Blue Jeans Go Green (BJGG) Denim Recycling Program: Fusing the Content of Two Courses

A creative teaching strategy was implemented in the fall of 2014 in order to fuse the content of two independent fashion merchandising courses. Blue Jeans Go Green Denim Recycling Program was created by Cotton Incorporated in 2006 as a call-to-action to recycle denim on college campuses. The recycled denim would be given new life as UltraTouch Denim Insulation and a portion of it donated for use in civic buildings and for communities in need across the U.S. The two fashion merchandising courses included Advanced Textiles and Fashion Promotion which shared the same enrolled students

Three Ways to Value Equality

There is much inequality in the world — inequalities of wealth, political power, health care and life-span, educational and cultural opportunities, and so on. Some of these inequalities are shared around so that they tend to cancel out, but to a large degree this is not so, and some people are much better off overall than others. This is manifest on any plausible way of measuring how well off people are overall

The basis of equality

It is often said that justice requires equality. Which kind of equality justice requires is, of course, a matter of dispute: it is widely held that in a just society there must be equality before the law, and equality of opportunity; many have claimed that justice requires equality of concern for the welfare of each person; and some have argued that significant inequalities in the allocation of resources must be avoided. And, of course, many believe that justice requires public affairs to be conducted through democratic institutions-for only such arrangements express an equality of political status, and seek to provide an equality of influence

Fraternity and Equality

Is there a connection between the values of fraternity and outcome equality? Is inequality at odds with fraternity? There are reasons to doubt that it is. First, fraternity requires us to want our ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ to fare well even when they are already better off than we are and their doing better will increase inequality. Second, fraternity seems not to require equality as a matter of fairness. Fairness requires (a certain) equality, but fraternity does not require fairness. In examining what fraternity requires I discuss Rawls' suggestion that the difference principle corresponds to a natural meaning of fraternity, arguing that fraternity may be even more tolerant of inequality than the difference principle. Nevertheless, I defend the claim that fraternity and equality are linked, albeit not in such a way as to make inequality inconsistent with fraternity. Fraternity is related to equality since equalizing expresses the connectedness at the core of fraternity; but inequality is consistent with fraternity since there are other ways of expressing that connectedness

New and old results on spherical varieties via moduli theory

Given a connected reductive algebraic group $G$ and a finitely generated monoid $\Gamma$ of dominant weights of $G$, in 2005 Alexeev and Brion constructed a moduli scheme $\mathrm M_\Gamma$ for multiplicity-free affine $G$-varieties with weight monoid $\Gamma$. This scheme is equipped with an action of an `adjoint torus' $T_{\mathrm{ad}}$ and has a distinguished $T_{\mathrm{ad}}$-fixed point $X_0$. In this paper, we obtain a complete description of the $T_{\mathrm{ad}}$-module structure in the tangent space of $\mathrm M_\Gamma$ at $X_0$ for the case where $\Gamma$ is saturated. Using this description, we prove that the root monoid of any affine spherical $G$-variety is free. As another application, we obtain new proofs of uniqueness results for affine spherical varieties and spherical homogeneous spaces first proved by Losev in 2009. Furthermore, we obtain a new proof of Alexeev and Brion's finiteness result for multiplicity-free affine $G$-varieties with a prescribed weight monoid. At last, we prove that for saturated $\Gamma$ all the irreducible components of $\mathrm M_\Gamma$, equipped with their reduced subscheme structure, are affine spaces.Comment: v3: 45 pages, minor improvements, final versio

Classification of strict wonderful varieties

In the setting of strict wonderful varieties we answer positively to Luna's conjecture, saying that wonderful varieties are classified by combinatorial objects, the so-called spherical systems. In particular, we prove that strict wonderful varieties are mostly obtained from symmetric spaces, spherical nilpotent orbits or model spaces. To make the paper self-contained as much as possible, we shall gather some known results on these families and more generally on wonderful varieties.Comment: 39 pages; final version to appear in Annales Inst. Fourie