Albion College

About: Albion College is a education organization based out in Albion, Michigan, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Higher education. The organization has 485 authors who have published 754 publications receiving 20907 citations.

Justification for Theism

Abstract: Belief in God is for Temple justified not by any single strand of evidence or by one argument alone. The approach is rather to gather evidence together from various areas of experience, incorporating the methods of several disciplines. It is the cumulative effect which the convergence of these independent arguments affords that gives both intellectual weight and psychological force to the belief in God.

A Real-Time Expert System For Control Of An Autonomous Mobile Robot Including Diagnosis Of Unexpected Occurrences

Abstract: An autonomous mobile robot deals with the empirical world which is never fully predictable, hence it must continually monitor its performance by comparing the actual responses of sensors to their expected responses. Where a discrepancy occurs, the source of the discrepancy must be diagnosed and on-line corrective actions or replanning may be required. The use of a production system for the control of an autonomous robot presents several attractive features: the explicitness and homogeneity of the knowledge representation facilitates explaining, verifying and modifying the rules which determine the robot's behavior; it also permits the incremental extension of the domain of competence. However, real-time operation poses a number of challenges due to the dynamic nature of the data and because the system must frequently deal with a large knowledge base in a limited time. An implementation of a control system is discussed where a large commercial real-time expert system originally designed for industrial process diagnostics was adapted to the control of an autonomous mobile robot for planning, executing and monitoring a set of navigational tasks. One of the essential components of the problem domain is the occurrence of an "unexpected" happening e.g., as new obstacles are moved into the domain during the robot traverse, or when an obstacle undetectable by the long-range sonar sensors is suddenly observed by a proximity sensor. In a recent demonstration of the system, the detection of a problem generated an interrupt alarm, a diagnostic procedure, and a new plan, which was successfully executed in real time.

The Chicago Latino film festival: shaping Latin American/Latino cinema in The United States

Abstract: Founded in 1985, the Chicago Latino Film Festival (CLFF) is one of the oldest and largest festivals devoted to Spanish and Portuguese-language films in the United States. One of the festiva...

Postmodern Subjects: On Lyman's Sociology of the Absurd

Abstract: According to Stanford Lyman, a specter continues to haunt social theory in the United States and that specter is "postmodernism" In Roads to Dystopia,2 Lyman continues3 a critical engagement with postmodern theory?especially that work which has been most influential with, and appropriated by, American sociologists Although critical of postmodern thought, Lyman is never dismissive of his subject4 Indeed, Lyman expresses a certain sympathy with some arguments within postmodernism because much is familiar to him5 In his existentialist sociology of the absurd, an intellectual project first articulated by Lyman and others more than a quar ter century ago,6 several recognizably "postmodern" themes, he maintains, can be found Lyman accepts that we live in postmodern times, a condition characterized, he suggests, by alienation and despair It is because of this, however, that he ultimately rejects the postmodernist's response Reflecting on our present historical condition, Lyman observes that it is "no wonder, then, that the present millennial moment is conceptualized as one 'in between' another, as one whose condition can only be designated as post-modernity, with no name for the age and situation that will follow"7 He concedes that our sense of time, our social and cultural memory, and even our abilities for self-expression, are all subject to ever-increasing fragmen tation Although our traditional landmarks are now blurred and shifting, Lyman refuses to acquiesce to other claims of postmodernism: namely, that

Occurrence and diversity of epiphytic bacterial communities on two native plant species in a Michigan Creek

Abstract: We examined the occurrence and diversity of bacteria of different phylogenetic groups in epiphytic assemblages on two native Michigan plant species mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) and cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum) when the plant leaves were submerged in fresh water. Fresh leaves were incubated in triplicate for about a week within a creek in Hasting, Michigan, and in laboratory microcosm to develop mature epiphytic assemblages. We enumerated bacteria in these assemblages by nucleic acid staining (i.e., total direct counts using 4′,6-diamidino-2-phenyllindole) and fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH), while community diversity was determined based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing. FISH indicated the dominance of members of the γ-Proteobacterial subclass (20%) on both plant species, while the 16S rRNA gene analysis revealed the predominance of the β-Proteobacteria (51%) on mayapple and the Fermicutes (26%) on cow parsnip, with the Bacteroidetes present equally within the epiphytic assemblages on both plants.