Into the Vortex of a Maelstrom: The Art of Municipal Governance in Confederate Richmond

From May 1861 until April 1865 the city of Richmond, Virginia served as the capital of the Confederate States of America, during the American Civil War. Throughout the course of the war it operated alongside the established governments of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the County of Henrico, and Richmond City. The body that experienced the greatest fluctuation and change was the municipal government, which consisted of a city council, mayor, and hustings court. The city government faced existential challenges that included an increase in its population, an influx of Confederate soldiers, and the constant threat of the Union army. While developing and implementing policies that responded to these situations, it refused to neglect or yield the duties that it had always performed. This included maintaining the gas and water works, funding police and fire departments, providing land for burial in cemeteries, and ensuring basic resources were available to its denizens

Expanding Constrained Kinodynamic Path Planning Solutions through Recurrent Neural Networks

Path planning for autonomous systems with the inclusion of environment and kinematic/dynamic constraints encompasses a broad range of methodologies, often providing trade-offs between computation speed and variety/types of constraints satisfied. Therefore, an approach that can incorporate full kinematics/dynamics and environment constraints alongside greater computation speeds is of great interest. This thesis explores a methodology for using a slower-speed, robust kinematic/dynamic path planner for generating state path solutions, from which a recurrent neural network is trained upon. This path planning recurrent neural network is then used to generate state paths that a path-tracking controller can follow, trending the desired optimal solution. Improvements are made to the use of a kinodynamic rapidly-exploring random tree and a whole-path reinforcement training scheme for use in the methodology. Applications to 3 scenarios, including obstacle avoidance with 2D dynamics, 10-agent synchronized rendezvous with 2D dynamics, and a fully actuated double pendulum, illustrate the desired performance of the methodology while also pointing out the need for stronger training and amounts of training data. Last, a bounded set propagation algorithm is improved to provide the initial steps for formally verifying state paths produced by the path planning recurrent neural network

Using computational swarm intelligence for real-time asset allocation

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is especially useful for rapid optimization of problems involving multiple objectives and constraints in dynamic environments. It regularly and substantially outperforms other algorithms in benchmark tests. This paper describes research leading to the application of PSO to the autonomous asset management problem in electronic warfare. The PSO speed provides fast optimization of frequency allocations for receivers and jammers in highly complex and dynamic environments. The key contribution is the simultaneous optimization of the frequency allocations, signal priority, signal strength, and the spatial locations of the assets. The fitness function takes into account the assets' locations in 2 and 3 dimensions maximizing their spatial distribution while maintaining allocations based on signal priority and power. The fast speed of the optimization enables rapid responses to changing conditions in these complex signal environments, which can have real-time battlefield impact. Initial results optimizing receiver frequencies and locations in 2 dimensions have been successful. Current run-times are between 300 (3 receivers, 30 transmitters) and 1000 (7 receivers, 30 transmitters) milliseconds on a single-threaded x86 based PC. Statistical and qualitative tests indicate the swarm has viable solutions, and finds the global optimum 99% of the time on a test case. The results of the research on the PSO parameters and fitness function for this problem is demonstrated

A cluster analysis of harmony in the McGill Billboard dataset

We set out to perform a cluster analysis of harmonic structures (specifically, chord-to-chord transitions) in the McGill Billboard dataset, to determine whether there is evidence of multiple harmonic grammars and practices in the corpus, and if so, what the optimal division of songs, according to those harmonic grammars, is. We define optimal as providing meaningful, specific information about the harmonic practices of songs in the cluster, but being general enough to be used as a guide to songwriting and predictive listening. We test two hypotheses in our cluster analysis — first that 5–9 clusters would be optimal, based on the work of Walter Everett (2004), and second that 15 clusters would be optimal, based on a set of user-generated genre tags reported by Hendrik Schreiber (2015). We subjected the harmonic structures for each song in the corpus to a K-means cluster analysis. We conclude that the optimal clustering solution is likely to be within the 5–8 cluster range. We also propose that a map of cluster types emerging as the number of clusters increases from one to eight constitutes a greater aid to our understanding of how various harmonic practices, styles, and sub-styles comprise the McGill Billboard dataset

Foraging in marine habitats increases mercury concentrations in a generalist seabird

