Piercing Gaze: Public Art in Schools

A gaze is a silent facial gesture while a piercing gaze suggests a shrieking sound. Unpacking the word, silence, allows one to look at the difference between the verbalizations hailing empowerment and the actual functioning of reinstatements of purpose in learning, teaching and mentoring in a public school. Silence, in the following article, signals a discomfort, sometimes solitude and, at times, an abyss perhaps indicating the disparity between expectation and implementation. The depth of research necessary by the school community to reach consensus for names of dignitaries and the in-depth archival photographic research on the part of the professional artists required time commitments and levels of perseverance that were unforeseen by the participants. The challenge of maintaining community-building activities underscored the problematic issues entrenched in areas of high poverty. The following article is grouped around nine sections, a post script and references: Paradigm of Silence, Tagging a Neighborhood, African American and Latino Diaspora, Developmental Stages, Convincing the Public, Aspects of Production: Multiple Visions, Whole School Reform: Language Arts and Visual Literacy, Aesthetics of Truth and Reconciliation and Teaching Tolerance: State-wide Commissions

Chopping Down the Rainforest: Finding a Solution to the Amazon Problem

Current economic conditions in the United States have led to a dramatic decrease in state tax revenue. Without these funds, states will be unable to support important public services, and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the public and private sectors are at risk of being cut, as states work to close $103 billion in budget gaps. Accomplishing that will involve overcoming many hurdles, such as the unpopularity of raising taxes during times of economic trouble, but one largely untapped source could provide a significant amount of income to states. States currently lose around$23 billion annually in uncollected use taxes, about half of which likely would have come from transactions with Web retailers. Use taxes act as an adjunct to sales taxes on purchased goods and services that are not subject to sales taxes. But because this tax is voluntarily collected from the consumer instead of the retailer, compliance is extremely low

Chopping Down the Rainforest: Finding a Solution to the Amazon Problem

Current economic conditions in the United States have led to a dramatic decrease in state tax revenue. Without these funds, states will be unable to support important public services, and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the public and private sectors are at risk of being cut, as states work to close $103 billion in budget gaps. Accomplishing that will involve overcoming many hurdles, such as the unpopularity of raising taxes during times of economic trouble, but one largely untapped source could provide a significant amount of income to states. States currently lose around$23 billion annually in uncollected use taxes, about half of which likely would have come from transactions with Web retailers. Use taxes act as an adjunct to sales taxes on purchased goods and services that are not subject to sales taxes. But because this tax is voluntarily collected from the consumer instead of the retailer, compliance is extremely low

Antiques Roadshow: The Object of Learning

Even as school administrators were cutting the unique feature of museum Educators from the school district budget, museum directors in Philadelphia were calling teaching through objects, \u27lightning in a bottle.’ Educating through objects that have been crafted by talented artisans, owned by famous people, cherished by their association with loved ones, or inanimate witnesses to important historical moments is a recognized and immediate path to learning in the arts. In the search for the authentic, while simultaneously embracing the virtual, Americans participate in shaping a broad understanding of popular culture and accumulated history. Americans are having a love affair with bric-a-brac, yard sales, estate sales, and flea markets. A parallel development can be seen in the advent of genealogy as a hobby in diagramming family trees. Learning from actual objects fuses the critical processes of observation, analysis and evaluation with an appreciation of technical and design skills. Object learning is a type of cultural mirror

Signal Lost: Is a GPS Tracking System the Same as an Eyeball?

On November 8th, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in United States v. Jones. One of the primary issues in the case is whether law enforcement personnel violated Mr. Jones\u27 Fourth Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures by using a GPS tracking device to monitor the location of his car without a warrant. The 7th Circuit and the 9th Circuit have both recently held that use of GPS tracking is not a search under the Fourth Amendment

Conditional Hardness of Earth Mover Distance

The Earth Mover Distance (EMD) between two sets of points A, B subseteq R^d with |A| = |B| is the minimum total Euclidean distance of any perfect matching between A and B. One of its generalizations is asymmetric EMD, which is the minimum total Euclidean distance of any matching of size |A| between sets of points A,B subseteq R^d with |A| <= |B|. The problems of computing EMD and asymmetric EMD are well-studied and have many applications in computer science, some of which also ask for the EMD-optimal matching itself. Unfortunately, all known algorithms require at least quadratic time to compute EMD exactly. Approximation algorithms with nearly linear time complexity in n are known (even for finding approximately optimal matchings), but suffer from exponential dependence on the dimension. In this paper we show that significant improvements in exact and approximate algorithms for EMD would contradict conjectures in fine-grained complexity. In particular, we prove the following results: - Under the Orthogonal Vectors Conjecture, there is some c>0 such that EMD in Omega(c^{log^* n}) dimensions cannot be computed in truly subquadratic time. - Under the Hitting Set Conjecture, for every delta>0, no truly subquadratic time algorithm can find a (1 + 1/n^delta)-approximate EMD matching in omega(log n) dimensions. - Under the Hitting Set Conjecture, for every eta = 1/omega(log n), no truly subquadratic time algorithm can find a (1 + eta)-approximate asymmetric EMD matching in omega(log n) dimensions

Wiring cost in the organization of a biological network

To find out the role of the wiring cost in the organization of the neural network of the nematode \textit{Caenorhapditis elegans} (\textit{C. elegans}), we build the neuronal map of \textit{C. elegans} based on geometrical positions of neurons and define the cost as inter-neuronal Euclidean distance \textit{d}. We show that the wiring probability decays exponentially as a function of \textit{d}. Using the edge exchanging method and the component placement optimization scheme, we show that positions of neurons are not randomly distributed but organized to reduce the total wiring cost. Furthermore, we numerically study the trade-off between the wiring cost and the performance of the Hopfield model on the neural network

Can contrast-response functions indicate visual processing levels?

YesMany visual effects are believed to be processed at several functional and anatomical levels of cortical processing. Determining if and how the levels contribute differentially to these effects is a leading problem in visual perception and visual neuroscience. We review and analyze a combination of extant psychophysical findings in the context of neurophysiological and brain-imaging results. Specifically using findings relating to visual illusions, crowding, and masking as exemplary cases, we develop a theoretical rationale for showing how relative levels of cortical processing contributing to these effects can already be deduced from the psychophysically determined functions relating respectively the illusory, crowding and masking strengths to the contrast of the illusion inducers, of the flankers producing the crowding, and of the mask. The wider implications of this rationale show how it can help to settle or clarify theoretical and interpretive inconsistencies and how it can further psychophysical, brain-recording and brain-imaging research geared to explore the relative functional and cortical levels at which conscious and unconscious processing of visual information occur. Our approach also allows us to make some specific predictions for future studies, whose results will provide empirical tests of its validity

On the Emergence and Awareness of Auditory Objects

How do humans successfully navigate the sounds of music and the voice of a friend in the midst of a noisy cocktail party? Two recent articles inPLoS Biology provide psychoacoustic and neuronal clues about where to search for the answers