Book Review: \u3cem\u3eRe-imagining South Asian Religions: Essays in Honour of Professors Harold G. Coward and Ronald W. Neufeldt\u3c/em\u3e

Book Review of Re-imagining South Asian Religions: Essays in Honour of Professors Harold G. Coward and Ronald W. Neufeldt. (Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions, volume 141.) Edited by Pashaura Singh and Michael Hawley. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013, xxv + 302 pp

Reference Revitalization and Roving Reference: Are the Reference Desk and Print Reference Sources Passé?

Print reference sources and references desks are still vital parts of reference service in some libraries, while in others innovative models such as roving reference and learning commons thrive. While undergraduate students’ preferences and usage has shifted from print to electronic, students still need to learn the application of metacognitive thinking skills in library research. Updating how reference is delivered to accommodate students’ emphasis on mobility and expectation of access to information has led to revitalizing reference collections, reconfiguring space as learning commons and roving reference as solutions at Taylor University and Palm Beach Atlantic University, while Whitworth University retains a more traditional configuration to meet student research needs

Partnering with Faculty through Liaison Activities

Anything worthwhile requires time and effort. Such is the case in building effective working relationships between librarians and teaching faculty. This article discusses collaborating and partnering with teaching faculty through library liaison relationships and shares experiences of the authors partnering with faculty at their institutions. This article is an outgrowth of a panel presentation at the 2007 ACL Conference by liaison librarians representing libraries in the Southeast, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. While partnering with faculty is both challenging and time consuming, it can be one of the most gratifying and productive activities in which librarians can be engaged

Walley School Community Arts Center Feasibility Study

The Walley School community arts center initiative began in the fall of 2011 as a joint project between the Town of Bristol and Roger Williams University’s School of Architecture. Shortly thereafter, the Gabelli School of Business was asked to development a business case for the project. Four students in the course “Management 439: Business Planning” took on the Walley School as their team project for the semester. The business case study was developed in conjunction with the Town of Bristol, the initiative’s steering committee, Roger Williams University’s Community Partnerships Center, the School of Architecture and the School of Construction Management. After a year of student work and public workshops, the conclusion has been made that it would be programmatically, architecturally and financially feasible to reopen the Walley School as a community arts and education facility for the Town of Bristol

Hardware accelerated image processing to enable real-time adaptive radiotherapy

The accuracy of radiotherapy is constrained by organ motion and deformation occurring between the acquisition of CT and MR images used to plan the treatment and the time at which the treatment is delivered. Adaptive radiotherapy uses image data acquired at the time of treatment to adapt the original treatment plan to match the current patient anatomy. Currently, the image processing and dose calculation algorithms required to perform this plan adaptation cannot be executed in a clinically acceptable timeframe. Hardware acceleration has the potential to speedup these algorithms, making real-time adaptive radiotherapy a clinical possibility[1]. Hardware acceleration is a technique where an algorithm is implemented using hardware that is better suited to the specific algorithm than more general purpose processors in order to reduce the execution time of the algorithm. This can be achieved using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), which are devices consisting of reconfigurable hardware, allowing their function to be customised for a specific application. These devices have been shown to be able to accelerate image processing algorithms pertinent to adaptive radiotherapy[2]. In this study a global thresholding algorithm based on Otsu’s method combined with a three dimensional mean filter was used to segment a series of CT images of a Modus QUASAR respiratory motion phantom into three unique classes. A Xilinx Zynq Z-7020 device consisting of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 central processing unit (CPU) coupled to an 85 000 logic cell FPGA was used to accelerate the algorithm by implementing sections of it in the reconfigurable hardware. The execution time of this implementation was compared to an implementation running on an ARM CPU and Intel Core-i5 CPU. The execution times of the implementations are shown in table 1. The hardware accelerated implementation was found to execute nearly sixty times as fast as the un-accelerated algorithm. The hardware accelerated implementation was also found to run around 14% faster than on the more powerful Intel Core-i5 CPU. Figure 1 shows an example of the segmentation results where the blue contour represents the boundary between two of the classes. In the algorithms presented here the overhead of transferring data to the hardware represents a significant proportion of the algorithm execution time. It is anticipated that greater acceleration will be possible for algorithms with greater computational complexity because the data transfer overhead will represent a smaller proportion of the overall execution time. The requirement for fast processing in radiotherapy is likely to increase as the amount of data available to more accurately guide treatment increases through the use of techniques such as 4D CT and image-guided radiotherapy. FPGA have been shown to be effective at accelerating certain algorithms required for real-time adaptive radiotherapy, however, more research is required to establish which will execute faster on other types of hardware, such as CPU and graphical processing units (GPU). It is likely that heterogeneous computing platforms, composed of a mixture of hardware architectures, will be used in the future implementation of real-time adaptive radiotherapy. References: 1.K. Østergaard Noe, B.D. De Senneville, U.V. Elstrøm, K. Tanderup, T.S. Sørensen, “Acceleration and validation of optical flow based deformable registration for image-guided radiotherapy,” Acta Oncologica, vol. 47, no. 7, pp.1286-1293, 2008 2.O. Dandekar, R. Shekhar, “FPGA-Accelerated Deformable Image Registration for Improved Target-Delineation During CT-Guided Interventions,” IEEE Trans. Biomed. Circuits Syst., vol. 1, no. 2, pp.116-127, 200

Talking science: the research evidence on the use of small-group discussions in science teaching

