The California Community Colleges is "a postsecondary education system" in the U.S. state of California. Despite its plural name, the system is consistently referred to in California law as a singular entity. The system includes the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges and 73 community college districts. The districts currently operate 115 accredited colleges. The online college Calbright College is not accredited. The California Community Colleges is the largest system of higher education in the United States, and third largest system of higher education in the world, serving more than 2.1 million students.Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the California Community Colleges is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the University of California system and the California State University system. Like the two other systems, the CCCS is headed by an executive officer and a governing board. The 17-member Board of Governors (BOG) sets direction for the system and is in turn appointed by the California Governor. The board appoints the Chancellor, who is the chief executive officer of the system. Locally elected Boards of Trustees work on the district level with Presidents who run the individual college campuses.The CCCS is a founding and charter member of CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, the nonprofit organization which provides extremely high-performance Internet-based networking to California's K-12 research and education community.
This primer introduces Gestalt Life Focus Communities, a concept developed by Erving Polster and furthered in the Mindful Life Focus Community. Life Focus Communities use Gestalt-based communal exploration to examine life beyond traditional psychotherapy, differing in both format and goals. The theoretical framework includes phenomenological methods, dialogical relationships, the cycle of awareness, and experiential experiments, all illustrated through vignettes from past gatherings. Embodied Relational Gestalt principles—such as embodiment, attunement, resonance, and articulation—are explained in terms of their application to these communities. Gestalt techniques like attending, amplification, and registration are described and demonstrated. The primer also discusses the design and facilitation of art-infused, culturally inclusive, and trauma-informed Life Focus Communities, detailing the structure of plenary groups, subgrouping, and reconvening. The use of arts, literature, music, dance, and film to guide group processes is highlighted, along with the benefits of belonging and autonomy in a postpandemic society.
Image denoising mitigates noise from the captured images and thereby, enhances the efficacy of high-demand vision applications, such as classification and segmentation. Hyperspectral Images (HSIs), with their multiple spectral bands, provide valuable information and make them highly applicable in real-world applications. Current Deep Learning methods mainly employ Transformers to denoise HSIs spatially and spectrally through self-attention (SA). However, SA focuses on individual samples and overlooks potential correlations within the images, indicating room for improvement. Moreover, existing Transformer-based denoising methods often fail to appropriately balance the importance of spatial and spectral features. This paper presents a novel method, VISIONARY, to address these issues by obtaining better HSI feature representation. To this end, it introduces the Spatial-Spectral-Cubic Transformer (SS-Cformer) block to address the shortcomings of Transformers in HSI denoising, particularly their inability to capture correlations within images of the same type, by introducing Global Feature Attention (GFA). Additionally, the SSC-former independently determines the optimal weightage for spatial and spectral features using attention mechanisms, leading to more effective denoising. Our method, VISIONARY is based on the integration of Transformer, U-Net and CNN architecture. Experimental results demonstrate that VISIONARY outperforms well-known methods on publicly available datasets, and our SSCformer block can be easily integrated with existing Transformer-based HSI denoising methods to improve their efficacy.
This article problematizes the imagination of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial “promised land” for mixed-race characters in Asian American fiction who struggle to find home and belonging within the continental United States. By putting critical mixed-race studies in conversation with settler-colonial studies and applying this layered lens to Asian American literary analysis, this article raises the question of whether the desire for belonging and national inclusion under multicultural liberalism necessarily erases Indigenous presence and priorities. After tracing the history of the discourse of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial utopia and situating the complex position of Hawaiʻi in Asian American studies, I briefly analyze the teleological development of Don Lee’s Country of Origin (2004) and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation (2002), where the respective multiracial protagonists’ search for home and belonging lead them to Hawaiʻi, replicating the settler-colonial imagination of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise that obscures Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) culture and presence. In contrast to these continental US-based novels, Kathleen Tyau’s A Little Too Much Is Enough (1995) highlights the interstice of Asian migrant-settler and Kanaka Maoli positionalities through its nonlinear and polyvocal stories about one Chinese-Hawaiian family. The novel demonstrates the persistence of Kanaka culture and genealogy under the conditions of settler colonialism, which seeks to repress and erase Indigeneity through compulsory assimilation and multicultural liberalism. Drawing on Kanaka geographical epistemologies, A Little Too Much Is Enough offers an alternate understanding of home and belonging for multiracial Hawaiians and their migrant-settler families.
