Come join Sigma Tau Delta & help us plan our Spring activities.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Abe, the Japanese government is proactively working to solve the major challenges Japan faces. Consul-General Kato discusses these challenges and outlines Japan’s path for-ward to prosperity.

Aki Kawamura’s talk will center on Kankuro Kudos, a popular screenwriter, dramatist, director and actor in Japan. His latest film, King of Apology, recently premiered in New York City.

Kawamura researches contemporary American literature and culture in the context of postmodern and ethnic studies, especially 9/11 novels like works by Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Safran Foer, and politics of hip hop culture. He has been recently interested in Japanese artists influenced by American culture, and would like to introduce them to American society as a Japanese researcher specializing in American studies.



A reception will follow the talk.



Sponsored by the American Studies Program 

Title:  On a thermodynamically consisted Stefan problem with variable surface energy

Abstract:  Given a filtration of a simplicial complex we can construct a series of invariants called the persistent homology groups of the filtration. In this talk we will give a basic introduction to the theory of persistence and explain how these ideas can be used in data analysis.

"New Lines"

Abstract: In the twenty years that have passed since the fabled Friday Harbor meetings of November 1993, where GIS practitioners and critical human geographers agreed to a cease-fire, the GIS & Society agenda has been reflected upon, pushed forward, and diffracted in few (but intellectually significant) arenas. Critical, participatory, public participation, and feminist GIS have given way more recently to qualitative GIS, GIS and non-representational theory, and the spatial digital humanities. Traveling at the margins of these efforts has been a kind of social history of mapping and GIS. And while GIScience has been conversant and compatible with many of these permutations in the GIS & Society agenda, a social history of mapping and GIS (as signaled most directly by John Pickles in 2004) has perhaps the least potential for tinkering with GIScience practice (see recent conversation between Agnieszka Leszczynski and Jeremy Crampton in 2009). Perhaps this disconnect is growing, as can be witnessed in the feverish emergence of a ‘big data’ analytics/representation perspective within the contemporary GISciences (alongside the growth of funding paths around cyberinfrastructure). What then is the relevance and role of a social history of GIS for GIScience practice? In this presentation, I sketch and reflect upon a diversity of efforts that address this question.