PERISCOPE: PERIapsis Subsurface Cave Optical Explorer

The PERISCOPE study focuses primarily on lunar caves, due to the potential for being imaged in orbital scenarios. In the intervening years, from 2012-2015, scientists developed further rationales and interest in the scientific value of lunar caves. It does not appear that they are likely to be sinks for water-ice due to the relatively warm temperatures(~-20 degrees Celsius) in the caves leading to geologically-rapid migration of unbound water due to sublimation, and inevitable loss through any skylights. However, the skylights themselves reveal apparent complex layering, which may speak to a more complex multi-stage evolution of mare flood basalts than previously considered, and so their examination may provide even more insight into the lunar mare, which in turn provide a primary record of early solar system crustal formal and evolution processes. Further extrapolation of these insights can be found within the exoplanet community of researchers,who find the information useful for calibrating star formation and planetary evolution models. In addition, catalogues of lunar and martian skylights, "caves" or "atypical pit craters" have been developed, with numbers for both bodies now in the low hundreds thanks to additional high resolution surveys and revisiting the existing image databases

Beyond the Ancestral Code: Towards a Model for Sociolinguistic Language Documentation

Most language documentation efforts focus on capturing lexico-grammatical information on individual languages. Comparatively little effort has been devoted to considering a language’s sociolinguistic contexts. In parts of the world characterized by high degrees of multilingualism, questions surrounding the factors involved in language choice and the relationship between ‘communities’ and ‘languages’ are clearly of interest to documentary linguistics, and this paper considers these issues by reporting on the results of a workshop held on sociolinguistic documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Over sixty participants from Africa and elsewhere discussed theoretical and methodological issues relating to the documentation of language in its social context. Relevant recommendations for projects wishing to broaden into the realm of sociolinguistic language documentation include: a greater emphasis on conversational data and the documentation of naturally occurring conversation; developing metadata conventions to allow for more nuanced descriptions of socio-cultural settings; encouraging teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration in order to extend the scope of sociolinguistic documentation; collecting sociolinguistic data which can inform language planning and policy; and creating opportunities for training in sociolinguistic documentation. Consideration of sociolinguistic language documentation also raises significant questions regarding the ways in which Western language ideologies, which have been especially prominent in shaping documentary agendas, may be unduly influencing documentary practice in other parts of the world.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Food Access in Petersburg, Virginia: Final Report and Recommendations

The City of Petersburg has long suffered with issues of limited access to food and food insecurity. Food deserts, or areas underserved by retail food options, are prevalent throughout the City. As a result, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has ranked the city last of Virginia\u27s 133 counties in their annual health rankings. For the Fall 2019 semester, students from Virginia Commonwealth University\u27s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, through Dr. John Accordino\u27s Urban Commercial Revitalization course, focused on planning solutions to address food deserts in commercial areas, with the City of Petersburg being one of their clients. The class assessed the potential for commercial revitalization and made five recommendations

Minimum-Cost Coverage of Point Sets by Disks

We consider a class of geometric facility location problems in which the goal is to determine a set X of disks given by their centers (t_j) and radii (r_j) that cover a given set of demand points Y in the plane at the smallest possible cost. We consider cost functions of the form sum_j f(r_j), where f(r)=r^alpha is the cost of transmission to radius r. Special cases arise for alpha=1 (sum of radii) and alpha=2 (total area); power consumption models in wireless network design often use an exponent alpha>2. Different scenarios arise according to possible restrictions on the transmission centers t_j, which may be constrained to belong to a given discrete set or to lie on a line, etc. We obtain several new results, including (a) exact and approximation algorithms for selecting transmission points t_j on a given line in order to cover demand points Y in the plane; (b) approximation algorithms (and an algebraic intractability result) for selecting an optimal line on which to place transmission points to cover Y; (c) a proof of NP-hardness for a discrete set of transmission points in the plane and any fixed alpha>1; and (d) a polynomial-time approximation scheme for the problem of computing a minimum cost covering tour (MCCT), in which the total cost is a linear combination of the transmission cost for the set of disks and the length of a tour/path that connects the centers of the disks.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, Latex, to appear in ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry 200

Increasing Access to Food: A Comprehensive Report on Food Supply Options

Access to food is one of the most important aspects of a healthy, sustainable community. Grocery stores and other suppliers can serve as an economic anchor to provide social benefits to communities. Unfortunately, many communities do not have convenient and/or affordable access to grocery items, particularly fresh produce. As part of Virginia Commonwealth University\u27s Fall 2019 graduate course on Urban Commercial Revitalization, class members researched 13 retail and other food access options, which are described in this report. Each chapter covers a food access option and provides basic information that will be useful to individuals, organizations, or government agencies that wish to attract and/or develop grocery operations in their communities

Inferring and Explaining

Review of OER Philosophy textbook by Jeffery L. Johnson, available at https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/66

Political Philosophy Reader

Review of OER Philosophy textbook by Noah Levin et al., available at https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Philosophy/Political_Philosophy_Reader_(Levin_et_al.

Introduction to Philosophy

Review of OER Philosophy textbook by Nathan Smith. et al., available at https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-philosoph