The Flood Last Time: ‘Muck’ and the uses of history in Kara Walker’s ‘Rumination’ on Katrina

Kara Walker describes her book After the Deluge (2007) as “rumination” on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of a “visual essay.” The book combines Walker's own artwork and the works of other artists into “a narrative of fluid symbols” in which the overarching analogy of “murky, toxic waters” holds the potential to “become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth.” This essay considers Walker's use of history within this collection of images to show how the book opens up ways to interrogate Katrina's particular significance as a wholly new, and yet eerily familiar, historical “event.” Nuancing a reading of Walker's book with reference to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), to which After the Deluge implicitly alludes, the essay examines Walker's artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present and demonstrates how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse after Katrina

L’histoire, les écoles, la croisée des chemins et la Saskatchewan

Le numéro d’automne du Bulletin de la S.H.C. comprenait un article de Harry Dhand du programme d’études de l’University of Saskatchewan, intitulé "L’histoire dans les écoles de la Saskatchewan: à la croisée des chemins”. Cet article examinait les changements qui ont été prévus, ainsi que ceux qui ont déjà été apportés en Saskatchewan au programme en études sociales du secondaire

A Quantum Multiparty Packing Lemma and the Relay Channel

Optimally encoding classical information in a quantum system is one of the oldest and most fundamental challenges of quantum information theory. Holevo's bound places a hard upper limit on such encodings, while the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland (HSW) theorem addresses the question of how many classical messages can be "packed" into a given quantum system. In this article, we use Sen's recent quantum joint typicality results to prove a one-shot multiparty quantum packing lemma generalizing the HSW theorem. The lemma is designed to be easily applicable in many network communication scenarios. As an illustration, we use it to straightforwardly obtain quantum generalizations of well-known classical coding schemes for the relay channel: multihop, coherent multihop, decode-forward, and partial decode-forward. We provide both finite blocklength and asymptotic results, the latter matching existing classical formulas. Given the key role of the classical packing lemma in network information theory, our packing lemma should help open the field to direct quantum generalization.Comment: 20 page

Were the Poppers Right? Outmigration and the Changing Economy of the Great Plains

I was born and raised west of the 100th meridian and lived close to the land and people of western Kansas for more than 40 years. When I entered high school, I set a goal of knowing everyone in the school within two weeks and I accomplished that. I also knew the name of every street in town, thanks to my having a paper route. Within my lifetime, I have seen dramatic changes in both the land and people. When the Poppers first introduced their Buffalo Commons idea, I was governor and I came out guns blazing like Matt Dillon. Like many Kansans, I wondered what two East Coast academics could possibly know about the Great Plains. Seventeen years later, I must admit I was wrong. In some areas, from Alberta to the Rio Grande, the depopulation has been even greater than what the Poppers predicted. That was disappointing to me as my families’ roots are deep in western Kansas. My mother and father built a house in Atwood and lived at that same address for 51 years. During that same time period, I’ve had 29 different mailing addresses, exemplifying changing lifestyles

Guide to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)

Open source intelligence, which researchers and security services style OSINT, is one of the most valuable tools to a contemporary reporter, because of the vast amount of publicly available online information. Reporters conducting OSINT-based research should aspire to use the information they gather online to peer behind the superficial mask of the internet—the anonymous avatars on Twitter, for example, or the filtered photographs on Instagram—and tell the story of the real, flesh-and-blood human beings on the other side of our screens. Every time we go online, we give up part of our identity. Sometimes, it comes in the form of an email used to make a Twitter account. Other times, it’s a phone number for two-factor authentication, or days’ and weeks’ worth of timestamps suggesting when a user is awake and asleep. Journalists can piece together clues like this and use them to tell stories which are of interest to the public. The following guide is written to provide a basic foundation not only for doing that work, but also for verifying the information, archiving findings, and interacting with hostile communities online. The closer we get to understanding the people who make the influential and newsworthy aspects of the internet happen—and their motivations—the easier our work of discovery becomes

Combustion analysis and particulate mutagenicity characterization for a single-cylinder diesel engine fueled by Fischer -Tropsch derived liquids

Further growth of diesel engines in the light-duty and heavy-duty vehicular markets is closely linked to the potential health risks of diesel exhaust. Cleaner burning fuels, such as those derived from natural gas via the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process, offer a potentially economically viable alternative to standard diesel fuel. As part of this study, a two-liter, single-cylinder, four-stroke direct-injected engine was instrumented for in-cylinder pressure measurements. The emissions and performance data from engine operation with Federal low sulfur No. 2 diesel fuel (DF) and natural gas derived FT fuel were compared. Also as part of the study, an investigation was carried out on the mutagenic characteristics of particulate matter (PM) derived from FT and DF fuel combustion by relating the in-vitro mutagenic activity of the particulate matter to engine operating conditions and particle size via the Ames Salmonella typhimurium bioassay (Maron and Ames, 1983). Particulate matter from two engine conditions were gathered using a Micro-Orifice Uniform Deposition Impactor (MOUDI) for size selective mutagenic analysis.;Results of the mutagenicity study indicate differences in the mutagenic response of the PM soluble organic fraction (SOF) of both Federal diesel No. 2 and FT fuel as functions of engine operating conditions, fuel type and particle size. The extracted solubles from particles of aerodynamic diameters greater than 100 nm were found to exhibit significantly greater mutagenic effect than their smaller counterparts (\u3c100 nm) for both fuels. Results of the combustion and emission study revealed a general trend for lower emissions for FT fuel compared to DF fuel. NOx emissions correlated well with ignition delay and the amount of heat released in the premixed combustion phase. With the exception of two high load engine conditions, lower CO and total hydrocarbon (THC) emissions were the general trend for FT fuel.;Engine test facilities were located at the U.S. DOE\u27s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Morgantown, WV. Particulate matter samples were collected in the NETL engine test cell. Measurement and extractions were also performed at NETL. The extracted PM was analyzed at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), also in Morgantown, WV, to determine particulate matter in-vitro mutagenicity via the AMES bioassay method

The development and validation of a test of industrial technological literacy

This study was designed to investigate the construct of industrial technological literacy. Technology and technological literacy were thoroughly defined. A theoretical model of technological literacy was developed;An instrument to measure the more narrow term of industrial technological knowledge was developed. The psychometric properties of the instrument were found to be comparable to the Iowa Test of Educational Development tests;Responses to items on the instrument and demographic data collected were used to investigate the existence of industrial technological literacy, the validity of the instrument, and possible correlates of the attribute. It was concluded that industrial technological literacy does exit and can be measured reliably. Among others, knowledge of science and the amount of industrial/technical courses taken were found to be related to score on the instrument