2,841 research outputs found
Traveling National Exhibition on Lincoln Makes Six-Week Stop at Lawrence University
No full textA traveling exhibition examining President Lincoln’s efforts toward the abolition of slavery during the Civil War will make its only appearance in Wisconsin during a six-week stay in Lawrence University’s Seeley G. Mudd Library.
Lawrence, one of only 40 sites in the country the exhibition will visit, hosts “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation” Jan. 21, 2004 – March 5. The exhibition will be located on the south end of the library’s second floor.
Displayed on two 75-foot-long sectioned panels, the exhibition features reproductions of rare historical documents, period photographs, and illustrative material including engravings, lithographs, cartoons, and miscellaneous political items.
The exhibition is divided into distinct sections starting with young Lincoln’s America in the early 19th century. Covering the next 30 years, it also chronicles the spread of slavery into the western territories, the war to preserve the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation, the role of black soldiers in the Civil War and the final months of Lincoln’s life. Enhancing the exhibition will be a display of collections from Lawrence’s own Lincoln Reading Room.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Lawrence is sponsoring a series of public lectures, highlighted by an opening address by noted historian and author Ronald C. White, Jr.
Based on his best-selling 2002 book of the same name, White will present “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech,” Thursday, Jan. 22 at 4 p.m. in the Wriston Art Center auditorium. A professor of American intellectual and religious history at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, White has drawn critical praise for his book, which takes Lincoln’s brief — it was only 701 words in length — second inaugural address of 1865 and places the remarks in historical context, demonstrating how Lincoln attempted to shape public sentiment through the power of eloquent and carefully calculated rhetoric.
In addition to White’s address, two other public lectures will be conducted during the exhibition’s stay. Lawrence University associate professor of history Jerald Podair will present “Back Door to Freedom: The Paradoxes of the Emancipation Proclamation” Feb. 3, 2004 at 7:30 p.m. in the Wriston auditorium. Lawrence assistant professor of English Faith Barrett will deliver the address “Drums Off the Phantom Battlement: American Poets and the Civil War,” Feb. 10, 2004 at 4 p.m. in the Wriston auditorium.
In collaboration with the Appleton Public Library, a series of book discussions, led by Lawrence faculty members, also will be held while the exhibition is here. The schedule includes: Jan. 28, James McPherson’s “Ordeal by Fire,” led by historian Rex Myers; Feb. 18, Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” led by assistant professor of history Monica Rico; and March 10, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” led by Susan Richards, director of the Lawrence library. All three programs will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the Appleton Public Library’s lower level.
“We are certainly excited about the many opportunities the ‘Forever Free’ exhibit provides, both for our students and the community at large,” said Richards. “Through the format of a traveling exhibit, we are able to support teaching and learning in a way we typically haven’t done before while also enabling us to showcase some of the outstanding books and documents in our own Lincoln Reading Room.
“We hope that the topic itself, Abraham Lincoln’s own struggle to come to terms with the abolition of slavery, will entice interested members of the community to visit the Lawrence library, see this high-quality exhibit and hear some excellent speakers. It has been fun working with the Appleton Public Library on this project as well and we look forward to joining forces with them again to provide the Fox Cites with other unique opportunities like this in the future.”
The exhibition itself and all other lectures and events associated with it, are all free and open to the public.
The “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation” exhibition has been organized by the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York City, in cooperation with the American Library Association Public Programs Office. The exhibition was been made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, promoting excellence in the humanities
Historian Ronald White Opens Lincoln Exhibition at Lawrence University with Lecture on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
No full textNoted historian and author Ronald C. White, Jr. helps launch a six-week visit of a traveling exhibition on Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to abolish slavery Thursday, Jan. 22 at Lawrence University.
Based on his 2002 best-selling book of the same name, White presents “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech” at 4 p.m. in the Wriston Art Center auditorium. His address is the first of a three-past series in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation,” which will be on display in Lawrence’s Seeley G. Mudd Library from Jan. 21 – March 5.
A professor of American intellectual and religious history at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, White has drawn critical praise for his book, which carefully examines Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Delivered on March 4, 1865, six weeks to the day before he died, the address was the last major speech of Lincoln’s life and came to be regarded as his epitaph, according to White.
In his book, White places Lincoln’s brief remarks in historical context, demonstrating how Lincoln attempted to shape public sentiment through the power of eloquent and carefully calculated rhetoric. The address was only 701 words long — 505 of which were monosyllabic — but it mentions God 14 times, includes four Scripture quotations and evokes prayer four times.
