In the Light of Michael Brown: Living the Mission of a Jesuit University

Dr. Norman White is Associate Dean for Community Engagement and Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University (SLU). White has long been known for his work for and with the under-served and under-privileged minority communities that surround SLU’s urban campus. In August 2014, after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri and during the protests and civil unrest that followed, White fielded numerous calls from the media for interviews and analysis. Those interviews brought White to the attention of newly inaugurated SLU president Dr. Fred Pestello. The two met in person, by chance, at an August SLU vigil calling for peace and justice in the wake of the violence in Ferguson. As the events of Occupy SLU unfolded a few weeks later, Pestello called on White as he sought to discern how to proceed. White played a pivotal role in administrative deliberations about how to respond to the occupation, as a voice who personally knew the communities and concerns being lifted up by the protestors and as a voice for SLU’s Jesuit mission. White’s reflection offers a narrative of the events of Occupy SLU as he experienced them and suggests how he was transformed by those events

Weak Gravitational Lensing and Cluster Mass Estimates

Hierarchical theories of structure formation predict that clusters of galaxies should be embedded in a web like structure, with filaments emanating from them to large distances. The amount of mass contained within such filaments near a cluster can be comparable to the collapsed mass of the cluster itself. Diffuse infalling material also contains a large amount of mass. Both these components can contribute to the cluster weak lensing signal. This ``projection bias'' is maximized if a filament lies close to the line-of-sight to a cluster. Using large--scale numerical simulations of structure formation in a cosmological constant dominated cold dark matter model, we show that the projected mass typically exceeds the actual mass by several tens of percent. This effect is significant for attempts to estimate cluster masses through weak lensing observations, and will affect weak lensing surveys aimed at constructing the cluster mass function.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. LaTeX2e, uses emulateapj.sty and onecolfloat.sty. To be submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letter

Urban and Rural Representation and State Legislative Apportionment

The complexion of societies and civilizations change, often with amazing rapidity. A nation once primarily rural in character becomes predomi nantly urban. Representative schemes once fair and equitable become archaic and dated. (Chief Justice Warren, in Reynolds v. Sims.)Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68668/2/10.1177_106591296401700409.pd

Why Cant We Be Sweethearts

Illustration of woman sitting on windowsillhttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cht-sheet-music/6773/thumbnail.jp

USER INTERFACES FOR DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: AN OVERVIEW

Information Systems Working Papers Serie

IMPACT OF OFFICE AUTOMATION ON SOCIETY: Implications for Education, Policy and Research

Information Systems Working Papers Serie

LANGUAGES FOR DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: AN OVERVIEW

In this paper we survey some issues relating to the language interfaces provided by DSS. We do this from the point-of-view of the designer of generalized software for building DSS. We first describe a fairly general architecture for such software. This is followed by a brief examination of the language interface components. We list the functions that must be provided through the language facilities of a DSS together with a number of implementation issues such as User-friendliness, degree of procedurality and interpretation versus compilation. This provides a useful framework for the comparative evaluation of DSS packages. Finally we discuss some possible directions for future development including specialized formal languages and the potential of English-like 'semi-natural' languages.Information Systems Working Papers Serie