William Penn Foundation - Is Philadelphia's Leading Philanthropy Back on Track?

For nearly 70 years, the William Penn Foundation has been a philanthropic giant in the Philadelphia area, leading efforts in the arts, environment and education. While the foundation is largely seen as an effective institution, recent changes in leadership and strategy have challenged the foundation's values of transparency and equity. Encouragingly, William Penn has signaled a renewed commitment to advocacy and organizing that engages affected communities. But there's much work to be done before William Penn is the proactive civic leader its constituents need it to be -- one that breaks through the major problems facing Philadelphia and its underserved communities

After the Prestige: A Postmodern Analysis of Penn and Teller

By mocking the magic community and revealing the secret behind some of their tricks, Penn and Teller perform a kind of parodic and post-modern “anti-magic.” Penn and Teller display an artful use of rhetoric; in exposing the secrets and shortcomings of conjuring, they are revolutionizing the way people think about both the art of magic and the magic community. Individuals such as Penn and Teller may use parody to subvert the hegemonic interpretations. However, we also know that it is difficult to bring down a system while operating within that system. Thus, this article explores the way Penn and Teller are challenging the metanarrative of the magic community, using several of the duo’s more popular illusions as examples for analysis. Ultimately, this paper should help us gain a better understanding of the way parody can be used to challenge hegemonic conceptions, and the limitations of this type of rhetorical approach

Regulatory Takings Challenges to Historic Preservation Laws After Penn Central

The Penn Central decision, in its most immediate concern, provided a legal framework within which local governments could enforce historic landmark restrictions without a regular constitutional requirement to pay just compensation. The decision amalgamated regulatory takings analysis of historic landmark restrictions to the familiar and tolerant federal standards for reviewing zoning. Affirming the importance of the public interest goals of historic preservation, the Court directed inquiry to whether sufficient economic potential remained in the control of the property owner, given reasonable expectations at the time of her investment in the property. While the broader jurisprudential merits of Penn Central\u27s approach to the Taking Clause have been the subject of wide debate, the constitutional question of how much of an economic burden the owner of a landmark may be required to bear has received very little attention. Ironically, it is this question that very well may have been the Court\u27s primary concern. This essay looks specifically at how Penn Central protects historic preservation regulation. The constitutional framework created by the decision has fostered a remarkable blossoming of historic preservation as a major tool of urban land use regulation. Preservation could never have played this role without the insulation from constitutional liability provided by the Penn Central Court, likewise, it could not have played this role if property owners had been denied all economic incentives to invest in the renovation and reuse of historic properties. Penn Central appears to have crafted a balance between local control and individual rights that has nourished preservation

Data communications and monitor for the Penn State University profiler network

The profiler network installed by the Department of Meteorology at Penn State University utilizes a microcomputer for network monitoring and control. The network consists of two VHF and one UHF wind profiling Doppler radars. Additional measurement systems added to the network include temperature and humidity profiling radiometers, sodar for boundary layer wind profiling and selected surface based baseline systems. Remote diagnostic capabilities were also implemented in the Penn State network. It is possible to remotely analyze many specific malfunctions of the transmitter or signal processor

Data-oriented parsing and the Penn Chinese treebank

We present an investigation into parsing the Penn Chinese Treebank using a Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) approach. DOP comprises an experience-based approach to natural language parsing. Most published research in the DOP framework uses PStrees as its representation schema. Drawbacks of the DOP approach centre around issues of efficiency. We incorporate recent advances in DOP parsing techniques into a novel DOP parser which generates a compact representation of all subtrees which can be derived from any full parse tree. We compare our work to previous work on parsing the Penn Chinese Treebank, and provide both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. While our results in terms of Precision and Recall are slightly below those published in related research, our approach requires no manual encoding of head rules, nor is a development phase per se necessary. We also note that certain constructions which were problematic in this previous work can be handled correctly by our DOP parser. Finally, we observe that the ‘DOP Hypothesis’ is confirmed for parsing the Penn Chinese Treebank

Between Liberalism and Theocracy

Our symposium conveners have focused us on “the relationship between liberalism and Christianity and their influence on American constitutionalism.” My objective is to complicate the relationship and reorient the influence. The focus of my inquiry is the liberty of conscience and its implications for the relationship between church and state. By approaching these issues through the lens of political theology (as distinct from either political or constitutional theory), hope to show that some of the most significant embodiments of conscience in the American colonies can neither be squared with an individualistic liberalism (as some on the left are prone to do) nor appropriated in the service of arguments that collapse the distinction between church and state (as some on the right are prone to do).I have in mind the political practices of Roger Williams and William Penn. Both are important figures in American political thought, both were known to many of the Founders, and both have drawn increased attention in recent scholarship. Both were also deeply theological thinkers—and their political practices cannot be given sense outside of the theological narratives within which those practices arose. My engagement with Williams and Penn is not confined to their arguments. Both men lived out their political practices in an era much different than our own. For this reason, identifying the theological context of Williams and Penn is only a first step. An equally important objective of this essay is to frame the ongoing relevance of their contributions. To this end, I link the theological politics of Williams and Penn to two contemporary theologians, John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. I then suggest a way to connect the theological insights of Yoder and Hauerwas back to Williams and Penn through the work of constitutional scholar H. Jefferson Powell. This essay sketches these connections as a roadmap to future work. It is offered as an opening round of what I hope will evolve into an extended discussion about the contribution of these five theological thinkers to our understanding of religious freedom and the intersection of theology, political theory, and law