Condemning Colonization: Abraham Lincoln’s Rejected Proposal for a Central American Colony

This article focuses on a proposal by Abraham Lincoln to settle freed African Americans in Central American countries. The backlash from several countries reveals that other countries besides the warring United States were also struggling with reconciling racial issues. This also reveals how interwoven racial issues were with political crises during the Civil War because it not only effected domestic policies but also international relations

Towards a universal end effector : the design and development of production technology's intelligent robot hand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Engineering and Automation at Massey University

Research into robot hands for industrial use began in the early 1980s and there are now many examples of robot hands in existence. The reason for research into robot hands is that standard robot end effectors have to be designed for each application and are therefore costly. A universal end effector is needed that will be able to perform any parts handling operation or use other tools for other industrial operations. Existing robot hand research would therefore benefit from new concepts, designs and control systems. The Department of Production Technology is developing an intelligent robot hand of a novel configuration, with the ultimate aim of producing a universal end effector. The concept of PTIRH (Production Technology's Intelligent Robot Hand) is that it is a multi-fingered manipulator with a configuration of two thumbs and two fingers. Research by the author for this thesis concentrated on five major areas. First, the background research into the state of the art in robot hand research. Second, the initiation, development and analysis of the novel configuration concept of PTIRH. Third, specification, testing and analysis of air muscle actuation, including design, development and testing of a servo pneumatic control valve for the air muscles. Fourth, choice of sensors for the robot hand, including testing and analysis of two custom made air pressure sensors. Fifth, definition, design, construction, development, testing and analysis of the mechanical structure for an early prototype of PTIRH. Development of an intelligent controller for PTIRH was outside the scope of the author's research. The results of the analysis on the air muscles showed that they could be a suitable direct drive actuator for an intelligent robotic hand. The force, pressure and position sensor results indicate that the sensors could form the basis of the feedback loop for an intelligent controller. The configuration of PTIRH enables it to grasp objects with little reliance on friction. This was demonstrated with an early prototype of the robot hand, which had one finger with actuation and three other static digits, by successfully manually arranging the digits into stable grasps of various objects

A strong law of large numbers for branching processes: almost sure spine events

We demonstrate a novel strong law of large numbers for branching processes, with a simple proof via measure-theoretic manipulations and spine theory. Roughly speaking, any sequence of events that eventually occurs almost surely for the spine entails the almost sure convergence of a certain sum over particles in the population.Comment: 6 page

Improving English education in Thailand by modeling classroom behavior

English classroom behavior across Thailand is highly influenced by long-held traditions, culture and values. By comparing Thai secondary education classroom behavior with that of Chinese classes working at the same level, we have constructed a model of Thai students’ English classroom behavior. Comparison is made from surveys conducted by schools with students demonstrating similarly wide range of performance and ability in English. We also suggest effective ways to improve English teaching in Thailand for both Thai and foreign teachers of English by incorporating this model with the theories of J. Kunin, so as to help avoid culture conflict, motivate students’ interest and make better use of existing standards and practices

Growth rates of the population in a branching Brownian motion with an inhomogeneous breeding potential

We consider a branching particle system where each particle moves as an independent Brownian motion and breeds at a rate proportional to its distance from the origin raised to the power $p$, for $p\in[0,2)$. The asymptotic behaviour of the right-most particle for this system is already known; in this article we give large deviations probabilities for particles following "difficult" paths, growth rates along "easy" paths, the total population growth rate, and we derive the optimal paths which particles must follow to achieve this growth rate.Comment: 56 pages, 1 figur

Pileup Per Particle Identification

We propose a new method for pileup mitigation by implementing "pileup per particle identification" (PUPPI). For each particle we first define a local shape $\alpha$ which probes the collinear versus soft diffuse structure in the neighborhood of the particle. The former is indicative of particles originating from the hard scatter and the latter of particles originating from pileup interactions. The distribution of $\alpha$ for charged pileup, assumed as a proxy for all pileup, is used on an event-by-event basis to calculate a weight for each particle. The weights describe the degree to which particles are pileup-like and are used to rescale their four-momenta, superseding the need for jet-based corrections. Furthermore, the algorithm flexibly allows combination with other, possibly experimental, probabilistic information associated with particles such as vertexing and timing performance. We demonstrate the algorithm improves over existing methods by looking at jet $p_T$ and jet mass. We also find an improvement on non-jet quantities like missing transverse energy.Comment: v2 - 23 pages, 10 figures; update to JHEP version, minor revisions throughout, results unchange