Milking the System: Do Poor People Deserve Fresh Food?

Poor Americans are all lazy, selfish people who must first prove their worth as human beings if they want to be able to feed their children. It sounds harsh, stereotypical, and judgmental when you put it like that, and few people would feel comfortable saying that exact phrase. However, it’s a perception of poverty in America that I’ve found still has a strong grip on our way of thinking. [excerpt

Fearless: Melanie Meisenheimer

After returning from a year in France and Cameroon, Melanie Meisenheimer ‘14 is fearlessly taking on the responsibility of running The Gleaning Project for the South Central Community Action Programs (SCCAP) in Gettysburg this summer. She’ll coordinate the collection of gleaned fruits and vegetables from local farms and the distribution to emergency food services - making fresh, local healthy food a reality for low-income families! [excerpt

Implementing the syntax of japanese numeral classifiers

While the sortal constraints associated with Japanese numeral classifiers are wellstudied, less attention has been paid to the details of their syntax. We describe an analysis implemented within a broadcoverage HPSG that handles an intricate set of numeral classifier construction types and compositionally relates each to an appropriate semantic representation, using Minimal Recursion Semantics

Flowing maps to minimal surfaces

We introduce a flow of maps from a compact surface of arbitrary genus to an arbitrary Riemannian manifold which has elements in common with both the harmonic map flow and the mean curvature flow, but is more effective at finding minimal surfaces. In the genus 0 case, our flow is just the harmonic map flow, and it tries to find branched minimal 2-spheres as in Sacks-Uhlenbeck and Struwe etc. In the genus 1 case, we show that our flow is exactly equivalent to that considered by Ding-Li-Lui. In general, we recover the result of Schoen-Yau and Sacks-Uhlenbeck that an incompressible map from a surface can be adjusted to a branched minimal immersion with the same action on $\pi_1$, and this minimal immersion will be homotopic to the original map in the case that $\pi_2=0$.Comment: Updated to reflect galley proof corrections. To appear in The American Journal of Mathematic

Head-initial constructions in japanese

Japanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project, present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as a means of testing linguistic hypotheses

Efficient deep processing of japanese

We present a broad coverage Japanese grammar written in the HPSG formalism with MRS semantics. The grammar is created for use in real world applications, such that robustness and performance issues play an important role. It is connected to a POS tagging and word segmentation tool. This grammar is being developed in a multilingual context, requiring MRS structures that are easily comparable across languages

AIN to Ulnar Motor Nerve Transfer Meta Analysis

Background: There are currently few comprehensive studies of end-to-end and “supercharged” reverse end-to-side (SETS) anterior interosseous nerve (AIN) to ulnar nerve transfers for treatment of ulnar neuropathy. The authors performed a literature review existing published literature to evaluate the indications for, and utility of, AIN-ulnar nerve transfer as a treatment method and to inform future treatment decisions. Methods: A literature review was performed based on the following inclusion criteria: inclusion of anterior interosseous nerve or AIN, ulnar nerve or ulnar motor nerve, transfer or nerve transfer, and outcome, motor, clinical, ulnar neuropathies, ulnar nerve paralysis, treatment or function. Exclusion criteria included animal studies or studies not in English. Results were analyzed based on the Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand (DASH) questionnaire scores, grip and key pinch strength, and interosseous Medical Research Council (MRC) graded strength. Preoperative and postoperative differences were evaluated by independent t-test and Mann-Whitney U-test. Results: Literature search identified 103 unique articles. Following screening, 13 full-text articles were reviewed. 9 articles met the inclusion criteria, of which 5 pertained to the reverse end-to-side (SETS) technique and 4 pertained to the end-to-end technique. 130 patients (mean age, 40.8 +/- 12.8 years) were included overall, and 114 patients had sufficient follow-up to evaluate functional outcomes. The mean time to surgery was 5.4 +/- 2.2 months and the mean follow-up period was 18.2 +/- 27.0 months. Injuries to the ulnar nerve and diagnoses varied, but all patients had preoperative clinical evidence of ulnar weakness, and the majority of patients (70%) had documented preoperative decreased grip or key pinch strength and/or motor MRC grade. Other indices included weak index crossover, interosseous atrophy, and denervation evidenced by electromyography of the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle. Motor MRC grade, DASH score, and grip and key pinch strength all improved significantly from their preoperative baseline. Conclusion: Both end-to-end and SETS nerve transfer produced significant improvement in motor function. Nerve transfer is an effective treatment method of both transection and compression injuries, with outcomes comparable to or better than traditional nerve grafts