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Walter Gropius was born in Berlin in 1883. The son of an architect, he studied at the Technical Universities in Munich and Berlin. He joined the office of Peter Behrens in 1910 and three years later established a practice with Adolph Meyer. For his early commissions he borrowed from the Industrial Classicism introduced by Behrens.

After serving in the war, Gropius became involved with several groups of radical artists that sprang up in Berlin in the winter of 1918. In March 1919 he was elected chairman of the Working Council for Art and a month later was appointed Director of the Bauhaus.

As war became eminent, Gropius left the Bauhaus and resumed private practice in Berlin. Eventually, he was forced to leave Germany for the United States, where he became a professor at Harvard University. From 1938 to 1941, he worked on a series of houses with Marcel Breuer and in 1945 he founded “The Architect’s Collaborative”, a design team that embodied his belief in the value of teamwork.

Gropius created innovative designs that borrowed materials and methods of construction from modern technology. This advocacy of industrialized building carried with it a belief in team work and an acceptance of standardization and prefabrication. Using technology as a basis, he transformed building into a science of precise mathematical calculations.

An important theorist and teacher, Gropius introduced a screen wall system that utilized a structural steel frame to support the floors and which allowed the external glass walls to continue without interruption.

Gropius died in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969.

Why Networks?
The space network provides the basic building block for all logistical decisions. It defines the entire set of allowable transfers to and from all points of interest. Networks are traditionally used in terrestrial transportation systems to represent physical locations and the connections between them. For space transportation networks, the concept of a location is abstracted to represent points of interest, such as orbits or Lagrange points. In addition, space networks have an additional burden of time varying properties.

Two Types of Networks
In space logistics, two types of networks are considered. The first one, termed the static network, captures the possible trajectories between locations regardless of the time. The time expanded network then builds on top of the static network by embedding time dependent aspects.

Static Network
Nodes & Arcs
The physical network, or static network, represents the set of physical locations – nodes – and the connections – arcs – between them. The static nodes represent various physical locations in space. Three types of nodes have been identified

Body nodes—such as Earth or the Moon surface locations
Orbit nodes—such as Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or Low Lunar Orbit (LLO)
Lagrange point nodes
The arcs represent the physical connections between two nodes, that is, the family of trajectories that can be traversed between two physical locations.

Sample Network

Figure 1 depicts an example of an Earth-Moon transportation network. The network consists of five Earth surface nodes and three lunar surface nodes, along with orbital nodes at low Earth orbit (LEO) and low lunar orbit (LLO), and a node at the Earth-Moon Lagrangian Point (EML1). The connections between the nodes represent the trajectories available to travel through the network. For each of the arcs there is an associated range of travel times available based on different transfer orbits. For example, the transfer from LEO to EML1 can take between 3 and 3.7 days.

Time Expanded Network
Time Dependence
The space logistics project is investigating the design of a sequence of missions that evolve over an extended period of time. In addition, certain properties of the space network are time-varying. For these reasons we introduce a time expanded network. In the time expanded network, the absolute time interval under consideration is discretized, and a copy of each static node is made for each of the time points. The nodes are connected according to the following rules:

The arc must exist in the static network.
The arc must create a connection that moves forward in time.
The arc must represent a feasible transfer, in terms of orbital dynamics.
Sample Network

Figure 2 depicts the time expanded network corresponding to the static network in Figure 1. Here, the overall time horizon in this example is 5 days and time is discretized by the day. In addition, all travel times are rounded up to the next day. For example, since it takes between 3 and 3.7 days to travel from LEO to EML1, in the time expanded network, these transfers are represented by two arcs: from LEO at day 1 to EML1 at day 4, and from LEO at day 1 to EML1 at day 5. In addition, the time expanded network representation explicitly depicts the ability to wait at a location for a period of time, shown in Figure 2 as horizontal green lines. It is important to note that Figure 2 does not display every connection in the time expanded network (the picture would become overwhelmed with connections, obscuring the relevant information).

Advantages
By representing the space network in this time expanded form, the network definition is decoupled from the celestial mechanics that govern space travel, since the existence of the arc in the time expanded network assures that a feasible transfer between two nodes exists. In addition, the time expanded network allows for a series of decisions about space logistics to be made in a holistic framework. Trade studies, such as where to create a depot, when to use the EML1 point as an intermediate transfer node, and how to utilize the moon as a staging point for Mars exploration are a natural consequence of the decision framework of the time expanded network.

Antibiotic resistance that has emerged, via adaptive evolution, among organisms that make people sick is troubling enough without this. New research shows that literally hundreds of microbial species in the soil are not merely resistant to antibiotics but gobble them up and apparently without so much as a stomach ache. Or cytoplasm ache either. They can live on nothing but antibiotics. Harvard researchers published their conclusion in Science this week. It raises an obvious question: what if such craving for antibiotics were to arise or be transfered to a microbe that causes human disease? At the same time, news accounts do tend to show the upside of such ability: antibiotics do not tend to accumulate in soil. Now we know why - but yet to come is exactly how the bacteria do it.

The WaSP / Microsoft Task Force was formed in July of 2005 to support Microsoft as the company begins increasing Web standards support in its products including the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser, developer tools including Visual Studio and ASP.NET, and designer tools such as Microsoft Expression Web Designer.

The Task Force is a highly cooperative collaboration between seemingly disparate ideologies. However, this unusual and sometimes controversial relationship has already born fruit as is evidenced by improvements to and advancement of Microsoft software as well as outreach and diplomacy initiatives between Microsoft and the Web standards community at large.

