An overview on European SPS activities

The organization of space and energy research in Europe is discussed. The European situation is highlighted with emphasis on the dependency of energy imports and on the energy requirements of Europe. The status of SPS research in the countries that form the European Space Agency was reviewed. It is concluded that in view of the unfavorable geographical and climatic situation of large parts of Europe, terrestrial solar energy conversion is unlikely to make a significant contribution to Europe's future energy supply. Thus, SPS development is of special interest to the European community

A multi-level approach for supporting configurations: A new perspective on software product line engineering

Configuration is a common way in many markets to cope with reduc- ing costs and improving customer satisfaction. There are various approaches to represent product configurations, the most common of which is feature model- ing. However, feature models suffer from principal limitations, including ambi- guity and lack of abstraction, increasing maintainability effort and limiting lifecycle support. In this paper, we suggest using a multi-level modeling ap- proach to improve flexibility, reuse, and integrity and demonstrate the ad- vantages of the approach over feature modeling

Investigating styles in variability modeling: Hierarchical vs. constrained styles

Context: A common way to represent product lines is with variability modeling. Yet, there are different ways to extract and organize relevant characteristics of variability. Comprehensibility of these models and the ease of creating models are important for the efficiency of any variability management approach. Objective: The goal of this paper is to investigate the comprehensibility of two common styles to organize variability into models - hierarchical and constrained - where the dependencies between choices are specified either through the hierarchy of the model or as cross-cutting constraints, respectively. Method: We conducted a controlled experiment with a sample of 90 participants who were students with prior training in modeling. Each participant was provided with two variability models specified in Common Variability Language (CVL) and was asked to answer questions requiring interpretation of provided models. The models included 9 to 20 nodes and 8 to 19 edges and used the main variability elements. After answering the questions, the participants were asked to create a model based on a textual description. Results: The results indicate that the hierarchical modeling style was easier to comprehend from a subjective point of view, but there was also a significant interaction effect with the degree of dependency in the models, that influenced objective comprehension. With respect to model creation, we found that the use of a constrained modeling style resulted in higher correctness of variability models. Conclusions: Prior exposure to modeling style and the degree of dependency among elements in the model determine what modeling style a participant chose when creating the model from natural language descriptions. Participants tended to choose a hierarchical style for modeling situations with high dependency and a constrained style for situations with low dependency. Furthermore, the degree of dependency also influences the comprehension of the variability model

History, Geography, and Maps: Teaching World History

As Geography without History seemeth as carkasse without motion, so History without Geography wandereth as vagrant without certain habitation. -attributed to Captain John Smith History is geography over time. -Andrei Lvovich Botvinnik in A WALK IN THE WOODS (1988) by Lee Blessing History ... is exceedingly difficult to follow without maps ... and, it may be whispered, geography untouched by the human element is dull to an extraordinary degree, duller even than mapless history, and that, the Dodo said, was the driest thing that it knew. -Sir Charles Arden-Close

Scripture on the Silver Screen

My course on the Bible and film, and my own fledgling research in the area, are based on two related assumptions. The first is that movies both reflect and also shape our views, norms, and attitudes. The second is that the majority of the movie-going audience has little direct knowledge of, or contact with, the Bible, and thus has no prior experiences against which to test its cinematic utilization. The testing of these assumptions I leave to social scientists, who are better equipped than biblical exegetes to measure and analyse the impact of the movies on their viewers. My aim today is simply to illustrate and reflect on some of the roles that the Bible, biblical passages, and biblical paradigms play in a selection of recent Hollywood films

Review of \u3ci\u3eZebulon Pike, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Matthew L. Harris and Jay H. Buckley.

During the 200th anniversary commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their achievements in exploration and cartography of the northern reaches of the territory were much celebrated with books, articles, and conferences as well as coins, medals, and postage stamps. Zebulon Montgomery Pike’s similar investigation and mapping of the southern parts of the region were marked appreciably less. Why? Were his accomplishments any less than those of Lewis and Clark? Was it that he got “lost” and was captured by the Spanish, who had earlier failed to intercept Lewis and Clark? Or was it because he was sent to spy against the Spanish for the United States or associated with former Vice President Aaron Burr and Louisiana Governor General James Wilkinson, who hoped to carve out a country of their own in the American Southwest? After his death as a general during the War of 1812, Pike was equally esteemed with Lewis and Clark throughout the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth he drifted into more relative obscurity. And the reasons are yet unclear

O'Conner, Image As Artifact - The Historical Analysis Of Film And Television

The history of the recorded moving image is but little more than a century old. Yet it has been a century of dynamic change, change in part documented, reflected, and ushered in by development of film and television. The recorded moving image is therefore becoming an important source for historians reconstructing the recent past and equally as important a tool for educators teaching about it