Confronting a Monument: The Great Chief Justice in an Age of Historical Reckoning

The year 2018 brought us two new studies of Chief Justice John Marshall. Together, they provide a platform for discussing Marshall and his role in shaping American law. They also provide a platform for discussing the uses of American history in American law and the value of an historian’s truthful, careful, complete, and accurate accounting of American history, particularly in an area as sensitive as American slavery. One of the books reviewed, Without Precedent, by Professor Joel Richard Paul, provides an account of Chief Justice Marshall that is consistent with the standard narrative. That standard narrative has consistently made a series of unsupported and ahistorical claims about Marshall over the course of two centuries. The substantial errors contained in this standard narrative are exposed by another book, Supreme Injustice, by Professor Paul Finkelman, which reveals, in groundbreaking fashion, Chief Justice Marshall’s deep personal and professional commitment to, and investment in, the institution of American slavery. Chief Justice Marshall’s commitment to an institution that has been rejected by our law and by pervasive social norms should give his modern successors, attorneys, judges or students of the law, as well as citizens, substantial pause when relying upon Marshall as a posthumous authority and reference point in debates regarding contemporary legal subjects. Any other conclusion would countenance an unjustified double-standard when assessing American historical figures whose conduct we would condemn if perpetrated by historical figures from foreign nations

Effects of automation on situation awareness in controlling robot teams

Declines in situation awareness (SA) often accompany automation. Some of these effects have been characterized as out-of-the-loop, complacency, and automation bias. Increasing autonomy in multi-robot control might be expected to produce similar declines in operators’ SA. In this paper we review a series of experiments in which automation is introduced in controlling robot teams. Automating path planning at a foraging task improved both target detection and localization which is closely tied to SA. Timing data, however, suggested small declines in SA for robot location and pose. Automation of image acquisition, by contrast, led to poorer localization. Findings are discussed and alternative explanations involving shifts in strategy proposed

State of the art in video system performance

The closed circuit television (CCTV) system that is onboard the Space Shuttle has the following capabilities: camera, video signal switching and routing unit (VSU); and Space Shuttle video tape recorder. However, this system is inadequate for use with many experiments that require video imaging. In order to assess the state-of-the-art in video technology and data storage systems, a survey was conducted of the High Resolution, High Frame Rate Video Technology (HHVT) products. The performance of the state-of-the-art solid state cameras and image sensors, video recording systems, data transmission devices, and data storage systems versus users' requirements are shown graphically

Understanding State Government Appropriations For the Arts: 1976-1999

Using panel data analysis, we examine the relative importance of citizen and government characteristics on a highly discretionary and volatile budget item: state appropriations to arts agencies. Despite the unimportance of arts spending to most citizens, changes in arts spending appear to reflect citizen desires. Spending rises with per capita income, state revenues, and citizen political and social liberalism, but characteristics of state legislatures do not significantly affect spending.Department of Economics and W.T. Beebe Institute of Personnel and Employment Relations Working Paper 07-0

The effect of flotation cell shape on deinking behaviour

Studies were undertaken to investigate the deinking behaviour of different shaped deinking cells of the same volume. For comparative purposes, most oprational variables were kept constant, and the same injector was used throughout the study. The position of the injector, however, was varied in some cases to go along with the particular cell shape being studied. Three types of cell shapes were studied, (1) cylindrical with tangential air injection, (2) rectanular with vertical injection, and (3) rectangular with horizontal injection. Eucalyptus/toner slurries and news/mag wastepaper slurries were deinked. Flow patterns in the cells and the corresponding deinking efficiencies were measured. It was found that strong and excessive re-circulatory flows within the cells could under certain conditions be a major factor in reducing brightness lift. Vertical injection into a rectangular cell gave stable flow patterns, non-wavy froth removal and sustained brightness lift for a wide range of feed and airflow rates. Horizontal injection into a similar rectangular shaped cell exhibited quite different characteristics. High brightness lift was possible for certain conditions and not for others. Wavy froth and excessive recirculation flow patterns varied with feed and airflow. The cylindrical cell with tangential injection gave stable circulatory flow and stable froth removal at low flow rates but was unable to deink at high flows

Journalists\u27 Views of the Environment: Issues and Challenges

In advocating the use of an environmental handbook for journalists, the authors report on a survey of reporters and editors regarding salient environmental issues in different regions of the United States and e emphasis placed on environmental reporting in newsrooms

Towards human control of robot swarms

In this paper we investigate principles of swarm control that enable a human operator to exert influence on and control large swarms of robots. We present two principles, coined selection and beacon control, that differ with respect to their temporal and spatial persistence. The former requires active selection of groups of robots while the latter exerts a passive influence on nearby robots. Both principles are implemented in a testbed in which operators exert influence on a robot swarm by switching between a set of behaviors ranging from trivial behaviors up to distributed autonomous algorithms. Performance is tested in a series of complex foraging tasks in environments with different obstacles ranging from open to cluttered and structured. The robotic swarm has only local communication and sensing capabilities with the number of robots ranging from 50 to 200. Experiments with human operators utilizing either selection or beacon control are compared with each other and to a simple autonomous swarm with regard to performance, adaptation to complex environments, and scalability to larger swarms. Our results show superior performance of autonomous swarms in open environments, of selection control in complex environments, and indicate a potential for scaling beacon control to larger swarms