Know all men by these presents: bonds, localism and politics in early Republican Mississippi

This article examines local politics in Mississippi during the early to mid-nineteenth century, by examining the bonds that officeholders were required to post to hold their positions in county government. The article argues that while states like Mississippi remain at the forefront of the history of American mass democracy, the existence of this election ritual paints a complicated picture of political practice. By requiring officeholders to post hundreds and even thousands of dollars to hold office, and by requiring that political friends vouch for them with their money and their reputations, bonds dampened democratic elections at every turn. In so doing, bonds suggest just some of the ways in which Americans practiced a much more complex politics than current paradigms allow

No One Does Christmas Better

Postcard from Rhiannon Mathisen, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at the University of Nottingham in Englan

Clear Visual Separation of Temporal Event Sequences

Extracting and visualizing informative insights from temporal event sequences becomes increasingly difficult when data volume and variety increase. Besides dealing with high event type cardinality and many distinct sequences, it can be difficult to tell whether it is appropriate to combine multiple events into one or utilize additional information about event attributes. Existing approaches often make use of frequent sequential patterns extracted from the dataset, however, these patterns are limited in terms of interpretability and utility. In addition, it is difficult to assess the role of absolute and relative time when using pattern mining techniques. In this paper, we present methods that addresses these challenges by automatically learning composite events which enables better aggregation of multiple event sequences. By leveraging event sequence outcomes, we present appropriate linked visualizations that allow domain experts to identify critical flows, to assess validity and to understand the role of time. Furthermore, we explore information gain and visual complexity metrics to identify the most relevant visual patterns. We compare composite event learning with two approaches for extracting event patterns using real world company event data from an ongoing project with the Danish Business Authority.Comment: In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Symposium on Visualization in Data Science (VDS), 201

Analyses of experiments and a functional model for ship rolling

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Simulation techniques and a Volterra functional polynomial are applied as two alternative methods of calculating ship roll response to irregular waves. The roll motion is modeled by a single degree of freedom differential equation, with two alternative nonlinear damping functions. Estimation techniques are developed to obtain the coefficients of the damping functions from decay tests and from forced rolling tests. A linear plus quadratic form of damping function is found to be slightly preferable to a linear plus cubic form. The roll response process is found to be non-Gaussian, and characterised by negative values of the coefficient of kurtosis. Simulation results agree well with results obtained from the functional polynomial for low response levels, but show increasing disagreement as the response level increases, due to divergence of the functional polynomial representation. Analyses of results from model tests in irregular waves and from sea trials confirm the non-Gaussian nature of the roll response. A "constrained" form of the generalised gamma distribution function is found to provide an improved fit to the roll maxima and tothe roll minima, as compared to the Rayleigh distribution. The model tests also show some asymmetry in the roll response, which is not predicted by the theoretical model. It is suggested that this asymmetry may primarily be due to the combined effect of horizontal drift forces and the restraining system used to keep the model on station.Financial support was obtained from: Dr.Techn. Georg Vedeler's Fund for Ship Research; A.S Veritas Research; the Overseas Research Students - ORS Awards Scheme; and the Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

Video feedback in higher education - a contribution to improving the quality of written feedback

The purpose of this article is to promote the significance of feedback regarding students’ working with written texts in higher education and to point out how technology can develop the quality and form of teachers’ feedback. The results of studies and tests completed in eight separate subject areas demonstrate that video feedback simplifies and increases the efficiency of responding to students’ work, as it allows the opportunity to achieve increased levels of precision and quality in the feedback process. Students emphasize their learning dividend and the inspiration they experience from working with this format. They actively use their teacher’s comments and acquire a stronger emotional bond with him/her as well

The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi

The reasons are not hard to understand. The centrifugal force in Civil War historiography remains the question of why the United States succeeded while the Confederacy collapsed. What Jarret Ruminski argues in this rich, complicated book, is that we ought to view the question of loyalty and disloyalty in the Confederacy not as a binary choice, but as an overlapping set of forces that pulled at individuals in several different directions and at different times. The contribution that Ruminski’s book makes is to emphasize loyalty’s complexity. By uncoupling it from the question of why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Ruminski points to the messy, inconclusive, fragmentary experience of common people, where little was certain, and destruction was everywher

Formative assessment in digital resources

This study investigates to what extent formative assessment is promoted in two digital resources. The motivation of this study was to examine and gain knowledge on how formative assessment in digital teaching materials can support the teacher and the pupils in language learning. The research question is as follows: To what extent do the English digital resources in the textbook series Enter 8-10 & Echo promote formative assessment? To answer the research question, the study used qualitative research. The data was analyzed and organized by using thematic analysis, which resulted in the themes “self-assessment”, “peer assessment” and “automated assessment”. The themes include data from tasks from the two digital resources. The theme “teacher” with the subchapter “lesson plans” include findings exclusively from Echo. The data included are derived from both the teacher and the pupil’s version. The findings indicate that the two digital resources promote formative assessment to a differing and varying extent. The findings show that in some themes there is a big difference between the two digital resources. Thus, the research question is discussed and answered both as a whole and individually to the themes and the respective digital resource. The concluding remark is that the findings show that Enter 8-10 promotes formative assessment to a great extent both for teachers and pupils. The pupil version of Echo promotes formative assessment to a limited extent. However, if the digital resource is used alongside the lesson plans, the teacher’s version promotes formative assessment to a sufficient extent. Keywords: formative assessment, assessment, digital resources, feedback, automated assessment, self-assessment, peer assessment

A Deep Learning-based approach for Fault Detection of Power Lines

Master's thesis in Information- and communication technology (IKT590)A transmission network is the most crucial part of modern infrastructure. However, it requires an extensive amount of power line inspection each year to maintain, and with an increased interest in replacing large helicopters with drones for this process, the possibility of including AI is equally compelling. This thesis goes into the second part by taking a deep learning-based approach in the interest of fault detection. A literature review illustrates that earlier research has some to none understanding of the complexity re-quired for inspection. Due to the advancement in object detection and classification, this thesis has identified and implemented an applicable model capable of giving state-of-the-art accuracy in electrical pole and component detection by dividing the process into multiple layers. This thesis takes as well and proposes a new method that presented great result in assuring more reliable fault detection and is a way to improve the quality of images taken by drones. The pole detection layer gave 97.7 mAP, the component detection layer reached 95.6mAP, the fault classifier delivered an accuracy of 93%, and the proposed quality classifier had an accuracy of 93% as well. The presented approach illustrates the possibility of phasing the physical inspection out. The amount of component labeled that must be available for algorithmic training to surpass a human expert is not readily available. Nevertheless, the presented approach is a sufficient tool for assisting the inspector