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NATO before the Korean War: April 1949–June 1950
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/new_foreign_relations/7/thumbnail.jpgA reexamination of the formative years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Conventional wisdom has the Korean War putting the “O” in NATO. Prior to that time, from the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, to the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, the Treaty allies were just going through the motions of establishing an organization. Historian Lawrence Kaplan argues that this is a mistaken view, and he fills significant blanks in the record of 1949 and 1950, which NATO officials and analysts alike have largely ignored.
When the Treaty was signed, the United States hailed the end of its isolationist tradition, as it recognized the necessity of devising new means to cope with the menace of Soviet-led Communism. It was interested in creating a new order in the Old World that would open the way to a united Europe. Toward this end, the allies crafted a transatlantic bargain. In its simplest form, the bargain involved a
U.S. commitment to rebuild, economically and militarily, a Western Europe devastated by World War II. In exchange for America’s abandonment of its customary abstention from Europe, the Western allies would take steps to end Europe’s traditional divisions and integrate its resources on every level. The sheer magnitude of the mutual obligations received widespread attention on both sides of the Atlantic as well as within the Communist bloc. The Korean War’s impact on the development of the organization marginalized the prewar history of NATO.
Kaplan asserts that the Korean War was not needed to convert the alliance into an organization, as it was already in place on June 25, 1950. The progress of NATO’s development was often improvised and untidy, and “the first crude tools of the organization,” as Dean Acheson noted, had been cast by the end of the London meeting of the North Atlantic Council in May 1950. The seeds of major changes took the form of the supreme allied commanders, and a civilian coordinating body could be found in negotiations conducted during the winter and spring of 1950. The origins of the “O” in NATO are found in the text of the North Atlantic Treaty, in Article 9, under whose auspices new responsibilities were justified.</p
The Historical Development and Marketing of Fantasy Sports Leagues
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/node/9969/8861-thumbnail.jpgBy 2013, fantasy sports leagues (and games) were entered into and played by more than an estimated 32-million people (Dwyer, 2013) across American and Canada, and produced a projected economic impact of $3.1-billion dollars annually (Fantasy Sports Trade Association, 2012). This work seeks to explain both the historical growth and cultural transitions of in-home sport gaming in the United States as well as the technological evolution that drove the appeal of modern ‘fantasy sports’ and continued enhancement of professional league avidity by developing stronger brand allegiances for leagues such as Major League Baseball (MLB) or the National Football League (NFL).
From a historical standpoint, the term ‘Fantasy League’ didn’t garner popularity until the 1980s, but the concept of fantasy sports gaming can be traced back to the mid-1860s with a simple wooden tabletop contraption that simulated outcome elements of a baseball game (Cooper, 1995). Over the next 150 years, technological and social developments in the areas of in-home re-creation and networked gaming have caused fantasy sports to re-shape sports media coverage, sports marketing (particularly of sports data), fan avidity, technology engagement and general sport discussion.
The impact of these fan-based developments might prove significant and increasingly leagues like the NFL have been forced to ask whether the at-home experience of following professional football (including the owning and managing of fantasy football league teams) is reaching a point where it could replace attending NFL games in person. A sea-change such as that (decreases in NFL game attendance, failure to sell out NFL games, etc.) would potentially threaten lucrative team and league sponsorships, stadium merchandise and concessions (food, beverage, parking, etc.) and possibly even TV network broadcast contracts (by way of diminished ratings and advertising demand).</p
Comparisons of air traffic control implementations on an associative processor with a MIMD and consequences for parallel computing
No full textThis paper has two complementary focuses. The first is the system design and algorithmic development for air traffic control (ATC) using an associative SIMD processor (AP). The second is the comparison of this implementation with a multiprocessor implementation and the implications of these comparisons. This paper demonstrates how one application, ATC, can more easily, more simply, and more efficiently be implemented on an AP than is generally possible on other types of traditional hardware. The AP implementation of ATC will take advantage of its deterministic hardware to use static scheduling. The software will be dramatically smaller and cheaper to create and maintain. Likewise, a large AP system will be considerably simpler and cheaper than the MIMD hardware currently used. While APs were used for ATC-type applications earlier, these are no longer available. We use a ClearSpeed CSX600 accelerator to emulate the AP solutions of ATC on an ATC prototype consisting of eight data-intensive ATC real-time tasks. Its performance is compared with an 8-core multiprocessor (MP) using OpenMP. Our extensive experiments show that the AP implementation meets all deadlines while the MP will regularly miss a large number of deadlines. The AP code will be similar in size to sequential code for the same tasks and will avoid all of the additional support software needed with an MP to handle dynamic scheduling, load balancing, shared resource management, race conditions, false sharing, etc. At this point, essentially only MIMD systems are built. Many of the advantages of using an AP to solve an ATC problem would carry over to other applications. AP solutions for a wide variety of applications will be cited in this paper. Applications that involve a high degree of data parallelism such as database management, text processing, image processing, graph processing, bioinformatics, weather modeling, managing UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems or drones) etc., are good candidates for AP solutions. This raises the issue of whether we should routinely consider using non-multiprocessor hardware like the AP for applications where substantially simpler software solutions will normally exist. It also raises the question of whether the use of both AP and MIMD hardware in a single heterogeneous system could provide more versatility and efficiency. Either the AP or MIMD could serve as the primary system, but could hand off jobs it could not handle efficiently to the other system.</p
Whence God? The origin of ultimate concern
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2013/Papers/10/thumbnail.jpgSeveral recent works have addressed the issue of the origin of religion. Some have linked this occurrence to evolutionary mechanisms, others to sociological processes, and still others to psychological functions. Each position has interest and sheds a different light on a necessarily complex process. The paper examines several of these theories and offers a synthetic perspective which integrates psychological, sociological, evolutionary, and theological concepts in a new manner.</p
Romeo and Juliet War (2013)
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/theatregallery/15/thumbnail.jpgDirected by: Daniel-Raymond Nadon
Set Design: Tony E. Kovacic
Costume Design: Eileen Janis Larson
Actors: Daniel Parsons, Christine Fowler</p
The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Construction of the Virginia Kendall Reserve, 1933–1939
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/facultybooks/31/thumbnail.jpgHow the Civilian Conservation Corps transformed our understanding of nature In the spring of 1933, the United States was in the midst of the worst economic calamity it had ever experienced. Newly inaugurated president Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to approve funding allowing legions of out-of-work young men to find employment reclaiming and developing the nation’s natural spaces. The Civilian Conservation Corps became a reality in April 1933 and forever changed the way the American people viewed their parks, rivers, lakes, and other natural areas. This book tells the story of the CCC’s construction of the Virginia Kendall Reserve, which today is part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, in Northeast Ohio. Four hundred and thirty acres of farmland came under the control of the Akron Metropolitan Park District and its director-secretary, Harold Wagner, who immediately applied to the federal government to establish a CCC camp there with the aim of creating a natural recreation landscape open to the public. Author Kenneth Bindas and seven of his students from Kent State University drew upon a wide variety of government documents, oral histories, and other primary sources to place the construction of the Reserve within the larger context of modernism and the emerging 1930s movements whose goals were to protect and open up natural areas. As a case study, the construction of the Virginia Kendall Reserve provides an example of the design, manipulation, and construction used to create so many Civilian Conservation Corps environments. The book is filled with historic photographs showing the process of construction, and contemporary photos by Marina Vladova visually detail the lush nature that families, hikers, runners, bikers, and naturalists enjoy today. Published in cooperation with the National Park Service and Eastern National</p
