Deck Of Cards Research Articles

The concept of desired value as a stimulus for change in social housing in Brazil

User satisfaction has been studied extensively in social housing, but this has not had a significant impact on design factors in many cases. In recent years, such studies have included the assessment of values relating to design attributes. This paper presents a discussion on the concept of desired value in social housing, based on results of a study conducted in the region of the city of Campinas, in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. End-users of four multi-family social housing projects, based on five storey walk-up apartment blocks were asked to identify aspects of housing design, which are most valued. The research method was based on the concept of stated preferences, where approximately 200 respondents organized a list of design attributes in order of their desired values. The investigation tool was based on the analogy of a deck of cards. Data was statistically analyzed and a general importance index was created for each of the value attributes. Results showed that security was the main preference aspect. Analysis of general results indicates a list of possible improvements to projects with regard to value delivery to end-users at little or no costs. To contribute towards a process of incremental improvements to social housing models in the State of São Paulo, the results of the case study can be applied by agents of the local housing provision system, in conjunction with a conceptual framework of data on housing quality indicators.

The ABCs of HVT: Key Lessons from High Value Targeting Campaigns Against Insurgents and Terrorists

The use of high value targeting (HVT)—using military and police forces to kill or capture leaders of insurgent and terrorist groups—has increased exponentially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. HVT operations have become the primary tool of the United States for combating Al Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide, and while these operations have eliminated scores of terrorists and insurgents from the battlefield, they haven't always led to strategic success. Utilizing a data set of 20 distinct HVT campaigns dating back to the end of World War II, this article will highlight the positive and negative effects of HVT efforts throughout history and identify six key lessons from past campaigns and their implications for the United States. The body of the paper looks at the important issues inherent to any HVT campaign, including the benefits of having a local force carry out the campaign, the importance of incorporating HVT into a larger counterinsurgency strategy, and the necessity of understanding the dynamics of the group being targeted. The United States has historically struggled in all of these areas, leading to difficulties in achieving success through HVT operations, but these historical lessons also provide opportunities for progress. The article concludes with important implications for the United States and identifies strategies for improvement in these pivotal areas, including expanding relationships with host governments, leveraging new technologies, and contemplating unique ways to approach target sets. Failure to make these changes, the article argues, will leave the United States with the same strategic failures it had with the infamous “deck of cards” in Iraq, where the focus on HVT at the expense of counterinsurgency both helped create and failed to stop the spread of a nationwide insurgency.

Pope's Game of Ombre

IT is astonishing that an entirely satisfactory reconstruction of the card game in Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic satire has eluded scholars for so long.1 Most violate close reading of the text, the rules of the game, or the tenets of good card play. Long ago William K. Wimsatt insisted that a complete reconstruction was impossible, and cautioned that by the extent to which any reconstruction exceeded the evidence given, it could have no critical bearing on the poem.2 Wimsatt might have conceded two corollaries: that a complete reconstruction was unnecessary, and that by the extent to which any reconstruction falls short of the evidence given—in that it ignores several particularly opaque lines—it has diminished critical bearing. The task is not that daunting. The first logical step is to examine the complete forty-card Ombre deck from which the three nine-card hands are dealt. Spanish Ombre deck From a knowledge of the rules and good card play, along with a close reading of Pope’s text—the only tools available, but tools available to Pope’s contemporary audience—four important but enormously simplifying inferences lead to an incomplete but entirely satisfactory reconstruction: Sixteen of the twenty-seven cards dealt are fully identified—all twelve court cards, three of the four aces, and one of the twenty-four plebeian cards. Pope’s simplified card deck—back into which the three hands must fit—will look like this.

Analysis of the SNaP™ Wound Care System, a Negative Pressure Wound Device for Treatment of Diabetic Lower Extremity Wounds

Negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) has become a widely used modality for the treatment of complex wounds. However, patient compliance is frequently difficult due to the need to carry a bulky, noisy electronic device. In this issue of Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, Lerman and colleagues describe a new system that uses no electricity and is about the size of a deck of cards. It is designed to be stored in the clinic and applied almost as simply as a standard wound dressing. Four cases are reviewed to demonstrate that the device is efficacious and helps to encourage patient compliance. No statistically significant outcomes are presented. By removing compliance barriers, this device may encourage more frequent NPWT applications for small wounds.

