The Decorated Shed in the Texas Triangle

Within the Texas Triangle, a region defined by rapidly growing metropolitan areas, the relationship between architecture and the edge-city is emerging and being defined. Dating back to the 1930s, with the help of special interest groups lobbying for highway construction and Eisenhower’s Federal Highway Act of 1956, American urbanism dramatically shifted its trajectory advocating for private automobile ownership for each citizen. Due to the population’s dependency on the automobile, architecture began to establish itself as roadside advertisements or better known in architectural discourse as the decorated shed, a term coined in the book Learning from Las Vegas. The architectural discoveries discussed in Learning From Las Vegas are still prevalent in roadside architecture of the 21st century yet there are new topics for study that have since revealed themselves. A topic that has made itself most prevalent is the fact that the decorated shed has evolved with our society to use the digital interface as a new medium to establish and exploit itself. Similar to the introduction and thus dependence of the car to the American society, our dependence on the phone and internet is heavily affecting the way these so-called decorated sheds are presenting themselves to their environments. The question remains, how has and how will the decorated shed evolve to exploit the current urban context? In order to speculate the future of the decorated shed, a creative artifact is made in order to create a fictional conclusion that takes place at intersection 191 which is found on interstate 35, the highway connecting San Antonio and Austin. The artifact is presented as though it is a series of Google Maps searches of buildings found at intersection 191. Doing this as a way to present the project implies that the decorated shed of the future exists not only in the physical world but also in the digital interface. The buildings that have been rendered at the intersection are meant to represent the current and evolving state of the common roadside building which includes the way people are interacting with the building physically, programmatically, and by means of the Internet

Improving the Assimilation of New Members in Small Adventist Churches in Central Pennsylvania

Problem The failure of many of our small Seventh-day Adventist congregations to fully welcome new members into their midst has been of pastoral concern for many years. This project is an attempt to build awareness among established church members of the need to assimilate and sacrifice for new members. Method The first part of the project involved research into the assimilation of new members in ten small Adventist congregations in central Pennsylvania. New members who had joined the church during a six-year interval were studied to see if they had maintained active membership status during that time. Interviews were also conducted with three pastors, four active SDA members, and four inactive members to explore their views about assimilating new members. A seminar was conducted in three churches to alert their membership to the needs of new members, and their own roles in assimilating them into their congregations. An attempt was made to ascertain the effectiveness of that approach in changing attitudes with respect to new members by comparing results from a pre-seminar questionnaire (given to the entire church about one month prior to the seminar) and a very similar questionnaire administered at the close of the seminar. Results The findings of the questionnaires regarding the effectiveness of the seminar in changing attitudes with respect to new members were inconclusive. The hope that church members would attend the seminar in large numbers was usually not realized. Therefore, the pool of those taking the follow-up questionnaire was more selective than the pool of those taking the pre-seminar questionnaire, making any conclusions reached by direct comparisons of the answers unreliable. However, subjective analysis of the behaviors of the churches involved and their assimilation percentages was revealing. Conclusions There is a definite comparison between the personal effort the church membership is willing to extend in support of new member assimilation and the likelihood that new members will become active in its fellowship. Churches with higher assimilation rates showed greater interest in the seminar than those with lower assimilation rates. An exception was noted in the smallest church surveyed. It had a large seminar attendance but a very poor record of assimilation. This suggests that factors other than the church\u27s willingness to personally welcome newcomers might be involved. Real change in attitude among the membership in small church settings is not likely to result from one or two seminars alone, but will require ongoing vision-casting by the leadership through sermons, lessons, and personal example

Resolving SNR 0540-6944 from LMC X-1 with Chandra

We examine the supernova remnant (SNR) 0540-697 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using data from the Chandra ACIS. The X-ray emission from this SNR had previously been hidden in the bright emission of nearby X-ray binary LMC X-1; however, new observations with Chandra can finally reveal the SNR's structure and spectrum. We find the SNR to be a thick-shelled structure about 19 pc in diameter, with a brightened northeast region. Spectral results suggest a temperature of 0.31 keV and an X-ray luminosity (0.3-3.0 keV) of 8.4 x 10^33 erg/s. We estimate an age of 12,000-20,000 yr for this SNR, but note that this estimate does not take into account the possibility of cavity expansion or other environmental effects.Comment: 8 pages, 2 GIF figures. Submitted to ApJL. Replaced with minor revisions from referee comment

Understanding and Avoiding AI Failures: A Practical Guide.

As AI technologies increase in capability and ubiquity, AI accidents are becoming more common. Based on normal accident theory, high reliability theory, and open systems theory, we create a framework for understanding the risks associated with AI applications. In addition, we also use AI safety principles to quantify the unique risks of increased intelligence and human-like qualities in AI. Together, these two fields give a more complete picture of the risks of contemporary AI. By focusing on system properties near accidents instead of seeking a root cause of accidents, we identify where attention should be paid to safety for current generation AI systems

The effect of boundary adaptivity on hexagonal ordering and bistability in circularly confined quasi hard discs

The behaviour of materials under spatial confinement is sensitively dependent on the nature of the confining boundaries. In two dimensions, confinement within a hard circular boundary inhibits the hexagonal ordering observed in bulk systems at high density. Using colloidal experiments and Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate two model systems of quasi hard discs under circularly symmetric confinement. The first system employs an adaptive circular boundary, defined experimentally using holographic optical tweezers. We show that deformation of this boundary allows, and indeed is required for, hexagonal ordering in the confined system. The second system employs a circularly symmetric optical potential to confine particles without a physical boundary. We show that, in the absence of a curved wall, near perfect hexagonal ordering is possible. We propose that the degree to which hexagonal ordering is suppressed by a curved boundary is determined by the `strictness' of that wall.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

THE FUTURE OF FEDERAL PROGRAMS FOR SOUTHERN COMMODITIES

Political Economy,

Breakout Session I Notes

These notes are intended as a supplement to the presentation