Something rotten in the state of Minnesota: or the morality of backwoodsmen: 'A Simple Plan'

'A Simple Plan' is a deceptively complex and multilayered film, combining elements of Celtic mythology with the morality play and the windfall fantasy gone disastrously wrong. Despite its blending of realism and heavyhanded symbolism, and its abundant trans-textual gestures, 'A Simple Plan' is in many ways defiantly not a 90s movie: its leading characters are fashionably flawed, but they are neither sensitive, nor honourable, nor heroic; there are no startling special effects or intricate timeshifts; and it desperately gives the impression of depth, of being emphatically more than mere superficial excess. At a stretch it almost appears to be a throwback to the 1930s Production Code emphasis on the role of cinema in moral instruction; while good hardly triumphs over evil, venality is painfully and emphatically punished. But in other ways it is a quintessential late 90s film: an American/British/Japanese/German/French co-production, 'A Simple Plan' acts most palpably as a commentary on the moral, economic and social condition of the United States at the end of the American century.

UN PLAN PARA RECUPERAR LOS RÍOS Y ACUÍFEROS DEL VALLE CENTRAL

El mayor consumo de agua en Costa Rica ocurre en el Valle Central, pues ahíestá asentada cerca del 60% de la población del país. Sin embargo, la disponibilidad de agua está disminuyendo debido al crecimiento demográfico y al decreciente volumen de los ríos y aguas subterráneas.El Valle Central posee cerca de 57 ríos que podrían utilizarse como fuente de agua potable. pero sólo 10 de ellos tienen sus nacientes ubicadas en bosques primarios y son adecuadas para este fin. Las nacientes de la mayoría de los otros ríos se encuentran en tierras económicamente improductivas, tales como pastizales y áreas de bosques muy alterados, que pierden su volumen de agua durante la estación seca.Las proyecciones de crecimiento demográfico hasta el año 2100 permiten visualizar un marcado incremento en la demanda de agua, el cual se mantendrá durante los próximos 50 años. Consecuentemente, para proporcionar un adecuado suministro de agua para esta creciente población. es fundamental detener la contaminación de las aguas subterráneas y recobrar el volumen de agua de los ríos.En este trabajo se propone un plan sencillo para aumentar el volumen de agua de los ríos del Valle Central y para proteger nuestros acuíferos. Se mencionan también otros beneficios económicos y sociales que tendría la aplicación de esta propuesta.Abstract: About 60% of the popuiation of Costa Rica lives in the Central Valley where consequcntly occurs the highest water consumption. As a contrast water shortness is increasing in this country due to population growth and diminishing volume of river and subterranean water.There are about 57 rivers in the Central Valley that could be used as a source of water but only 10 of them have their headwaters inside primary forest and are appropriate for this purpose. The headwaters of mosi of the nvers lay in underproductive lands such as grass fields and very disturbed forest and bose their water volume during dry season.Population growth estimates until year 2100 allow foreseeing a high rate of increase in water demand for the next 50 years. In order to have an adequate supply of water for ihis expanding population it is mandatory to stop subterranean water pollution and to recovcr nver water volume.In this paper 1 propose a simple plan to augment the water volume of the headwaters of the rivers of the Central Valley and to protect our subterranean water sources. Other social and economic benefits that stem from this plan are also analyzed.

Progressive pronouncing French reader; on a plan new, simple and effective being a course of interesting and instructive lessons selected from the works of the best prose writers and poets, preceded by a collection of easy fables /

First published 1837.

The cook's oracle; containing receipts for plain cookery on the most economical plan for private families: also, the art of composing the most simple and most highly finished broths, gravies, soups, sauces, store sauces, and flavouring essences; pastry, preserves, puddings, etc. And an easy, certain, and economical process for preparing pickles. The quantity of each article is accurately stated by weight and measure.

First published in London in 1817 under title: Apicius redivivus; or, The cook's oracle.

A grammar of chemistry on the plan of the Rev. David Blair : adapted to the use of schools and private students, by familiar illustrations and easy experiments requiring cheap and simple instruments /

Includes index.

The cook's oracle : containing receipts for plain cookery on the most economical plan for private families, also, the art of composing the most simple, and most highly finished broths, gravies, soups, sauces, store sauces, and flavoring essences : the quantity of each article is accurately stated by weight and measure, the whole being the result of actual experiments instituted in the kitchen of a physician.

First published 1817 with title: Apicius redevivus; or, The cook's oracle.

