Disparities in Assets and Ownership: Limitations to the American Dream in Communities of Color

The disparities in assets and ownership seen between communities of color and whites perpetuate a troubling problem in Illinois. Thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, American Indians and other communities of color are denied access to opportunities for wealth building and future prosperity.Wealth-building activities are crucial to securing personal well-being and increasing economic mobility. Wealth is calculated as the total value of what one owns minus any remaining outstanding debt.Assets, a means to build wealth, provide an array of benefits including social influence, political participation, household stability and an orientation toward the future.Gaining wealth through asset ownership -- home ownership, retirement savings accounts, entrepreneurship, advanced college education -- provides the footing for individuals to move up the socioeconomic ladder

Designing scattering-free isotropic index profiles using phase-amplitude equations

The Helmholtz equation can be written as coupled equations for the amplitude and phase. By considering spatial phase distributions corresponding to reflectionless wave propagation in the plane and solving for the amplitude in terms of this phase, we designed two-dimensional graded-index media which do not scatter light. We give two illustrative examples, the first of which is a periodic grating for which diffraction is completely suppressed at a single frequency at normal incidence to the periodicity. The second example is a medium which behaves as a 'beam shifter' at a single frequency; acting to laterally shift a plane wave, or sufficiently wide beam, without reflection.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Creating Your Own Symbols: Beginning Algebraic Thinking With Indigenous Students

Because mathematics education devalues Indigenous culture, Indigenous students continue to be the most mathematically disadvantaged group in Australia. Conventional wisdom with regard to Indigenous mathematics education is to utilise practical and visual teaching methods, yet the power of mathematics and the opportunities it brings for advancement lie in symbolic understanding. This paper reports on a Maths as Story Telling (MAST) teaching approach to assist Indigenous students understand algebra through creating and manipulating their own symbols for equations. It discusses effective Indigenous mathematics teaching, describes the MAST approach, analyses it in terms of Ernest’s (2005) semiotic processes, discusses its applications, and draws implications for Indigenous mathematics learning

Controlling Tokamak Geometry with 3D Magnetic Perturbations

It is shown that small externally applied magnetic perturbations can significantly alter important geometric properties of magnetic flux surfaces in tokamaks. Through 3D shaping, experimentally relevant perturbation levels are large enough to influence turbulent transport and MHD stability in the pedestal region. It is shown that the dominant pitch-resonant flux surface deformations are primarily induced by non-resonant 3D fields, particularly in the presence of significant axisymmetric shaping. The spectral content of the applied 3D field can be used to control these effects

Rain Removal in Traffic Surveillance: Does it Matter?

Varying weather conditions, including rainfall and snowfall, are generally regarded as a challenge for computer vision algorithms. One proposed solution to the challenges induced by rain and snowfall is to artificially remove the rain from images or video using rain removal algorithms. It is the promise of these algorithms that the rain-removed image frames will improve the performance of subsequent segmentation and tracking algorithms. However, rain removal algorithms are typically evaluated on their ability to remove synthetic rain on a small subset of images. Currently, their behavior is unknown on real-world videos when integrated with a typical computer vision pipeline. In this paper, we review the existing rain removal algorithms and propose a new dataset that consists of 22 traffic surveillance sequences under a broad variety of weather conditions that all include either rain or snowfall. We propose a new evaluation protocol that evaluates the rain removal algorithms on their ability to improve the performance of subsequent segmentation, instance segmentation, and feature tracking algorithms under rain and snow. If successful, the de-rained frames of a rain removal algorithm should improve segmentation performance and increase the number of accurately tracked features. The results show that a recent single-frame-based rain removal algorithm increases the segmentation performance by 19.7% on our proposed dataset, but it eventually decreases the feature tracking performance and showed mixed results with recent instance segmentation methods. However, the best video-based rain removal algorithm improves the feature tracking accuracy by 7.72%.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System

Evaluation of Kapton pyrolysis, arc tracking, and flashover on SiO(x)-coated polyimide insulated samples of flat flexible current carriers for Space Station Freedom

Kapton polyimide wiring insulation was found to be vulnerable to pyrolization, arc tracking, and flashover when momentary short-circuit arcs have occurred on aircraft power systems. Short-circuit arcs between wire pairs can pyrolize the polyimide resulting in a conductive char between conductors that may sustain the arc (arc tracking). Furthermore, the arc tracking may spread (flashover) to other wire pairs within a wire bundle. Polyimide Kapton will also be used as the insulating material for the flexible current carrier (FCC) of Space Station Freedom (SSF). The FCC, with conductors in a planar type geometric layout as opposed to bundles, is known to sustain arc tracking at proposed SSF power levels. Tests were conducted in a vacuum bell jar that was designed to conduct polyimide pyrolysis, arc tracking, and flashover studies on samples of SSF's FCC. Test results will be reported concerning the minimal power level needed to sustain arc tracking and the FCC susceptibility to flashover. Results of the FCC arc tracking tests indicate that only 22 volt amps were necessary to sustain arc tracking (proposed SSF power level is 400 watts). FCC flashover studies indicate that the flashover event is highly unlikely