Hyla avivoca

Number of Pages: 2Integrative BiologyGeological Science

The Virtue of Civility in the Practice of Politics (Chapter Three of The Virtue of Civility in the Practice of Politics)

Excerpt: This chapter has more than one goal. First, I want to introduce readers to the apparatus of practices, institutions and virtues (PIV) that helps us understand what virtues are. Second, I want to explore the notion of politics a little, to see what its main problem is. (I will claim, perhaps surprisingly, that business management is largely a variation of politics.) Third, I want to reintroduce civility and suggest that it is an important contributor to solving the political problem (and problems of management). Throughout this chapter, I will emphasize process. As we shall see, process is integrated in more than one way into the whole structure of virtues, as we learn what virtues are and as we train ourselves in them. Already, in chapter one, I suggested that controversies are processes in which we can seek truth. The writing and reading of books constitute another process in which we can seek truth. I hope that the things I write here will contribute to a wider discussion of the virtue of civility, a discussion which may promote truth, even if the particular ideas I espouse here turn out to be wrong

Trends in Black-White Church Integration

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that eleven o\u27clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King\u27s statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King\u27s classic Letter from a Birmingham Jail was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002])

Towards structured, block-based PDF

The Portable Document Format (PDF), defined by Adobe Systems Inc. as the basis of its Acrobat product range, is discussed in some detail. Particular emphasis is given to its flexible object-oriented structure, which has yet to be fully exploited. It is currently used to represent not logical structure but simply a series of pages and associated resources. A definition of an Encapsulated PDF (EPDF) is presented, in which EPDF blocks carry with them their own resource requirements, together with geometrical and logical information. A block formatter called Juggler is described which can lay out EPDF blocks from various sources onto new pages. Future revisions of PDF supporting uniquely-named EPDF blocks tagged with semantic information would assist in composite-pagemakeup and could even lead to fully revisable PDF

Less-is-more effects without the recognition heuristic

Inferences consistent with “recognition-based” decision-making may be drawn for various reasons other than recognition alone. We demonstrate that, for 2-alternative forced-choice decision tasks, less-is-more effects (reduced performance with additional learning) are not restricted to recognition-based inference but can also be seen in circumstances where inference is knowledge-based but item knowledge is limited. One reason why such effects may not be observed more widely is the dependence of the effect on specific values for the validity of recognition and knowledge cues. We show that both recognition and knowledge validity may vary as a function of the number of items recognized. The implications of these findings for the special nature of recognition information, and for the investigation of recognition-based inference, are discusse

Rana palustris

Number of Pages: 3Integrative BiologyGeological Science

On strongly nonlinear vortex/wave interactions in boundary-layer transition

The interactions between longitudinal vortices and accompanying waves considered are strongly nonlinear, in the sense that the mean-flow profile throughout the boundary layer is completely altered from its original undisturbed state. Nonlinear interactions between vortex flow and Tollmien-Schlichting waves are addressed first, and some analytical and computational properties are described. These include the possibility in the spatial-development case of a finite-distance break-up, inducing a singularity in the displacement thickness. Second, vortex/Rayleigh wave nonlinear interactions are considered for the compressible boundary-layer, along with certain special cases of interest and some possible solution properties. Both types, vortex/Tollmien-Schlichting and vortex/Rayleigh, are short-scale/long-scale interactions and they have potential applications to many flows at high Reynolds numbers. The strongly nonlinear nature is believed to make them very relevant to fully fledged transition to turbulence