An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...

In this article, based on mutual appropriation of concepts from cultural-historical activity theory (especially Andy Blunden’s works) and Iranian Marxist tradition Kamal Khosravi’s ideas), I have elaborated two crises which, we believe, are main characteristics our historical stage other manifestations them: (a) crisis perspective human self-emancipation (b) in emancipatory social science. Cris...

Qualification of employees who operate technological processes directly influences the safety of production. However, the employees’’ qualification cannot completely exclude human factor. Today, there are many technologies that can minimize or eliminate human factor impact on production safety ensuring. The augmented reality technology is an example of this technology. Nowadays, the augmented r...

This paper addresses a special problem with historical document images where handwritten characters from the reverse side appear as noise on the front side and even interfere with the front side characters. A novel method to extract clear textual images from interfering and overlapping areas of text is presented here. The proposed algorithm is interesting in that, with an observation that the e...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

We describe ongoing work aiming at deriving a multilingual controlled vocabulary (German, French, Italian) from the combined subject indices from 22 volumes of a large-scale critical edition of historical documents. The controlled vocabulary is intended to support editors in assigning descriptors to new documents and to support users in retrieving documents of interest regardless of the spellin...

Post-employment restrictive covenants in the context of employment relationships have long posed challenges for employers. Both the nature of the agreement and the context in which it is entered into impact the enforceability of restrictive covenants. The lack of a unified or “national” body of law on restrictive covenants within the US further complicates the issue. For example, in some states...

From a biological-genealogical perspective, the history of mankind appears as a steady continuous flow of thousands of millions of individual lives upon which no collective periodization can be imposed. In contrast, the history of the social production of man characteristically moves in stages, that is, distinctive periods of time. The conceptual model of historical generations leads to the mee...