectory extends from Harriet Jacobs to Black Lives Matter in one conceptual breath and argues that when some men have focused on or embedded childhood within their autobiographical projects, they do so in relation to women’s writing. Thus the gendered discourse of autobiographical narratives of childhood develops in authority and innovation in demonstrable ways through the work of women.
Critical studies of both childhood, including children’s literature and queer theory, and autobiographical narrative, including graphic memoirs and picture books, represent a provocative and important intersection for at least two reasons. First, adult autobiographers politicize childhood in ways that challenge “certain stylized and largely unquestioned assumptions about childhood” (Duane 8). Second, adults writing about their own childhoods bring attention to abuses often hidden from view and encourage adult readers to ally with them and advocate for change in the public sphere. Scholars in this area have theorized the child as a symbolic and contested social category rather than a biological certainty (Bruhm and Hurley; Driscoll; Duane; Dubinsky; Gittins; Higonnet; Kehily; Sánchez-Eppler; Steedman). Scholars of childhood maintain that while there are actual children who need protection from those positioned to provide it, the meanings a culture gives to childhood, and the harm or protections solidified in institutions and policy, will differ across time, culture, and location, as well as across the variables of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This multiplicity of meanings has been captured in cultural studies of childhood that note how the figure of the child often serves as a means to elicit a wide range of competing emotions, from sympathy to patriotism (Berlant; Edelman; Stockton). Children’s literature scholars, in particular (Capshaw; Kincaid; Kidd; Mickenberg), have been instrumental in drawing attention to how the imagined child reflects larger social and political ideologies, histories, and movements. To this field, we contribute an analysis of how the figure of the child witness enables readers to connect the private act of reading to the collective project of social change.
The interdisciplinary field of autobiographical literature examines how people represent their lives in relation to history and do so in creative and innovative ways (Chaney; Chute; Gilmore; Smith and Watson; Whitlock). Historically, this practice has taken numerous nonfictional forms, including autobiography, memoir, slave narrative, and other testimonial discourses, and has also paralleled the development of fictional forms interested in the first person, including the bildungsroman, first person fiction, lyric poetry, and ‘zines (Gilmore; Rak and Polletti). We draw upon and amplify Leigh Gilmore’s analysis of limit cases in life writing in order to offer a critical frame for theorizing the use of the child witness within the larger historical and creative project of life narrative in different media.
To this end, we recognize the diverse linguistic and visual strategies that authors and illustrators employ within a complex history of socio-political movements. Thus Child Witness connects an analysis of slave narratives of the 19th century to contemporary graphic memoirs and children’s picture books by historicizing and theorizing the emergence of the child witness as testimonial figure and site of cultural judgment. By design, we place autobiographical narrators like Harriet Jacobs and Rigoberta Menchú and comics artists like Marjane Satrapi and Phoebe Gloeckner alongside works often read in K-12 contexts, including fairy tales, and graphic life writing in picture book format, such as Duncan Tonatiuh’s Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight For Desegregation in order to capture the broad use of the child witness. This cross section of texts allows us to make visible the dynamic interrelations of gender, genre, race, and class in the context of testimony and its investments in social justice. We have been struck in our previous research (Gilmore, “Witnessing Persepolis”; Gilmore and Marshall; Marshall) by the wide range of textual and visual strategies writers and artists use to politicize childhood. Among these, we have observed how writers and artists pose ethical demands as an outgrowth of shared affect, offer up radical pedagogies that blur the soft borders between childhood and adulthood, and teach alternative lessons about history, trauma, and resistance through life writing. Our previous work examined how adults use texts and images of their own childhoods to make larger claims in the public sphere and allowed us to further analyze feminist interventions in the symbolic and cultural meanings of childhood through the media of life writing and graphic memoirs. Here we elaborate a framework for understanding how feminist autobiographical projects disrupt the symbolic and political meanings of the child.
Chapter One, “Girlhoods, Crisis, and Autobiography,” examines three linked cases that introduce readers to how adult women use girlhood as a category to compel social activism. In each, the authors draw on and insert the child as central to the political activism for which they seek witness. From slave narratives to the Latin American testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchú,and autobiography in comics form, such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, in the global literary marketplace, women use autobiographical narratives of childhood to elicit readers’ ethical engagement with political topics and cultural critique. In this chapter, we chart a feminist history of how women of color use autobiographical narratives of their own girlhood to elicit sympathy from a mostly white and often geographically distant readership. These popular autobiographical narratives reach across national borders to call for political action, including the abolition of slavery in the U.S., humanitarian intervention in the civil war in Guatemala, and understanding of revolution in Iran. In these texts, women argue that political and moral autonomy develops from their responses to childhood experience and crisis.
We begin with Harriet Jacobs’s critique of the destruction of childhood for enslaved children. Jacobs shifts the focus from race to racism and slavery by describing her own happy young life. Childhood, for Jacobs, offers a way to interrogate her white readers’ assumptions about race and racism. Rigoberta Menchú uses her childhood to establish a complex network of testimony, truth-telling, and privacy. She contrasts the independence and respect children are accorded and the work they are relied upon to do in Quiché culture with the exploitation of their labor on coastal plantations. Marjane Satrapi offers her child-self as a witness to the rise of the Ayatollah in Iran even as the childhood she knows disappears when her parents send her into exile. The symbolic and political meanings of the child differ in each example as do they ways in which they are unsettled; yet, taken together, they represent a history of feminist representation of the child as a testimonial figure and site.
