Autographs for Freedom and Reaching a New Abolitionist Audience

Scholars correctly appreciate Frederick Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave (1853) as an important early work of African American literature and as a significant indicator of its author’s endorsement of violent tactics to end slavery in the United States.1 This essay will literally step back farther from the text of Douglass’s only fictional work, and examine The Heroic Slave as a component of a larger project—the gift book Autographs for Freedom—edited by Douglass and his closest ally in the early 1850s, British abolitionist Julia Griffiths. The thirty-nine pieces of short fiction, poetry, essays, and correspondence in the 263-page anthology were envisioned as tools to construct a wider and politically more potent antislavery alliance than any in which the two abolitionists had previously participated. In the diverse composition of its collection of authors and antislavery themes, Autographs for Freedom was both a cultural and political tool designed by Douglass and Griffiths to help assemble a more powerful antislavery coalition from the volume’s reading audience

Challenges Experienced by Aquaponic Hobbyists, Producers, and Educators

We used an online survey to document challenges experienced by aquaponic hobbyists (n = 81), producers (n = 117), and educators (n = 75). Responses were distilled into the following categories: 1) operations and management; 2) facilities, location, and system design; 3) knowledge and educational resources; 4) funding; 5) economic viability; 6) plant culture; 7) marketing and distribution; 8) fish culture; 9) human factors; 10) regulations and certifications. Training and research in these areas are needed to advance the aquaponics industry

GraphCombEx: A Software Tool for Exploration of Combinatorial Optimisation Properties of Large Graphs

We present a prototype of a software tool for exploration of multiple combinatorial optimisation problems in large real-world and synthetic complex networks. Our tool, called GraphCombEx (an acronym of Graph Combinatorial Explorer), provides a unified framework for scalable computation and presentation of high-quality suboptimal solutions and bounds for a number of widely studied combinatorial optimisation problems. Efficient representation and applicability to large-scale graphs and complex networks are particularly considered in its design. The problems currently supported include maximum clique, graph colouring, maximum independent set, minimum vertex clique covering, minimum dominating set, as well as the longest simple cycle problem. Suboptimal solutions and intervals for optimal objective values are estimated using scalable heuristics. The tool is designed with extensibility in mind, with the view of further problems and both new fast and high-performance heuristics to be added in the future. GraphCombEx has already been successfully used as a support tool in a number of recent research studies using combinatorial optimisation to analyse complex networks, indicating its promise as a research software tool

Talented suppliers? Strategic change and innovation in the UK aerospace industry

The 1990s marked the start of extensive re-structuring in the aerospace industry throughout the world. While the ensuing consolidation among prime contractors has been widely researched, the changes affecting the aerospace supply chain have received less attention. This study focuses on the re-structuring taking place within the supply chain of the UK aerospace industry. The findings point to extensive re-structuring. Unlike most earlier studies the lean supply model was found to be a powerful influence, with suppliers moving away from subcontractor status and instead taking on the mantle of ‘talented’ suppliers. While some of the implications of lean supply, in terms of the dynamics of innovation, were not apparent, there were modest signs of increased process innovation on the part of some suppliers

IT on teaching and learning process of visually impaired students

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Effective K-Vertex connected component detection in large-scale networks

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

The Impact of Perceived Expectations and Uncertainty on Firm Investment

This paper analyses the (differential) impact of perceived expectations and uncertainty on investment spending in small and large firms. We analyse two types of investment, viz. aggregate investment and investment in energy-saving technologies, using Dutch firm level data. The results show that expectations and uncertainty about input- and output prices and domestic demand have substantial but different effects on investment spending in firms of different sizes. Furthermore, we find evidence, at least for small firms, that there are important differences between the effects of uncertainty about input and output variable