The island empire of the East : being a short history of Japan and missionary work therein with special reference to the mission of the M.S.C.C. / by Rev. J. Cooper Robinson ; with an introduction by the lord bishop of Algoma.

http://www.archive.org/details/theislandempire00robiuoft

Bible work in Bible lands, or, Events in the history of the Syria mission / by Isaac Bird.

http://www.archive.org/details/bibleworkinbible00birduoft

Missionary heroines in eastern lands : woman's work in mission fields / by E.R. Pitman.

http://www.archive.org/details/missionaryheroin00pitmuoft

An American missionary : a record of the work of Rev. William H. Judge, S.J. / by Charles J. Judge ; introduction by His Eminence, Cardinal Gibbons.

http://www.archive.org/details/anamericanmissio00judguoft

Our west China mission : being a somewhat extensive summary by the missionaries on the field of the work during the first twenty-five years of the Canadian Methodist mission in the province of Szechwan, western China.

http://www.archive.org/details/westchinamiss00unknuoft

OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS: WHAT FACULTY AUTHORS CAN DO TO ENSURE OPEN ACCESS TO THEIR WORK THROUGH THEIR INSTITUTION

The Internet has brought unparalleled opportunities for expanding availability of research by bringing down economic and physical barriers to sharing. The digitally networked environment promises to democratize access, carry knowledge beyond traditional research niches, accelerate discovery, encourage new and interdisciplinary approaches to ever more complex research challenges, and enable new computational research strategies. However, despite these opportunities for increasing access to knowledge, the prices of scholarly journals have risen sharply over the past two decades, often forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. Today even the wealthiest institutions cannot afford to sustain all of the journals needed by their faculties and students. To take advantage of the opportunities created by the Internet and to further their mission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, many academic institutions are taking steps to capture the benefits of more open research sharing. Colleges and universities have built digital repositories to preserve and distribute faculty scholarly articles and other research outputs. Many individual authors have taken steps to retain the rights they need, under copyright law, to allow their work to be made freely available on the Internet and in their institutionâ s repository. And, faculties at some institutions have adopted resolutions endorsing more open access to scholarly articles. Most recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step. The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the universityâ s digital repository and that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University. As of March 2008, a proposal is also under consideration in the University of California system by which faculty authors would commit routinely to grant copyright permission to the university to make copies of the facultyâ s scholarly work openly accessible over the Internet. Inspired by the example set by the Harvard faculty, this White Paper is addressed to the faculty and administrators of academic institutions who support equitable access to scholarly research and knowledge, and who believe that the institution can play an important role as steward of the scholarly literature produced by its faculty. This paper discusses both the motivation and the process for establishing a binding institutional policy that automatically grants a copyright license from each faculty member to permit deposit of his or her peer-reviewed scholarly articles in institutional repositories, from which the works become available for others to read and cite.

Multi-version Speculative Concurrency Control with Delayed Commit

This paper presents an algorithm which extends the relatively new notion of speculative concurrency control by delaying the commitment of transactions, thus allowing other conflicting transactions to continue execution and commit rather than restart. This algorithm propagates uncommitted data to other outstanding transactions thus allowing more speculative schedules to be considered. The algorithm is shown always to find a serializable schedule, and to avoid cascading aborts. Like speculative concurrency control, it considers strictly more schedules than traditional concurrency control algorithms. Further work is needed to determine which of these speculative methods performs better on actual transaction loads.