We connect these texts to make clear that how life writing, children’s literature, and visual culture are co-producing the child is broadly intersectional along the lines Kimberlé Crenshaw adumbrated. Our work can be read alongside previous theorizations of the child by scholars such as Robin Bernstein, Anna Mae Duane, Caroline Levander, Kathryn Bond Stockton and others, who also recognize the multiple systems of oppression that motivate a diverse range of equally intersectional responses by authors, artists, and activists. As with these critical projects, our method is less concerned with naming a particular child figure (e.g., the suffering child) in a particular historical moment, or communicating the authentic perspective of the child; rather, our intersectional feminist frame allows for a focus on the unique formation of an adult rendering his/her/their own childhood as a testimonial site from which to agitate for social justice. No longer representative of static subaltern silence, girls emerge in these narratives as figures of sympathy represented by politically active women autobiographers.
Chapter Two, “ Soft Borders and the Feminist Politics of Girlhood,” shifts focus from the use of the child figure to draw attention to injustice and to compel the action of others on behalf of the child in order to examine the strategic use of the girlhood as a category with soft temporal borders. Here, we connect Susanna Kaysen’s popular memoir Girl, Interrupted about her confinement in McLean hospital, Lucy Grealey’s Autobiography of a Face about her experience of jaw cancer in childhood through multiple surgeries and hospitalizations, and David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches about his childhood experience of throat cancer, surgery, and its consequences. In each example, experiences of illness take the authors out of one form of time, in suspending one childhood temporality and supplanting it with another that moves in the tempo of diagnosis and treatment. One form of childhood time –growing in relation to siblings and peers, for example, schooling, neighborhood life—is replaced with the rhythms and routines of the hospital, routines that offer new markers for charting life. Childhood in these texts is a borderline category. Kaysen fuses childhood and young adulthood to make a feminist critique about the white middle class family and about mental illness. In Autobiography of a Face, Grealey offers different trajectories of growth for her body and her face, deftly revealing how the medicalization of her childhood lacked a developmental language adaptable to her sexuality. Viewed as a childhood patient, yet living in a maturing body, Grealey’s face emblematizes a complex site of traumatic experience and testimony. Whereas Susanna Kaysen represents her young adulthood as being interrupted by her institutionalization for borderline personality disorder, Grealey’s life is interrupted by a narrative of her difference, a condition she can neither leave nor outgrow but must address through narrative. We read David Smalls’ graphic memoir in relation to Kaysen and Grealey to place him within the gendered market of contemporary life writing about trauma and to highlight the feminist strategies he adapts to narrate childhood trauma.
Chapter Three, “Fairy Tale Girlhoods: Sexual Violence and Feminist Graphic Knowledge,” considers the category of girlhood as a site for feminist critique through a reading of Virginia Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories.Here we identify specific formal strategies Gloeckner crafts in the service of testimony, including the telescoping of child and adult perspectives and temporalities, and the use of children’s literature, especially fairy tales in Gloeckner’s graphic autobiographical project. The connection between nonfictional narratives of endangered children and the canon of children’s literature may seem tenuous, but adult life writers often rely upon familiar texts from childhood (Marshall). Fairy tale characters like Little Red Riding Hood and All-Fur experience evil stepmothers, threats of rape and rape, and other forms of violence, and provide a familiar touch point for life writing about childhood and trauma. Gloeckner returns to the sexual violence of traditional fairy tales to rupture the façade of the unknowing child. In comics like “Magda Meets the Little Men in the Woods” Gloeckner remediates the fairy tale in contemporary comics form to offer a pedagogy in which the child witness refuses the position of resilient being who grows out of or forgets trauma. This chapter offers a method for reading the visual and verbal strategies of feminist resistance that Gloeckner employs through the child witness. Specifically we note how Gloeckner creates a feminist graphic knowledge of sexual violence through her use of the gutter (the white space between panels in comics) and scale. She uses the figure of the child to intervene in the epistemology of children’s sexual precarity within families by illustrating it explicitly. She reaches out to readers visually to counter the claim that such violence is invisible and unknown. To contextualize Gloeckner’s graphic strategy, we consider Virginia Woolf’s imposed reticence about being her experience of sexual abuse as a child in her autobiographical essay, “Sketch of the Past,” and demonstrate how Una’s graphic memoir about abuse, Becoming Unbecoming present sexual abuse as defining childhood and adulthood for women rather than as an isolated or episodic interruption.
In the previous chapters, we examine texts published for an adult or young adult audience and the figure of the child as witness. The final chapter, “Witnessing Social Violence for Children: Picture Books, Auto/Biography and Social Change,” takes up children’s nonfictional picture books as a unique and radical form of graphic life writing in which indigenous writers and authors and illustrators of color center a child figure who is both witness and activist. These texts represent social histories often left out of official social studies curricula. Often dismissed as simple or solely for a young audience, picture books have a history of providing “necessary cover” (Capshaw 103) for the child witness to speak and relay lessons about discrimination, violence, and activism. For instance, Duncan Tonatiuh’s biography of Sylvia Mendez and her family in Separate Is Never Equal, Ruby Bridges’ memoir Through My Eyes, and Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton’s co-authored auto/biography When I Was Eight recuperate and reclaim histories through counter-storytelling in image and narrative (Solórzano and Yosso). The child witness-as-activist is central to counter histories of racialized misrepresentation in text and image and to the creation of culturally specific stories of resistance that have radical potential for social justice education. In each of these auto/biographical picture books, a child witness who is also an activist child.
In the conclusion, “New Child Witnesses,” we turn our attention to current events and movements in which the child witness is crucial to forwarding human rights. Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s representation of her childhood experience and activism in I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood up For the Taliban and Was Shot (Youfsazi and Lamb) emerges alongside the representation of her by others, including picture books, such as Malala Yousafzai: Warrior With Words (Abouraya and Wheatley) and Malala, A Brave Girl From Pakistan (Winter) and enables a comparison of the autobiographical and biographical child witness.In addition, we examine how the feminist and anti-racist movements of #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName protest not only the expendability of black boys and girls, but also how these subjects are denied their status as children. Tied to representational strategies in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents, the black child remains a critical figure for social justice and a contested site of interpretation. Police officers typically see black children and adolescents as older than they are and link imputed age to the risk they pose to officers. Under these conditions, children of color and indigenous youth are at heightened risk of police violence. Social justice activism aimed at reclaiming Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice as children politicizes the category of the child and clarifies its potent use in calls for justice. These new child witnesses circulate in a range of visual verbal circuits, draw on the strategies we outline, and also highlight emergent uses of social justice life writing that compel readers and viewers toward activism. They connect to the earlier histories of abolition and demonstrate the significance of children lives in testimonial projects.
Works Cited
Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Print. Bridges, Ruby. Through My Eyes. New York: Scholastic, 1999. Bruhm, Steven, and Natasha Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Print. Capshaw, Katharine. Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Print. Chaney, Michael, ed. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Print. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print. Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print. Duane, Anna Mae, ed. The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Print. Dubinsky, Karen. “Babies Without Borders: Rescue, Kidnap, and the Symbolic Child.” Journal of Women’s History19 (2007): 142-150. Print. Farley, Lisa & Julie C. Garlen. “The Child in Question: Childhood Texts, Cultures, and Curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry 46 (2016): 221-229. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. (2001). “Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation and the Jurisdictions of Identity.” Biography24 (1): 128-139. Gilmore, Leigh. “Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony.” Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael Chaney. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. 157- 163. Print. Gilmore, Leigh, and Elizabeth Marshall. “Trauma and Young Adult Literature: Representing Adolescence and Knowledge in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir. Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 35.1 (2013): 16-38. Print. Gloeckner, Phoebe. A Child’s Life and Other Stories. Berkeley: Frog, Ltd. Books, 1998/2000. Print. Harrison, Kathryn.The Kiss. New York: Avon, 1997. Print. Higonnet, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London: Thames & Hudson, 1998. Print. Jacobs, Harriet, A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. 1861; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Jordan-Fenton, Christy and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton. When I was Eight. Toronto & Vancouver: Annick, 2013. Print. Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1994. Print. Kehily, Mary Jane. An Introduction to Childhood Studies(2nd ed.). New York: Open University Press. 2009. Print. Kidd, Kenneth. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print. Kincaid, James. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Marshall, Elizabeth. “The Daughter’s Disenchantment: Incest as Pedagogy in Fairy Tales and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss.” College English 66.4 (2004): 395-418. Print. Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú. New York: Verso, 1984. Print. Mickenberg, Julia, L. Learning From the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. Rak, Julie and Anna Polletti. Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Print. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print. Searle, Ronald. The Terror of St. Trinian’s and Other Drawings. New York: Penguin, 1959. Print. Searle, Ronald. To the Kwai- and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945. London: William Collins Sons & Co., 1986, Print. Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives(2nd ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Print. Solórzano, Daniel G., and Tara J. Yosso. “Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Educational Research.” Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education. Eds. Taylor, Edward, David Gillborn and Gloria Ladson-Billings. New York Routledge, 2009. 131-47. Print. Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780- 1930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Print. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in The Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Tonatiuh, Duncan. (2014). Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & Her Family’s Fight For Desegregation. New York: Abrams, 2014. Print. Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print. Winter, Jeanette. Malala: A Brave Girl From Pakistan. New York: Beach Lane Books, 2014. Print. Yousafzai, Malala, and Christina Lamb. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot By the Taliban. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2013. Print.
Associate Professor
Departamento de Economia e Relações Internacionais
Faculdade de Ciências Econômicas
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Av. João Pessoa, 52, 1o. andar, sala 18-D.
Centro, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
CEP 90040-000
Tel: +55(51)3308-3332
e-mail:[email protected]
URL:http://professor.ufrgs.br/nelsonseixas
Research Project Submitted and to The Alfred P. Sloan School of Management to apply to a Visiting Scholar Position with Professor Rodrigo Verdi.
\label{intro} The classification of supernovae (SNe) has remained a challenging task in astrophysics since the first type distinction was made in 1941 by \cite{Minkowski_1941}. Minkowski split SNe into two groups: Type I spectra do not have any Hydrogen features, while Type II spectra exhibit strong Hydrogen features. Since then, SNe classification has developed more complexity as the number of observed spectra has increased, along higher quality of observing instruments. Figure 1 illustrates the basic classification scheme, excluding unique spectra that might define their own subtypes.
In this paper, we focus on Type I SNe, specifically types Ib, Ic, broad line Ic (Ic-BL), and IIb. These non Type Ia SNe are generally less studied than Type Ia because they are not used as standard candles. Type Ib SNe are generally characterized by the presence of a strong HeI line, while Type Ic spectra lack this feature. Type IIb spectra resemble Ib spectra, but with the presence of a weak Hydrogen line at early phases. More information on the historical classification of SNe can be found in \cite{Filippenko_1997} or \cite{Matheson_2001}, and more recent discussion can be found in \cite{Modjaz_2014}, \cite{Liu_2016}, and \cite{Modjaz_2016}. These four SNe types are examples of stripped-envelope core-collapse super novae (SESNe). A SESNe is classified by the lack of Hydrogen layers, and often Helium layers, in the progenitor star. The progenitors lose their outer shells either through strong winds woo\cite{Woosley_1993} or binary interactions \cite{Podsiadlowski_2004}, and then explode when their cores collapse.