Natural constructal emergence of vascular design with turbulent flow

Here, we show that vascular design emerges naturally when a volume is bathed by a single stream in turbulent flow. The stream enters the volume, spreads itself to bathe the volume, and then reconstitutes itself as a single stream before it exits the volume. We show that in the pursuit of a smaller global flow resistance and larger volumes, the flow architecture changes stepwise from a stack of identical elements bathed in parallel flow (like a deck of cards) to progressively more complex structures configured as trees matched canopy to canopy. The transition from one architecture to the next occurs at a precise volume size, which is identified. Each transition marks a decrease in the rate at which the global flow resistance increases with the volume size. This decrease accelerates as the volume size increases. The emergence of such vasculatures for turbulent flow is compared with the corresponding phenomenon when the flow is laminar. To predict this design generation phenomenon is essential to being able to scale up the designs of complex flow structures, from small scale models to life size models. The constructal law is a bridge between the principles of physics and biology.

A cultural history of tarot: from entertainment to esotericism

The enigmatic and richly illustrative tarot deck reveals a host of strange and iconic mages, such as The Tower, The Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man and The Fool: over which loom the terrifying figures of Death and The Devil. The 21 numbered playing cards of tarot have always exerted strong fascination, way beyond their original purpose, and the multiple resonances of the deck are ubiquitous. From T. S. Eliot and his 'wicked pack of cards' in 'The Waste Land' to the psychic divination of Solitaire in Ian Fleming's 'Live and Let Die'; and from the satanic novels of Dennis Wheatley to the deck's adoption by New Age practitioners, the cards have in modern times become inseparably connected to the occult. They are now viewed as arguably the foremost medium of prophesying and foretelling. Yet, as the author shows, originally the tarot were used as recreational playing cards by the Italian nobility in the Renaissance. It was only much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, that the deck became associated with esotericism before evolving finally into a diagnostic tool for mind, body and spirit. This is the first book to explore the remarkably varied ways in which tarot has influenced culture. Tracing the changing patterns of the deck's use, from game to mysterious oracular device, Helen Farley examines tarot's emergence in 15th century Milan and discusses its later associations with astrology, kabbalah and the Age of Aquarius.

Selection and Evolution with a Deck of Cards

Imparting a basic understanding of evolutionary principles to students in an active, engaging fashion can be troublesome because the logistics involved in designing experiments where students pose their own questions and use the data to test alternative hypotheses often outstrip time and financial constraints. In recent years, educators have begun publishing exercises that teach evolution using innovative, in-class experiments. This article adds to this growing forum by describing a classroom exercise that introduces the concept of evolution by natural selection in a hypothesis-driven, experimental fashion, using a deck of cards. Our standard exercise is suitable for upper-level high school and introductory biology students at the college level. In this paper, we discuss the exercise in detail and give several examples that illustrate how our games provide accessible bridges to the primary literature. Finally, we discuss how extensions of our basic exercise can be used to effectively teach advanced evolutionary concepts.

Shuffling with ordered cards

We consider a problem of shuffling a deck of cards with ordered labels. Namely we split the deck of N = kq cards (where t ≥ 1 is maximal) into k equally sized stacks and then take the top card off of each stack and sort them by the order of their labels and add them to the shuffled stack. We show how to find stacks of cards invariant and periodic under the shuffling. We also show when gcd(q, k) = 1 the possible periods of this shuffling are divisors of orderk(N − q).

