That Boy Red by R. Gilmore

Gilmore, Rachna. That Boy Red. Toronto: HarperTrophy, 2011. Print. That Boy Red by Canadian author Rachna Gilmore is an engaging, lightly humorous, episodic novel suitable for young readers ages 8 to 12. Set on a Prince Edward Island farm during the Great Depression, it tells the story of the MacRae family through the focal character of middle child Red, who is about the same age as the book's intended readers. Red is an excitable lad whose quick temper and jocularity often land him in trouble he later regrets. One immediately thinks of comparisons–Anne Shirley, Tom Sawyer, or Brian O'Connal in Who Has Seen the Wind–but the similarities only go so far. Red's unique quality is a moral compass (coupled with sensible familial guidance) that always steers him back to thoughtfulness and the tone of the book is lighter than some of these classics, being driven more by dialogue than poetic descriptions. The novel's six episodes are distributed throughout the seasons of a calendar year, and each one focuses on Red's relationship with a different family member, which provides Gilmore the opportunity to develop the family as a cast of rounded characters. Ellen, the eldest, is the teacher at the local school and lives with the family. Alex and Mac are Red's older brothers; Alex is away at college, while Mac is slightly older than Red and shares a good-natured rivalry with him. Lucy, or Bunch for short, is the youngest of the family. Other characters, such as Red's stern grandmother Cat-Less Granny, also make appearances.Red's parents are practical, hard working, and possessed of some remarkably effective parenting skills. Times are tough, but it is their steadfast ambition, indeed the family mission, to finance the advanced education of each child with the salary of an older sibling, as he or she gains well-paying employment: Ellen is paying Alex's college fees, Alex will pay Mac's fees, and so forth. The entire family has accepted this vision, but that doesn't mean Red finds school particularly motivating. For him school means enduring the taunts of other boys and studying when he would rather be tinkering in the woodshop. Ultimately, though, he comes to understand the value of education, and this is nicely figured in the final episode when Red goes up in an aeroplane. From a high vantage point, he senses instinctively the freedom of the sky, the connections between places near and far, and the way this new perspective sets him apart from others in the astonished community not brave enough to take the plunge with him. Red's ride in the sky tells us that he will eventually leave his home, but the story itself remains firmly grounded in the locales of the farm and surrounding community, which we see through the varying seasons: the swimming hole in summer, and the snow drifts on the railway tracks in winter. Much of the action involves dashing or trudging along the paths that cross the back lots of neighboring farms or riding to town to meet the train. Overlaid on these comings and goings are the routines of rural life: evening chores, family meals, and church on Sunday. These will not be the most riveting of plot events for readers looking for whizz-bang action, but they serve as a kind of rhythm for the larger story that pulls the reader along. Gilmore's language matches the scale of events in the narrative: direct, with occasional colourful turns of phrase, but not bombastic. The humour does not jump out and surprise the reader, but it serves as a kind of protective blanket that envelopes everything–even serious matters like accidents–and recalls the sense one has as a child, while still absolved of adult responsibilities, that, somehow, things will turn out all right. Gilmore neatly represents the states of mind of a young person who senses the machinations of the adult world without understanding them. In this Bildungsroman, Red begins to encounter the responsibilities of adult life at the same time that he discovers the special place his family has given him. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: John HuckJohn Huck is a metadata and cataloguing librarian at the University of Alberta. He holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and maintains a special interest in the spoken word. He is also a classical musician and has sung semi-professionally for many years.