Predicting the likelihood of QA failure using treatment plan accuracy metrics

This study used automated data processing techniques to calculate a set of novel treatment plan accuracy metrics, and investigate their usefulness as predictors of quality assurance (QA) success and failure. 151 beams from 23 prostate and cranial IMRT treatment plans were used in this study. These plans had been evaluated before treatment using measurements with a diode array system. The TADA software suite was adapted to allow automatic batch calculation of several proposed plan accuracy metrics, including mean field area, small-aperture, off-axis and closed-leaf factors. All of these results were compared the gamma pass rates from the QA measurements and correlations were investigated. The mean field area factor provided a threshold field size (5 cm2, equivalent to a 2.2 x 2.2 cm2 square field), below which all beams failed the QA tests. The small aperture score provided a useful predictor of plan failure, when averaged over all beams, despite being weakly correlated with gamma pass rates for individual beams. By contrast, the closed leaf and off-axis factors provided information about the geometric arrangement of the beam segments but were not useful for distinguishing between plans that passed and failed QA. This study has provided some simple tests for plan accuracy, which may help minimise time spent on QA assessments of treatments that are unlikely to pass.

A simple method for EPID-based in vivo dosimetry for radiotherapy treatments of head-and-neck cancers

This study used a homogeneous water-equivalent model of an electronic portal imaging device (EPID), contoured as a structure in a radiotherapy treatment plan, to produce reference dose images for comparison with in vivo EPID dosimetry images. Head and neck treatments were chosen as the focus of this study, due to the heterogeneous anatomies involved and the consequent difficulty of rapidly obtaining reliable reference dose images by other means. A phantom approximating the size and heterogeneity of a typical neck, with a maximum radiological thickness of 8.5 cm, was constructed for use in this study. This phantom was CT scanned and a simple treatment including five square test fields and one off-axis IMRT field was planned. In order to allow the treatment planning system to calculate dose in a model EPID positioned a distance downstream from the phantom to achieve a source-to-detector distance (SDD) of 150 cm, the CT images were padded with air and the phantom’s “body” contour was extended to encompass the EPID contour. Comparison of dose images obtained from treatment planning calculations and experimental irradiations showed good agreement, with more than 90% of points in all fields passing a gamma evaluation, at γ (3%, 3mm )Similar agreement was achieved when the phantom was over-written with air in the treatment plan and removed from the experimental beam, suggesting that water EPID model at 150 cm SDD is capable of providing accurate reference images for comparison with clinical IMRT treatment images, for patient anatomies with radiological thicknesses ranging from 0 up to approximately 9 cm. This methodology therefore has the potential to be used for in vivo dosimetry during treatments to tissues in the neck as well as the oral and nasal cavities, in the head-and-neck region.

Structural complexity in structural health monitoring: Design of laboratory model and test plan

Many researchers in the field of civil structural health monitoring (SHM) have developed and tested their methods on simple to moderately complex laboratory structures such as beams, plates, frames, and trusses. Fieldwork has also been conducted by many researchers and practitioners on more complex operating bridges. Most laboratory structures do not adequately replicate the complexity of truss bridges. Informed by a brief review of the literature, this paper documents the design and proposed test plan of a structurally complex laboratory bridge model that has been specifically designed for the purpose of SHM research. Preliminary results have been presented in the companion paper.

DADAISM Project Plan

The DADAISM project brings together researchers from the diverse fields of archaeology, human computer interaction, image processing, image search and retrieval, and text mining to create a rich interactive system to address the problems of researchers finding images relevant to their research. In the age of digital photography, thousands of images are taken of archaeological artefacts. These images could help archaeologists enormously in their tasks of classification and identification if they could be related to one another effectively. They would yield many new insights on a range of archaeological problems. However, these images are currently greatly underutilized for two key reasons. Firstly, the current paradigm for interaction with image collections is basic keyword search or, at best, simple faceted search. Secondly, even if these interactions are possible, the metadata related to the majority of images of archaeological artefacts is scarce in information relating to the content of the image and the nature of the artefact, and is time intensive to enter manually. DADAISM will transform the way in which archaeologists interact with online image collections. It will deploy user-centred design methodologies to create an interactive system that goes well beyond current systems for working with images, and will support archaeologists’ tasks of finding, organising, relating and labelling images as well as other relevant sources of information such as grey literature documents.

Marine Fisheries Stock Assessment Improvement Plan: report of the National Marine Fisheries Service National Task Force for Improving Fish Stock Assessments

