Cours élémentaire de teinture sur laine, soie, lin, chanvre et coton: et sur l'art d'imprimer les toiles /

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Overcoming Barriers to People of Color in Union Leadership

[Excerpt] It has been 10 years since the report on full participation. In preparation for the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention, the AFL-CIO, under the direction of the Executive Council’s Civil and Human Rights Committee, initiated a study to consider what other steps can be taken to address the underrepresentation of people of color in union leadership. It is hoped that this report will serve as a complement to a similar report on working women that was submitted to the Executive Council by the Executive Council’s Working Women’s Committee in March 2004, entitled, “Overcoming Barriers to Women in Organizing and Leadership.”

Collaborative Design in a Virtual Learning Environment : Three Design Experiments in Textile Teacher Education

The aim of the study was to analyze and facilitate collaborative design in a virtual learning environment (VLE). Discussions of virtual design in design education have typically focused on technological or communication issues, not on pedagogical issues. Yet in order to facilitate collaborative design, it is also necessary to address the pedagogical issues related to the virtual design process. In this study, the progressive inquiry model of collaborative designing was used to give a structural level of facilitation to students working in the VLE. According to this model, all aspects of inquiry, such as creating the design context, constructing a design idea, evaluating the idea, and searching for new information, can be shared in a design community. The study consists of three design projects: 1) designing clothes for premature babies, 2) designing conference bags for an international conference, and 3) designing tactile books for visually impaired children. These design projects constituted a continuum of design experiments, each of which highlighted certain perspectives on collaborative designing. The design experiments were organized so that the participants worked in design teams, both face-to-face and virtually. The first design experiment focused on peer collaboration among textile teacher students in the VLE. The second design experiment took into consideration end-users needs by using a participatory design approach. The third design experiment intensified computer-supported collaboration between students and domain experts. The virtual learning environments, in these design experiments, were designed to support knowledge-building pedagogy and progressive inquiry learning. These environments enabled a detailed recording of all computer-mediated interactions and data related to virtual designing. The data analysis was based on qualitative content analysis of design statements in the VLE. This study indicated four crucial issues concerning collaborative design in the VLE in craft and design education. Firstly, using the collaborative design process in craft and design education gives rise to special challenges of building learning communities, creating appropriate design tasks for them, and providing tools for collaborative activities. Secondly, the progressive inquiry model of collaborative designing can be used as a scaffold support for design thinking and for reflection on the design process. Thirdly, participation and distributed expertise can be facilitated by considering the key stakeholders who are related to the design task or design context, and getting them to participate in virtual designing. Fourthly, in the collaborative design process, it is important that team members create and improve visual and technical ideas together, not just agree or disagree about proposed ideas. Therefore, viewing the VLE as a medium for collaborative construction of the design objects appears crucial in order to understand and facilitate the complex processes in collaborative designing.

Aromatic, microporous polymer networks with high surface area generated in Friedel-Crafts-type polycondensations

A series of novel, microporous polymer networks (MPNs) have been generated in a simple, acid catalysed Friedel-Crafts-type self-condensation of A(2)B(2)- and A(2)B(4)-type fluorenone monomers. Two A2B4-type monomers with 2,7-bis(N, N-diphenylamino) A or 2,7-bis [4-(N, N-diphenylamino) phenyl] D substitution of the fluorenone cores lead to MPNs with high S(BET) surface areas of up to 1400 m(2) g(-1). Two MPNs made of binary monomer mixtures showed the highest Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface areas S(BET) of our series (SBET of up to 1800 m(2) g(-1)) after washing the powdery samples with supercritical carbon dioxide. Total pore volumes of up to 1.6 cm(3) g(-1) have been detected. It is observed that the substitution pattern of the monomers is strongly influencing the resulting physicochemical properties of the microporous polymer networks (MPNs).

