Modelling the Semantic Web using a Type System

We present an approach for modeling the Semantic Web as a type system. By using a type system, we can use symbolic representation for representing linked data. Objects with only data properties and references to external resources are represented as terms in the type system. Triples are represented symbolically using type constructors as the predicates. In our type system, we allow users to add analytics that utilize machine learning or knowledge discovery to perform inductive reasoning over data. These analytics can be used by the inference engine when performing reasoning to answer a query. Furthermore, our type system defines a means to resolve semantic heterogeneity on-the-fly

Book review: presidents and their generals: an American history of command in war by Matthew Moten

Matthew Moten looks to trace a history of the evolving roles of civilian and military leaders in conducting war, demonstrating how war strategy and national security policy shifted as political and military institutions developed, and how they were shaped by leaders’ personalities. Reviewed by Jeff Lupo

An Ethnography of African American Parents\u27 Perceptions About Exiting the Child Welfare System

Families of color in the State of Michigan, as in many other states, have been overrepresented in the child welfare system, particularly in the foster care system. The Child and Family Services and Improvement Act of 2006 (P.L. 109-288) was intended, in part, to provide community-based interventions that could rectify the inequality some African American families experienced during their journey through the U.S. child welfare system. Guided by Bronfenbrenner\u27s human ecology theory and Shaw and McKay\u27s social disorganization theory, the purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the experiences and perceptions of African American parents and families about the barriers they experienced in exiting the child welfare system, thereby expanding the current literature and increasing awareness of institutional racism that many African American families experience. The central research question was how human ecology and social disorganization theories might explain the challenges African American families experienced in exiting the child welfare system. Semi structured interviews of 8 African American parents were conducted and data analyzed using a continuous iterative process. Findings indicated that African Americans experienced institutional racism and cultural bias from caseworkers that appear to slow their successful exit from the system. Implications for social change include informing policy makers of the need for cultural sensitivity training among those responsible for implementing child welfare policies so as to lessen biased pathways African American families experience while navigating through these complicated systems

The History Of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education: The Case of HBCUs

Originally published by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, Proceedings, Forty-Second Annual Conference, April, 2015, Thinking about Tomorrow: Collective Bargaining and Labor Relations in Higher Educatio

Trends in Labor Management Issues at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

The uniqueness of Historically Black Colleges and Universities make achieving collective bargaining on these campuses problematic. All but a handful of black colleges are located in the south, a region with a well-established aversion to organized labor. The South’s history of plantation slavery coupled with feudal peonage labor and Big Mule politics is antithetical with notions of fair wages, reasonable benefits and work hours, and safe working environments. Something similar can be argued about shared governance on the campuses of HBCUs where labor trends favoring union representation of staff trails the success achieved on many Historically White Colleges and Universities during the last two decades

Licia’s Lectures on Nothing

And God said let there be a little light: and there was this little light of nonbelonging, Lucecita and her “Génesis.” Her light is given brightest in an incoherence she bears. It’s not that Lucecita can’t but that no one can be the voice of the nation. Having already shown how the nation can’t have a mother, Licia Fiol-Matta shows us that the nation can’t have a voice, either. Women, in being continually enjoined to do the impossible, are irreducible to that imposition, which is why and how they carry the extranational flavor and desire of the nation’s refusal, its nonperformance. Licia allows us to hear Lucecita’s perfectly deviant moral perfectionism (the truth; the objective account of the good life which is, eventually, crystallized into a sense of the absolute necessity of freedom): I have only one weakness / which I share with all my might / I must be free. I want to be perfect. I am not pro-independence, I am not a nationalist, I am nothing. The only thing you can’t allow is to have your freedom taken from you because then you become nothing. I must be free. I desire freedom. I want to enjoy freedom. I have a taste for liberty. I can taste it. I can feel it in my mouth. Freedom is very sweet. The mouthfeel of freedom. Evangelical perfectionism, neither identification nor plenitude, but truth in transport, suspension, via signal not symbol, having refused the readily legible. There is a discourse on nothing, on nothingness and nowhere, with which Licia begins. Is the lyrical content of “Génesis” really lugubrious? What about that little drum figure, that husky-voiced intro to a bombast of strings and woodwinds? Isn’t it the music and not the words that threaten too sweetly to overwhelm. What would it be for nothing to be left on earth? This pop-zen attitude hit the English-speaking world a couple of years later with John Lennon’s “Imagine,” also echoing a convergence that had already occurred in Don Cherry’s 1970 Mu, re-echoed a few years later in Billy Preston’s “Nothing from Nothing.” But “the nowhere that is Puerto Rico” is where it all begins, remaining special, as it were, in the manmade persistence of the storm. What is the nature of this sub-national, anti- and ante-national, international nowhere? If we consider the residual insurgency of the historical irrelevents, as Zbigniew Brzenski calls them, which Greil Marus famously recites in his history of punk music, Lipstrick Traces, then Lucecita is a punk artist, as much as The Slits, in being more + less than a “great woman singer.” More precisely, she exemplifies that proto-punk thing that constituted the insurgency that punk came along to mourn in its recrudescent whiteness. This is almost like the historical transition and loss of the lower east side, which will have already occurred by the mid-seventies, if you’ll forgive that weird sleight of hand with tense and case, a subjunctivity already buried. What was the mood of the times? The loss will have occurred long ago. If it occurs, the loss will have occurred long ago