Skyline Research Articles

Mosques, Mawlanas and Muharram: Indian Islam in Colonial Natal, 1860-1910

This study examines the establishment of Islam in colonial Natal, attempting to fill a void in and correct the existing historiography.1 In comparison with other parts of Africa, the lack of a historiographical tradition on Islamic South Africa is conspicuous, but understandable given that traditionally the impact and consequences of racial segregation occupied the attention of most historians. Although Islam is a minority religion in South Africa, apartheid has created an impression of population density not reflected in the census figures. According to the 1996 census, there were 553,585 Muslims in a total population of forty million.2 Indian Muslims make up one of the two largest sub-groups, the other being Malay¸.3 There are 246,433 Malay and 236,315 Indian Muslims.4 The majority of Indian Muslims are confined to KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng, while most Malay Muslims live in the Western Cape. There is thus very little contact and interaction between them; indeed there are deep differences of history, culture, class and tradition. Muslims have played an important role in the social, economic and political life of the country. The many mosques that adorn the skylines of major South African cities are evidence that Islam has a living presence in South Africa, while the militant activities of the Cape-based People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) in the post-1994 period has ensured that Islam remains in the news. This study demonstrates that, apart from obvious differences between Indian and Malay Muslims, there are deep-seated differences among Indian Muslims. The diversity of tradition, beliefs, class, practices, language, region, and experience of migration has resulted in fundamental differences that have generated conflict.

China into the World Economic System

China in 1978 embarked on a major economic transformation, seeking to alter the stance of the previous 30 years and engage economically with the rest of the world in several dimensions—trade, foreign direct investment by private firms, external borrowing by government from both private and public sources, and education. Each of these represented a major change in policy. The transformation in the intervening 22 years has been dramatic and palpable, as can be seen in the sky-lines of the major cities. On official figures, agricultural output has jumped more than two and a half times from 1978 to 1998, and industrial output increased more than nine-fold. The service sector, discouraged under central planning, increased eight-fold. Exports during this period grew from $10 billion to $184 billion, making China now the world's ninth largest trading country (just ahead of Belgium). The current account was roughly in balance over most of the last 20 years (although in surplus since the currency consolidation and anti-inflation program of 1994), but thanks to large inward foreign investment, foreign exchange reserves have grown to $160 billion, second largest in the world after Japan. China experienced various bouts of inflation, followed by policy constriction; prices during 1999 declined by 3 percent, exceptional for a developing country.

Mosques, Mawlanas and Muharram: Indian Islam in Colonial Natal, 1860-1910

AbstractThis study examines the establishment of Islam in colonial Natal, attempting to fill a void in and correct the existing historiography.1 In comparison with other parts of Africa, the lack of a historiographical tradition on Islamic South Africa is conspicuous, but understandable given that traditionally the impact and consequences of racial segregation occupied the attention of most historians. Although Islam is a minority religion in South Africa, apartheid has created an impression of population density not reflected in the census figures. According to the 1996 census, there were 553,585 Muslims in a total population of forty million.2 Indian Muslims make up one of the two largest sub-groups, the other being Malay¸.3 There are 246,433 Malay and 236,315 Indian Muslims.4 The majority of Indian Muslims are confined to KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng, while most Malay Muslims live in the Western Cape. There is thus very little contact and interaction between them; indeed there are deep differences of history, culture, class and tradition. Muslims have played an important role in the social, economic and political life of the country. The many mosques that adorn the skylines of major South African cities are evidence that Islam has a living presence in South Africa, while the militant activities of the Cape-based People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) in the post-1994 period has ensured that Islam remains in the news. This study demonstrates that, apart from obvious differences between Indian and Malay Muslims, there are deep-seated differences among Indian Muslims. The diversity of tradition, beliefs, class, practices, language, region, and experience of migration has resulted in fundamental differences that have generated conflict.

Far‐Ultraviolet Echoes from the Frontier between the Solar Wind and the Local Interstellar Cloud

We propose that first-order Fermi acceleration of Lyα photons should occur at the interface region between the solar and interstellar winds. In this process, photons are Doppler-shifted toward shorter wavelengths each time they are scattered by hydrogen neutrals that have been decelerated by charge exchange with protons in the transition region wrapping the heliopause. An additional component should therefore appear on the blue side of the line profile of the Lyα sky background emission. Its detection would not only reveal the existence of the heliopause interface but also trace its spatial distribution. We report here Hubble Space Telescope (HST) high-resolution Lyα line profiles of the sky background showing that the inner heliospheric hydrogen has a mean velocity of 23.2 ± 0.5 km s-1 in the upwind direction. This velocity corresponds to an averaged deceleration along the line of sight of the interstellar hydrogen of 2.8 ± 0.5 km s-1 after crossing the transition region. We show that an extra component, which we interpret to be the spectral signature of the Fermi process in the upwind direction, is present in the blue wing of the Lyα sky line profile. In addition, we interpret here the enigmatic excess in the Lyα sky brightness that was recently detected by Voyager deep in the inner heliosphere as being due to the additional Fermi emission. According to this interpretation, the distribution of this excess emission should also represent the spatial variation of the neutral velocity drop-off across the interface region. In this scope, we show that the region of the heliosphere's nose is ~12° away from the upwind axis—a good indication that the interstellar magnetic field deviates ~40° from the interstellar flow direction.

The Role of Global and Local Landmarks in Virtual Environment Navigation

In visual navigation, landmarks can be used in a number of different ways. In this paper, we investigate the role of global and local landmarks in virtual environment navigation. We performed an experiment in a virtual environment called “Hexatown”, consisting of a regular hexagonal grid of streets and junctions. Each junction was identified by the presence of distinct local landmarks (buildings, phone box, and so on). Additionally, compass information or a global frame of reference was provided by global landmarks (hilltop, television tower, and city skyline). According to participants' movement decisions, egomotion was simulated, and displayed on a 180 deg. projection screen. Participants learned the route back and forth between two local landmarks. In the test phase, individual junctions were approached and the participant's movement decision was recorded. We performed two experiments involving landmark changes after learning. In the first, we used conflicting cues by transposing landmarks. In the second experiment, we reduced either local or global landmark information. Results show that both local and global landmarks are used in wayfinding decisions. However, different participants rely on different strategies. In the first experiment (cue conflict) for example, some of the participants used only local landmarks while others relied exclusively on global landmarks. Other participants used local landmarks at one location and global landmarks at the other. When removing one landmark type in the second experiment, the other type could be used by almost all participants, indicating that information about the neglected landmark type was present in memory.

Fun City: TV's Urban Situation Comedies of the 1990s

The show begins with a black-and-white photograph of the New York City skyline reminiscent of the opening moments of Woody Allen's Manhattan. In the same Allen style, there then follows a photomontage of the happy couple enjoying the city, strolling across a bridge in Central Park with the Dakota apartments behind them, hailing a cab in the rain, walking their dog past a churchyard, ordering food at a deli, browsing through a bookstore, returning from a trip to the corner grocery, buying flowers at a street stand, sharing wine and lunch by the Central Park lagoon, and walking along the East River promenade. Several shots show them engaging in public displays of affection: They are caught snuggling up to each other on that Central Park bridge; the man kisses the woman's shoulder as they wait for the subway train at the Union Square stop; they pause in the midst of a nighttime stroll down a crowded city street to kiss each other once again, and finally they commit to a serious kiss as the East River shimmers in the background.