As a newly minted graduate student at MIT, I am among many who suffer from "imposter syndrome." How did I get here? Ask anyone at MIT what made them special and the probable answer is, "I don't know how or why I got in, but how about you?" While your research advisor, academic advisor, or counselor may put emphasis on the tangibles – the series of acronyms like GPA, GRE, and CV that define your intellectual prowess – the real separation between those accepted and those declined lies in their habits. Among these habits, the hot mess of graduate students seems ordered and coherent and the reasoning of their acceptance seems obvious.
There are four real ways graduate students get into top schools.
I'd like to find a solution where at time zero for any x as it approaches infinity, the derivative approaches zero, so all roads lead to \(\frac{b}{a}\) which is a steady state
Journal Article: Comparative membrane interaction study of viscotoxins A3, A2 and B from mistletoe (Viscum album) and connections with their structures (10.1042/BJ20030488)
recientemente la comunidad científica ha estado haciendo hincapié en el impacto de la actividad humana en cambio climático. existe evidencia que lasla emisiones de gasesn de efecto invernadero a provocado el aumento de la tempratura a nivel global. es por ello que en el presente trabajo pretendemos externar una opinión al respecto de los estudios ante mencionado. Este cambio puede trener concecuencias catastróficas.\ref{467629}
There are many similarities between Qi Gong and Eurithme; in energetic creativity, form and movement. There is a zeitgeist that is beginning to explore this cross-over. Eurithme practitioners find that Qi Gong improves their grounding whilst Qi Gong practitioners may find that Eurithme deepens their understanding of the energetic influence and the subtleness in movements of Qi Gong.
This article presents a set of diagrams that provide an insight into Prime Frequencies, or the Harmonic Frequency of Primes as Thomas Mario Kalmar would put it. It explains how the diagrams are made and how they come together. The diagrams are intimately wrapped up with prime numbers, and provide a visual description of how prime numbers occur. Principally, given a prime number, and assuming all other prime numbers up to that prime number are known, the diagrams will reveal the prime numbers in the series up to the square of the first next prime number found. It is uncertain that this is an efficient method of divining primes, or if the diagrams actually add anything new to the theory of prime numbers or number theory in general. However I have every reason to believe the diagrams are unique and are interesting in themselves from a purely visual perspective, although they are most similar in appearance to Sacks’ Spirals. My hope is that they may pique the curiosity of people interested in prime numbers. The diagrams were discovered by thinking carefully (obsessively) about the Discrete Fourier Transform and the famous musical concept of the Circle of Fifths.
Photocatalytic ozonation (PH-OZ) process using TiO2 photocatalyst conducted in acidic water environment often leads to a synergistic effect in terms of decomposition and mineralisation of aqueous organic contaminants. The synergism is greatly influenced by photocatalyst physicochemical properties and pollutant type, besides pH, temperature, O3 concentration and other factors. Herein, five different commercial TiO2 photocatalysts (P25, PC500, PC100, PC10 and JRC-TiO-6) were used in photocatalysis (O2/TiO2/UV), catalytic ozonation (O3/TiO2) and PH-OZ (O3/TiO2/UV) advanced oxidation systems for degradation of two pollutants (dichloroacetic acid - DCAA and thiacloprid), simultaneously present in water. Synergistic effect in PH-OZ was much more expressed in the case of thiacloprid which did not significantly adsorb on the photocatalyst surface—in contrast to DCAA with stronger adsorption. Faster PH-OZ kinetics correlated to the higher exposed surface of TiO2 agglomerates, regardless of (lower) BET surfaces of primary particles. But, DCAA mineralisation reactions on a TiO2 surface were much faster in comparison to thiacloprid degradation reactions in solution bulk. Hence, we propose that high BET surface area of the photocatalyst is crucial for fast surface reactions (DCAA mineralisation), while good dispersity—high exposed surface of aggregates—and charge separation play a major role when it comes to photocatalytic degradation or PH-OZ of less-adsorbed organic pollutants (thiacloprid).
Review of "APE: An Annotation Language and Middleware for Energy-Efficient Mobile Application Development"
Suggestion for acceptance
Strongly accept (maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think all of the reviewed papers so far have been very interesting and have made worthwhile contributions)
Summary of the paper
Annotated Programming for Energy-efficiency (APE) is a service for specifying and implementing system-level power management policies. The policies are written as special APE Java annotations by the developer and can specify complex power management policies with very few lines of code compared to manually writing this power management code manually. This is very beneficial because mobile developers are often on an agile development cycle and don't want to refactor complicated power management policies throughout the development cycle. With APE, policies can be quickly and easily added in after requirement code is complete.
Positive points
The introduction was well written, following the method we discussed in class where the author describes current problems in the field and then their own contributions. APE's main positive point is that it removes the complexity of writing power management policies for continuously-running mobile (CRM) application developers, with negligible overhead. One example of this attribute on page 8 shows a policy written in Java that takes 19 LOC rewritten in APE to be only three lines of APE annotations. I think the manageability and flexibility of APE makes it very valuable to CRM application developers.
Negative points
Figure 8 seemed out of place, as it wasn't referenced in the section it appeared in, but rather in the following section. With energy conservation comes data loss; the application is not sending as many updates as it would if APE was disabled. It's ultimately up to the programmer to decide which areas of code need to send/receive updates frequently however, so it's not really a negative point of the APE service, just a negative point of energy-saving techniques in general. They only tested on one application, CitiSense. They got good results from one instance, and then created several instances to show that APE works well with "multiple APE-enabled applications", which seems a little presumptuous. They also only used one energy-saving APE policy on these instances, which made enough of a difference to prove their point, but I feel like demonstrating more than one of their policies would have been more interesting. Also, I feel that this study created some highly-optimistic graphs that can be somewhat misleading at first glance. Figures 9 and 10 show drastic improvement, but upon further investigation, this improvement is in a very specific case.