This paper reports the findings of two systematic reviews of the use and effects of small-group discussions in high school science teaching. 94 studies were included in an overview (systematic map) of work in the area, and 24 studies formed the basis of the in-depth reviews. The reviews indicate that there is considerable diversity in the topics used to promote small-group discussions. They also demonstrate that students often struggle to formulate and express coherent arguments, and demonstrate a low level of engagement with tasks. The reviews suggest that groups function more purposefully, and understanding improves most, when specifically constituted such that differing views are represented, when some form of training is provided for students on effective group work, and when help in structuring discussions is provided in the form of 'cues'. Single sex groups function more purposefully than mixed sex groups, though improvements in understanding are independent of gender composition of groups. Finally, the reviews demonstrate very clearly that, for small-group discussions to be effective, teachers and students need to be given explicit teaching in the skills associated with the development of arguments and the characteristics associated with effective group discussions. In addition to the substantive findings, the paper also reports on key features of the methods employed to gather and analyse data. Of particular note are the two contrasting approaches to data analysis, one adopting a grounded theory approach and the other drawing on established methods of discourse analysis

Affordances and the Potential for Architecture

Affordances and the Potential for Architecture divulges our engagement with the built environment is a deeply rooted experience. In a biological and philosophical sense, it reveals that the mind is inseparable from the body, just as the body is inseparable from its environment. The world displays itself before us as rife with potential movements, activities, engagements, for which we continuously rehearse the myriad possibilities and choose the best course of action in the moment. It defines our phenomenological natures through this readiness-for-action, and thereby suggests we will improve the spaces, buildings, and landscapes that we inhabit by mastering how we enact and perceive them. This concise manuscript proposes affordances as an important contribution to thinking about architecture, space, and perception. To be sure, Architecture is not an object but something we do. The argument opens with Andrea Jelić’s pervasive question, “How does architecture afford being-in-the-world?” Identifying humans’ modern conceit of separating the mind from the body and the body from its situation—she frames our scaffold for experience alternately as one of co-dependence rather than of abstraction. Our perception nests and centers the sensory body in the unfolding discoveries of science’s new models of cognition, along the ecological thesis of James Gibson’s affordances. Likewise, Sarah Robinson, in “Articulating Affordances: Towards a New Theory of Design,” demonstrates that one size never fits all. Even as our bodies are equally constituted and share much in common, it is the specificity of differences between us that should instruct designers. There is no “average” body size for women nor a standard size of fighter pilot. Instead, there is a double entendre which asks desingers to understand perception as the confluence of varying influences, all the while considering the particularities of an individual. In architecture, a theory of affordances appreciates that while the rocking chair will always provide for rocking, its occupation depends on location and the frame of mind of the person so absorbed. Such sensory partaking in life, like rocking in a chair, is the material beauty of an architectural moment. It is the rocking chair which animates the porch. In “Just What Can Architects Afford?” Harry Mallgrave claims that after decades of architects reducing form to conceptual gamesmanship, one has to raise the question of where has this left architectural practice? Has it improved our cities or our houses? In the face of the mounting evidence to the contrary, and in view of the complexity of information age real life, wants, and desires, shall architects mindlessly follow the old Modernist track? The new biological models reveal that our engagement with buildings is “a whole-body experience,” one grounded not only in our multisensory, emotional, and visceral responses to the world but also in the phenomenal or “lived” nature of our being. Standing against the hollowing of human nature in contemporary digital practice, Mallgrave offers the lesson that we are indeed active agents in the culture that we create, and this built world can indeed be attuned to our biological and social natures. Beauty is something we do, an expression of the vital paradisiacal instinct grounded in human nature. James Hamilton, to wit asks, “How do Appreciators and Designers Discover Affordances?” He assigns to himself the difficult task of arbitrating for the ‘user,’ who might appreciate a building, while at the same time distrusting the designer to grasp the real intention of the things they make. He does so by examining Gibson’s claims for affordances and questioning the basis for understanding how objects appear to us or are useful within a specific environment. It seems that what something affords has to do with the experience or understanding you bring to the artifact and moment. You have to see a chair as a chair in order to sit upon it. A secondary and more difficult notion here is that even if a designer makes a chair, it may still be at odds with the peculiarities of the individual. As Dr. Hamilton concludes, “There is no shortcut to understanding on the part of appreciators, and none on the part of designers who design things for them.” Architects say they must educate their clients, yet in order to make this strategy work, designers must be better educated in the needs, wants, and desires of their clients. Affordances are a way to understand the environmental actions and behaviors of our species, while recognizing that which makes us humans of individual needs. One size never fits all, although it begins in our mutual humanity and dependable biology. Taken in sum, these essays consider the model of affordances within the context of architecture and provide a valuable contribution to this discussion of how to conceive, think, and better attune the human organism with the environment in which we dwell.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1036/thumbnail.jp

Dependency structure matrix modelling for stakeholder value networks

This paper develops a qualitative/quantitative network approach, namely a “Stakeholder Value Network”, to understand the impacts of both direct and indirect relationships between stakeholders on the success of large engineering projects. Specifically, this paper explores the feasibility and benefit of applying the Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) as the modelling platform for Stakeholder Value Networks. Further, an efficient algorithm is designed for computing indirect stakeholder influence and implemented in a case study for a multinational energy project. The results derived from this analysis are able to answer three fundamental questions for stakeholder management: What are the critical paths/themes for a project to engage other stakeholders? Who are the most important stakeholders for a project? How can the complexity of a large relationship network be reasonably managed