Griggs and Corrothers: Historical Reality and Black Fiction

Sutton E. Griggs\u27s Imperium in Imperio and James D. Corrothers\u27s A Man They Didn\u27t Know are two early Afroamerican fictions which suggest a black alliance with foreign powers in the face of unrelenting racial injustice at home.1 Imperium in Imperio, published in 1899, has been described as the first political novel by a black American;2 and A Man They Didn\u27t Know, appearing in 1913, is probably the first Afroamerican fiction to suggest a specific alliance between American blacks, groups in Mexico, and the Japanese. Sutton E. Griggs is currently undergoing rediscovery, and Imperium in Imperio is by now well known to students of Afroamerican literature, if not to students of American literature in general. However, aspects of the historical context of Imperium in Imperio have been overlooked by literary scholars at significant cost to a complete appreciation of what Griggs is doing in the novel. Corrothers\u27s A Man They Didn\u27t Know has been overlooked in all respects. This highly interesting fictional work, comparable in important respects to Griggs\u27s novel, needs to be brought to the attention of students of American culture of various disciplines, and, like Imperium in Imperio, to be fully understood, it must be read in its historical context

The First Encounter: Fighting for Naval Supremacy on Lake Ontario, 7–10 August 1813

To upgrade the fighting ability of the Provincial Marine, the Royal Navy sent one of their best young commodores along with 465 officers and ratings to operate the ships of the Lake Ontario squadron. This detachment of Royal Navy personnel, including four commanders, were all veterans with a wealth of sea experience. Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo was described as a zealous, enterprising officer whose daring was unequalled in the annuals of the Royal Navy. Hence his rapid rise to flag rank and his knighthood at the age of thirty-one. The purpose of this article is to illustrate that the way in which Chauncey and Yeo conducted their operations on Lake Ontario was very much in keeping with their background and experience. It was evident from their first encounter that Yeo, the veteran, was the confident aggressor while Chauncey, the administrator, was wary of the reputation of his knighted opponent and unsure of his own squadron’s capabilities

The date of the Decalogue

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Volume phase holographic gratings for the Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph: performance measurements of the prototype grating set

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a major instrument under development for the 8.2 m Subaru telescope. Four identical spectrograph modules are located in a room above one Nasmyth focus. A 55~m fiber optic cable feeds light to the spectrographs from a robotic positioner at the prime focus, behind the wide-field corrector developed for Hyper Suprime-Cam. The positioner contains 2400 fibers and covers a 1.3~degree hexagonal field of view. The spectrograph optical design consists of a Schmidt collimator, two dichroic beamsplitters to split the light into three channels, and for each channel a volume phase holographic (VPH) grating and a dual-corrector, modified Schmidt reimaging camera. This design provides a 275~mm collimated beam diameter, wide simultaneous wavelength coverage from 380~nm to 1.26~\textmu m, and good imaging performance at the fast f/1.05 focal ratio required from the cameras to avoid oversampling the fibers. The three channels are designated as the blue, red, and near-infrared (NIR), and cover the bandpasses 380--650~nm (blue), 630--970~nm (red), and 0.94--1.26~\textmu m (NIR). A mosaic of two Hamamatsu 2k$\times$4k, 15~\textmu m pixel CCDs records the spectra in the blue and red channels, while the NIR channel employs a 4k$\times$4k, substrate-removed HAWAII-4RG array from Teledyne, with 15~\textmu m pixels and a 1.7~\textmu m wavelength cutoff. VPH gratings were an obvious choice for PFS and a set of three prototype VPH gratings (one each of the blue, red, and NIR designs) was ordered and has been recently delivered. In this paper we present the design and specifications for the PFS gratings, the plan and setups used for testing both the prototype and final gratings, and results from recent optical testing of the prototype grating set.Comment: 18 pages, 20 figures SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014, Montrea