Potential future work
The authors mention that they will conduct a study to examine how well experienced developers adapt to using APE to define power-management policies. This is a worth-while experiment and can also result in valuable user-feedback in real-life situations. It would also be useful to implement other APE policies across various applications and run them concurrently to see how these policies interact with each other.
We are going to learn how you can use R for statistical computing in this paper. You will need an instance of Rstudio to work with the modules. Rstudio is a free and open source software that uses R as its back end. In order to work with these series of examples, just load or fire up Rstudio and copy and paste these codes from this page to the script window.
Set up
Create three directories: data, code, and documents
Use script (this) and console
Keep all data in the data directory
Keep all codes and scripts in the code directory or folder
You can write a document using the script window
In the script window you type the contents of your document
You use using markdown syntax
In the following table the markdown syntax is explained
| Markdown syntax | Meaning |
|-----------------|-----------------------------|
| Headers | Use a number of hash marks |
| Table | This is an example of table |
| Figures | ![name](filename.jpg) |
Type math in console:
(3 + 5) # type these in the console, not here
Assign values to objects
wt_kg <- 55 # will not print anything in the console
Note the following with object names
You can give an object any name you want
Do not start with a number
Object names are case sensitive
Do not use reserved names
Use nouns for variable names
Use verbs for function names
Avoid dots in object names
When you create objects, R will not print anything in the console
If yuou want to print, use parentheses ()
What can you do with variable names?
Do arithmetic with it
Change the variable's value by assigning new value to it
If you use other variables with this variable, then:
Changing the variable value does not change this other variable
R code: variables
wt_kg <- 100
wt_lb <- wt_kg * 2.0
wt_kg <- 120
(wt_lb) # what do you think the wt_lb will print? 200 or 240? Why?
Functions and arguments
Functions are
Automate complex and repeated sets of commands
Canned scripts
Can be predefined such as mean()
You can access them by loading packages
Each function has inputs called arguments
Functions return a value
The values functions return can be numeric or non-numeric
When you run a function, you will have to first call it
R code: example of a function
a <- 9 # assign 9 to variable a
b <- sqrt(a) # b calls function sqrt and gives argument a which is 9 to it
Vectors and data types
Vectors are the most common and basic data type in R
Single value or series of values
Either number or characters
Assign using c() function
For character vector essential to have quote marks otherwise R thinks these are objects and throws error messages
length() tells you how many elements are present in a vector
class() tells you what type of element is this object
str() tells you what is the structure of the object
Some examples to run
wt_g <- c(50, 60, 70, 80)
animals <- c("mouse", "rat", "cat", "dog")
(length(wt_g)) # return 3
(length(animals)) # return 4
(class(wt_g)) # returns numeric as everything is number
(class(animals)) # returns character as it is a character vector
(str(wt_g)) # gives you more information about this vector that is it is number
wt_g <- c(wt_g, 90) # we can add more elements this way to the end
wt_g <- c(30, wt_g) # add an element to its front
# other types of vectors are logical (true/false),
# integers == whole numbers or integer numbers
# complex = complex numbers
# raw = raw data
Data structures
Vectors are the ones that contain similar or identical types of elements
Columns of data sets are vectors
lists can contain mix of element types (rows of data sets)
The first position is 1, so the indexing starts at 1
R code example of subsetting vectors
ans <- c("mice", "rats", "dogs", "cats")
(ans[2]) # will return "rats"
(ans[c(3,2)]) # will return dogs rats
Conditional subsetting
Subset from a vector by defining different conditions
R code example of conditional subsetting
weight_g <- c(21, 34, 39, 54, 55)
(weight_g[c(TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE)]) # we only want 1st, 3rd and 4th element
(weight_g > 50) # if you want weight > 50
(weight_g[weight_g > 50]) # subset
(weight_g[weight_g > 50 | weight_g < 30]) # use pipe
(weight_g[weight_g > 50 & weight_g < 30] ) # use and boolean
How to search for strings in a vector
animals <- c("cat", "rat") # define what you want to search
statement <- c("a", "cat", "sat", "on a", "mat", "to catch a", "rat" ) # specify the search string
(animals %in% statement) # are animals in statement?
( animals[animals %in% statement]) # which animals?
How to analyse real world data sets and missing data?
Missing data in R are presented as NA
If you operate on a vector which has NA, the operation will result NA
You have to remove NA in these cases
For those operations, set na.rm = TRUE
R code example of missing data
height <- c(2,4,4,NA, 6)
( mean(height)) # will return NA
( mean(height, na.rm = T)) #T is short hand for TRUE
What will you do to remove missing values from data sets?
( height[!is.na(height)] ) # will return 4 values
( na.omit(height)) # remove missing data
( height[complete.cases(height)]) # similar to !is.na()
lengths <- c(10, 24, NA, 18, NA, 20) # vector
lengths_without_NA <- lengths[!is.na(lengths)]
( median(lengths_without_NA)) # can you think of one other way of doing this?
Working with data sets
We will analyse a data set that has the following variables
Column
Description
record_id
Unique ID
month
month of observation
day
day of observation
year
year of observation
plot_id
ID of particular plot
species_id
ID of a particular species
sex
sex male or female
hindfoot_length
length of the hindfoot
weight
weight in grams
genus
genus of the animal
species
species of the animal
taxa
the taxonomy
plot_type
type of plot
Use download.file() function to download the file
Store it in the data folder
Read the data into R using read.csv() function
This will save the data as a data.frame object
How to read data in R
download.file("https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/2292169", "data/portal_data_joined.csv") #download data
surveys <- read.csv('data/portal_data_joined.csv')
What do we do with the data set?