Detour-Based Mobility Coordination in DTNs

Commonly, research work in routing for delay tolerant networks (DTN) assumes that node encounters are predestined, in the sense that they are the result of unknown, exogenous processes that control the mobility of these nodes. In this paper, we argue that for many applications such an assumption is too restrictive: while the spatio-temporal coordinates of the start and end points of a node's journey are determined by exogenous processes, the specific path that a node may take in space-time, and hence the set of nodes it may encounter could be controlled in such a way so as to improve the performance of DTN routing. To that end, we consider a setting in which each mobile node is governed by a schedule consisting of a ist of locations that the node must visit at particular times. Typically, such schedules exhibit some level of slack, which could be leveraged for DTN message delivery purposes. We define the Mobility Coordination Problem (MCP) for DTNs as follows: Given a set of nodes, each with its own schedule, and a set of messages to be exchanged between these nodes, devise a set of node encounters that minimize message delivery delays while satisfying all node schedules. The MCP for DTNs is general enough that it allows us to model and evaluate some of the existing DTN schemes, including data mules and message ferries. In this paper, we show that MCP for DTNs is NP-hard and propose two detour-based approaches to solve the problem. The first (DMD) is a centralized heuristic that leverages knowledge of the message workload to suggest specific detours to optimize message delivery. The second (DNE) is a distributed heuristic that is oblivious to the message workload, and which selects detours so as to maximize node encounters. We evaluate the performance of these detour-based approaches using extensive simulations based on synthetic workloads as well as real schedules obtained from taxi logs in a major metropolitan area. Our evaluation shows that our centralized, workload-aware DMD approach yields the best performance, in terms of message delay and delivery success ratio, and that our distributed, workload-oblivious DNE approach yields favorable performance when compared to approaches that require the use of data mules and message ferries.

How Does the Cerebral Cortex Work? Developement, Learning, Attention, and 3D Vision by Laminar Circuits of Visual Cortex

A key goal of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience is to link brain mechanisms to behavioral functions. The present article describes recent progress towards explaining how the visual cortex sees. Visual cortex, like many parts of perceptual and cognitive neocortex, is organized into six main layers of cells, as well as characteristic sub-lamina. Here it is proposed how these layered circuits help to realize the processes of developement, learning, perceptual grouping, attention, and 3D vision through a combination of bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down interactions. A key theme is that the mechanisms which enable developement and learning to occur in a stable way imply properties of adult behavior. These results thus begin to unify three fields: infant cortical developement, adult cortical neurophysiology and anatomy, and adult visual perception. The identified cortical mechanisms promise to generalize to explain how other perceptual and cognitive processes work.

A Local Circuit Model of Learned Straitial and Dopamine Cell Responses under Probabilistic Schedules of Reward

Before choosing, it helps to know both the expected value signaled by a predictive cue and the associated uncertainty that the reward will be forthcoming. Recently, Fiorillo et al. (2003) found the dopamine (DA) neurons of the SNc exhibit sustained responses related to the uncertainty that a cure will be followed by reward, in addition to phasic responses related to reward prediction errors (RPEs). This suggests that cue-dependent anticipations of the timing, magnitude, and uncertainty of rewards are learned and reflected in components of the DA signals broadcast by SNc neurons. What is the minimal local circuit model that can explain such multifaceted reward-related learning? A new computational model shows how learned uncertainty responses emerge robustly on single trial along with phasic RPE responses, such that both types of DA responses exhibit the empirically observed dependence on conditional probability, expected value of reward, and time since onset of the reward-predicting cue. The model includes three major pathways for computing: immediate expected values of cures, timed predictions of reward magnitudes (and RPEs), and the uncertainty associated with these predictions. The first two model pathways refine those previously modeled by Brown et al. (1999). A third, newly modeled, pathway is formed by medium spiny projection neurons (MSPNs) of the matrix compartment of the striatum, whose axons co-release GABA and a neuropeptide, substance P, both at synapses with GABAergic neurons in the SNr and with the dendrites (in SNr) of DA neurons whose somas are in ventral SNc. Co-release enables efficient computation of sustained DA uncertainty responses that are a non-monotonic function of the conditonal probability that a reward will follow the cue. The new model's incorporation of a striatal microcircuit allowed it to reveals that variability in striatal cholinergic transmission can explain observed difference, between monkeys, in the amplitutude of the non-monotonic uncertainty function. Involvement of matriceal MSPNs and striatal cholinergic transmission implpies a relation between uncertainty in the cue-reward contigency and action-selection functions of the basal ganglia. The model synthesizes anatomical, electrophysiological and behavioral data regarding the midbrain DA system in a novel way, by relating the ability to compute uncertainty, in parallel with other aspects of reward contingencies, to the unique distribution of SP inputs in ventral SN.