David Rotman

https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/oral_histories/1011/thumbnail.jp

Textual Animals Turned into Narrative Fantasies: The Imaginative Middle Ages

This article focuses on the concept 'reconstruction of the world' proposed by G. Zoran in his theoretical work on the representation of space in narrative. It makes special reference to the inter-medially transformative processes that narrators and audiences undergo, as materially concrete objects in space turn into representations in the verbal medium. Investigating the possible bodies of knowledge common to the participants in the communicative process, the article specifically discusses animals widely described in late antique and medieval Jewish folk tales and considers the possibilities for reconstructing the sources of shared imaginary worlds

The Design of an Effective, Economical Executive Information System For Cedarville College

The managers of a corporation have an obligation to make the best use of available organizational resources for daily operational activities of the corporation and for long-range development. This requirement for efficient management certainly obtains for higher education, as declining student populations and shrinking funding sources argue for an even greater need to manage well. One important aspect of efficient management is having sufficient information for decision making. This dissertation addresses the need for electronic tools to assist officers of a higher education institution in the management of the institution by improving access to information. College administrators need information about the status of their institution, projections of enrollment and funding, and comparative data from other institutions. This dissertation presents a systems analysis model for provision of that management data in the form of an executive information system (EIS). A review of the literature on executive information systems reveals extensive EIS activity in the commercial environment, but very little EIS activity within higher education. Recent declines in hardware pricing and the appearance of economical productivity software have made the development of an EIS more feasible within higher education. The literature review includes a discussion of information requirements for executives, historical development of executive information systems, and commercial executive information systems. The design section of the dissertation presents a framework for development of an EIS for Cedarville College. The recent installation of a campus-wide network has provided desktop computing access to administrative officers of the college, but there is not yet an appropriate software system which would utilize this network for administrative information delivery. The design framework includes a requirements analysis, a preliminary feasibility study, testing procedures, and an implementation plan for the development of an executive information system for Cedarville College. The requirements analysis performed as part of the study are based on interviews with administrators and middle-managers at Cedarville College. The identified requirements include a description of major decision making to be supported and the types of data which are typically used in support of that decision making. Following the requirements analysis, the author presents a review of five commercially-available EIS software packages. The review includes a description of each product, pricing information, and an overview of the data structures used by each product. As part of the analysis procedure, a prototype EIS was designed and implemented in three of the packages. The entire EIS design and prototype implementations were reviewed by Cedarville College participants and by four external reviewers. The systems analysis efforts performed as part of this study have resulted in an increased awareness of information requirements within the College administration and middle-management. The proposed EIS design and corresponding prototypes have demonstrated the feasibility of improving executive information support within the College. Such a design can provide an effective EIS for Cedarville College. However, development of the EIS prototypes has highlighted the importance of continued active participation by executives and systems analysts in the ongoing evolution of the executive information system. While EIS software costs can be identified and kept within a fairly small budget, personnel support issues may outweigh any software costs involved in an EIS project. Thus, delivery of an economical EIS for Cedarville College and other similar colleges remains an area for ongoing research

Exact rings and semirings

We introduce and study an abstract class of semirings, which we call exact semirings, defined by a Hahn-Banach-type separation property on modules. Our motivation comes from the tropical semiring, and in particular a desire to understand the often surprising extent to which it behaves like a field. The definition of exactness abstracts an elementary property of fields and the tropical semiring, which we believe is fundamental to explaining this similarity. The class of exact semirings turns out to include many other important examples of both rings (proper quotients of principal ideal domains, matrix rings and finite group rings over these and over fields), and semirings (the Boolean semiring, generalisations of the tropical semiring, matrix semirings and group semirings over these).Comment: 17 pages; fixed typos, clarified a few points, changed notation in Example 6.

Plane curves and their fundamental groups: Generalizations of Uludag's construction

In this paper we investigate Uludag's method for constructing new curves whose fundamental groups are central extensions of the fundamental group of the original curve by finite cyclic groups. In the first part, we give some generalizations to his method in order to get new families of curves with controlled fundamental groups. In the second part, we discuss some properties of groups which are preserved by these methods. Afterwards, we describe precisely the families of curves which can be obtained by applying the generalized methods to several types of plane curves. We also give an application of the general methods for constructing new Zariski pairs.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol3/agt-3-21.abs.htm

Smoking cessation and desire to stop smoking in nine countries of the former Soviet Union.

INTRODUCTION: Smoking rates and corresponding levels of premature mortality from smoking-related diseases in the former Soviet Union (fSU) are among the highest in the world. To reduce this health burden, greater focus on smoking cessation is needed, but little is currently known about rates and characteristics of cessation in the fSU. METHODS: Nationally representative household survey data from a cross-sectional study of 18,000 respondents in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine were analyzed to describe patterns of desire and action taken to stop smoking, quit ratios (former ever-smokers as a percent of ever-smokers, without a specified recall period), and help used to stop smoking. Multivariate logistic regression was used to analyze characteristics associated with smoking cessation and desire to stop smoking. RESULTS: Quit ratios varied from 10.5% in Azerbaijan to 37.6% in Belarus. About 67.2% of respondents expressed a desire to quit, and 64.9% had taken action and tried to stop. The use of help to quit was extremely low (12.6%). Characteristics associated with cessation included being female, over 60, with higher education, poorer health, lower alcohol dependency, higher knowledge of tobacco's health effects, and support for tobacco control. Characteristics associated with desire to stop smoking among current smokers included younger age, poorer health, greater knowledge of tobacco's health effects, and support for tobacco control. CONCLUSIONS: Quit ratios are low in the fSU but there is widespread desire to stop smoking. Stronger tobacco control and cessation support are urgently required to reduce smoking prevalence and associated premature mortality