( head(surveys)) # first six rows
( tail(surveys)) # last six rows
( str(surveys)) # get the data structure
(nrow(surveys)) # number of rows
(ncol(surveys)) # number of columns
( names(surveys)) # lists variables
(colnames(surveys)) # lists variables another style
( summary(surveys)) # get a summary of the data set
Indexing and subsetting data sets
(surveys[1,1]) # first row first column
( surveys[1,6]) # element in row 1 and column 6
( surveys[, 1]) # contents of the first column
( surveys[c(1:3), 7]) # first three rows, column 7
( surveys[, -1]) # data set minus the first column
( surveys[c(1:6), ]) # keep only the first 6 rows
( surveys["species_id"]) # return a column by name
( surveys[, "species_id"]) # returns a vector values
How to deal with factors
Used to represent categorical data
Can be ordered or unordered
Factors are stored as integers
These integers have labels associated with them
Even though they behave like characters, they are integers
R sorts factors in alphabetical order
R code samples to deal with factors
sex <- factor(c("male", "female", "female", "male"))
( levels(sex)) # R assigns 1 to female and 2 to male
( nlevels(sex)) # returns number of levels
plot(surveys$sex) # plot the number of observations
( levels(surveys$sex)) # returns "", "F", "M"
levels(surveys$sex)[1] <- "not known" # change "" to "not known"
How to format dates
Convert date and time to appropriate and usable
Use the lubridate package and ymd() function
How to format dates with R
library(lubridate) # load the lubridate package
surveys$date <- ymd(paste(surveys$year, surveys$month, surveys$day, sep = "-")) # ymd converts dates
( str(surveys$date)) # returns the structure of date object
1750-1869: David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, J.S. Mill and Karl Marx
1870- 1939: Alfred Marshall, Joseph Shumpeter, Colin Clark, Kuznets, Hoffman, and Roy Harrod
1940-1985: Solow and Swan
1986 to present: Paul Romer, Robert Barro, Phillip Aghion, Oded Galor, Daron Acemoglu...
Stylized facts about growth (what reality are you trying to explain):
Economies grow over time in the long-run
There are vast differences in the standard of living across countries
Factors of production (K & L) share of total income are roughly constant: \(F(cK, cAL) = cF(K,AL)\)
Ratio of capital to labor (K/L) is roughly constant over time (1:3): \(F(K,L) = K^\alpha (AL^{1-\alpha})\)
Marginal return to capital is +/- constant (mostly true for UK... longest time series)
Productivity tends to increase over the very long run (history of world GDP, 444 \(\rightarrow\) 6000
Share of consumption in GDP has remained constant (~70%): \(\dot k (t) = sY(t) - \delta k(t)\)
Financial development precedes economic development and growth (Hamilton's predictions)
There are structural transformation in the development process that a generalized production function cannot capture (different industries)
There are growth miracles and disasters (i.e. China vs. Buenas Aires)
Important issues:
What does production function capture? Work at home? Is it OK to assume labor and knowledge are exogenously determined?
Solow Model:
\(Y (t) = F(K (t), L (t)A (t)\)
Assumptions: constant returns to scale (CRS), and growth rate of L and A is exogenous (something that the model is not intending to explain)
Properties of a production function: has three arguments all of which are function of time, AL ("effective labor" enters multiplicatively, this specification implies that K/Y is constant, homogenous of degree 1 -- constant returns to scale, inputs other than K, A, and L are unimportant (no land or resources, which don't change implications anyway)
\(\therefore\) Cobb-Douglas is convenient and easy to understand
\(F(\frac{K}{AL}, 1) = \frac{1}{AL} F(K,AL)\)
\(y \equiv \frac{Y}{AL}; k \equiv \frac {K}{AL}\)
\(y = f(k)\)
Remember, \(F(K,L) = K^\alpha (AL^{1-\alpha})\)
\(\therefore f(k) = k^\alpha\)
Evolution of inputs:
\(\dot L (t) = nL(t)\), growth rate of labor (exogenous)
\(\dot A(t) = gA(t)\), growth rate of knowledge (exogenous)
\(\dot K(t) = sY(t) - \delta K(t)\), growth rate of capital (savings) minus depreciation (endogenous-- asking, what drives K?)
Dynamics of the model (embedded all three equations into one):
the model is determined by the movement of k over time
So, k* is being replenished by savings/investment, then diminished by the growth rates of A (g) and L (n) and depreciation (\(\delta\)). And in steady state, this means that \(\dot k = n+g\) (growth rate of capital per unit of effective labor equals the growth rate of those two factors).
E.g.: a change in savings rate
Temporarily increase the growth rate of output per effective worker
Impact on long-term consumption will depend on whether the new steady-state level of capital is above or below the "Golden Rule" level
Consumption will be equal to: \(c = y - (n+g+ \delta)k\), or the amount of output that is not saved
Max consumption by: \(f'(k) = n + g + \delta\), or tangent line of \(f(k)\)
^THAT is the Golden Rule
Problems with Solow Model
Implied differences across countries in capital per worker are extremely large (US to India would be over 100x)
Implied differences across countries in the marginal return to capital are also implausibly large
g is exogenous (but improvements on current capital are the bulk of growth)
Growth Accounting
Useful for identifying the proximate causes of growth in seeking to find out what fraction of growth is due to increases in factors of production and then from everything else
Works by taking partial derivatives of each component to find the residual:
Size does matter. With global resources on the verge of depletion and all kinds of pollution on the rise, the better part of the population is slowly turning towards the smaller things for salvation, dubbed nanotechnology. Perhaps National Nanotechnology Initiative describes it best when declaring nanotechnology ‘as the manipulation of matter with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometers’, such matter that possesses the ability to exhibit certain properties at the nanoscale. It is one of those feats of science that fits in every field of daily life; the sky is the limit when it comes to its benefits as it boasts immense potential in medicine, energy and food just to name a few.
