Use of the World Wide Web in Mathematics Instruction

Many mathematics instructors may find they can use the World Wide Web to distribute information and facilitate discussion and interaction in their classrooms, while actually reducing their administrative workload. Here is a discussion of some of the benefits (including better student understanding!) which an instructor might enjoy from taking the plunge

Ours to Displace, Ours to Protect : The Borderlands of American Indian Histories, Whiteness, and the Wilderness Ideal

\u27 Ours to Displace, Ours to Protect : The Borderlands of American Indian Histories, Whiteness, and the Wilderness Ideal\u27 is featured in the journal Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 4

Chicano Ethnicity and Aging

In an insightful article published a decade ago, The Chicano Aged, David Maldonado offers some comments that are germane to this presentation. In summing up the dilemma of the Chicano elderly, he asserts: The aged person in the extended family holds high status and commands the respect and obedience of the younger family members. Within the extended family structure. the aging person grows in prestige and respect. The individual holds high rank and has influence in the life of the group.[1] This is the position afforded the aged in many societies as long as the elderly are able to function and contribute in a meaningful way. Prestige, respect, and influence are important parts of their role so long as the aged are not perceived as being a burden. There is, however, a stigma attached to aging in the United States because of the emphasis upon youth and a mind set which does not view aging as a positive process

A parallel implementation of ant colony optimization

Ant Colony Optimization is a relatively new class of meta-heuristic search techniques for optimization problems. As it is a population-based technique that examines numerous solution options at each step of the algorithm, there are a variety of parallelization opportunities. In this paper, several parallel decomposition strategies are examined. These techniques are applied to a specific problem, namely the travelling salesman problem, with encouraging speedup and efficiency results.Full Tex

Further evidence of the absence of Replica Symmetry Breaking in Random Bond Potts Models

In this short note, we present supporting evidence for the replica symmetric approach to the random bond q-state Potts models. The evidence is statistically strong enough to reject the applicability of the Parisi replica symmetry breaking scheme to this class of models. The test we use is a generalization of one formerly proposed by Dotsenko et al. and consists in measuring scaling laws of disordered-averaged moments of the spin-spin correlation functions. Numerical results, obtained via Monte Carlo simulations for several values of q, are shown to be in fair agreement with the replica symmetric values computed by using perturbative CFT for the second and third moments of the q=3 model. RSB effects, which should increase in strength with moment, are unobserved.Comment: 7 pages, some minor modifications (mainly misprints). To Appear in Europhysics Letter

RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) project: final report

RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) was a 18-month partnership between UCL (University College London), Imperial College London, and the Universities Glasgow, Cambridge and Cornell. The project was funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK). The project team worked with the Astrophysics community investigate aspects of overlay journals. For the purposes of the project, an overlay was defined as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides more open access repositories. The project had both technical aims and supporting, non-technical aims. The primary technical deliverable from the project was a toolkit for the creation and maintenance overlay journals. The toolkit supports the exchange of data between a repository and piece of journal software. It supports functions such as author validation, metadata extraction from the source repository, and submission tracking. The toolkit is platform-neutral and could, in theory, be employed by any journal using content from any number repositories, in any discipline. The project also implemented a demonstrator overlay applying the RIOJA toolkit to the arXiv subject repository, and a demonstrator implementation of the RIOJA tool for GNU EPrints. Aside from creating the demonstrator and its underlying tools, the project aimed to acceptibility and feasibility of the overlay model. First, a large-scale survey of the Astrophysics community was undertaken. The survey collected data about research publishing practices within this community, and probed its reaction to the principle publishing. Second, the views of editors and publishers in this discipline were sought through interviews. These views were added to findings from the literature and summarised in a more general report on issues around the sustainability of an overlay journal