The Circle Cast: The Lost Years of Morgan Le Fay by A. Epstein

Epstein, Alex. The Circle Cast: The Lost Years of Morgan Le Fay. Vancouver: Tradewind Books, 2010. Print. This Young Adult historical fantasy novel begins in Britannia around 500AD. Anna’s father, a Roman chieftain, is slain by the British war leader Uter Pendragon. To protect her from Uter, her mother sends her to Ireland with a new identity as Morgan. Morgan is a strong female character who will appeal to female readers. She is a survivor who adapts well to new surroundings and situations.  Her driving force is her mission to return one day to Britain to avenge her father’s death. The story follows her life in Ireland. She lives first with a great warrior clan that is related to her family by marriage. When a neighbouring clan defeats them, she is captured and lives as the slave of Buanann, the clan’s magical wise woman. She escapes and flees to a Christian settlement where she stays until she marries the landowner’s son Conall. As his wife, she teaches him and his men British war tactics which help him to become a great warrior with extensive land and large numbers of men. She eventually returns to Britain with a small group of Conall’s warriors to seek vengeance on Uter and in the end helps to protect her birthplace from invading Saxons. The novel is filled with elements of magic and connections to the earth as we learn of Morgan’s growing prowess with casting spells. This period of her life has previously not been mentioned in Irish mythology, and provides one interpretation of how and why she became known as ‘Le Fay’. The book is an aside to an otherwise familiar story. The Enchanter, whom we know as Merlin, plays a small role. In the epilogue, the character of Arthur is introduced and leaves the story open to a sequel. In mythical legend, Arthur and Morgan are half-siblings. The short prologue uses a style of writing that is quite poetic and unlike most of the rest of the text. This may not appeal to some readers and may discourage them from continuing with the rest of the book, which is presented in a more easily digestible style. The story includes scenes of sex and violence that may not appeal to all readers. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Trish ChatterleyTrish is a Public Services Librarian for the John W. Scott Health Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. In her free time she enjoys dancing, gardening, and reading books of all types.

The role of basic laboratory services in strengthening primary health centres

Several proposals have been initiated under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) to strengthen public health services in the country. Primary health centres (PHCs) are the basic structure for implementing primary healthcare, and basic laboratory services are essential not only for strengthening PHCs but also for their sustainability. In order to accomplish these, possibilities within NRHM are discussed.

National Rural Health Mission: the current scenario

A Factor Analysis Study on the Mission Characteristics of Taiwanese Community Colleges

There is a certain degree of assumption that a mission statement reveals the utmost vision of an organization in terms of what it seeks to become and who it wants to serve. To examine the general public’s identification of the stated missions of the Taiwanese community colleges, a national survey was conducted to assess people’s knowledge of institutional missions of these colleges. Four hundred twenty-one effective responses were received, and data were analyzed mainly by exploratory factor analytic methods. Six factors, including “Human and Social Capital Enhancement,” “Value and Action Construction,” “Individual and Community,” “Personal Learning and Growth,” “Society and Culture,” and “Public Participation and Action” were extracted, and these factors indicated that perspectives regarding missions of community colleges in Taiwan might greatly divergent. The Pearson Product-Moment correlation coefficient was used to investigate the relationships between missions identified and socio-demographic characteristics. The data showed that age, income, knowledge of community colleges, and enrollment experiences possessed significant degrees of association with the factors extracted. More research with different methods was encouraged to further study people’s perception of the community college model in Taiwan in order to enhance its accountability.

Selected Papers from i-SAIRAS 2010

This special issue features the selected papers from i-SAIRAS 2010 (The 10th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space) at Sapporo, Japan on August 29 - September 1, 2010), which explores the technology of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automation and Robotics, and its application in space. In the AI domain, in particular, i-SAIRAS focuses on the following issues: (1) spacecraft autonomy (e.g., inboard software for mission planning and execution, resource management, fault protection, science data analysis, guidance, navigation and control, smart sensors, testing and validation, architectures); (2) mission operations automation (e.g., decision support tools for mission planning and scheduling, anomaly detection and fault analysis, innovative operations concepts, data visualization, secure commanding and networking); (3) design tools and optimization methods, electronic documentation; and (4) AI methods (e.g., automated planning and scheduling, agents model-based reasoning, machine learning and data mining).In the selection process for JACIII (Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics), 13 papers were firstly nominated from 133 oral presentation papers as outstanding AI-related papers by i-SAIRAS International Committee, and 6 papers were finally accepted through the two-stages of pear-reviews. All papers were reviewed by three reviewers. As the brief introduction of these papers, the paper by Mark Johnston and Mark Giuliano presents an architecture called MUSE (Multi-User Scheduling Environment) to integrate multi-objective evolutionary algorithms with existing domain planning and scheduling tools. The second paper by Amdeo Cesta et al. discusses general lessons learned from a series of deployed planning and scheduling systems. The third paper by Alessandro Donati et al. spotlights specific achievements and trends in the area of spacecraft diagnosis and mission planning and scheduling. The fourth paper by Cedric Cocaud and Takashi Kubota proposes the system that provides position and attitude information to a spacecraft during its approach descent and landing phase toward the surface of an asteroid. The firth paper by Tomohiro Harada et al. studies On-Board Computer which evolves computer programs through the bit inversion and analyzes its robustness to the bit inversion. Finally, the last paper by Masayuki Otani et al. explores the distributed control of the multiple robots which may be broken in the assembly of space solar power satellite. The editor hopes that these papers would help for readers to capture the state-of-art of AI technology in space.

