Milliken v. Green: Breaking the Legislative Deadlock

A chronicle of efforts at educational finance reform in Michigan in which the state judiciary initially ruled that the deductible-millage system was unconstitutional in Milliken V Green later dismissed the case, but in the process stimulated the legislature to move toward reform

Building a Battle Site: Roads to and through Gettysburg

On the morning of 1 July 1863, lead elements of Confederate General Robert E. Lee\u27s Army of Northern Virginia advanced on the town of Gettysburg situated in the lush farm lands of south-central Pennsylvania just eight miles east of the South Mountain in Adams county. The Southern reconnaissance in force made early that summer morning was destined not only to change the history of the struggling Confederacy, but also to set the infant United States republic, indeed the world, on courses towards more democratic forms of government. Although many historians have dwelled on those three fateful days in 1863, few emphasize the role the major roads played in the drama that unfolded at Gettysburg. However, events that transpired over a 116- year period prior to the great battle actually created the highway system that was to draw the opposing forces to town-a hub of ten major roads. This essay will briefly explore the development of state- and county ordained roads to and through the site of Gettysburg from 1747 until the year of the battle. After a brief history of the colonial development in the greater Adams county area, emphasis will be placed on the evolution of the ten major roads that join at Gettysburg and how the development of the town affected their positioning and that of some ancillary roads within the borough limits. [excerpt

Some Observations on the Nature of Insect Names

A recent study of dragonfly names (Montgomery, 1973) has led to a consideration of insect names, especially ancient and early English names. This interest was aroused, chiefly by the statement in Sarot\u27s study of the folklore of the dragonfly from A Linguistic Approach that no recognizable name for dragonflies has been found in Anglo-Saxon, classical Latin or ancient Greek. Any language is capable of supplying names for all objects, including insects, which are recognized by its community of speakers. As so many names for dragonflies have been found in modern languages, (95 in English, over 60 in German, about 40 in French and almost 200 in Italian) and names for other insects are fairly numerous in these languages (for example: at least 13 for grasshopper or locust, eight for beetles, and six each for moth, fly and cicada in ancient Greek) this is surprising if not incredible. However, in several years of search I must say that I have been as unsuccessful as Sarot. The search is made rather difficult because all of the comprehensive dictionaries and glossaries of these languages which I have found are one-way, that is from the other language into English. Search for an English word in them is comparable in difficulty to getting where you wish to go by traveling the wrong way on a lane of a super-highway! A great amount of data on insect names in general has been acquired

On the Trail of Sidney O\u27Brien: An Inquiry into Her Family and Status - Was She a Slave or Servant of the Gettys Family in Gettysburg? Was Her Daughter, Getty Ann, a Descendant of James Gettys?

Like many Decembers in the greater Adams county area, the beginning of the winter usually is a collage of intermittent warm spells spliced amongst Arctic days with cold Canadian northwest winds. Amid the hoopla, as Gettysburgians prepared for the 1873 Christmas holidays during the week between the 17th and 24th of December, a person had, as Alfred Lord Tennyson so eloquently described, Crossed the Bar. But in the local newspapers there had been no notice of declining health. No death notice appeared. Possibly the cost of five cents a line for all over four lines- cash to accompany the notice was too much for the family. Or did not the publishers of Gettysburg\u27s two newspapers consider the passing of another Black-American as newsworthy for their readership? The only printed evidence of the passing of a grand dame of Gettysburg, a human link dating back to the very founding of the town, was a short legal notice regarding the filing of Letters Testamentary printed directly below the death notices in the 24 December Star and Sentinel. Sidney O\u27Brien had died. [excerpt

Anatomy of a Log House in Adams County, Pennsylvania and Its Unspoken Language

Sixteen years after the end of the Revolution, and on the eve of the formation of Adams county, the United States became embroiled in a quasi-war with France (1797-1801) which strained the federal treasury. As a result of the diplomatic disagreement, Congress approved several bills to fund America\u27s military build-up. One of these, the U.S. Evaluation Tax of July 9, 1798, was signed into law to raise two million dollars in revenues. The direct or window tax was levied based on landholdings, buildings and the number of glass lights, and slaves-in essence, a federal property tax. Although the window tax was considered a burden by most contemporaries, it was a blessing for modern cultural scientists. Fulfilling their duty by compiling at least five schedules for each township, the assessors described each major structure on nearly every farmstead and in every village and town in York county, noting building dimensions, number of stories, number of windows and lights, and construction materials. Although some schedules have not survived, the remainder graphically illustrate that most of the dwelling houses in Adams county by the summer of 1798 were made of wood. [excerpt

