The Use of the Terms Negro and Black to Include Persons of Native American Ancestry in Anglo North America

In 1854 the California State Supreme Court sought to bar all non-Caucasians from equal citizenship and civil rights. The court stated: The word Black may include all Negroes, but the term Negro does not include all Black persons . . . . We are of the opinion that the words White, Negro, Mulatto and Black person, whenever they occur in our constitution . . . must be taken in their generic sense . . . that the words Black person, in the 14th section must be taken as contra distinguished from White, and necessarily includes all races other than the Caucasian.[1] As convoluted as the quote may be, it tends to express a strong tendency in the history of the United States, toward creating two broad classes of people: white and non-white, citizen and non-citizen (or semi-citizen)

Theta Graph Designs

We solve the design spectrum problem for all theta graphs with 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 edges

Completing the design spectra for graphs with six vertices and eight edges

Apart from two possible exceptions, the design spectrum has been determined for every graph with six vertices and at most eight edges. The purpose of this note is to establish the existence of the two missing designs, both of order 32

Icosahedron designs

It is known from the work of Adams and Bryant that icosahedron designs of order v exist for v ≡ 1 (mod 60) as well as for v = 16. Here we prove that icosahedron designs exist if and only if v ≡ 1, 16, 21 or 36 (mod 60), wit

Fascism: A Review of Its History and Its Present Cultural Reality in the Americas

The Italians may have given us the word “fascismo,” but whether we use that word or the Spanish ”falangismo” or the German “National Socialism” (Naziism) we are talking about a form of social organization which has a complex history. Indeed, many persons wrongly believe that fascism as a political system first achieved state power in Italy in the 1920s. However, fascism in modern times first achieved independent (sovereign) power in the Americas -- in the Argentina of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1830s) and in the Confederate States of America (1860-1865)

The Southern Vilnius Photometric System. IV. The E Regions Standard Stars

This paper is the fourth in a series on the extension of the Vilnius photometric system to the southern hemisphere. Observations were made of 60 stars in the Harvard Standard E regions to increase a set of standard stars.Comment: 6 pages, TeX, requires 2 macros (baltic2.tex, baltic4.tex) included no figures, to be published in Baltic Astronomy, Vol 6, pp1-6 (1997

EM Algorithms for Weighted-Data Clustering with Application to Audio-Visual Scene Analysis

Data clustering has received a lot of attention and numerous methods, algorithms and software packages are available. Among these techniques, parametric finite-mixture models play a central role due to their interesting mathematical properties and to the existence of maximum-likelihood estimators based on expectation-maximization (EM). In this paper we propose a new mixture model that associates a weight with each observed point. We introduce the weighted-data Gaussian mixture and we derive two EM algorithms. The first one considers a fixed weight for each observation. The second one treats each weight as a random variable following a gamma distribution. We propose a model selection method based on a minimum message length criterion, provide a weight initialization strategy, and validate the proposed algorithms by comparing them with several state of the art parametric and non-parametric clustering techniques. We also demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed clustering technique in the presence of heterogeneous data, namely audio-visual scene analysis.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

The optical and near-infrared properties of nearby groups of galaxies

We present a study of the optical (BRI) and near-infrared (JHK) luminosity fuctions (LFs) of the GEMS sample of 60 nearby groups of galaxies between 0<z<0.04, with our optical CCD photometry and near-IR photometry from the 2MASS survey. The LFs in all filters show a depletion of galaxies of intermediate luminosity, two magnitudes fainter than L*, within 0.3 R{500} from the centres of X-ray faint groups. This feature is not as pronounced in X-ray bright gropus, and vanishes when LFs are found out to R{500}, even in the X-ray dim groups. We argue that this feature arises due to the enhanced merging of intermediate-mass galaxies in the dynamically sluggish environment of low velocity-dispersion groups, indicating that merging is important in galaxy evolution even at z~0.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of the ESO workshop "Groups of Galaxies in the Nearby Universe", Santiago, Dec 5-9, 2005. Eds. I. Saviane, V. Ivanov, & J. Borissova (Springer Verlag); 5 page

Designs for graphs with six vertices and nine edges

The design spectrum has been determined for eleven of the 21 graphs with six vertices and nine edges. In this paper we completely solve the design spectrum problem for the remaining ten graphs