Methylmercury concentrations vary widely across geographic space and among habitat types, with marine and aquatic-feeding organisms typically exhibiting higher mercury concentrations than terrestrial-feeding organisms. However, there are few model organisms to directly compare mercury concentrations as a result of foraging in marine, estuarine, or terrestrial food webs. The ecological impacts of differential foraging may be especially important for generalist species that exhibit high plasticity in foraging habitats, locations, or diet. Here, we investigate whether foraging habitat, sex, or fidelity to a foraging area impact blood mercury concentrations in western gulls (Larus occidentalis) from three colonies on the US west coast. Cluster analyses showed that nearly 70% of western gulls foraged primarily in ocean or coastal habitats, whereas the remaining gulls foraged in terrestrial and freshwater habitats. Gulls that foraged in ocean or coastal habitats for half or more of their foraging locations had 55% higher mercury concentrations than gulls that forage in freshwater and terrestrial habitats. Ocean-foraging gulls also had lower fidelity to a specific foraging area than freshwater and terrestrial-foraging gulls, but fidelity and sex were unrelated to gull blood mercury concentrations in all models. These findings support existing research that has described elevated mercury levels in species using aquatic habitats. Our analyses also demonstrate that gulls can be used to detect differences in contaminant exposure over broad geographic scales and across coarse habitat types, a factor that may influence gull health and persistence of other populations that forage across the land-sea gradient

First-principles equation of state of CHON resin for inertial confinement fusion applications

A wide-range (0 to 1044.0 g/cm3 and 0 to 109 K) equation-of-state (EOS) table for a CH1.72O0.37N0.086 quaternary compound has been constructed based on density-functional theory (DFT) molecular-dynamics (MD) calculations using a combination of Kohn-Sham DFT MD, orbital-free DFT MD, and numerical extrapolation. The first-principles EOS data are compared with predictions of simple models, including the fully ionized ideal gas and the Fermi-degenerate electron gas models, to chart their temperature-density conditions of applicability. The shock Hugoniot, thermodynamic properties, and bulk sound velocities are predicted based on the EOS table and compared to those of C-H compounds. The Hugoniot results show the maximum compression ratio of the C-H-O-N resin is larger than that of CH polystyrene due to the existence of oxygen and nitrogen; while the other properties are similar between CHON and CH. Radiation hydrodynamic simulations have been performed using the table for inertial confinement fusion targets with a CHON ablator and compared with a similar design with CH. The simulations show CHON outperforms CH as the ablator for laser-direct-drive target designs

Measurement of Fronto-limbic Activity Using an Emotional Oddball Task in Children with Familial High Risk for Schizophrenia

Adolescence is a critical developmental period where the early symptoms of schizophrenia frequently emerge. First-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia who are at familial high risk (FHR) may show similar cognitive and emotional changes. However, the neurological changes underlying the emergence of these symptoms remain unclear. This study sought to identify differences in frontal, striatal, and limbic regions in children and adolescents with FHR using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Groups of 21 children and adolescents at FHR and 21 healthy controls completed an emotional oddball task that relied on selective attention and the suppression of task-irrelevant emotional information. The standard oddball task was modified to include aversive and neutral distractors in order to examine potential group differences in both emotional and executive processing. This task was designed specifically to allow for children and adolescents to complete by keeping the difficulty and emotional image content age-appropriate. Furthermore, we demonstrate a technique for suitable fMRI registration for children and adolescent participants. This paradigm may also be applied in future studies to measure changes in neural activity in other populations with hypothesized developmental changes in executive and emotional processing

Locked out: liberating disabled people's lives and rights in Wales beyond COVID-19

This report originated from discussions at the Welsh Government’s Disability Equality Forum, Chaired by Deputy Minister and Chief Whip, Jane Hutt, MS. In the summer of 2020, having heard of the different ways that disabled people were being negatively affected by the pandemic, the Forum resolved to set up an evidence-based enquiry into disabled people’s experiences, in part to counter the significant under-reporting by central Government and the mainstream media. The decision to establish such an enquiry is significant. To our knowledge, it is the first of its kind to be published by a Government in the UK. This report is also unique in that it has been controlled and co-produced by a Steering Group of disabled people representing Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) and disability charities, supported by Welsh Government in terms of administrative support, supplementary research expertise and data analysis. The nominal ‘Chair’ (or co-ordinator) of the enquiry, was chosen by disabled members of the Disability Equality Forum and self-identifies as a disabled person. Dr Debbie Foster is Professor of Employment Relations and Diversity at Cardiff University’s Business School. She interpreted her role as one of co-ordinator of documentary evidence collated by Welsh Government and evidence voiced by members of the Steering Group, all of whom had lived experience of disability. Over 300 items of written evidence were considered, sifted, summarised then discussed, prioritised and supplemented, by the Steering Group, in what was an iterative process

The Lantern Vol. 72, No. 2, Spring 2005

• Transmigration • Faces of the Moon • Euphony of the Euphonium • He Met Me in the Arcs & Ebbs of Frailty • An Adoration of Ordination • Ebony: The Essence Thereof • Curbside Statue Has No Legs Left • Triggerfinger Romance • Lost • Running Through Connecticut • Eve • The Day Lates and the Dollar Shorts • Somnambulist • That\u27s That • The Glenn Machine • Evenfall in Bad Homburg • Absence of Field • Dating Myself • Traveling Without a Map • The Non-Euclidean Way to Get Some Bagels • La Belle Epoque • Satin Boxeshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/lantern/1166/thumbnail.jp