William and Isabel: Parallels Between the Life and Times of the William Bliss Family, Transplanted New Englanders at Gettysburg, and a Nineteenth-Century Novel, \u27Isabel Carollton: A Personal Retrospect\u27 by Kneller Glen

By 3 July 1863, Union troops under the command of General George G. Meade and elements of General Robert E. Lee\u27s Confederate army had struggled for two days over the rolling farm lands, ridges, and rocky crags around a small farming community and county seat known as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Within the encompassing whirlpool ofbattle, however, smaller dramas had unfolded, and one of them is of interest to us here. The soldiers had been fighting for the possession of a house and barn situated equidistant between the battle lines about one and onequarter miles south-southwest of the town square. During a thirty-one hour period, the farmstead had changed hands ten times, but by midmorning of the third day, Federal troops along Cemetery Ridge could no longer tolerate the harassing sharpshooters\u27 fire originating from the barn. After men of the 14th Connecticut Regiment recaptured the farmstead, a courier was sent out to the besieged Nutmeggers with orders to torch the buildings and withdraw. Shortly before the noon, the farmstead was engulfed in flames. Later, a two-hour cannonade was followed by a massed Confederate infantry assault on the Union center, the famous Pickett\u27s Charge. Men in butternut-and-grey again traversed the same farmstead, but by that time the earlier actions there had become anticlimactic. By 5 July the armies had withdrawn, but they had left behind a devastated landscape. However, more was destroyed the morning of the third than a refuge for the skirmishers and sharpshooters: a secure family setting and livelihood were also consumed in the fires. The lives of the farmer, William Bliss, his wife Adeline, and their daughters Sarah and Frances had been immeasurably altered. But there is one major difference between the Bliss\u27s situation and that of other noncombatants: during Lee\u27s Gettysburg campaign, William and his family were the only civilians to lose everything except the clothes on their backs and that which was most dear to them-their lives. [excerpt

Raising Kane Takes Its Toll on the Old Chambersburg Turnpike : A Tale of Photographic Detection

Inquires to which the staff of the society responds fall into several categories, but all can be characterized as sensible, ludicrous, or somewhere in between. Most sensible requests focus on genealogy, old businesses, or some other facet of early Adams county history. Many other times, ludicrous requests are received from parties who want to know something about their ancestors from some foreign state who fought in the battle of Gettysburg. The society simply does not have that information. At face value, however, some requests only border on the ludicrous. Such was one relatively recent inquiry which the author was asked to answer. In early September 1996, the society received a letter from a collector of Gettysburg memorabilia. Enclosed were two photographs which the collector indicated were identified as Toll Gate, Gettysburg, Pa. 1907. [excerpt

Ages of origin and destination for a difference in life expectancy

Decomposition of a difference in life expectancies may identify ages at which the difference originates in mortality differences, or may identify age at which the difference results in different values of person-years lived (life table population). This study shows that the two approaches are orthogonally related to each other, and derives an origin-destination decomposition matrix in which summing in one direction produces Andreev's origin-decomposition results, while summing in the other direction produces destination-decomposition corresponding to directly-observed differences in nLx values.age decomposition, life tables, temporary life expectancy

Direct optimisation of the discovery significance when training neural networks to search for new physics in particle colliders

We introduce two new loss functions designed to directly optimise the statistical significance of the expected number of signal events when training neural networks to classify events as signal or background in the scenario of a search for new physics at a particle collider. The loss functions are designed to directly maximise commonly used estimates of the statistical significance, $s/\sqrt{s+b}$, and the Asimov estimate, $Z_A$. We consider their use in a toy SUSY search with 30~fb$^{-1}$ of 14~TeV data collected at the LHC. In the case that the search for the SUSY model is dominated by systematic uncertainties, it is found that the loss function based on $Z_A$ can outperform the binary cross entropy in defining an optimal search region

A spatial revolution continues in Oakland

The article describes the purpose-built young adult space in Oakland Public Library\u27s (OPL) 81st Avenue Branch in California. Launched on January 29, 2011, the space emphasizes the library\u27s dedication to young adult literature. The space expands the library\u27s commitment to public space equity for teenagers as well as contributes to the facility\u27s revolution in serving young adult readers. An overview of the planning process involved in the construction of the space.