Sleeping dragons

In six months Wyce has learned almost nothing about the research compound that has become his prison. That there are mages amongst his captors can only mean that someone within the Magister\u27s Council endorses this facility, but while this fact disturbs him deeply as a student of magic himself, it leads him no closer to understanding. His reality has become a waking nightmare, and over time constant experimentation and abuse degrade even his natural curiosity. He fights an impending sense of complacency, internally outraged at his failure to act in his own interest, constantly reminded that because of his spell stutter - a magical disability - he is less of a threat to the soldiers that guard him than a well-educated child. When the woman in the cell next to his proposes an escape Wyce pledges his loyalty and assistance in spite of her refusal to share the details of her plan. Escaping seems to be the only thing that matters, but in the full course of time Wyce must realize that there are always other considerations. The chapters herein form the opening to a novel-in-progress that imagines a world where modern science forges magic instead of machines; where commercialism is rampant and apathy is a default state of being. The novel follows Wyce and Reina in their escape from the compound until their status as wanted criminals finally lands them in the hands of a young fortune hunter named Spades, whose decision not to hand the two over to authorities forces him into taking a stand on issues that he\u27s made a career out of avoiding. How to navigate the growing tide of modernity is a question that speaks to all of us, and the struggle of these three companions to do just that is a story for all of us

Heart and Minds: A Social Model of U.S. Productivity Growth

macroeconomics, product growth

The Difference in Satisfaction among Academic Advising Formats for Online College Students

Online education is growing so quickly that colleges are finding it difficult to provide enough online programs to meet student demands, and they are still finding their way in terms of the best academic advising format. To better understand the best way to support online students, the researcher studied student satisfaction within centralized advising offices with general academic advisors, department academic advisors, and individually assigned academic advisors. The researcher utilized developmental academic advising because it provided an excellent theoretical framework for academic advising’s purpose and its best practices. The instrument Advising Scale was used to measure student satisfaction. Advising Scale was the best fit because it was developed using developmental academic advising theory, and it was one of the only statistically validated instruments that measured academic advising satisfaction and performance. The researcher conducted a causal comparative study using a one-way ANOVA for statistical analysis. The sample was from an online undergraduate and graduate student population that attended college online. Three groups of students from distance learning programs were selected. The groups were students with a general advisor, individual advisor, or department advisor. The researcher found that there was a statistically significant difference in student satisfaction between students that had either an individual advisor, general advisor, or department advisor. Students in the individual advisor group had the highest level of student satisfaction, department advising scored second highest, and the general advisor group had the lowest student satisfaction scores. Recommendations for future research include having colleges send the survey directly to students instead of the researcher, using a qualitative approach, sampling different online colleges, and researching different advising structures

Geologic Mapping and Geochronology of the Heavens gate 7.5-Minute Quadrangle: How Long Does it Take to Accrete an Island Arc to a Continent?

The Blue Mountain province of western Idaho and eastern Oregon is composed of a mélange of geologic terranes that represent Permian and Triassic island arcs that collided with North America in the Mesozoic, resulting in westward growth of the continent. Separating these accreted rocks from North America are the mid- crustal metamorphic rocks of the Salmon River suture zone. Containing units and features associated with the accreted island arc terranes and suture zone is the Heavens Gate 7.5-minute quadrangle, located in Idaho county, Idaho. Within the quadrangle the Salmon River suture zone is divided into structural blocks by a series of N-S trending, east dipping thrust faults, the Morrison Ridge, Rapid River, and Pollock Mountain thrust faults (west to east). Formal units mapped within the quadrangle include the Hunsaker Creek and Wild Sheep Creek Formations (Seven Devils Group), the Morrison Ridge Formation, Lucille Slate, the Lightning Creek, Fiddle Creek, and Squaw Creek Schists (Riggins Group), and the Imnaha Basalt. Informal units mapped include tonalitic and quartz diorite plutons, quaternary deposits, and the Pollock Mountain Amphibolite and Cold Springs Orthogneiss and migmatite. Rocks of the Seven Devils Group, part of the Wallowa oceanic island arc, are folded into a north plunging anticline within the central portion of the map, with folding bracketed by zircon geochronology at 140-130 Ma. The anticline is cut by the Morrison Ridge thrust fault, emplacing the Martin Bridge Formation and Lucille Slate above the Seven Devils Group. Structurally above these units lies the Riggins Group, exposed east of the Rapid River and above the Rapid River thrust fault. The highest structural sheet contains the Pollock Mountain Amphibolite and Cold Springs orthogneiss. Zircon geochronology of volcanic, deformed and undeformed plutonic, and metamorphic rocks were used to determine that thrust fault development in the Salmon River suture zone occurred out of sequence with nearly synchronous activation along the Morrison Ridge thrust to the west (pre-123 Ma) and the Pollock Mountain thrust to the east (117 Ma). The approximately 109 Ma. Rapid River thrust was the final thrust fault to develop in the region

On Fairness in Secure Computation

Secure computation is a fundamental problem in modern cryptography in which multiple parties join to compute a function of their private inputs without revealing anything beyond the output of the function. A series of very strong results in the 1980's demonstrated that any polynomial-time function can be computed while guaranteeing essentially every desired security property. The only exception is the fairness property, which states that no player should receive their output from the computation unless all players receive their output. While it was shown that fairness can be achieved whenever a majority of players are honest, it was also shown that fairness is impossible to achieve in general when half or more of the players are dishonest. Indeed, it was proven that even boolean XOR cannot be computed fairly by two parties The fairness property is both natural and important, and as such it was one of the first questions addressed in modern cryptography (in the context of signature exchange). One contribution of this thesis is to survey the many approaches that have been used to guarantee different notions of partial fairness. We then revisit the topic of fairness within a modern security framework for secure computation. We demonstrate that, despite the strong impossibility result mentioned above, certain interesting functions can be computed fairly, even when half (or more) of the parties are malicious. We also provide a new notion of partial fairness, demonstrate feasibility of achieving this notion for a large class of functions, and show impossibility for certain functions outside this class. We consider fairness in the presence of rational adversaries, and, finally, we further study the difficulty of achieving fairness by exploring how much external help is necessary for enabling fair secure computation

Compiling a GIS Database of Tree Farms on Leyte Island

Tree farms were located and surveyed as part of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) tree farm project activities. The sample area was the island of Leyte in the Philippines. Tree farms found were referenced using a Global Positioning System (GPS), to incorporate the information into a Geographical Information System (GIS) database. Information from the sites was recorded and entered into an Excel spreadsheet, which was then placed into a GIS system. Information collected included owner name and address, species of trees, topography, access, reasons for the plantation, silviculture and the owner's willingness to use their trees for extension purposes. The information recorded into a GIS database was accompanied by shapefiles of Leyte. There was a problem with mismatching shapefiles in the GIS system due to different datums used. Photos of some of the sites were hyperlinked to the point files of the tree farms. The database is being used to select tree farms for demonstration sites. The demonstration sites are being used to demonstrate effective management of tree farms and plantations to provide advice about silvicultural methods and other aspects of plantation management