White, who earned his Ph.D. in religion and history at Princeton University, has written or edited five other books, including “Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel.”
The “Forever Free” exhibition will be displayed on the second floor of the library on two 75-foot-long sectioned panels featuring reproductions of rare historical documents, period photographs and illustrative material, including engravings, lithographs, cartoons and miscellaneous political items.
The exhibition has been organized by the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York City, in cooperation with the American Library Association Public Programs Office. The exhibition was been made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
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The Electron-Ring Accelerator Program at Berkeley
No full textEarly in 1968 a research group was set up at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory to investigate the exciting new concept of accelerating ions by means of relativistic electron rings, which had been introduced and developed by Veksler, Sarantsev, and other workers at Dubna. The initial work of our group was reported at the first USSR National Conference on Particle Accelerators in 1968. In this report the author review the subsequent progress and the present program
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
ATOMIC SPECTROSCOPY AT THE LAWRENCE RADIATION LABORATORY
No full textAuthor Institution: Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of CaliforniaA progress report on the Energy Levels of CmI will be presented along with a discussion of the spectra of ionized actinide elements
Evaluating Human Performance in Virtual Reality Based on Psychophysiological Signal Analysis
No full textPhysiological signals measured from the body, such as brain activity and motor behavior, can be used to infer different physiological states or processes in humans. Signal processing and machine learning often play a fundamental role in this assessment, providing unique approaches to analyzing and interpreting physiological data for a variety of applications, such as medical diagnosis and human-computer interaction. In this work, these approaches were utilized and adapted for two separate applications: brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and the assessment of visual-motor skill in virtual reality (VR).The goal of BCI technology is to allow people with severe motor impairments to control a device without the need for voluntary muscle control. Conventional BCIs operate by converting electrophysiological signals measured from the brain into meaningful control commands, eliminating the need for physical interaction with the system. However, despite encouraging improvements over the last decade, BCI use remains primarily in research laboratories. One of the biggest obstacles limiting their daily in-home use is the significant amount of time and expertise that is often required to set up the biosensors (electrodes) for recording brain activity. The most common modality for brain recording is electroencephalography (EEG), which typically employs gel-based “wet” electrodes for recording signals with high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). However, while wet electrodes record higher quality signals than dry electrodes, they often hinder frequent use because of the complex and time-consuming process of applying the electrodes to the scalp. Therefore, in this research, a signal processing solution was implemented to help mitigate noise in a dry electrode system to facilitate a more practical BCI device for everyday use in people with severe motor impairments. This solution utilized a Bayesian algorithm that automatically determined the amount of EEG data to collect online based on the quality of incoming data. The hypothesis for this research was that the algorithm would detect the need for additional data collection in low SNR scenarios, such as those in the dry electrode systems, and collect sufficient data to improve BCI performance. In addition to this solution, two anomaly detection techniques were implemented to characterize the differences between the wet and dry electrode recordings to determine if any additional types of signal processing would further improve BCI performance with dry electrodes. Taken as a whole, this research demonstrated the impact of noise in dry electrode recordings on BCI performance and showed the potential of a signal processing approach for noise mitigation. However, further signal processing efforts are likely necessary for full mitigation and adoption of dry electrodes for use in the home.The second study presented in this work focused on signal processing and machine learning techniques for assessing visual-motor skill during a simulated marksmanship task in immersive VR. Immersive VR systems offer flexible control of an interactive environment, along with precise position and orientation tracking of realistic movements. These systems can also be used in conjunction with brain monitoring techniques, such as EEG, to record neural signals as individuals perform complex motor tasks. In this study, these elements were fused to investigate the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying visual-motor skill during a multi-day simulated marksmanship training regimen. On each of 3 days, twenty participants performed a task where they were instructed to shoot simulated clay pigeons that were launched from behind a trap house using a mock firearm controller. Through the practice of this protocol, participants significantly improved their shot accuracy and precision. Furthermore, systematic changes in the variables extracted from the EEG and kinematic signals were observed that accompanied these improvements in performance. Using a machine learning approach, two predictive classification models were developed to automatically determine the combinations of EEG and kinematic variables that best differentiated successful (target hit) from unsuccessful (target miss) trials and high-performing participants (top fourth) from low-performing participants (bottom fourth). Finally, in order to capture the more complex patterns of human motion in the spatiotemporal domain, time series methods for motion trajectory prediction were developed that utilized the raw tracking data to estimate the future motion of the firearm controller. The objective of this approach was to predict whether the controller’s virtually projected ray would intersect with the target before the trigger was pulled to shoot, with the eventual goal of alerting participants in real-time when shooting may be suboptimal. Overall, the findings from this research project point towards a comprehensive psychophysiological signal processing approach that can be used to characterize and predict human performance in VR, which has the potential to revolutionize the design of current simulation-based training programs for realistic visual-motor tasks.</p
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On "General Conservation Equations for Multiphase Systems: 1. Averaging Procedure" by M. Hassanizadeh and W. G. Gray.