This report argues for greatly increased resources in terms of data collection facilities and staff to collect, process, and analyze the data, and to communicate the results, in order for NMFS to fulfill its mandate to conserve and manage marine resources. In fact, the authors of this report had great difficulty defining the "ideal" situation to which fisheries stock assessments and management should aspire. One of the primary objectives of fisheries management is to develop sustainable harvest policies that minimize the risks of overfishing both target species and associated species. This can be achieved in a wide spectrum of ways, ranging between the following two extremes. The first is to implement only simple management measures with correspondingly simple assessment demands, which will usually mean setting fishing mortality targets at relatively low levels in order to reduce the risk of unknowingly overfishing or driving ecosystems towards undesirable system states. The second is to expand existing data collection and analysis programs to provide an adequate knowledge base that can support higher fishing mortality targets while still ensuring low risk to target and associated species and ecosystems. However, defining "adequate" is difficult, especially when scientists have not even identified all marine species, and information on catches, abundances, and life histories of many target species, and most associated species, is sparse. Increasing calls from the public, stakeholders, and the scientific community to implement ecosystem-based stock assessment and management make it even more difficult to define "adequate," especially when "ecosystem-based management" is itself not well-defined. In attempting to describe the data collection and assessment needs for the latter, the authors took a pragmatic approach, rather than trying to estimate the resources required to develop a knowledge base about the fine-scale detailed distributions, abundances, and associations of all marine species. Thus, the specified resource requirements will not meet the expectations of some stakeholders. In addition, the Stock Assessment Improvement Plan is designed to be complementary to other related plans, and therefore does not duplicate the resource requirements detailed in those plans, except as otherwise noted.

Understanding Simple Picture Programs

What are the characteristics of the process by which an intent is transformed into a plan and then a program? How is a program debugged? This paper analyzes these questions in the context of understanding simple turtle programs. To understand and debug a program, a description of its intent is required. For turtle programs, this is a model of the desired geometric picture. a picture language is provided for this purpose. Annotation is necessary for documenting the performance of a program in such a way that the system can examine the procedures behavior as well as consider hypothetical lines of development due to tentative debugging edits. A descriptive framework representing both causality and teleology is developed. To understand the relation between program and model, the plan must be known. The plan is a description of the methodology for accomplishing the model. Concepts are explicated for translating the global intent of a declarative model into the local imperative code of a program. Given the plan, model and program, the system can interpret the picture and recognize inconsistencies. The description of the discrepancies between the picture actually produced by the program and the intended scene is the input to a debugging system. Repair of the program is based on a combination of general debugging techniques and specific fixing knowledge associated with the geometric model primitives. In both the plan and repairing the bugs, the system exhibits an interesting style of analysis. It is capable of debugging itself and reformulating its analysis of a plan or bug in response to self-criticism. In this fashion, it can qualitatively reformulate its theory of the program or error to account for surprises or anomalies.

Le plan-séquence chez Kenji Mizoguchi

Cette recherche porte sur le langage cinématographique (ou mode de représentation) adopté par Mizoguchi en contraste avec le style classique hollywoodien. Notre hypothèse est que le refus de Mizoguchi de recourir au découpage classique et au gros-plan procurerait au spectateur une expérience de perception qui tendrait à se rapprocher de celle vécue par un spectateur de théâtre ou le témoin d’une action se déroulant dans notre monde physique. Mizoguchi a débuté son métier au début des années 1920. Le cinéma japonais venait tout juste de prendre la voie d’un art nouveau en quittant son statut de simple captation de spectacles théâtraux. L’industrie cinématographique japonaise était alors en incubation marquée par diverses influences occidentales. Nous nous pencherons plus particulièrement sur les questions stylistiques à partir du moment où le cinéma japonais s’engageait dans le parlant en imitant le style classique hollywoodien. Ce cinéma dominant devenait une norme que Mizoguchi décida de ne pas suivre pour préférer un style caractérisé par des plans-séquences. Ce style plus « neutre » et «objectif » allait être encensé par Bazin après la guerre au moment où ce dernier découvrit notamment Welles et Wyler. À partir de plusieurs extraits filmiques, nous analysons le plan-séquence mizoguchien comme substitution à une série de plans rapprochés qui se serait imposé normalement avec le style classique hollywoodien. Et ce, afin de discuter des enjeux de réalisme et de théâtralité soulevés par Bazin.

Plan de empresa “GAIA”

GAIA es un restaurante que se dedicará a ofrecer a los clientes comidas sencillas como son pizzas personales, hamburguesas, calzones, empanadas. Además, su diferencial está en ofrecer un espacio de relajación y tranquilidad mediante una decoración adecuada, un servicio de atención al cliente especial y el arte consciente a través de colectivos.

Plan de empresa Huevos del Rancho

El plan de empresa, nombrado Huevos del Rancho (HDR) es un proyecto que nació a partir del emprendimiento de dos estudiantes de administración, con ganas de implementar la teoría estudiada en un proyecto real. Esta iniciativa que al principio fue una idea simple, terminó convirtiéndose en un proyecto de vida. Huevos del Rancho se dedica a la producción, distribución y comercialización de huevos orgánicos. Sus productos y procesos cuentan con valores agregados y diferenciados que han permitido generar un modelo único de producción y de distribución del producto en los mercados objetivos. A pesar de que HDR ya inició operaciones en esta actividad de manera empírica en el 2010, sus resultados brindaron a los socios una visión del verdadero potencial que recaía en este negocio. El principal fundamento que se inculcó en los socios fue empezar a pensar en grande, no en negocio, sino en empresa.