Litter on Wheels: An Ocean Garbage Art Car

In the Fall term of 2018, Gettysburg College seniors Bill LeConey and Will Gibson created the world\u27s first Ocean Garbage Art Car, by covering an old Ford truck with plastic bottles (and other trash commonly found in our oceans), to raise awareness about anthropogenic pollution in our seas. Since the 1950’s, plastics have been an essential and ubiquitous commodity in nearly every society on the planet. Plastics find their way into just about every aspect of our lives - from water bottles and cell phone cases, to even advanced medical equipment and space shuttles - it’s no secret how prevalent plastic is. Unfortunately, an overwhelming majority of the ≈450 million tons of plastic produced annually ends up in our oceans, posing a substantial threat to our aquatic life and the ecosystems they reside in. Much of this waste coalesces into gyres called garbage patches - some as large as countries - floating within the water column, and harming the tranquility of the environment they are intruding on. Several environmental art forms similar to our Ocean Garbage Art Car were studied and compared to give a more in depth background on our issue. Many other artists have utilized ocean trash, but ours is a one of a kind. An urgent call to action must take place to cleanup our oceans and to stop the excessive waste of plastic before irreversible repercussions occur. It is our hope that the Ocean Garbage Art Car created in the ES 400 seminar will help raise awareness about this dire issue threatening our planet as we know it

AI: Inventing a new kind of machine.

A means-ends approach to engineering an artificial intelligence machine now suggests that we focus on the differences between human capabilities and the best computer programs. These differences suggest two basic limitations in the "symbolic" approach. First, human memory is much more than a storehouse where structures are put away, indexed, and rotely retrieved. Second, human reasoning involves more than searching, matching, and recombining previously stored descriptions of situations and action plans. Indeed, these hypotheses are related: Remembering and reasoning both involve reconceptualization. This short paper outlines recent work in situated cognition, robotics, and neural networks that suggests we frame the problem if AI in terms of inventing a new kind of machine

McGovern, International Trade Regulation

International Trade Regulation is a work with many strengths and few weaknesses. One could nitpick about certain aspects of its organization, but basically the organization is sufficiently logical overall that the book could be read cover to cover and be a coherent introduction to the subject of international trade regulation for a novice in the field. At the same time, within each section, the exposition of the basic international rules, followed by a discussion of the related United States and EEC rules, works well

Nonlinear pre-stress for cloaking from antiplane elastic waves

A theory is presented showing that cloaking of objects from antiplane elastic waves can be achieved by elastic pre-stress of a neo-Hookean nonlinear elastic material. This approach would appear to eliminate the requirement of metamaterials with inhomogeneous anisotropic shear moduli and density. Waves in the pre-stressed medium are bent around the cloaked region by inducing inhomogeneous stress fields via pre-stress. The equation governing antiplane waves in the pre-stressed medium is equivalent to the antiplane equation in an unstressed medium with inhomogeneous and anisotropic shear modulus and isotropic scalar mass density. Note however that these properties are induced naturally by the pre-stress. Since the magnitude of pre-stress can be altered at will, this enables objects of varying size and shape to be cloaked by placing them inside the fluid-filled deformed cavity region.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure