Counting Ascents in Generalized Dyck Paths

Non-negative Lukasiewicz paths are special two-dimensional lattice paths never passing below their starting altitude which have only one single special type of down step. They are well-known and -studied combinatorial objects, in particular due to their bijective relation to trees with given node degrees. We study the asymptotic behavior of the number of ascents (i.e., the number of maximal sequences of consecutive up steps) of given length for classical subfamilies of general non-negative Lukasiewicz paths: those with arbitrary ending altitude, those ending on their starting altitude, and a variation thereof. Our results include precise asymptotic expansions for the expected number of such ascents as well as for the corresponding variance

Advances and Novel Approaches in Discrete Optimization

Discrete optimization is an important area of Applied Mathematics with a broad spectrum of applications in many fields. This book results from a Special Issue in the journal Mathematics entitled ‘Advances and Novel Approaches in Discrete Optimization’. It contains 17 articles covering a broad spectrum of subjects which have been selected from 43 submitted papers after a thorough refereeing process. Among other topics, it includes seven articles dealing with scheduling problems, e.g., online scheduling, batching, dual and inverse scheduling problems, or uncertain scheduling problems. Other subjects are graphs and applications, evacuation planning, the max-cut problem, capacitated lot-sizing, and packing algorithms

Linking Animals Aloft with the Terrestrial Landscape

Despite using the aerosphere for many facets of their life, most flying animals (i.e., birds, bats, some insects) are still bound to terrestrial habitats for resting, feeding, and reproduction. Comprehensive broad-scale observations by weather surveillance radars of animals as they leave terrestrial habitats for migration or feeding flights can be used to map their terrestrial distributions either as point locations (e.g., communal roosts) or as continuous surface layers (e.g., animal densities in habitats across a landscape). We discuss some of the technical challenges to reducing measurement biases related to how radars sample the aerosphere and the flight behavior of animals. We highlight a recently developed methodological approach that precisely and quantitatively links the horizontal spatial structure of birds aloft to their terrestrial distributions and provides novel insights into avian ecology and conservation across broad landscapes. Specifically, we present case studies that (1) elucidate how migrating birds contend with crossing ecological barriers and extreme weather events, (2) identify important stopover areas and habitat use patterns of birds along their migration routes, and (3) assess waterfowl response to wetland habitat management and restoration. These studies aid our understanding of how anthropogenic modification of the terrestrial landscape (e.g., urbanization, habitat management), natural geographic features, and weather (e.g., hurricanes) can affect the terrestrial distributions of flying animals

Linking Animals Aloft with the Terrestrial Landscape

Despite using the aerosphere for many facets of their life, most flying animals (i.e., birds, bats, some insects) are still bound to terrestrial habitats for resting, feeding, and reproduction. Comprehensive broad-scale observations by weather surveillance radars of animals as they leave terrestrial habitats for migration or feeding flights can be used to map their terrestrial distributions either as point locations (e.g., communal roosts) or as continuous surface layers (e.g., animal densities in habitats across a landscape). We discuss some of the technical challenges to reducing measurement biases related to how radars sample the aerosphere and the flight behavior of animals. We highlight a recently developed methodological approach that precisely and quantitatively links the horizontal spatial structure of birds aloft to their terrestrial distributions and provides novel insights into avian ecology and conservation across broad landscapes. Specifically, we present case studies that (1) elucidate how migrating birds contend with crossing ecological barriers and extreme weather events, (2) identify important stopover areas and habitat use patterns of birds along their migration routes, and (3) assess waterfowl response to wetland habitat management and restoration. These studies aid our understanding of how anthropogenic modification of the terrestrial landscape (e.g., urbanization, habitat management), natural geographic features, and weather (e.g., hurricanes) can affect the terrestrial distributions of flying animals

Exploration, Science, and Society in Venezuela's Cave Landscape.