Realizing a Kid's Dream of Computerized Baseball

Growing in the 1950s, we did not have PlayStations, Nintendos, or Xboxes--no video games at all. We did not have 150 channels on cable or satellite TV or VHS movies or DVDs. We had no surround sound or CDs, no cell phones, no personal computers, and no Internet. But we did have our imaginations, and we made games. One game I played was dice baseball. In college in 1970, I programmed a baseball computer game based on my dice baseball game that has been accepted in the Baseball Hall of Fame as the oldest baseball game computer code. How did this journey happen? When I was about ten years old, my cousin George introduced me to a game that involved rolling two dice; their combinations when tossed equated to hits, doubles, homers, or outs. I will always remember the dice combinations: two is a home run, three a double, four an out, and so on through twelve. The probabilities of the dice combinations with hits were comparable to a typical player's season batting average. In my junior high school days, I played this game hundreds of times and began keeping cumulative statistics for batter and team records. I played a full thirty-two-game season with all the National League teams, and I even played an All-Star game after each team had played sixteen games by selecting the batters and pitchers with the best individual records. I am convinced that the skills I learned from adding batter's records and calculating batting averages from my simple game prepared me for a business career that involves measures and metrics. It led to my authoring books and presenting seminars in over thirty international cities annually on how organizations can improve their performance. As a manager of performance management solutions at SAS, a world leader in business intelligence and analytics software, I observe incredible computer applications, ranging from biotech industry drug testing analysis to retailers forecasting line-item inventory for tens of thousands of shelf-items in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of stores. FROM CHILD'S PLAY TO GAME THEORY During my junior year at Cornell University, I took a game theory course taught by Henry David Block, a famous professor who wrote computer chess games that played against computerized chess games written by Russian professors. I majored in industrial engineering and operations research, which was a demanding curriculum on top of being a varsity football letterman. Professor Block, with his classic white Santa Claus beard, was an inspiration to me. His course, titled Bionics and Robots, was fun and less stressful than other engineering courses. For my term project in this course, I wrote a computer program using a programming language that was a blend of COBOL and FORTRAN--two ancient programming languages. The computer code applied a random number generator (in place of the two dice) for one hundred possible outcomes of batter hits that simulated every batter's at-bat for the 1969 National League season. I still have the original hard-copy print-out on that big paper with the paper-feed holes--a true relic of the past. It was programmed on IBM punch cards that you had to walk to the data center to submit your card deck. This program's deck of punch cards was a foot thick. My classmate, Pete Watzka (who, coincidently, led the 1971 Ivy League baseball conference in batting average), calibrated each player to his 1969 batting average. Our computer program also differentiated batting power between single and home-run hitters, and for each game we adjusted the players down or up based on the quality of the opposing pitcher's 1969 record. Our computer program simulated all of the games played for each National League team. Pete and I enjoyed changing the input variables of players and pitchers and seeing how the outcomes changed each time we processed a computer run. On May 13, 1970, Pete and I submitted the final computer run for the course paper. …

Secrets that only tides will tell

Evidence that the most recently discovered extrasolar planet is virtually at the end of its life is a surprise. The odds of that are very low — similar to drawing two consecutive red aces from a well-shuffled deck of cards. 'Hot Jupiter' extrasolar planets are thought to have formed at some distance from their host stars and to have migrated inwards at a later date. These planets provide new perspectives on the evolution of planetary systems, and the discovery of WASP-18b, the closest-orbiting and most extreme hot Jupiter yet, provides a glimpse of what may be a planet nearing the end of its life. With a close orbit, high mass (ten times that of Jupiter), and brief (0.94-day) orbital period, WASP-18b has the strongest tidal interaction of any known star–planet system. We appear to be seeing WASP-18b in a rare and short-lived state as it spirals towards its host star, destined to be destroyed within the host star's lifetime. Alternatively, the tidal dissipation this system — and perhaps other hot Jupiters — must be much weaker than that in our Solar System.

For - 3D ultrasound in first and second trimester - hype or helpful?

For - 3D ultrasound in first and second trimester - hype or helpful?

Puzzle—A Magical IP

Free AccessAboutSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Go to SectionFree Access HomeINFORMS Transactions on EducationVol. 9, No. 3 Puzzle—A Magical IPMartin J. ChlondMartin J. ChlondPublished Online:1 May 2009https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.1090.0035"Puzzle—A Magical IP." INFORMS Transactions on Education, 9(3), pp. 188–189 Previous Back to Top FiguresReferencesRelatedInformationCited ByTeaching Integer Programming Starting From an Energy Supply GameJeroen Beliën, Jan Colpaert, Liesje De Boeck, Johan Eyckmans, Wouter Leirens, 1 May 2013 | INFORMS Transactions on Education, Vol. 13, No. 3 Volume 9, Issue 3May 2009Pages 97-189 Article Information Supplemental Materials Metrics Downloaded 42 times in the past 12 months Information Published Online:May 01, 2009 Copyright © 2009, INFORMSCite asMartin J. Chlond, (2009) Puzzle—A Magical IP. INFORMS Transactions on Education 9(3):188-189. https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.1090.0035 Keywordspuzzlescard tricksinteger programmingPDF download

Miniature swept source for point of care Optical Frequency Domain Imaging

Point of care (POC) medical technologies require portable, small, robust instrumentation for practical implementation. In their current embodiment, optical frequency domain imaging (OFDI) systems employ large form-factor wavelength-swept lasers, making them impractical in the POC environment. Here, we describe a first step toward a POC OFDI system by demonstrating a miniaturized swept-wavelength source. The laser is based on a tunable optical filter using a reflection grating and a miniature resonant scanning mirror. The laser achieves 75 nm of bandwidth centered at 1340 nm, a 0.24 nm instantaneous line width, a 15.3 kHz repetition rate with 12 mW peak output power, and a 30.4 kHz A-line rate when utilizing forward and backward sweeps. The entire laser system is approximately the size of a deck of cards and can operate on battery power for at least one hour.

Power, Order, and the Politics of Social Policy in Central and Eastern Europe

If there is one topic on which political science ought to be able to stake out a distinct claim to fame against other social sciences, it is power. From Machiavelli in the Renaissance Florence of the Medici to Bismarck and Pope Leo XIII in late nineteenth-century Prussia and Rome, rulers and their counsellors have been studied by political scientists in how they have used their state power to establish and consolidate political order. In the post-war decades, early post-behavioural theories by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) and Steven Lukes (1974) represented seminal breakthroughs. They emphasized the hidden faces of power, suggesting how the asymmetric distribution of political and economic rights can structure relations of dominance in society above and beyond any observable decisions taken by ruling elites. Even in the absence of manifest conflict — what Lukes called the first face of power — powerholders often have the ability to stack the deck of cards of social life in ways such as to avoid the making of decisions (the second face of power), for instance through institutional design and agenda setting. Moreover, powerholders can shape the definitions of subordinate actors’ identities and interests, thereby forcing them to pre-emptively adapt to newly stacked decks of cards (the third face).

Riffle shuffles of a deck with repeated cards

We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask 'How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?'. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and asymptotic results for all decks of practical interest, e.g. a deck of 52 cards. But what if one only cares about the colors of the cards or disregards the suits focusing solely on the ranks? More generally, how does the rate of convergence of a Markov chain change if we are interested in only certain features? Our exploration of this problem takes us through random walks on groups and their cosets, discovering along the way exact formulas leading to interesting combinatorics, an 'amazing matrix', and new analytic methods which produce a completely general asymptotic solution that is remarkable accurate.