"In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like." - Kim Eric Drexler
That is the very essence of our research. In this paper we discuss the role nanotechnology in destined to play in our food industries. Today’s agricultural system is being affected badly through climatic changes, both natural and artificial. The bane of this system is polluted irrigation and groundwater reserves, rapidly changing climatic variables leading to uncontrolled plant growth and infertility. Our paper analyzes what nanotechnology can do to avert this crisis which will eventually lead to lesser and lesser food production, breaking down lives and economies. Its most amazing and rare properties can allow us to maintain and control our crops much better and efficiently at the most minutest of scales. In the end, this research paper recommends solutions to some of the problems faced while executing the technology, mainly toxicity and its environmental impact. Suffice to say, regulated use of nanotechnology can offer a promising future for us, provided its potential is completely understood and exploited.
Introduction
The 21st century has brought about a fast-paced revolutionary era that has produced incredible marvels in every field of science and humanity, including introductions of many new ones, yet it has presented seemingly unsolvable problems many of which have victimized our agricultural industries. These challenges include global warming resulting in uncontrolled farming, impure water for irrigation, soil infertility, accumulation and runoff of industrial and fertilizer chemicals resulting in toxicity and contamination; all of the above mentioned problems along with many others, have squeezed global food production and struck the economies of developing countries even more as agricultural production is the backbone of such countries’ economies.
In time, the demand for food is inevitably going to rise to feed the mouths of 9.8 billion people by 2050 [1]. Also, with the high prices and consequences of fossil fuels, countries will soon start viewing agricultural products as the new big thing in international trade. Furthermore, efficient and promising biofuels, especially algae, will become a global trend to serve as a petroleum-supplement owing to its rare and multi-use properties. For all this to become a reality, food production has to keep increasing with population growth, which will strain already weak agricultural systems and have a heavy toll on this land, which is, by every minute, becoming infertile. Innovative scientific solutions, like nanotechnology, pose possible solutions to increase farm productivity and reduce its environmental strain.
Richard Feyman was the first to describe the magnitude of nanotechnology’s potential in real-word applications, during his lecture, producing the infamous statement, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” [2] Nanotechnology can effectively filter irrigation water that has been contaminated through nanotechnology membranes. To have greater control over the plants’ growth nanosensors and nanobots can be employed to maintain healthy growth even in exceptional conditions like those presented by global warming. For better crop yield and fertiliser efficiency, nutrient delivery can be implemented with nanotechnology. Also, the conventional method of producing all the nanomaterials to build such technology has adverse environmental impacts as well as high production costs. In this context, plants can act as bioreactors and ‘green synthesize’ nanomaterials relieving burdens on other industries related to the process. Although such technologies have weak public support, there is a dire need for their acceptance as perhaps, right now, they are the only cost-effective, environment-friendly and productive means of meeting global demand for agricultural products.
Water purification using nanotechnology exploits nanoscopic materials such as carbon nanotubes and alumina fibers for nanofiltration
it also utilizes the existence of nanoscopic pores in zeolite filtration membranes, as well as nanocatalysts and magnetic nanoparticles
Nanosensors, such as those based on titanium oxide nanowires or palladium nanoparticles are used for analytical detection of contaminants in water samples.
It can be used for removal of sediments, chemical effluents, charged particles, bacteria and other pathogens.
"The main advantages of using nanofilters, as opposed to conventional systems, are that less pressure is required to pass water across the filter, they are more efficient, and they have incredibly large surface areas and can be more easily cleaned by back-flushing compared with conventional methods," - Alpana Mahapatra and colleagues Farida Valli and Karishma Tijoriwala
carbon nanotube membranes can remove almost all kinds of water contaminants including turbidity, oil, bacteria, viruses and organic contaminants.
Although their pores are significantly smaller carbon nanotubes have shown to have an equal or a faster flow rate as compared to larger pores, possibly because of the smooth interior of the nanotubes.
Nanofibrous alumina filters and other nanofiber materials also remove negatively charged contaminants such as viruses, bacteria, and organic and inorganic colloids at a faster rate than conventional filters.
In the near future, it has been estimated that average water supply per person will drop by a factor of one third, which will result in the avoidable premature death of millions of people
Conventional desalination technologies like reverse osmosis membranes are being used but these are costly due to the large amount of energy required.
Nanotechnology has played a very important role in developing a number of low-energy alternatives, among which three are most promising. (i) protein-polymer biomimetic membranes, (ii) aligned-carbon nanotube membranes and (iii) thin film nanocomposite membranes
These technologies have shown up to 1000 times better desalination efficiencies than RO, as these have high water permeability due to the presence of carbon nanotube membranes in their structure
Some of these membranes are involved in the integration of other processes like disinfection, deodorizing, de-fouling and self-cleaning.
