Environment libraries : endangered species?

Slashed budgets, accusations of political interference in science, protests from over 10,000 scientists, aggressive senatorial oversight hearings: who knew libraries could be at the center of such controversy. Such is the case, however, since the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided to shut down or reduce operating hours at many of its libraries across the US. Conversely, north of the border, only a deafening silence surrounds the slow demise of Environment Canada’s libraries

The Arts and School Reform: Lessons and Possibilities From the Annenberg Challenge Arts Projects

The three Annenberg Challenge Arts projects (in New York City, Minneapolis, and a national consortium of schools) fostered a civic commitment to arts education in their local schools and communities, which led to an expansion in local ownership and investment in arts education. The report offers insights from arts education for school reform practitioners (build reform from within; make excellence equitable) and lessons from standards-based reform for arts educators (rethink accountability; begin with permanence in mind)

Patch-type Segmentation of Voxel Shapes using Simplified Surface Skeletons

We present a new method for decomposing a 3D voxel shape into disjoint segments using the shape’s simplified surface-skeleton. The surface skeleton of a shape consists of 2D manifolds inside its volume. Each skeleton point has a maximally inscribed ball that touches the boundary in at least two contact points. A key observation is that the boundaries of the simplified fore- and background skeletons map one-to-one to increasingly fuzzy, soft convex, respectively concave, edges of the shape. Using this property, we build a method for segmentation of 3D shapes which has several desirable properties. Our method segments both noisy shapes and shapes with soft edges which vanish over low-curvature regions. Multiscale segmentations can be obtained by varying the simplification level of the skeleton. We present a voxel-based implementation of our approach and illustrate it on several realistic examples.

Robust Segmentation of Voxel Shapes using Medial Surfaces

We present a new patch-type segmentation method for 3D voxel shapes based on the medial surface, also called surface skeleton. The boundaries of the simplified fore- and background skeletons map one-to-one to increasingly fuzzy, soft convex, respectively concave, edges of the shape. Using this property, we build a method for segmentation of 3D shapes which has several desirable properties. Our method robustly segments both noisy shapes and shapes with soft edges which vanish over low-curvature regions. As the segmentation is based on the skeleton, it reflects the symmetry of the input shape. Finally, multiscale segmentations can be obtained by varying the simplification level of the skeleton. We present a voxel-based implementation of our approach and demonstrate it on several examples.

One King, two burials: The politics of funerals in South Africa's Transkei

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented October, 1990King Sabata Jonguhlanga Dalindyebo, deposed Paramount Chief of the Thembus, was buried twice. The first interment took place on 20th April 1986; the second took place on 1st October, 1989. The first interment was secretive, hasty and without salute - a pauper's burial. The second was a visible organisation of grief, a public performance, highly orchestrated, and supremely lavish - a king's burial. The first interment attracted minimal media comment; the second was a well chronicled affair receiving significant attention from both the local and international media. This paper represents some musings upon the contrasting burials of Chief Sabata Dalindyebo. Its primary aims are to explore the kinds of contests which produced the different burial rituals, [or lack thereof] and to subject the rituals themselves to closer examination in a search for their meanings. The most crucial argument advanced in this paper is that the struggles which surrounded the control of the burials of the Thembu King were urgent attempts to appropriate the dead body in a bid to inscribe and to re-write specific political messages on the corpse, and to erase others. Furthermore, the burial of Dalindyebo provided a powerful platform from which these messages could be disseminated to a larger audience

Governmental & Accounting Profession Changes Implemented in an Attempt to Prevent Another Major Enron Type Corporate Collapse

One thing that remains constant through the Enron collapse and subsequent investigation is the resolve of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the accounting profession to assure the public that they are taking the appropriate measures to avoid a situation like this in the future. Since the SEC released its intent to investigate Enron, in October 2001, both the SEC and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AI CPA) have made and implemented many changes including four new Statements on Auditing Standards (SASs) and at least two new programs. Of the four new standards, only SAS No. 99 is not an update to a previously published statement. In response to the SEC\u27s action, the accounting profession has begun to implement the new standards as well as create new programs in an attempt to regain public support

Efficient job scheduling for a cellular manufacturing environment

An important aspect of any manufacturing environment is efficient job scheduling. With an increase in manufacturing facilities focused on producing goods with a cellular manufacturing approach, the need arises to schedule jobs optimally into cells at a specific time. A mathematical model has been developed to represent a standard cellular manufacturing job scheduling problem. The model incorporates important parameters of the jobs and the cells along with other system constraints. With each job and each cell having its own distinguishing parameters, the task of scheduling jobs via integer linear programming quickly becomes very difficult and time-consuming. In fact, such a job scheduling problem is of the NP-Complete complexity class. In an attempt to solve the problem within an acceptable amount of time, several heuristics have been developed to be applied to the model and examined for problems of different sizes and difficulty levels, culminating in an ultimate heuristic that can be applied to most size problems. The ultimate heuristic uses a greedy multi-phase iterative process to first assign jobs to particular cells and then to schedule the jobs within the assigned cells. The heuristic relaxes several variables and constraints along the way, while taking into account the flexibility of the different jobs and the current load of the different cells. Testing and analysis shows that when the heuristic is applied to various size job scheduling problems, the solving time is significantly decreased, while still resulting in a near optimal solution. ii

Environment libraries : endangered species?

Slashed budgets, accusations of political interference in science, protests from over 10,000 scientists, aggressive senatorial oversight hearings: who knew libraries could be at the center of such controversy. Such is the case, however, since the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided to shut down or reduce operating hours at many of its libraries across the US. Conversely, north of the border, only a deafening silence surrounds the slow demise of Environment Canada’s libraries