Happy Birthday, CSS! The Web Standards Project celebrates the 10th anniversary of the publication of the first Cascading Style Sheets level 1 recommendation, which was published on December 17, 1996. (The final recommendation came in 1999.) We bow deeply and graciously to Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie, the co-authors of that original document and two of the folks who were thinking about style on the Web during the earliest days of the W3C… and probably even before then.

To celebrate this milestone, the W3C has launched the CSS10 site, which gives a brief history of the technology, links to essays, a gallery of CSS-related materials, and a “hall of fame” area that recognizes important CSS-related sites. We’re honored that both WaSP and the CSS Samurai are among the sites listed, and we’re proud to be part of the history (as well as future!) of CSS.

Congratulations to the many people that have helped CSS reach this milestone!

Her chapter in Friends of Ed’s Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance, Understanding Web Accessibility is an excellent practical introduction into the barriers disabled people face when using the web. One point in particular stood out for me: Allowing text to increase in size is not enough, sometimes content can be more accessible when text size is allowed to be reduced. Take for example a person suffering with tunnel vision, the range of view is limited, so a smaller font-size allows more content into their field of vision.

The RNIB Web Access Team are hosting Shawn’s accessibility talk which covers recent developments, current issues, tools, web applications, ARIA, and the WCAG-complementary guidelines ATAG and UAAG.

Opera Chief Technology Officer and co-inventor of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie has written an open letter to the Web community explaining the reasons that Opera has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer and to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop.

Their press release says

Opera requests the Commission to implement two remedies to Microsoft’s abusive actions. First, it requests the Commission to obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop. Second, it asks the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities. The complaint calls on Microsoft to adhere to its own public pronouncements to support these standards, instead of stifling them with its notorious “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” strategy. Microsoft’s unilateral control over standards in some markets creates a de facto standard that is more costly to support, harder to maintain, and technologically inferior and that can even expose users to security risks.

ATF Manifesto
The Potential
The Web can be a truly democratic medium that enables people with disabilities in life-changing ways. Blind and visually impaired users can shop online. Those with cognitive difficulties can learn on-line at their own speed. Users with hearing impairments have access to rich media content. People can meet online, participate and socialise without prejudice and, potentially, with no barriers in their way.

In many places this is already true. But not everywhere. We believe that everyone has a right to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the Web.

The Problem
Creating web pages which apply standards-based markup and design practices is an essential step towards ensuring that content can be accessed across the widest range of user agents, devices and operating environments.

Web standards offer many specific markup elements and attributes that can aid accessibility, as they more clearly define relationships, provide alternative content and give richer meaning to what would normally just be unstructured content.

Since its inception in 1998, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has been campaigning for the general adoption of web standards. While great progress has been made in getting browser manufacturers, web designers and even some authoring tool developers to understand and leverage the advantages of standards, there still remain crucial parts of the ‘web equation’ to be tackled.

Assistive technologies (such as screen readers) that some people with disabilities use still do not consistently take full advantage of the possibilities offered by standards-compliant markup.

Sophisticated and expensive content management tools produce poor-quality, non-semantic, inaccessible markup.

A lot of authoring software (including CMS and blogging tools) cannot be easily used by people with disabilities, because they don’t conform to Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) – the W3C recommendation for web authoring tools.

Corporations and their web developers mistakenly believe that accessible web development is incompatible with branding and beauty.

Those that do care are often sold expensive and erroneous solutions by that new phenomenon: the Accessibility Snake Oil Salesman – companies claiming a thorough understanding of web accessibility issues and promising “miracle cure” systems that automatically take care of them, but only delivering solutions which are anything but accessible.

The rapid adoption of DOM scripting and AJAX introduces further problems with regards to support by Assistive Technologies.

The Accessibility Task Force believes that now is the time to address these problems. We want to highlight the daily issues faced by designers and developers which perpetuate inaccessible processes and output, and work toward the swift eradication of these problems. And we want to change the focus of accessibility from simply quieting an automated tool to addressing the real barriers encountered by real users of all abilities.

The Proposal
That all Assistive Technologies used to assist web browsing understand the whole of the HTML , XHTML, DOM and CSS recommendations.
That the manufacturers of assistive technologies transparently document their products’ capabilities and behaviour in terms of standards support and scripting.
That all Content Management Systems produce semantic, accessible, valid and lean code straight out of the box.
That CMS vendors make certain that people with disabilities can easily use their tools to produce Web content.
That web developers use web standards to produce their websites and, where possible, they test them with assistive technologies and with people with disabilities to ensure that they are both accessible and usable.
That the community remember that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are only part of the puzzle—the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) and in fact the Document Object Model (DOM) are web standards too.
The Promise
We will work ceaselessly to demonstrate that accessibility and well-formed markup can go hand-in-hand with effective interactivity, branding and aesthetics.
We will demand more from our tools. All of them. We will push for browsers, media players and assistive technology to support UAAG , and for WYSIWYG code editors, CMSes, blogging tools, converters and media tools to support ATAG .
We will impartially attempt to engage all vendors in constructive dialogue to help them support web standards and thereby enhance accessibility.
We will strive to educate corporations and their web developers, so that they can make informed decisions without falling prey to Accessibility Snake Oil Salesman .
We will work closely with other WaSP Task Forces and relevant Working Groups such as the WCAG WG to develop reliable patterns and methodologies for developing standards-compliant, interactive and accessible web sites that work consistently for users with disabilities.
Finally, when a vendor is unwilling to engage and willfully continues to pursue discriminatory practices, we will use the resources we have available to force the issue.

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