Women in Traditional Judaism: Rights, Roles, and Obligations

Author of On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition, and How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1240/thumbnail.jp

Miles Away Dir. Nick Cope: Video/DVD 6’19”, 2009, soundtrack: Phil Thornton.

Short Documentary exploring the Tibetan Shoton Festival, Drepung Monastery, Lhasa

Real-time terahertz imaging with a single-pixel detector

Terahertz (THz) radiation is poised to have an essential role in many imaging applications, from industrial inspections to medical diagnosis. However, commercialization is prevented by impractical and expensive THz instrumentation. Single-pixel cameras have emerged as alternatives to multi-pixel cameras due to reduced costs and superior durability. Here, by optimizing the modulation geometry and post-processing algorithms, we demonstrate the acquisition of a THz-video (32 × 32 pixels at 6 frames-per-second), shown in real-time, using a single-pixel fiber-coupled photoconductive THz detector. A laser diode with a digital micromirror device shining visible light onto silicon acts as the spatial THz modulator. We mathematically account for the temporal response of the system, reduce noise with a lock-in free carrier-wave modulation and realize quick, noise-robust image undersampling. Since our modifications do not impose intricate manufacturing, require long post-processing, nor sacrifice the time-resolving capabilities of THz-spectrometers, their greatest asset, this work has the potential to serve as a foundation for all future single-pixel THz imaging systems

Movement as Medicine and Screendance as Survivance: Indigenous Reclamation and Innovation During Covid-19

Indigenous screendance challenges US settler colonial constructions that drive political, environmental, and global injustices, which the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated. This article analyzes online workshops taught in 2020 by Rulan Tangen, Founder and Director of DANCING EARTH CREATIONS, as "movement as medicine" and "screendance as survivance." By connecting Tangen's workshops to Indigenous peoples' historical and ongoing uses of dance and the digital sphere for wellbeing and survival, we show how and why these practices provide powerful possibilities to counter settler colonial concepts of anthropocentrism, Cartesian dualism, patriarchy, and chronological time. Tangen's teaching offers ways for humans and more-than-humans—meaning land, cosmos, nonhuman animals, water, and plants—to (re)connect, drawing on the past to imagine the future and building human solidarity, which we theorize as "homecoming." Ultimately, we link our concept of "homecoming" to the Land Back movement because of the vital connections among Indigenous bodies, sovereignty, and survival

32. Using Our Languages Improves Our Health (I)

During this workshop, together we\u27ll become aware of connections between language use and wellbeing. We\u27ll talk about how different cultures define health. (“Western Desert Aborigines see \u27health\u27 not only in the absence of sickness, but more positively: on the physical side, in the presence of coldness and dryness in the body, and on the spiritual side, in having one’s spirit in the area of the stomach. Conversely, when the spirit moves to the back of a person or leaves the body altogether, when the body is hot and wet, then the person is considered sick.” Peile, A. R. 1997 Body and Soul: An Aboriginal View. Victoria Park, WA: Hesperian Press. p. xxi.) We\u27ll review some case studies connecting ancestral language use to rates of diabetes, suicide, and substance abuse. (Oster, Richard, Angela Grier, Rick Lightning, Maria J. Mayan, and Ellen L. Toth. 2014. Cultural continuity, traditional Indigenous language, and diabetes in Alberta First Nations: a mixed methods study. International Journal for Equity in Health 13(92). (doi:10.1186/s12939-014-0092-4)) (Hallett, D., Chandler, M. J., & Lalonde, C. (2007). Aboriginal Language Knowledge and Youth Suicide. Cognitive Development 22 (3), pp. 392–399.) (Chandler, M. J. & Lalonde, C. E. (2008). Cultural Continuity as a Protective Factor against Suicide in First Nations Youth. Horizons --A Special Issue on Aboriginal Youth, Hope or Heartbreak: Aboriginal Youth and Canada’s Future. 10(1), 68-72.)) Weʼll share eye witness accounts of language use and its relation to health from our own and othersʼ experiences. Weʼll consider the difference between correlation and causation. Weʼll consider various health factors; emotional, physical, social, spiritual, economic, educational and how we might collect evidence-based data to support language-health causation. Weʼll practice our arguments to authorities [family, community, legislature, health industry, congress] to support ancestral Indigenous language based on the health benefits it provides

A CURE for noisy magnetic resonance images: Chi-square unbiased risk estimation

In this article we derive an unbiased expression for the expected mean-squared error associated with continuously differentiable estimators of the noncentrality parameter of a chi-square random variable. We then consider the task of denoising squared-magnitude magnetic resonance image data, which are well modeled as independent noncentral chi-square random variables on two degrees of freedom. We consider two broad classes of linearly parameterized shrinkage estimators that can be optimized using our risk estimate, one in the general context of undecimated filterbank transforms, and another in the specific case of the unnormalized Haar wavelet transform. The resultant algorithms are computationally tractable and improve upon state-of-the-art methods for both simulated and actual magnetic resonance image data.Comment: 30 double-spaced pages, 11 figures; submitted for publicatio

A New Design Algorithm for Two-Band Orthonormal Rational Filter Banks and Orthonormal Rational Wavelets

In this paper, we present a new algorithm for the design of orthonormal two-band rational filter banks. Owing to the connection between iterated rational filter banks and rational wavelets, this is also a design algorithm for orthonormal rational wavelets. It is basically a simple iterative procedure, which explains its exponential convergence and adaptability under various linear constraints (e.g., regularity). Although the filters obtained from this algorithm are suboptimally designed, they show excellent frequency selectivity. After an in-depth account of the algorithm, we discuss the properties of the rational wavelets generated by some designed filters. In particular, we stress the possibility to design "almost" shift error-free wavelets, which allows the implementation of a rational wavelet transform

Executive Compensation and Misconduct: Environmental Harm

We explore the relationship between managerial incentives and misconduct using the setting of environmental harm. We find that high powered executive compensation can increase the odds of environmental law-breaking by 40-60% and the magnitude of environmental harm by over 100%. We document similar results for the setting of executive compensation and illegal financial accounting. Finally, we outline some managerial and policy implications to blunt these adverse incentive effects

Using iterated rational filter banks within the ARSIS concept for producing 10 m Landsat multispectral images

International audienceThe ARSIS concept is meant to increase the spatial resolution of an image without modification of its spectral contents by merging structures extracted from a higher resolution image of the same scene but in a different spectral band. It makes use of wavelet transforms and multiresolution analysis. It is currently applied in an operational way with dyadic wavelet transforms that limit the merging of images whose ratio of their resolution is a power of two. Nevertheless, provided some conditions, rational discrete wavelet transforms can be numerically approximated by rational filter banks which would enable a more general merging: indeed, in theory, the ratio of the resolution of the images to merge is a power of a certain family of rational numbers. The aim of this article is to examine whether the use of those approximations of rational wavelet transforms are efficient within the ARSIS concept. This work relies on a particular case: the merging of a 10 m SPOT Panchromatic image and a 30 m Landsat Thematic Mapper multispectral image to synthesize 10 m multispectral image called TM-HR