Deep Intermediate-Band Surface Photometry of NGC 5907

We obtained very deep exposures of NGC 5907 with a Schmidt telescope, large-format CCD, and intermediate-band filters centered at 6660A and 8020A. These two filters, part of a 15-filter set, are custom-designed to avoid the brightest (and most variable) night sky lines, with the result that our images go deeper, with lower sky noise, than those taken with broad-band filters. Our errors of observation reach 1 mag/arcsec^2 at 29.00 mag/arcsec-2 in the 6660A image (= 28.7 in R-band), and 27.4 mag/arcsec^ in the 8020A image (same zero point as I-band). Fainter than R = 27 mag arcsec^, the surface brightness around NGC 5907 is strongly asymmetric, being mostly brighter the NW side of the galaxy midplane. This asymmetry rules out a halo for the origin of the faint surface brightness we see. Rather, this asymmetry is likely an artifact due to a combination of light from a faint ring around this galaxy (as described in Shang et al. 1998, ApJL 504, 23) and residual surface brightness at faint levels from stars that our star-masking procedure cannot completely eliminate. Good agreement with the surface photometry of NGC 5907 by Morrison et al. and other workers lead us to conclude that their data are similarly affected at faint levels by ring light and residual effects from their star masking procedures. Inspection of the images published by Morrison et al. and Sackett et al. confirm this to be the case. Thus, we conclude that NGC 5907 does not have a faint, extended halo.

A Robust Classification of Galaxy Spectra: Dealing with Noisy and Incomplete Data

Over the next few years new spectroscopic surveys (from the optical surveys of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 2dF Galaxy Survey through to space-based ultraviolet satellites such as GALEX) will provide the opportunity and challenge of understanding how galaxies of different spectral type evolve with redshift. Techniques have been developed to classify galaxies based on their continuum and line spectra. Some of the most promising of these have used the Karhunen & Loeve transform (or principal component analysis) to separate galaxies into distinct classes. Their limitation has been that they assume that the spectral coverage and quality of the spectra are constant for all galaxies within a given sample. In this paper we develop a general formalism that accounts for the missing data within the observed spectra (such as the removal of sky lines or the effect of sampling different intrinsic rest-wavelength ranges due to the redshift of a galaxy). We demonstrate that by correcting for these gaps we can recover an almost redshift-independent classification scheme. From this classification we can derive an optimal interpolation that reconstructs the underlying galaxy spectral energy distributions in the regions of missing data. This provides a simple and effective mechanism for building galaxy spectral energy distributions directly from data that may be noisy, incomplete, or drawn from a number of different sources.

The Geostrategy of Place Branding

PLACE IS A powerful yet frequently overlooked branding strategy. It can augment the prestige of a product or service. It can help an item stand out from the crowd. It can amplify the emotions that persuade customers to buy. And intriguingly, something doesn't need to be from a place to exploit that venue in its identity—witness the Las Vegas hotel styled after the New York City skyline. Stephen Roulac probes these and other issues in the realm of place branding and comments on this tool's importance in the global digital marketplace.

Characterization of Narrow Band Filters for Infrared Astronomy The Brγ and H 2 filters

We present a characterization of two narrow band filters commonly used in Infrared Astronomy. Our study mainly quantifies the effect of temperature and tilt angle on the central wavelength and width of the transmission bands of such filters. This allows to evaluate some important effects that must be taken into account to have good quality astronomical images. Effects as the limitation of the field of view and the presence of OH sky lines in the final image are quantified.

Optical Spectroscopy of Diffuse Ionized Gas in M31

We have obtained sensitive long-slit spectra of diffuse ionized gas (DIG) in the Andromeda galaxy, M31, covering the wavelength range of 3550-6850 A. By co-adding extracted DIG spectra, we reached a 1 σ uncertainty of 9.3 × 10-19 ergs s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2 corresponding to 0.46 pc cm-6 in emission measure. We present average spectra of DIG at four brightness levels with emission measures ranging from 9 to 59 pc cm-6. We present the first measurements of [O II] λ3727 and [O III] λ5007 of the truly diffuse ionized medium in the disk of an external spiral galaxy. We find that I[O II]/IHα = 0.9-1.4. The [O III] line is weak (I[O III]/IHβ = 0.5), but it is stronger than found for the Galactic DIG. Measurements of [N II] λ6583 and [S II] (λ6717 + λ6731) are also presented. The [S II] lines are clearly stronger than typical H II regions (I[S II]/IHα = 0.5 compared to 0.2), confirming various imaging studies of spiral galaxies. Overall, the line ratios are in agreement with predictions of photoionization models for diffuse gas exposed to a dilute stellar radiation field, but the line ratios of the DIG in M31 are somewhat different than observed for Galactic DIG. The differences indicate a less diluted radiation field in the DIG of M31's spiral arms compared to DIG in the Solar Neighborhood of the Milky Way. Turbulent mixing layers can contribute at most 20% of the ionization budget of the DIG, with lower percentages producing better fits to the observed line ratios. We have also detected He I λ5876 emission from the brightest DIG in M31. The He I line appears to be stronger than in the Galactic DIG, possibly indicating that most of the Helium in the bright DIG in M31 is fully ionized. However, this result is somewhat tentative since bright night sky lines hamper an accurate measurement of the He I line strength.

Fabry–Perot CCD annular-summing spectroscopy: study and implementation for aeronomy applications

The technique of Fabry-Perot CCD annular-summing spectroscopy, with particular emphasis on applications in aeronomy, is discussed. Parameter choices for optimizing performance by the use of a standard format CCD array are detailed. Spectral calibration methods, techniques for determining the ring pattern center, and effects imposed by limited radial resolution caused by superpixel size, variable by on-chip binning, are demonstrated. The technique is carefully evaluated experimentally relative to the conventional scanning Fabry-Perot that uses a photomultiplier detector. We evaluate three extreme examples typical of aeronomical spectroscopy using calculated signal-to-noise ratios. Predicted sensitivity gains of 10-30 are typical. Of the cases considered, the largest savings in integration time are estimated for the day sky thermospheric O(1)D case, in which the bright sky background dominates the CCD read noise. For profile measurements of faint night sky emission lines, such as exospheric hydrogen Balmer-α, long integration times are required to achieve useful signal-to-noise ratios. In such cases, CCD read noise is largely overcome. Predictions of a factor of 10-15 savings in integration time for night sky Balmer-α observations are supported by field tests. Bright, isolated night sky lines such as thermospheric O(1)D require shorter integration times, and more modest gains dependent on signal level are predicted. For such cases it appears from estimate results that the Fabry-Perot CCD annular-summing technique with a conventional rectangular format may be outperformed by a factor of 2-5 by special CCD formats or by unusual optical coupling configurations that reduce the importance of read noise, based on the ideal transmission for any additional optics used in these configurations.

Boston's "Sacred Sky Line"

Boston's "Sacred Sky Line"

GLOBALIZATION: A GOSPEL AND CULTURE PERSPECTIVE

International Review of MissionVolume 85, Issue 336 p. 85-92 GLOBALIZATION: A GOSPEL AND CULTURE PERSPECTIVE K.C. Abraham, K.C. Abraham K.C. Abraham is president of EATWOT, and professor of Theology and Ethics at the United Theological College, Bangalore, India.Search for more papers by this author K.C. Abraham, K.C. Abraham K.C. Abraham is president of EATWOT, and professor of Theology and Ethics at the United Theological College, Bangalore, India.Search for more papers by this author First published: January 1996 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6631.1996.tb02734.xCitations: 2 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume85, Issue336January 1996Pages 85-92 RelatedInformation