I Am the World, I'll Eat the World: A Conversation with Gary Shteyngart

28 i World Literature Today special section IAm the World, I'll Eat the World A Conversation with Gary Shteyngart Sara Brown & Armando Celayo Gary Shteyngart was bornin1972 inLeningrad,in theSovietUnion.He immigrated tothe United States with his parents when he was seven years old, lost his accent at age fourteen, andgraduated fromOberlinCollegewith a degreeinpoliticalscience. He laterreceived an MF A increative writing from Hunter College and iscurrently an associateprofessor in the creative writingprogramatColumbiaUniversity. InOctober2008 Shteyngart visitedthe Universityof Oklahoma alongwithworld renowned Soviet artist Vitaly Komar. The twowere part of a five-day lecture course entitled "RussianEmigreArtists in the Contextof AmericanCulture/'whichwas sponsoredby the Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program.Thefull-length versionofthe following interview can befound on the WLT website (wlt.ou.edu). SARA BROWN & ARMANDO CELAYO We were wondering if there's anything you're working on right now. GARY SHTEYNGART Yeah. It's a very difficultbook. It's difficultbecause it's so timely. I started two years ago, so it's about the collapse of theUnited States. Itbegins with this sortof financial collapse. SB & AC Are thereany recurringcharacters? GS None. I don't think so. I keep changing itbecause I'm so finickyabout it,but it's also a love story, which isprettydifferentfor me. It's reallyabout twopeople fromtwodifferentcultures and theirrelation ship. So, it's a very different book, in a way?it's different and it's not. I usually write about Russia in very differentapocalyptic terms,but now I don't have togo toRussia to feelapocalyptic. SB & AC Is itlike their love story's set on thebackdrop of the collapse? GS Yeah, you know, playing with thiskind of fictionthatIwrite?character for me is the most important, but I'm also very interested inaworld of ideas. Likewise, I'm very interested inday-to-day lifeindifferent countries and cultures and differentpolitics, and how politics affectsthepersonal. The book is also about the death of literature. It's set slightly in the future,and nobody can read and comprehend a sentence. There's actually one scene in the book where one character tries to read The 3 March-April 2009 i29 Unbearable LightnessofBeing toanother, and there'sa generational gap between them,about tenyears, but theother character reading justcannot comprehend one part of it.It's something I'm veryworried about, obviously. Where thingsare trending. SB & AC It seems like you've got a whole lotof idioms inyour language?especially with Absurdistan (2006), you had Misha, who's very influenced by hip-hop culture, and uses hip-hop language.Was that something thatyou consciously wanted Misha tohave so that itreflectedhis view ofAmerica? GS In someways, Absurdistanwas really in the throesofwhat happens toglobalism when the whole deck of cards collapses. At thispoint, certainly in termsof culture, there's a huge permeation ofAmerican cul ture inRussia and other countries. So I think Misha is theZagat Survey,orwhatever?he's the most global man hewants tobe. Other identitieshe carries?whether a nationalist identity,religious identity,or even his identityas his father's son?are so important tohim. The easiest thing is toopt out and tobe the world?We are the world, as thatsong used to say. I am the world, or I'll eat the world. SB & AC In an article you said something about how you identify yourself as a Soviet Jew.Consid ering theJewishdiaspora, do you thinkthathelps you tounderstand thediaspora of other cultures? GS Well, being Jewish isbeing Jewish,of course, and being in a diaspora is being in a diaspora. Well, you know, it's different. I thinkAmerican Jews are?and Iwon't speak forall of them?but I think those that are several generations behind feelcertainlymore American than anything.Now there are organizations, of course, for every ethnic group that trytokeep the spiritgoing because it's in their own interest to perpetuate. But, American Jewishism isn't religious, and it's really,maybe, a euphemism forfeelingout ofplace. SB &AC One aspect ofmigration ingeneral is that it'svery difficult to incorporate yourself fully into one culture and it'salso difficult togo back to the other culture, so you end up straddling theborder, which is likewhat? Misha doesn't end up straddling theborder, he kind of embodies theperfectperson who's absorbed everything,but yourGirshkin character,he's straddling it. Have you found that...

