Browsing by Subject "history"
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Item ELECTRIC LIGHTING POLICY IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, 1880-2016(2018-01-01) Wallace, Harold Duane; Tatarewicz, Joseph N; School of Public Policy; Public PolicyFederal policies have targeted electric lighting since the 1880s with varying success. This dissertations examines the history of those policies to understand policy makers' intent and how their decisions affected the course of events. This qualitative study poses three research questions: How have changes in lamp efficacy affected policy development? How and why have federal policies targeted electric lighting? How have private sector actors adapted public policy to further their own goals? The analysis uses an interdisciplinary approach taking advantage of overlapping methodologies drawn from policy and political sciences, economics, and the history of technology. The concepts of path dependency, context, and actor networks are especially important. Adoption of electric lighting spurred the construction of complex and capital intensive infrastructures now considered indispensable, and lighting always consumed a significant fraction of US electric power. Engineers and scientists created many lamps over the decades, in part to meet a growing demand for energy efficient products. Invention and diffusion of those lamps occurred amid changing standards and definitions of efficiency, shifting relations between network actors, and the development of path dependencies that constrained efforts to affect change. Federal actors typically used lighting policy to conserve resources, promote national security, or to symbolically emphasize the onset of a national crisis. The study shows that after an initial introductory phase, lighting-specific policies developed during two distinct periods. The earlier period consisted of intermittent, crisis-driven federal interventions of mixed success. The later period featured a sustained engagement between public and private sectors wherein incremental adjustments achieved policy goals. A time of transition occurred between the two main periods during which technical, economic, and political contexts changed, while several core social values remained constant. In both early and later periods, private sector actors used policy opportunities to further commercial goals, a practice that public sector actors in the later period used to promote policy acceptance. Recently enacted energy standards removing ordinary incandescent lamps in favor of high efficiency lamps mark the end of the later period. Apparent success means that policy makers should reconsider how they use lighting to achieve future goals.Item History, State of the Art and Challenges for Agent Communication Languages(2000-01-01) Labrou, Yannis K.; Finin, TimKnowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML) is a language of typed messages, usually understood as speech-acts, encoded as ASCII strings (in a LISP-like syntax), that are transported over TCP/IP connections, and aimed at knowledge and information exchange between software systems that are viewed as Virtual Knowledge Bases. KQML, which first appeared almost 10 years ago, has come to define the concept of an ACL and in the process the ACL has become the centerpiece of a large category of agent systems. Inevitably an ACL has become a loosely-defined concept that encompasses a variety of issues which may or may not be ACL-relevant depending on one’s point of view. The more “conservative” viewpoint advocates that the semantics of the message types is the one and only real issue. Agent development suggests though that semantics is the least important concern when one actually builds an agent system. The efforts of many researchers to develop multi-agent systems have brought to the foreground issues and considerations that are at least as important as the semantics for interoperable agent systems. After introducing some of the basic concepts relating to Agent Communication Languages, we cover KQML and FIPA ACL, the two existing fully-specified ACLs. We give a brief introduction to their semantics and the issues relating to semantic descriptions of ACLs. We then shift our focus beyond the semantics and point to emerging threads of research in the ACL community. The issues that we deem relevant to the widest possible acceptance of ACLs include alternative syntactic encodings, services and infrastructure, integration with the WWW, and specification of conversation protocols.Item Lessons From Baltimore 1968: How History Can Heal a Harmed City(Time Magazine, 2015-04-29) Nix, Elizabeth M.In the 20 years that I have lived in Baltimore City, I have seen guns fired only twice; in each instance the targets were black men and the shooters were police. In one case the officer was trying to stop a group of men who had apparently stolen a car. They bailed out in front of my house, and as they were running away, the officer fired, but missed. In the second case the officer’s aim was better; an assailant held up a medical student on a bicycle, then ran through traffic right in front of our car. An off-duty cop saw the scuffle and fired. He turned out to be a 14-year-old with a BB gun. The boy lay in the street, shot in the stomach; my 12-year-old son and I waited until the police told us to move on. I called my district and set up an appointment with a detective. No one ever came to question me.Item Pamphleteers Construct Concini(University of Baltimore - School of Law, 1990) Sawyer, Jeffrey K.This paper is built around a problem of textual analysis that I have been wrestling with for some time as a historian of early seventeenth-century political propaganda. Stated broadly the problem is how to use the texts of hundreds of political pamphlets to reconstruct the world of discourse within which pamphlet readers reacted to printed political tracts. Take for example the dozens of pamphlets concerning the rise to power and assassination in April 1617 of Concino Concini. Concini, also referred to as the Marechal d'Ancre, was for a time one of the principal ministers in the administration of Marie de Medicis during the youth of Louis XIII. The Bibliotheque Nationale holds over 100 pamphlets published against Concini between 1614 and 1617, and another 16 (or so) in his favor. It is interesting to note that almost half of the pamphlets published against Concini appeared after his death. In fact, carefully edited accounts of Concini's strange career and horrible demise formed the centrifugal center of a legally sanctioned (and no doubt subsidized) campaign of printed propaganda. Fifty-seven (57) of the one hundred one (101) pamphlets against Concini at the B.N. were published after the events of April 24th, and many of these were published well after the subsequent trial and execution of Concini's widow on July 8th of the same year.Item Shoreline, July 2002(2002-07) Nabb Research CenterThe Shoreline is the publication of the Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture at Salisbury University. It features regular news from the Center and research conducted by employees and others.Item The Development of Frederick Rugby(2010-04-28) Ames, Lucy; History; History SeminarItem Whitework: Uncovering the visual culture of whiteness through quiltmaking, history and art education curricula(2019-01-01) Kuthy, Diane; King, Nicole; Smalls, James; Language, Literacy & Culture; Language Literacy and CultureWhitework argues that quilts are important sources for close readings of visual and material culture of whiteness when placed against the backdrop of political and social history. These art objects create for the quilt makers and audiences a new body of multimodal knowledge that promotes a deeper understanding of the workings of white supremacy and the cultural myths that have kept it in place. The quilts created for and analyzed in the dissertation and the related curricular resources provide important educational tools to promote racial justice. Using the methodology of a/r/tography, an embodied and emergent form of inquiry within practice-based educational research that includes the interconnected practices of artist, educator and researcher, this dissertation investigates the visual and material culture of whiteness and the historical context that produces its meaning. As part of this study, two quilts were created collaboratively with a community of artist/researchers. Each quilt is complemented by a curricular resource for high school or college art education classrooms to critically engage learners with historical artifacts of whiteness and resistance to whiteness, as well as related contemporary exemplars. The thematic moments selected and animated in the historically informed curricula engage with current social justice issues and underscore the workings of white supremacy and resistance to it.