Geographic knowledge has played a key role in the formation of empires and nations. As maps and monuments, it has helped define imperial and national identities and territories. In the case of the Venezuelan cave landscape, however, it is not the state that performs its exploration or manages its knowledge, but a group of civilians—mostly friends among them, many not even career scientists. For over 40 years, the members of the Sociedad Venezolana de Espeleología (Venezuelan Speleological Society), have practiced speleology, or cave science, as an amateur pursuit. This has involved exploring, mapping, and cataloguing caves all over the country into a national registry that the group publishes. Once mapped, caverns become spaces for and objects of science, whether in geology, biology, or archeology. Based on research carried out in 2007 and 2008, this dissertation examines the activities of the Venezuelan Speleological Society, from ethnographic and historical perspectives. By analyzing the relations between scientific practice, sociality, and landscape, I argue that the production of speleological knowledge must be considered in dialectic with the production of the Society itself. For most of its members, cave science primarily is about experience and relatedness: exploring and mapping caverns as a collective pursuit. It is in this context that the national speleological project is produced, gains meaning, and is maintained over time. This highlights the importance of collective experience and relatedness, along with norms and trust, in scientific practice. Moreover, by going beyond the field and laboratories, this project exposes a broader, more intimate, and also more dynamic geography of science. At the same time, understanding speleological practice begs appreciating caves’ intense symbolic and material qualities that come into being as humans traverse their passages. Representing caverns requires their exploration, since there is no technology that can accurately map them from the surface. This grants an anachronistic second life to exploration often dismissed as a thing of the past. Finally, in the case of Venezuela, speleological practice points to unexplored ways citizens may reconfigure and even challenge state-orchestrated relations between nature, nation, and their histories.Ph.D.AnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91583/4/Perez_2012_Diss_UM_Vnzla_Caves_REV.pd

The Fulness of the Gospel: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism

"The Fulness of the Gospel: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism"Stephen Joseph FlemingScholars have long wondered about the source of Mormon doctrines, many of which differed significantly from the Protestantism that dominated Joseph Smith's environment. In 1994 John Brooke's Refiner's Fire proposed that Joseph Smith drew on Renaissance "hermeticism," esoteric beliefs influenced by the antique Corpus Hermericum. Mormon scholars criticized Brooke, often arguing for ancient connections inaccessible to Smith, while scholars of Western esotericism argued that the concept of hermeticism was problematic and that the esoteric ideas labeled hermetic were actually Platonic. This dissertation argues that Smith's quest to restore what he called "the fulness of the gospel," or the complete truth that was missing from contemporary churches and even the Bible itself drew from the thought of Christians influenced by Plato and is best understood as a form of Christian Platonism. Thus, for Smith, "the fulness of the gospel" included the restoration of divination, the central Christian-Platonic doctrine, as well as the rites and priesthood offices needed to achieve it.Though Smith would not have designated himself a Christian Platonist (most Christian Platonists would not have either), he gravitated towards such ideas, which were available to him through a variety of routes, including popular forms of religiosity embraced by his family; the views of key followers; and the scholarship of his day as summarized in histories, encyclopedias, and other reference works. Viewing Joseph Smith's folk practices, utopianism, temple rituals, soteriology, marital practices, and political ambition through a Christian-Platonic lens allows us to see underlying connections that make intelligible many disparate and peculiar aspects of early Mormonism

Gender, Tyranny, and Republicanism in England, 1603-1660

This dissertation examines how classical history and gendered conceptions of masculine governance and misgovernance shaped the political culture of seventeenth-century England, the distinctive character of English republican thought, and the cultural and intellectual origins of the English Revolution. By attending to a series of classical stories about lustful and incestuous tyrants, republican revolution, matricide, and Christian persecution, which were appropriated through imaginative literature and discourse, this dissertation argues that Englishmen developed a significant ethical and political vocabulary of tyranny that imagined and condemned misgovernance in highly gendered terms, characterizing the tyrant as effeminate, uxorious, idolatrous, violent, and enslaved. The following chapters maintain that this classical and gendered understanding of tyranny greatly affected English perceptions and public criticisms of King James and King Charles. Through an examination especially of John Milton’s writings, it further maintains that this discourse shaped the burgeoning republican vocabulary of seventeenth-century England, for conceptions of gender played a central and primary role in republican discourses of virtue, liberty, citizenship, and good governance, and marriage was envisioned as a significant republican institution. The study concludes by demonstrating the importance of classical and gendered conceptions of governance during the Interregnum, arguing that the grammar of tyranny developed in the Stuart period became a central criterion whereby republican writers understood, defended and criticized Oliver Cromwell and his government