Impasse Tempête

227 He’d lived in Port-au-Prince his whole life, and when I first knew him he liked to mock the Macoutes and their country ways, their bumbling attempts at urban cool. “Macoute guy, he dance like this,” Pierre would say, stomping and lurching around like a man trying to fling a crab off his foot. “But you born in Port-au-Prince, you from the city, you dance like this,” and now he’d ease into a fluid shuffle and glide that made you thankful for your eyes. But that was years ago, and now he never left his house except to see the doctor. One of his legs was always numb, and the high blood pressure often made him dizzy, and with his cataracts he felt lost on the streets. “I can see far,” he told me, “I can see the mountains, but I can’t see your face. Your face just look all dusty to me.” People kept wandering through the room where we sat, his wife, kids and grandkids, nieces, nephews, stray children from the neighborhood . It wasn’t a big house, four cinderblock rooms next to the massive gulch that cut through the heart of Martissant. When he’d first shown me where he planned to build his house, this part of Martissant had looked like a demolition site, a dead landscape of scorched rubble and debris. But a bidonville had grown up around Pierre’s house, and the unpaved alley that led through the neighborhood had an official name now, Impasse Tempête. I can see the mountains, but I can’t see your face. He brought out a plastic shopping bag filled with medicines and described each one for me, Ben Fountain Impasse Tempête fiction 228 Ecotone: reimagining place going by feel, recognizing them by the shapes of the bottles. Yesterday’s storm had almost flooded his house, a spectacular lavalas that roared down the mountains and overflowed the gulch, spilling into the antheap network of alleys and paths. Nou la, Pierre said when I asked about the storm. Grâce à Dieu, nou la anko. We’re here. Thanks to God, we’re still here. The gulch held five or six feet of standing water today, a thick, sludgy roux slowly roiling in spots where jets of methane gas bubbled up from below. From the looks of the sky there would be no storms today, only the sun beating down like a punishment. We sat in the soft gray light of the room, sweating and drinking warm 7-Up. As always, he wanted to talk politics, although his mind kept wandering, shuffling past and present like a deck of cards. “You see Aristide up there?” he asked, pointing at the ceiling. “He’s sort of hard to miss.” Whenever that big black helicopter screamed across the sky, the entire city knew their president was on the move. Aristide in his helicopter, far above them all; that story had turned bitter a long time ago, and as we talked Pierre seemed to get the priest and Papa Doc confused in his mind. But soon enough he came back to the present. “That thing in Iraq,” he said now, “everybody in Haiti know they only want the oil.” “Then you guys are way ahead of Americans,” I said. “Mohammed Atta, you know that guy? He marry a Haitian girl.” “I didn’t know that.” “CIA all over Haiti looking for that girl, they take her away. Take her to Cuba, people say. Nobody see that girl again.” He took a drink of 7-Up and shook his head, faking a long look at me. “That guy Bush,” he asked with a plaintive, wondering break, “what does he want?” It was a fair question. “Like you said, Pierre, I think he wants the oil. And whatever else Cheney tells him to want.” Pierre smiled, looked down at the palms of his cracked hands. He knew how it worked, he had a veteran’s highly developed feel for Here in his cinder block house, next to that latrine of a gulch, he could smell the sickness three thousand miles away. 229 ben fountain the personal...

Community teams demonstrate motivation with a pack of cards

Community teams demonstrate motivation with a pack of cards

Bronik Returns to Vienna

In the old days, before democracy, a tobacco shop looked like a farmer's kitchen. The countertop would be crowded with unfilled jars and boxes and the glass case stained yellow from age and tobacco smoke. Peer through the glass top and you would see two shelves with small, separated piles of one or two or three packets of cigars, cigarettes, or pipe tobacco. Cuban cigars were cheap here but hard to find. Everything was hard to find. On open shelves cut into the stone wall behind the counter, there might be a few more items, only for smoking. Related goods that filled and brightened smoke shops in more frivolous citiessay London or New Yorkwere sold here in dedicated magazinas: a candy store, a paper goods store. If you wanted a tobacco pouch, you would have to go to a store for leather goods. Against the far wall in this tobacco shop, under a calendar, some pictures of working people and a few announcements printed in the alphabet of that country, would be a small wooden table with a not very clean oilcloth cover and two ungainly wooden chairs. The storekeeper, a smudge of a man with hair like a scrubbing brush, might be sitting on one of the chairs, reading a newspaper, the newspaper, drinking dense sugared coffee from a chipped cup. A friend might join him with a deck of cards. On unspecified days new supplies would be delivered by a worker with a handcart, breathing hard, while customers hurried after him and lined up at the door. On such days the storekeeper did not sit. Merchandise was stacked on the table and chairs. No

William Francis Ganong

William Francis Ganong