Identification and mapping of amplified fragment length polymorphism markers linked to shell color in bay scallop, Argopecten irradians irradians (Lamarck, 1819)

Amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLP) were used to study the inheritance of shell color in Argopecten irradians. Two scallops, one with orange and the other with white shells, were used as parents to produce four F-1 families by selfing and outcrossing. Eighty-eight progeny, 37 orange and 51 white, were randomly selected from one of the families for segregation and mapping analysis with AFLP and microsatellite markers. Twenty-five AFLP primer pairs were screened, yielding 1138 fragments, among which 148 (13.0%) were polymorphic in two parents and segregated in progeny. Six AFLP markers showed significant (P < 0.05) association with shell color. All six loci were mapped to one linkage group. One of the markers, F1f335, is completely linked to the gene for orange shell, which we designated as Orange1, without any recombination in the progeny we sampled. The marker was amplified in the orange parent and all orange progeny, but absent in the white parent and all the white progeny. The close linkage between F1f335 and Orange1 was validated using bulk segregation analysis in two natural populations, and all our data indicate that F1f335 is specific for the shell color gene, Orange1. The genomic mapping of a shell color gene in bay scallop improves our understanding of shell color inheritance and may contribute to the breeding of molluscs with desired shell colors.

An assessment of phytoplankton primary productivity in the Arctic Ocean from satellite ocean color/in situ chlorophyll-abased models

We investigated 32 net primary productivity (NPP) models by assessing skills to reproduce integrated NPP in the Arctic Ocean. The models were provided with two sources each of surface chlorophyll-a concentration (chlorophyll), photosynthetically available radiation (PAR), sea surface temperature (SST), and mixed-layer depth (MLD). The models were most sensitive to uncertainties in surface chlorophyll, generally performing better with in situ chlorophyll than with satellite-derived values. They were much less sensitive to uncertainties in PAR, SST, and MLD, possibly due to relatively narrow ranges of input data and/or relatively little difference between input data sources. Regardless of type or complexity, most of the models were not able to fully reproduce the variability of in situ NPP, whereas some of them exhibited almost no bias (i.e., reproduced the mean of in situ NPP). The models performed relatively well in low-productivity seasons as well as in sea ice-covered/deep-water regions. Depth-resolved models correlated more with in situ NPP than other model types, but had a greater tendency to overestimate mean NPP whereas absorption-based models exhibited the lowest bias associated with weaker correlation. The models performed better when a subsurface chlorophyll-a maximum (SCM) was absent. As a group, the models overestimated mean NPP, however this was partly offset by some models underestimating NPP when a SCM was present. Our study suggests that NPP models need to be carefully tuned for the Arctic Ocean because most of the models performing relatively well were those that used Arctic-relevant parameters.

Marine Bacteria As Source Of Pigment For Application As Dye In Textile Industry

The textile industry is one amongst the rapidly growing industries world wide, which utilizes enormous amounts of synthetic dyes. Consequently, the effluent from these textile industries poses serious threat to the environment which is often very difficult to treat and dispose. This has become a very grave problem in environment conservation and hence natural pigments have drawn the attention of industry as safe alternative. In this context, in the present study an attempt was made to bioprospect marine bacteria towards isolation of a suitable and ideal pigment that could be used as a natural dye. A marine Serratia sp. BTWJ8 was recognized to synthesize enormous amounts of a prodigiosin-like pigment. The pigment was isolated and characterized for various properties. The pigment was evaluated for application as a dye in the textile industry. Results of the studies indicated that this pigment could be used as a natural dye for imparting red-yellow colour to various grades of textile materials. The colour was observed to be stable after wash performance studies

Role of color in face recognition

One of the key challenges in face perception lies in determining the contribution of different cues to face identification. In this study, we focus on the role of color cues. Although color appears to be a salient attribute of faces, past research has suggested that it confers little recognition advantage for identifying people. Here we report experimental results suggesting that color cues do play a role in face recognition and their contribution becomes evident when shape cues are degraded. Under such conditions, recognition performance with color images is significantly better than that with grayscale images. Our experimental results also indicate that the contribution of color may lie not so much in providing diagnostic cues to identity as in aiding low-level image-analysis processes such as segmentation.