For a 1% increase in P, quantity demanded falls by 16.7%
Example #2:\(P = 940 - 48(Q) + Q^2\)
\(Q = 10, P = 560\)
\(\frac {dP}{dQ} = \frac{1}{\frac{dP}{dQ}}\)
\(E = -2\)
Cross-elasticity: \(E_{xy} = \frac{dQ_x}{P_y} \cdot \frac{P_y}{Q_x}\), if positive, then goods are substitutes, but if negative, they are complements
Income elasticity: \(E_I = \frac{dQ}{dI} \cdot \frac{I}{Q}\), as incomes rise, people have fewer children (inferior good? less because they become a higher quality kid?)
These lecture notes are based on Stata and wherever possible, corresponding codes in R for analysis.
Biostatistics differs from statistics in a number of ways where here our emphasis is on biological or health care related examples; in biostats we talk about survival analysis, and study designs and analytical techniques that are different from how these things are dealt in the regular statistics. Biostatistics is closely linked with epidemiology and epidemiological study designs. Here we shall deal with some essential principles.
Biostatistics connects Epidemiology and thinking in epidemiology with the real world data and provides you with the tools that you use in order to explore issues around biology and health care to explore distribution of exposure and health effects and study the association between exposure and health effects. Let's start with a quick recap of scientific thinking and setting up of studies.
Scientific thinking is based on the following rough principles and methods:
Note observations and get the facts. When you observe the facts, they should not be colluded by your own feelings or emotions. Therefore a plan of measuring what you observe is important
For explaining the world, you should have a theory that should explain the world of observations
Based on the theory set up a set of predictions and test the predictions with new sets of data
You should set up more than one theory that can explain the pattern and continue to refute theories till the best one stands
From this listing, we note that a few things are essential for the scientific process of induction, deduction, and abduction to proceed:
We need a method and tools to describe the world
We need a way to measure entities whose values vary
We need tools and ways to then link the measured entities with each other
In case of biostatistics, we deal with biological and health care related variables
Biostatistics provide us with the tools of thinking and using the thinking tools. We use concepts, techniques and tools. In this lecture note, let's cover a few points.
Four different types of variables
Tables and figures for nominal and ordinal variables
How do we estimate mean and standard deviation for continuous variables?
V.2-Oh Jehová, he oído tu palabra, y temí.Oh Jehová, aviva tu obra en medio de los tiempos,En medio de los tiempos hazla conocer;En la ira acuérdate de la misericordia.
Esta oración comienza con otro enfoque en relación a la del primer capitulo, apelando a la misericordia de Dios. Esto creo que en la vida intima que tenemos con el Señor es vital ya que ciertamente nos podemos expresar de lo que sintamos lo que vemos así como el profeta lo hacia, pero ciertamente es la misericordia del Señor en la que nos debemos centrar. Habacuc reconoce las grandezas del señor y su forma de obrar anteriormente con el pueblo.
Para estos tiempos debe ser igual ya que el juicio de Dios esta muy cercano (pestilencia marcha delante de El y le siguen de cerca)sin duda la tierra ya esta con dolores de parto y a lo único que nos podemos aferrar es a su misericordia, a la gracia que el deposito en nuestras vidas.
V1. Subiré a mi torre de vigilancia y montaré guardia. Allí esperaré hasta ver qué dice el Señor y cómo responderá a mi queja.
Habacuc luego de haber estado en contacto con Dios decide ponerse en un estado de atención y espera respecto a lo que Dios le dirá. Creo que esto debemos aplicarlo a nuestra vida de fe. ya que en variadas ocasiones personalmente no he guardado un tiempo de reposo para esperar lo que Dios nos dirá y sin duda el Señor siempre tiene una respuesta. Para el caso de Habacuc le dio una respuesta o visión que mando dejar en un pendrive de la antiguedad un documento de texto perdurable hasta nuestros días.
Esto me lleva a pasar tiempos de reposo en la presencia del Señor ya que el tiene una respuesta una visión que suplirá nuestra necesidad conforme a su voluntad.
Debo confiar en lo que el Señor hará así como planifico la respuesta, la visión, para la salvación del hombre enviando al UNIGÉNITO.
Habacuc se quejo por la injusticia de ese tiempo, pero debemos ser pacientes ya que Dios no dará por inocente al culpable.
Due Date: Sunday night, beginning of week of lab finals 23:59 hours
Every UNIX process is guaranteed to have a
unique numeric identifier called the process ID. The process ID or PID is
always a nonnegative integer. The only way under UNIX (with a few
exceptions) to create a new process is when an existing process calls the fork function. You can find details about
fork and wait in the manual pages (man fork).
The ideal solution is composed of a single
parent process which simultaneously opens up multiple child processes which
performs their function once and then quits. Code to close up the child processes should be at the end of the program.
Also introduced in this lab are command-line options
for UNIX programs. By convention, your program should start with the following
two variables:
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
//argc is an integer of the number of arguments
//argv “argument vector” is a character array of the arguments
Write a simple program that uses the fork function. Sample code: man wait & man getpid
Program requirements:
The program should take either filenames or wildcards (* for example)
as input.
Create as many child processes as there are files on the command line. Child processes should run simultaneously, not wait on each other. There are MANY ways that your code may be
limited to sequential processing. To test for parallel code, make your child
process wait for 1 second. If you have n
files and your program is delayed 1 second, your code is parallel. If it is delayed n seconds, it is not
parallel. If your code does not run in parallel, you cannot pass this assignment
For each child process, print the file name and the process ID of the
child process
The parent process should wait for all the
children to finish then show the output from: system("ps -H"); This statement placed in other
locations of your program may be a helpful command to debug your code.
1%
Extra Credit: instead of Canvas, submit your assignment via https://education.github.com/ (MUST be private, invite swirsz) I will use Github’s last modified date as the submission date.
Make sure to putyour full name in the headerof
your file if you submit it by Github.