Duality in Bouazizi: Appraising the Contradiction

We know that Mohammed Bouazizi lived in Sidi Bouzid and that he was often the sole income for a poor family. We know that he sold fruit from a cart and that, while vending on December 17th, 2010, he had an altercation with the police, and later doused himself in flammable liquid in front of the municipal offices and struck a match. There are some who know more – childhood friends, neighbors, customers, cousins – who knew the man and interacted with him over the course of his relatively short life. But for us, the general public of the World, to move beyond these spare details is to move into the realm of things-we-are-told, of facts intuited or debatable, because we never met Mohammed Bouazizi, did not see the confrontation on the 17th and were generally unaware that he existed until perhaps the first days of January 2011

Why Summer Camp Matters: The Benefits of Working at Summer Camp on Future Employment

After the school year ends, many students have the freedom to choose how they would like to spend their summer. Internships have become an increasingly popular option for students who seek to improve their resumes and boost their chances of landing a job out of college. This project, however, takes a look at one of the major alternatives to an internship, the summer camp counselor job, in order to demonstrate what it is exactly that camp counselors do and why this job has been critical to the success of so many individuals. Although this project does attempt to place value on the camp counselor position and persuade students to at least consider this as a viable summer option, the purpose of this project is not to bash the internship experience. Rather, through six first-person interview stories of individuals who either work or have worked at Camp Seneca Lake, this project concludes that both an internship and a camp counselor job are highly valuable, albeit in their own ways, and that students should consider both when thinking about summer goals and what they hope to accomplish. Though some of the first-person narratives place emphasis on the importance of the internship experience in terms of gaining credentials and landing a job, all of the stories clearly show the value of working at summer camp and how a camp counselor job can translate to so-called “real world” success. As such, this project hopes to complicate the often times far too simple decision for students to seek summer internships, and it encourages students to truly think about how the camp counselor job may benefit them in their search for future employment

Consistently Orienting Facets in Polygon Meshes by Minimizing the Dirichlet Energy of Generalized Winding Numbers

Jacobson et al. [JKSH13] hypothesized that the local coherency of the generalized winding number function could be used to correctly determine consistent facet orientations in polygon meshes. We report on an approach to consistently orienting facets in polygon meshes by minimizing the Dirichlet energy of generalized winding numbers. While the energy can be concisely formulated and efficiently computed, we found that this approach is fundamentally flawed and is unfortunately not applicable for most handmade meshes shared on popular mesh repositories such as Google 3D Warehouse.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure