Visualizing War

Popular artwork during the era of the Civil war can be placed into three broad categories. The first is a prewar theme of political discontent, in which political leaders were viewed as ineffective and ill-prepared to address the political challenges of the day. Additionally, this prewar theme was also characterized by a romanticized interpretation of war and unrealistic ideas about the nobility and honor of war. The second period is the wartime period in which the romanticized depictions of war disappeared as the harsh reality of prolonged civil war set in. Popular artwork was much more focused on the ugly realities of the war and not on fanciful notions of glory and honor that had pervaded prewar society. Finally, there is a postwar period which saw the slow return of the stylized and idealized representations of the American Civil War. While this change was not a rapid shift, the changes began to creep into art, as the immediate horror and suffering dimmed in the public eye. These idealized postwar portrayals of the American Civil War still exist today, though they do not represent a total regression to prewar idealism, as the human cost of the war is addressed in a stylized manner in the postwar period

Relative measurement and the selective philosophy in education

Teachers in different countries, when judging the achievement of their students, do not use absolute standards but seem to work by comparison. The paper describes the reason for and the philosophy behind relative judgement in education. The explanation for the frequent use of relative testing in education is that it has a selective function in the classroom. The selective approach does fit in an educational philosophy regarding the place of schooling in our society. The philosophy does not possess a theoretical framework nor a clear description of its content. Six statements typical of the selective philosophy are discussed. They relate to the paucity of jobs on the market, to competition, the distribution of talent, and the supposed attributes of good school tests. The statements are related to each other in order to demonstrate how they can form a coherent system of opinions about how schooling ought to be organized. It is concluded that no philosopher can solve the problem of the educator who realizes that he is measuring instead of educating. Finally, it is argued that the problem of setting up a non-selective organization is a technological matter - a matter of choice for other learning strategies and other measurement techniques

Identification of relevant environmental descriptors

Based on previous experiences and a literature review the most relevant environmental descriptors were selected and tested by means of field experiments. These included: (i) the temperature-humidity index (THI), (ii) the cattle stocking system (rotational stocking, continuous stocking or strip-grazing), (iii) the botanical composition of the grasslands, (iv) the net grassland productivity in terms of Net Energy (NE) and/or energy-corrected milk (ECM) per unit grassland area, and (v) the behaviour of dairy cows within grazing herds as recorded with SensOor® technology

A macro-analysis of quality assessment in higher education

In most West European countries a quality control system for higher education is in a process of development. This article examines some general characteristics of the emerging structures, how quality is defined and what impact this definition has on internal evaluation.\ud \ud On the basis of a more substantive conceptualization of the term quality, the current trend of a quality control system in which quality is predominantly defined from one central power centre is questioned. Important methodological and substantive weaknesses inherent in this centralist model will be discussed.\ud \ud In the final section a shift towards a quality control system is advocated in which other interests and perspectives are taken into account

Diversification and stabilization in a resource-exporting country

The costs and benefits of export diversification in an old non-oil commodity exporting country are the subject matter of the following analysis. In chapter 2 the causal nexus from commodity price fluctuations to domestic disturbances is developed from well-established macro- and microeconomic theory-. As both structural change and multiple distortions are central to the argument, the analysis is promising only in a quantitative multisectoral general equilibrium framework applied to some appropriate country. The case of copper-exporting Chile will be studied here. The country model is described in chapter 3 and documented in the appendix. The model experiments used for determining the costs and benefits are also designed in chapter 3. The results are presented and discussed in chapter 4 and conclusions are drawn in chapter 5.

Norm-Establishing and Norm-Following in Autonomous Agency

Living agency is subject to a normative dimension (good-bad, adaptive-maladaptive) that is absent from other types of interaction. We review current and historical attempts to naturalize normativity from an organism-centered perspective, identifying two central problems and their solution: (1) How to define the topology of the viability space so as to include a sense of gradation that permits reversible failure, and (2) how to relate both the processes that establish norms and those that result in norm-following behavior. We present a minimal metabolic system that is coupled to a gradient-climbing chemotactic mechanism. Studying the relationship between metabolic dynamics and environmental resource conditions, we identify an emergent viable region and a precarious region where the system tends to die unless environmental conditions change. We introduce the concept of normative field as the change of environmental conditions required to bring the system back to its viable region. Norm-following, or normative action, is defined as the course of behavior whose effect is positively correlated with the normative field. We close with a discussion of the limitations and extensions of our model and some final reflections on the nature of norms and teleology in agency

The real projective spaces in homotopy type theory

Homotopy type theory is a version of Martin-L\"of type theory taking advantage of its homotopical models. In particular, we can use and construct objects of homotopy theory and reason about them using higher inductive types. In this article, we construct the real projective spaces, key players in homotopy theory, as certain higher inductive types in homotopy type theory. The classical definition of RP(n), as the quotient space identifying antipodal points of the n-sphere, does not translate directly to homotopy type theory. Instead, we define RP(n) by induction on n simultaneously with its tautological bundle of 2-element sets. As the base case, we take RP(-1) to be the empty type. In the inductive step, we take RP(n+1) to be the mapping cone of the projection map of the tautological bundle of RP(n), and we use its universal property and the univalence axiom to define the tautological bundle on RP(n+1). By showing that the total space of the tautological bundle of RP(n) is the n-sphere, we retrieve the classical description of RP(n+1) as RP(n) with an (n+1)-cell attached to it. The infinite dimensional real projective space, defined as the sequential colimit of the RP(n) with the canonical inclusion maps, is equivalent to the Eilenberg-MacLane space K(Z/2Z,1), which here arises as the subtype of the universe consisting of 2-element types. Indeed, the infinite dimensional projective space classifies the 0-sphere bundles, which one can think of as synthetic line bundles. These constructions in homotopy type theory further illustrate the utility of homotopy type theory, including the interplay of type theoretic and homotopy theoretic ideas.Comment: 8 pages, to appear in proceedings of LICS 201

Closure of the single fluid magnetohydrodynamic equations in presence of electron cyclotron current drive

In the presence of electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD), the Ohm's law of single fluid magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) is modified as ${\bf E} + {\bf v} \times {\bf B} = \eta( {\bf J} - {\bf J}_{\rm EC} )$. This paper presents a new closure relation for the EC driven current density appearing in this modified Ohm's law. The new relation faithfully represents the nonlocal character of the EC driven current and its main origin in the Fisch-Boozer effect. The closure relation is validated on both an analytical solution of an approximated Fokker-Planck equation as well as on full bounce-averaged, quasi-linear Fokker-Planck code simulations of ECCD inside rotating magnetic islands. The new model contains the model put forward by Giruzzi et al., Nucl. Fusion 39 (1999) 107, in one of its limits