The One and the Many

I have finally changed my mind about computers. I used to regard them with pre-modernist disdain. I considered them to be just another triumph of technocracy, a symptom of the redefinition of thought as manipulation within pre-established channels. I was worried that they privilege novelty over organicity and mask the role of the body in the written word. So I have resisted my colleagues' suggestions that I have a computer installed in my office. Of course, my refusal never ends the conversation. I am occasionally invited into a neighboring office so that the computer's features may be demonstrated to me. My colleagues explain that a computer removes the drudgery and makes work enjoyable. I tell them that I already enjoy my work, and that I especially enjoy guiding my blue felt-tip pen along the lines of my yellow legal pad. One of my special pleasures is to decide, every so often, after examining the breadth of the line and the resistance of the pen, that the point has become dull. I then discard the pen and start again with a new one, confident that the fine, crisp line will sharpen my thought. I ask whether I would continue to experience such pleasures if I were to begin writing on a computer. They respond that the computer is more efficient. I tell them that I find it very efficient to think about the next sentence while staring out the window at the city skyline. Is it more efficient, I ask, to come up with the next sentence by staring into the computer? They tell me that they can display different documents on the screen simultaneously. I politely explain that I can do the same thing on my desk. This time they change their approach. They ask whether I know that, if I had a computer, I could put a question to it, in normal language, and the computer would almost immediately display documents that provide an answer. I hesitate for a second as I recall the question I was exploring when I was interrupted, then inquire about the sort of question that one is permitted to ask. As far as the law is concerned, any question you like, they tell me. All right, I say, what about this one: What does Hegel mean for the law? Well no, they say, of course you cannot ask that kind of question. Oh, I say, I'm sorry. I take another moment to reflect. This is astonishing.

Reading the Skylines of American Cities

Reading the Skylines of American Cities

Skyline Shelter and Devils Triangular Dart Points: Evidence for A New Component of the Lower Pecos Early Archaic Sequence, Southwest Texas

Discussion d'une serie de pointes de projectile de l'abri de Skyline, date de l'Archaique ancien qui, d'un point de vue technologique, differe des autres styles definis dans la region

900-MHz multipath propagation measurements for US digital cellular radiotelephone

The results of multipath power delay profile measurements of 900-MHz mobile radio channels in Washington, DC, Greenbelt, MD, Oakland, CA, and San Francisco, CA, are presented. The measurements have focused on acquiring worst-case profiles for typical operating locations. The data reveal that at over 98% of the measured locations, root mean square (RMS) delay spreads are less than 12 mu s. Urban areas typically have RMS delay spreads on the order of 2-3 mu s and continuous multipath power out to excess delays of 5 mu s. In hilly residential areas and in open areas within a city, RMS delay spreads are slightly larger, typically having values of 5-7 mu s. In very rare instances, reflections from city skylines and mountains can cause RMS delay spreads in excess of 20 mu s. The worst-case profiles show resolvable diffuse multipath components at excess delays of 100 mu s and amplitudes 18 dB below that of the first arriving signal. >

900 MHz multipath propagation measurements in four United States cities

This letter describes multipath power delay profile measurements of 900 MHz mobile radio channels in four US cities. Preliminary data show that for over 98% of the measured locations, RMS delay spreads are less than 12 μs. In very rare instances, reflections from city skylines and mountains can cause RMS delay spreads which exceed 20 μs and excess delays which exceed 100 μs. Such large excess delays have not been previously reported in the literature.

A Fourier Series Approach to Skyline Generalization for Surface Irradiance Estimates in Alpine Terrain

The degree of generalization acceptable in defining alpine skylines in radiation budget components is explored using truncated Fourier series representations. Numerical simulations are performed for sites in the Teton range of Wyoming, U.S.A. The mean skyline approach performs poorly for all irradiances except the incoming longwave. To calculate direct and global solar and net radiation, more complex skylines are needed with several harmonics, although the requirements are less stringent if primary interest is focused on spatially-averaged radiation budgets. Nevertheless, the Fourier series approach shows promise as a means of reducing storage requirements for skyline data in computer programs to perform topoclimatic radiation calculations and as a method of generating conveniently and objectively a continuous skyline function from discrete data.