City School, Urban Re-Form: Sublimating Education into Daily Civic Life

The urban public school is in crisis. In the 21st century we have yet to reform the bounded and centralized school model: one of queues, rigid spatial/temporal organization, and restricted learning in a continuously supervised environment. The general failure of the public school system within the American city is compounded with the need for new skill sets that refocus educational priority upon ability to communicate, think critically and embody creativity – skills that are becoming crucial in the globalizing culture and economy. The urban public school awaits a critical re-formation that can architecturally and ideologically address these shortcomings

Jeanne d’Arc

Jeanne d’Arc is a one-woman theatrical work, written, produced, and performed as Megan Dobbertin’s Capstone Project. Its intention is to explore religious conflict. How does something like organized religion, which was created to be a force of peace and order in a chaotic world, get twisted into violence and discord? All major organized religions profess to be founded on a basis of peace, tolerance, unity, and love. How then do we have notions such as the crusade or the jihad? This piece seeks to explore the causes behind so-called ‘holy’ wars. It is the story of Joan of Arc, heroine of the Hundred Year’s War, patron saint of France, and teenage girl. She heard voices telling her that it was her destiny to saveFrance. She believed so strongly that it was emissaries from God telling her to do this that she ran away from home to join the army. Incredibly, she was granted royal patronage by the Dauphin, Charles VII, led the armies ofFrance, and single-handedly reversed the course of the war. France’s adversary,England, was so stunned that they could not believe it was anything but supernatural aid, either. However, they attributed the astounding victories to the devil rather than God. Joan was taken prisoner, put on trial, and burnt at the stake for witchcraft. Yet the English could not dispel the affect she had on France. Within twenty years,Francehad won back all their conquered territory. This farm girl and her belief permanently altered the map of the world. The political lines she drew are still the French borders of today. It may seem that this tale of miracles and holy wars is not applicable to the modern world. Yet in Joan, there is an eerie parallel to modern female suicide bombers. They are women who overcome the confines of their femininity, even within a very male-dominated society, to give their lives for what they believe to be a holy cause. They are driven by violence to violence; they receive their reward in martyrdom. The only difference is that historians applaud Joan’s military dominance, and condemn the suicide bombings as senseless murder. But can things be this black and white? Is Joan merely praiseworthy because she is ancient and lived in a time when life was less valued? Or because she was Western? And are suicide bombings really just random acts of pure evil? Ayat al-Akhras was a Palestinian eighteen-year-old who committed a suicide bombing in March of 2002 that killed three people, including herself. Jeanne d’Arc is her story, too, intertwined with Joan’s. Two girls, inheriting the violence of generations, refusing to sit passively in that legacy. Both committed unspeakable atrocities. Both killed and died in the name of their god. Both went to their graves, convinced, as people so often are, that they were right and the other was wrong. The real question is not whether or not they were right. It is whether or not they are any different from each one of us. The object of presenting these stories in a presentational theatrical format is to challenge the audience to consider this question

Exploring research issues in selected forest journals 1979-2008

• Forest science and policy have experienced significant changes under the pressure of global change. Assuming that scientific publications mirror contemporary issues, our objective was to verify whether titles of articles show a temporal trend, and whether it coincides with the new agenda set by sustainable forest management. • We used ISI Web of Science to collect articles published 1979-2008 in 6 peer-reviewed forest(ry) journals (n = 20677). We split titles into strings and processed them to increase the homogeneity of our sample. We applied principal components analysis (PCA) as an indirect gradient analysis. We also searched titles for words related to the social, political and economic components of forestry. • The PCA ordination revealed a dominant and distinct time gradient in the use of title words in our corpus. A few words have disappeared, but those with a positive trend clearly dominate, reflecting an opening of forest science towards more process-oriented research, especially in ecology and environmental and climate change. However, socio-economic aspects are still underrepresented. • In our study, titles of forest(ry) publications increasingly include topics from neighboring natural sciences, but still very few from socio-economic discipline

Dipole-dipole interactions in confined planar geometries

This thesis investigates the dipole-dipole interactions of thermal atomic vapors that are confined by a planar surface or a nanocavity and subjected to near-resonant light. One focus is on the Casimir-Polder effect, an atom-wall interaction caused by thermal and quantum fluctuations. Furthermore, it is shown that the atom-atom interactions lead to density-dependent line shifts and broadenings beyond continuous electrodynamics models. They can be controlled by the properties of the nanocavity.Diese Arbeit untersucht die Dipol-Dipol-Wechselwirkungen thermischer atomarer Gase an einer Oberfläche oder in einer Nanokavität, die nahe ihrer Resonanz angeregt werden. Ein Schwerpunkt ist der Casimir-Polder Effekt, eine durch thermische und Quantenfluktuationen verursachte Wechselwirkung zwischen Atomen und Oberflächen. Außerdem wird gezeigt, dass die Wechselwirkungen zwischen den Atomen zu dichteabhängigen Linienverschiebungen und -verbreiterungen führen, die Modelle aus der kontinuierlichen Elektrodynamik nicht erklären können. Sie lassen sich durch die Eigenschaften der Kavität steuern

Using Slides to Test for Changes in Crown Defoliation Assessment Methods. Part I: Visual Assessment of Slides

In this study we used photographs of tree crowns to test whether the assessment methods for tree defoliation in Switzerland have changed over time. We randomly selected 24 series of slides of Norway spruce with field assessments made between 1986 and 1995. The slides were randomly arranged and assessed by three experts without prior knowledge of the year when the slide was taken or the tree number. Defoliation was assessed using the Swiss reference photo guide. Although the correlations between the field assessments and slide assessments were high (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient ranged between 0.79 and 0.83), we found significant differences between field and slide assessments (4.3 to 9% underprediction by the slide assessors) and between the slide assessments. However, no significant trends in field assessment methods could be detected. When the mean differences between field and slide assessments were subtracted, in some years, field assessors consistently underpredicted (1990, 1992) or overpredicted defoliation (1987, 1991). Defoliation tended to be overpredicted in slides taken against the light, and underpredictedfor trees with more than 25% crown overlap. We conclude that slide series can be used to detect changes in assessment methods.However, potential observer bias calls for more objectivemethods of assessmen