Master\u27s Project: A Soilful Journey

This project involved the evolution and continued development of Soilful City, an organization in D.C. that uses food and farming as a social change agent. Soilful City views farming as a way to cultivate food and sovereignty for communities and to cultivate, heal, and rebuild our souls. The organization utilizes the agricultural and political principles of agroecology to work in solidarity with under-resourced communities to develop a collective consciousness about restoring bodies, families, communities, and the land. This project focused on three central components: 1) the clear articulation of Soilful’s cosmology, 2) the development of a theory of change, and 3) a series of actions to increase organizational visibility and strengthen networks and relationships. Each of these initiatives required significant collaboration and community involvement and provided an opportunity for Soilful City to grow in ways that align with the organization’s core values. These efforts have resulted in a stronger organization and has raised Soilful City’s visibility in important ways that have allowed the organization to more effectively put its vision and mission into action

Handel's fixed point theorem revisited

Michael Handel proved in [7] the existence of a fixed point for an orientation preserving homeomorphism of the open unit disk that can be extended to the closed disk, provided that it has points whose orbits form an oriented cycle of links at infinity. Later, Patrice Le Calvez gave a different proof of this theorem based only on Brouwer theory and plane topology arguments [9]. These methods permitted to improve the result by proving the existence of a simple closed curve of index 1. We give a new, simpler proof of this improved version of the theorem and generalize it to non-oriented cycles of links at infinityComment: Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems, Available on CJO 201

A Programmatic And Scheduling Needs Assessment For The University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of external communities toward the programs and scheduling of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Clark County, Nevada was the metropolitan area studied. The county included only one full service university. The area was isolated from other full service institutions and was a nontraditional area that maintained a 24-hour work schedule. A county-wide school district operated many elementary schools on a 12-month schedule. A major Air Force base was present whose work hours conflicted with traditional university teaching hours; Surveys were taken from three groups. They were the Clark County School District teachers; the Educational Service Officer representing the Nellis Air Force Base personnel; and a random selection of persons in the community with residential telephones; The main finding was that the external communities did have perceived needs that differed from the programs and schedulings offered by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. However, each of the groups had different perceived needs; The findings, concerning programmatic needs, showed that 31 percent of community respondents recommended Law be offered and 15 percent recommended Medicine. The teachers survey had 22 percent favoring the introduction of Library Science. The military respondent favored the expansion of existing engineering and computer science programs to masters and doctoral levels; The findings, concerning scheduling needs, included the determination that morning classes were preferred by a scant 51 percent of the community respondents. Afternoon classes were preferred by only 18 percent and evening classes were preferred by only 41 percent. (Numbers did not round to 100 percent as separate questions were asked concerning morning, afternoon and evening classes.) The teachers and military personnel preferred evening and weekend courses; A vast majority (94 percent) of community respondents preferred weekday to weekend classes. Several subpopulations, however, had substantially larger proportions favoring weekend classes. These subpopulations included black respondents, respondents with professional degrees, respondents seeking a community college degree and respondents with leisure and recreational goals; Community respondents favored one-hour classes, while the teachers and military personnel preferred one class meeting per week regardless of the number of hours of that class

Solving the Puzzle of the Black Vote: Is Education Really the Missing Piece?

Given the popular knowledge that with greater education comes the likelihood of higher voting participation rates among Americans, it is puzzling that African Americans have not been subject to a rise in voting participation that is equivalent to the increase in the rate of education attainment over the last four decades. This study is dedicated to explaining why education is a weak predictive factor for voting participation among African American voters. It ventures to suggest and support that communal factors tied to group membership exert a strong force on whether or not African American citizens vote

Chiral Superconducting Strings and Nambu-Goto Strings in Arbitrary Dimensions

We present general solutions to the equations of motion for a superconducting relativistic chiral string that satisfy the unit magnitude constraint in terms of products of rotations. From this result we show how to construct a general family of odd harmonic superconducting chiral loops. We further generalise the product of rotations to an arbitrary number of dimensions.Comment: 6 pages, RevTex. Replaced with version accepted for publication in J. Math. Phy

A short diastereoselective total synthesis of (±)-vibralactone

A total synthesis of the (±)-vibralactone has been achieved in 11 steps and 16% overall yield from malonic acid. Key steps include a highly diastereoselective allylation of an α-formyl ester containing an all carbon α-quaternary center, a Pd-catalyzed deallylative β-lactonization, and an aldehyde-selective Wacker oxidation of a terminal alkene

The Potential of the Implementation of Offline Robotic Programming into Automation-Related Pedagogy

In this study, the offline programming tool RoboDK is used to program industrial robots for the automation sector. The study explores the feasibility of using this non-disruptive robot programming software for classroom use; assesses how well RoboDK can be used to program various robots used in the industry; creates and tests various applications; and pinpoints technical obstacles that prevent a smooth link between offline programming and actual robots. Initial results indicate that RoboDK is an effective tool for deploying its offline programming code to a Universal Robot, UR3e. There are many potential for advanced applications. The goal of the project is to utilize RoboDK, the offline robot programming software to respond to the rising need for knowledgeable robot programmers in the automation sector

A Survey of UV Bright Sources Behind the Halo of M31

We have performed a wide-area ultraviolet (UV) imaging survey using the GALaxy Evolution eXplorer (GALEX) to search for bright, point-like UV sources behind M31's extended halo. Our survey consisted of 46 pointings covering an effective area of ~50 deg^2, in both the far-UV and near-UV channels. We combined these data with optical R-band observations acquired with the WIYN Mosaic-1 imager on the Kitt Peak National Observatory 0.9m WIYN telescope. An analysis of the brightness and colors of sources matched between our photometric catalogs yielded ~100 UV-bright quasar candidates. We have obtained discovery spectra for 76 of these targets with the Kast spectrometer on the Lick 3m telescope and confirm 30 active galactic nuclei and quasars, 29 galaxies at z > 0.02 including several early-type systems, 16 Galactic stars (hot main-sequence stars), and one featureless source previously identified as a BL Lac object. Future UV spectroscopy of the brightest targets with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope will enable a systematic search for diffuse gas in the extended halo of M31.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures. Accepted to MNRA