No full textThe author comments upon a point made in the referenced paper on general conservation equations. The author directs attention to the fact that the referenced paper's authors correctly point out that when an averaging operation involves integration, the integrand multiplied by the infinitesimal volume must be an additive quantity. The importance of this requirement is emphasized
The construction of Karen Karnak: The multi-author-function
No full textThis thesis is situated within the comparatively recent developments of Web 2.0 and the emergence of interactive WikiMedia, and explores the mode of authorship within a Read/Write culture compared to that of a Read/Only tradition. The hypothesis of this study is that the role of the audience has become merged with the author, and as such, represents new functions and attributes, distinct from a more conventional concept of authorship, in which the roles of audience and author are more separate. Read/Write and participatory culture, as defined by this study, is focused on collaboration, and includes the influences of D.I.Y. culture, Open-Source practices and the production of text by multiple authors. Multi-authorship presents a re-thinking of several concepts which support the notion of the individual author, since the focus of multi-authorship is not on attribution and ownership of a finished text, but on the continued malleability of a text. Modes of multi-authorship, demonstrated in the use of the pseudonyms Alan Smithee and Karen Eliot, represent declarative authors whose names signify multiple origins, whilst concurrently indicating a distinct body of work. The function of these names form an important context to this study, since primary research involves the construction of an experimental mode of multi-authorship utilising WikiMedia technology and the interaction of thirty nine participants, who are invited to create a body of work under the collective pseudonym Karen Karnak. The data generated by this experiment is analysed using aspects of Michel Foucault's author-function to identify and determine power structures inherent in the WikiMedia context. The interplay of power structures, including concepts such as identity, ownership and the body of work, affect the resulting mode of authorship and contribute to the construction of Karen Karnak, suggesting further areas of research into the emerging multi-author
Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria quartet: influences shaping his fiction.
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Design and synthesis of G-quadruplex selective macrocyclic polyoxazoles
No full textNucleic acid sequences that can form stable G-quadruplex structures have been implicated in numerous biological functions. G-quadruplexes are thought to play a vital role in telomere maintenance and regulating gene expression. The majority of cancer cells over-express telomerase, an enzyme that bypasses the aging process by adding telomeric repeats to chromosome ends. Also about 65% of oncogenes have a potential G-quadruplex forming sequence in their promoter region. It is believed that stabilized G-quadruplexes can indirectly inhibit telomerase and decrease oncogene expression resulting in cancer cell death. These observations have led to the development of small molecules that stabilize G-quadruplexes as a new class of anticancer agents. Several research groups have developed such molecules but most lack selectivity over other forms of DNA. A unique molecule among these is telomestatin, a macrocyclic natural product with 70-fold selectivity for G-quadruplex DNA over duplex and low micromolar cytotoxicity. Although telomestatin has exceptional activity, it is difficult to synthesize and hard to formulate because it lacks water-solubilizing groups. Initial studies utilized telomestatin as a lead structure to develop a novel class of macrocyclic hexaoxazoles with the most active compound being HXDV. It was shown to stabilize G-quadruplex DNA with no detectable interaction with duplex DNA and had comparable cytotoxic activity to telomestatin. Unfortunately, HXDV had limited aqueous solubility and required a lengthy synthesis. Efforts to modify the structure of HXDV to enhance water solubility and simplify the synthetic process are described in this dissertation. While this was generally successful, a shorter synthesis was needed to rapidly assess structure-activity relationships. This led to the development of a second class of compounds called macrocyclic pyridyl polyoxazoles (PyPX). These compounds utilize a molecular scaffold that is readily accessed in few synthetic steps to form numerous macrocyclic analogs. This enables quick assessment of structure-activity relationships. Several members of this class are excellent G-quadruplex stabilizers and do not interact with duplex DNA. These compounds also possess low nanomolar cytotoxicity and one was active in an in vivo bioassay. Structure-activity studies utilizing the PyPX scaffold continue in an effort to identify clinical candidates.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Suzanne G. Rzucze
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