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Discusses the use of silhouette imaging in correcting the feeding and orienting of parts in assembly operations. Using sensors that can sense edge points via data transitions, edge detecting algorithms can be employed to orient parts or gauge discrimination. Outlines the advantages and disadvantages of dealing with a binary image in relation to greyscale image analysis. Examines the various sensor technologies that can be used to create an article silhouette and looks at the benefit of using a backlit CCD array system where the silhouette of a transparent or opaque article is required.

The computer is every day looming larger on the professional horizon of every librarian. Instruction librarians, too, must confront the realities and potential of the computer in their efforts to bring the library into the pedagogical mainstream of their institutions. Reference Services Review takes this opportunity to offer three different perspectives on how the computer relates to library instruction. Carol Tobin, Princeton University, discusses the impact that access to online bibliographic databases has on the instructional program of a library; Harriet Tippet, Lawrence University, addresses word processing applications for producing instructional materials and the use of the computer as a management tool for library instruction data; and Patricia Culkin and Elizabeth Walker focus on computer assisted instruction.

Of all of the educational tools used in social studies education, by far the most critiqued is the standard basal textbook. If used properly, nevertheless, textbooks are not as problematic as critics claim and can be a useful tool in the teaching and learning of social studies and history. Based on the focus found in the Common Core Standards on informational texts, the practicality of using textbooks is especially true in today’s educational environment. This article was written with the goal of helping social studies teachers develop lessons that assist their students in meeting the requirements of the Common Core. One specific strategy is described to offer teachers an example of how to effectively use their textbook in a Common Core focused and social studies content-based activity. A sample lesson, based on an inquiry activity titled “Hollywood or History,” is provided.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

This paper aims to examine the prospects of a Boeing recovery following disasters in 2019 and 2020. While some companies have navigated successful journeys through the process of reputational recovery following self-inflicted pain, Boeing faces significant reputational and global complications which have greatly prolonged the recovery process.

This paper is based on a case study approach examining the recovery process for Boeing, considering the safety issues of 2019 and the pandemic crisis during 2020. Although the Covid-19 spread was certainly a black swan event, Boeing had already inflicted a great deal of damage upon its business and reputation because of the 737 Max. This paper examines their recovery process thus far by using a four-step recovery model of replace, restructure, redevelop and re-brand that has been implemented in previous corporate recoveries.

When examining the corporate recovery process, though the four-step approach is a model that can work across industries, there are some challenges depending on corporate specifics. The major challenge with Boeing is the ongoing reputational concerns regarding safety combined with the new global reality because of the Covid-19 pandemic. A full corporate recovery will require attention to each of these four prongs of the process, stretched out over several years. Any missteps along the way will only prolong the pain for one of history’s most historic and influential manufacturers.

While several publicly traded companies have overcome significant obstacles over the past five years in the quest to regain trust within the marketplace, Boeing continues to face strong headwinds. Using previous examples of corporate recovery provides an interesting case analysis of what to do and what not to do during the corporate recovery process and provides a unique blueprint to what might bring Boeing back from the brink.

In 1967, Robert N. Bellah famously argued that there existed an “American Civil Religion,” which was distinct from churchly religion and captured the “transcendental” dimension of the American project. In this chapter, I revisit the civil religion concept and reconstruct it along more Weberian lines. Specifically, I argue that the civil religion tradition is one of three competing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship between religion and politics in America; the other two are religious nationalism and liberal secularism. Whereas liberal secularism envisions a complete separation of the religious and political value spheres, and religious nationalism longs for their (re)unification, civil religion aims for a mediating position of partial separation and productive tension. Following Bellah, I argue that the two central strands of the civil religion tradition have been covenant theology and civic republicanism. The body of the chapter sketches out the development of the tradition across a series of national foundings and refoundings, focusing on the writings of leading civil theologians from John Winthrop and John Adams through Abraham Lincoln and John Dewey to Martin King and Barack Obama. The conclusion advances a normative argument for American civil religion – and against liberal secularism and religious nationalism. I contend that liberalism is highly inclusive but insufficiently solidaristic; that religious nationalism is highly solidaristic but insufficiently inclusive; and that only civil religion strikes a proper balance between individual autonomy and the common good.

In 1990 we compiled an annotated bibliography of official state lists of endangered, threatened, and rare species. In gathering information for that bibliography, which appeared in Reference Services Review in Spring 1991, we found numerous unofficial sources of state lists, such as those developed by universities, institutes, and Natural Heritage Programs, which also provide valuable information on statuses of endangered, threatened, and rare species. A comprehensive search for unofficial lists results in this second bibliography.

Disability as a consequential social characteristic has not drawn sociologists’ contemporary attention in the way that race, class, gender, and sexuality have. In order to understand why, it is instructive to analyze how disability has been framed since the inception of the American Sociological Society, now known as the American Sociological Association.

Our findings are based on an intensive, systematic, and comprehensive content analysis of 10 years of the Proceedings from the American Sociology Society’s Annual Meetings, 1906–1915.

Three key themes emerged from the content analysis of the proceedings of the first 10 years of the papers delivered at the Annual Meetings (1906–1915). First, people with disabilities were largely invisible in those papers. Second, influenced strongly by a social reform agenda which stressed progress and the powerful eugenics movement of the time, those early presenters who addressed people with disabilities in their papers vilified them. Third, their denigration was met largely with silence in the printed commentary which followed in the proceedings.

In order to understand the present limited attention to disability, researchers need to know the historical context.

Although there have been a number of thoughtful books, edited volumes and review essays exploring the history of the discipline of sociology, none of them have attended to the history of disability within the field. This paper contributes to that historical understanding.