Stronger Partnerships for Safer Food: An Agenda for Strengthening State and Local Roles in the Nation's Food Safety System

Examines federal, state, and local agencies' responsibilities, strengths, and weaknesses in ensuring food safety. Recommends systemwide reforms to enhance state and local roles and improve surveillance, outbreak response, and regulation and inspection

A Model of Creation? Scott, Sidney and Du Bartas

The copyright for this article belongs jointly to the Sidney Journal and to the author, and the Sidney Journal is willing to make the essay accessible via an institutional repository.William Scott’s translation from Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine, which follows Scott's treatise in the surviving manuscript, is an essential counterpart to the Model of Poesy. As well as being a practical demonstration of Scott’s technical principles, the translation provides the most immediate and enriching literary context for the Model’s arguments about the purpose of poetry. Shared images of making (e.g. gestation, architecture and agriculture) that describe the creation of poems in the Model and the creation of the world in Du Bartas evoke the analogy between the poetic maker and divine Maker, which Sidney had explored in the Defence. Yet the Model’s more positive assessment of the role of human reason in poetic composition contrasts with Du Bartas’ insistence on the poet’s dependence on prior creative acts. So how alike for Scott are composing a poem and creating the world? How far is a Model of Poesy also a Model of Creation? By pursuing interpretative questions like these, the Du Bartas translation emerges as a key resource for assessing how Scott wrote the Model, what makes his arguments distinctive, and how he assimilated insights from contemporary writers, especially Sidney’s account of the poet as maker

CHORUS Deliverable 3.3: Vision Document - Intermediate version

The goal of the CHORUS vision document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area (in line with the mandate of CHORUS as a Coordination Action). This current intermediate draft of the CHORUS vision document (D3.3) is based on the previous CHORUS vision documents D3.1 to D3.2 and on the results of the six CHORUS Think-Tank meetings held in March, September and November 2007 as well as in April, July and October 2008, and on the feedback from other CHORUS events. The outcome of the six Think-Thank meetings will not just be to the benefit of the participants which are stakeholders and experts from academia and industry – CHORUS, as a coordination action of the EC, will feed back the findings (see Summary) to the projects under its purview and, via its website, to the whole community working in the domain of AV content search. A few subjections of this deliverable are to be completed after the eights (and presumably last) Think-Tank meeting in spring 2009

NASA space station automation: AI-based technology review

Research and Development projects in automation for the Space Station are discussed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based automation technologies are planned to enhance crew safety through reduced need for EVA, increase crew productivity through the reduction of routine operations, increase space station autonomy, and augment space station capability through the use of teleoperation and robotics. AI technology will also be developed for the servicing of satellites at the Space Station, system monitoring and diagnosis, space manufacturing, and the assembly of large space structures