The formation and arrangement of pits by a corrosive gas

When corroding or otherwise aggressive particles are incident on a surface, pits can form. For example, under certain circumstances rock surfaces that are exposed to salts can form regular tessellating patterns of pits known as "tafoni". We introduce a simple lattice model in which a gas of corrosive particles, described by a discrete convection diffusion equation, drifts onto a surface. Each gas particle has a fixed probability of being absorbed and causing damage at each contact. The surface is represented by a lattice of strength numbers which reduce after each absorbtion event, with sites being removed when their strength becomes negative. The model generates regular formations of pits, with each pit having a characteristic trapezoidal geometry determined by the particle bias, absorbtion probability and surface strength. The formation of this geometry may be understood in terms of a first order partial differential equation. By viewing pits as particle funnels, we are able to relate the gradient of pit walls to absorbtion probability and particle bias

The Impact of Class Size and Number of Students on Outcomes in Higher Education

Numerous studies have investigated the impact of class size on student outcomes. This analysis contributes to this discussion by examining the impact of class size on student outcomes in higher education. Additionally, this paper investigates the importance of student load (total number of students taught across all courses) in educational outcomes. We find that both class size and student load negatively impact student assessments of courses and instructors. Large classes and heavy student loads appear to prompt faculty to alter their courses in ways deleterious to students

New Accounting Rules For Special Assessments

In 1979, the National Council on Governmental Accounting\u27s Statement One eliminated several inconsistencies in governmental accounting. However, accounting for special assessments was never fully resolved. After several revisions, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) issued Statement 6 in January 1987. Assessments typically are divided into those providing capital improvements and those providing services. The new accounting and financial reporting requirements include: 1. special assessments for operating services provided to the public, 2. accounting for debt service for which no government has an obligation in an agency fund, and 3. reporting a direct capital expenditure or a transfer to a capital projects fund if an improvement is financed with existing resources. The accounting and financial reporting standards of Statement 6 are effective for periods beginning after June 15, 1987. The Statement also discusses reporting for services that are financed in whole or in part by special assessments paid by the property owners receiving those services

The Enemy: A Thought Experiment on Patriarchies, Feminisms and Memes

This article examines who or what should be the target of feminist criticism. Throughout the discussion, the concept of memes is applied in analyzing systems such as patriarchy and feminism itself. Adapting Dawkins' theory on genes, this research puts forward the possibility that patriarchies and feminisms are memeplexes competing for the limited energy and memory space of humanity

A Case for Machine Ethics in Modeling Human-Level Intelligent Agents

This paper focuses on the research field of machine ethics and how it relates to a technological singularity—a hypothesized, futuristic event where artificial machines will have greater-than-human-level intelligence. One problem related to the singularity centers on the issue of whether human values and norms would survive such an event. To somehow ensure this, a number of artificial intelligence researchers have opted to focus on the development of artificial moral agents, which refers to machines capable of moral reasoning, judgment, and decision-making. To date, different frameworks on how to arrive at these agents have been put forward. However, there seems to be no hard consensus as to which framework would likely yield a positive result. With the body of work that they have contributed in the study of moral agency, philosophers may contribute to the growing literature on artificial moral agency. While doing so, they could also think about how the said concept could affect other important philosophical concepts

Philosophical Signposts for Artificial Moral Agent Frameworks

This article focuses on a particular issue under machine ethics—that is, the nature of Artificial Moral Agents. Machine ethics is a branch of artificial intelligence that looks into the moral status of artificial agents. Artificial moral agents, on the other hand, are artificial autonomous agents that possess moral value, as well as certain rights and responsibilities. This paper demonstrates that attempts to fully develop a theory that could possibly account for the nature of Artificial Moral Agents may consider certain philosophical ideas, like the standard characterizations of agency, rational agency, moral agency, and artificial agency. At the very least, the said philosophical concepts may be treated as signposts for further research on how to truly account for the nature of Artificial Moral Agents