Multi-Objective Scheduling for Space Science Missions

We have developed an architecture called MUSE (MultiUser Scheduling Environment) to enable the integration of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms with existing domain planning and scheduling tools. Our approach is intended to make it possible to re-use existing software, while obtaining the advantages of multi-objective optimization algorithms. This approach enables multiple participants to actively engage in the optimization process, each representing one or more objectives in the optimization problem. As initial applications, we apply our approach to scheduling the James Webb Space Telescope, where three objectives are modeled: minimizing wasted time, minimizing the number of observations that miss their last planning opportunity in a year, and minimizing the (vector) build up of angular momentum that would necessitate the use of mission critical propellant to dump the momentum. As a second application area, we model aspects of the Cassini science planning process, including the trade-off between collecting data (subject to onboard recorder capacity) and transmitting saved data to Earth. A third mission application is that of scheduling the Cluster 4-spacecraft constellation plasma experiment. In this paper we describe our overall architecture and our adaptations for these different application domains. We also describe our plans for applying this approach to other science mission planning and scheduling problems in the future.

Deploying Interactive Mission Planning Tools- Experiences and Lessons Learned -

This article contains a retrospective overview of connected work performed for the European Space Agency (ESA) over a span of 10 years. We have been creating and rening an AI approach to problem solving and injected a seriesof deployedplanningand schedulingsystemswhich have innovated agency’s mission planning practice. Goal of the paper is to identify general lessons learned and guidelines for work practice of the future. Specically, the work dwells on issue related to some key points that have contributed to strengthen the effectiveness of our approach: the attention to domain modeling, the constraintbased algorithmsynthesis, andthe developmentof an endto-end methodology to eld applications. Desirable features of space applications useful for protable and successful deployment on different ground segment operations are also discussed.

Benefits of Using Innovative Tools for Diagnostics and Planning in ESA Mission Operations

Future European Space Agency (ESA) space missions are demanding and driving new operations concepts for increased on-board autonomy, for flexible and robust planning and scheduling services, and for ground capabilities to agglomerate and process a huge amount of downlinked data (e.g., tens of thousands of telemetry parameters) to extract high-level information and knowledge. Mission control will have to cope with maintaining and programming challenging missions such as interplanetary probes, complex scientific missions, and a constellation of earth-observation missions. The process of innovation in these areas is already progressing at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) of the ESA, and this paper highlights specific achievements and trends in the area of spacecraft diagnosis and mission planning and scheduling by making use of a variety of technologies and techniques. The discussion then focuses on the tools’ operational impact and on the expected trends in the future.

Educational Activities with a Focus on Robot Strategies – Through the Development of LEGO Manipulation Robots –

This paper reports a robotics educational trial for 3rd grade undergraduate students in Intelligent Cooperative Systems Laboratory at The University of Tokyo. In the trial, we discussed with the students about strategies to realize automatic domino aligning or transferring robots comparing with existing manipulation robots. The students produced prototype robots to confirm the validity of their strategies. These processes prompted the students to understand the importance of adopting the best strategy to realize this target mission with the least effort.