Fusion Spring 2013
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/fusion/19/thumbnail.jp
Keeping Faith: Factors Contributing to Spiritual Transformation, Identity, and Maturity in Adolescents
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/asir/vol3/iss1/4/thumbnail.jpgThe current research study investigated factors associated with spiritual development among adolescents. Eighty five participants (12 – 19 years) attending Protestant church youth groups were asked to complete a questionnaire measuring spiritual transformation, identity, and maturity as well as demographics, personality, religious social support, and personal devotional activities. The purpose of this research was to understand how religious social support (family, friends, church, mentorship) and personal devotional activities (prayer, worship, study of sacred texts) were related to a spiritual transformation experience, spiritual identity, and spiritual maturity. It was hypothesized that adolescents who reported having had a positive spiritual transformation and who demonstrated higher levels of spiritual identity and maturity would be more connected to religious support systems and would engage more in personal devotional activities. These hypotheses were supported. In particular, those who reported stronger levels of spiritual identity were more actively engaged in prayer, worship, and study of sacred texts and had more religious support from friends, parents, church, and mentorship. Youth who had higher levels of spiritual identity also reported a desire both to be mentored and to mentor others. Active engagement in a greater religious community was related to having had a spiritual transformation experience. These findings may enable mental health professionals, religious leaders, and parents to better understand how to support adolescents with religious and spiritual interests in their journey of spiritual development.</p
The Search for Meaning: Information Seeking and Religious Conversion
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/asir/vol3/iss1/5/thumbnail.jpgAs evidenced by the annual CSIR Conference on Information and Religion, the intersections between religion and information are beginning to be recognized and explored. However, the literature on information seeking and religion has tended to focus on the information behavior of religious leaders (see Michels, 2009, 2012; Roland, 2007; Roland & Wicks, 2009; Wicks, 1999). Several papers from the previous two CSIR Conferences on Information and Religion focus on information seeking, use and evaluation, but the emphasis continues to be placed on examining these topics from an historical or clergy-centered perspective. This paper offers an alternative approach to the study of information and religion by exploring information seeking practices in the context of religious conversion. Based on a search for peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings in the major library and information science (LIS), religious studies, anthropology, and sociology databases, this paper includes what Marcia J. Bates has called a “rigorous systematic bibliography” (1976). I identify ways in which the concept of information seeking in the religious conversion process has been presented in the literature under subject terms, in combination with keyword searching. Using this method, I draw attention to the presence of information, and information seeking, in the existing literature on religious conversion. By highlighting the ways in which these articles illustrate the concept of information seeking in the process of religious conversion, I develop a thorough definition of religious conversion and discuss its implications for our discipline’s understanding of “the social construction of religious knowledge” – the theme of the Third Annual CSIR Conference on Information and Religion. My findings build upon Jarkko Kari’s work on spiritual information phenomena (Kari, 2011, 2009, 2007, 2001; Kari & Hartel, 2007), and will further contribute to scholarly knowledge about information practices in religious contexts.</p
Time Allocation of Sales Activities in Professional Sport Organizations
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/node/9972/8863-thumbnail.jpgThe sale of tickets, premium seating, and sponsorship is fundamental to the financial viability of professional sport organizations. With ticket sales as the most important source of local revenue for most sport organizations and the sale of premium suites and sponsorships unshared amongst other franchises (Smith & Roy, 2011; Howard & Crompton, 2004), recruiting, training, and retaining high quality salespeople is an important managerial function of professional sport franchises (Irwin, Sutton, & McCarthy, 2008; Pierce, Petersen, Clavio, & Meadows, in press). Although researchers have examined sales activities in many industries, little research exists on how salespeople utilize their time in the sport industry. Sport salespeople have a variety of responsibilities, from cold calling to working on game day (Pierce et al., in press). However, sales activities might differ based on salesperson characteristics such as gender and experience, or by organization based on level of competition or what is being sold. The purpose of this study was to determine how much time sport sales personnel spend on a variety of sales tasks, examine differences between types of sales employees, and determine if time spent on sales tasks predicts job performance or satisfaction.</p