IOWA QUALITY BEEF SUPPLY COOPERATIVE INITIATIVE

Agribusiness, Livestock Production/Industries,

Tasting the Forbidden Fruit: Transgressions and Rebellion Against God in Paradise Lost, Night, and The Innocence of the Devil

What do a religious work published in 1667, a Holocaust memoir, and a contemporary Egyptian feminist\u27s novel have in common? These three pieces seem to have nothing in common at first glance. And there are bound to be cross-cultural situations that should be considered when reading these works in concert with one another, but nonetheless, these works do have some aspects in common. Each of the works deals with interactions between God and man

Intercept System to Edit, Control, and Analyze Packets (ISECAP)

ISECAP is an advanced packet filtering framework designed for use with the Internet Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment (ISEAGE) at Iowa State University. ISEAGE is a network security test bed where cyber attacks can be carried out for security research. ISECAP functions as a FreeBSD-based general purpose packet control system designed to alter ISEAGE network data as it is being transmitted. Scripts are interpreted by ISECAP to modify network data in real-time, assisting in the simulation and obfuscation of various network attacks tested at the ISEAGE facility. The ISECAP system is developed as a flexible tool with a forward focus on ease of extensibility to meet the future needs of ISEAGE

Video Composition, Creative Discourse, and Facilitated Freedom: A Teacher\u27s Journey to Reveal Student Potential

This research project was conducted in response to students’ lack of engagement in traditional modes of instruction and composition in a high school English Language Arts course. In order to better understand students as creative composers of knowledge, this research project asked students to engage in the video production process in collaborative groups. The research was conducted over the course of eight class periods in three different sections of Junior-level English Language Arts courses. Analysis of the data from this study reveals three important findings: 1) students respond well to creative and relevant performance assessments; 2) students’ collaborative conversations, or talk, reveal their true potential to compose; and 3) the use of multimodal composing in the high school English classroom offers opportunities for teachers to reposition themselves as facilitators of creative composition, which can invite greater student engagement. These findings have pedagogical implications for educators who wish to increase student engagement through implementation of innovative, creative, multimodal composition assessments in their classrooms

Investigation of Lead-Free Solder for Military Applications

Due to international environmental regulations that took effect in July 2006, the replacement of lead-tin solder with lead-free solder is occurring globally in the electronics industry. Although aerospace and military applications are exempt from the regulations, the shift to lead-free solder for high volume consumer products, such as cell phones, is impacting aerospace and military electronic assemblies as suppliers abandon lead-tin solder and ship only lead-free components. The switch to lead-free alloys is already being seen by defense contractors and military installations in Missouri and throughout the United States. The reliability of lead-free solder joints in military and aerospace applications is not known, resulting in new research opportunities in this area. To investigate the use and impact of lead-free solder on military applications, the University of Missouri - Rolla (UMR) has teamed with Boeing Integrated Defense Systems in St. Louis and Northrop Grumman Interconnect Technologies in Springfield to research the reliability of repaired and reworked lead-tin, lead-free, and mixed lead-tin/lead-free solder joints for military and aerospace applications. Evaluations have been performed on components soldered to test boards, including the effect of thermal cycling between -55°C and 150°C, vibration testing up to 5 g\u27s, and measuring the melting point of the various solder alloys. Results indicate a dramatic change in microstructure before and after thermal cycling that may impact long term reliability. Vibration testing indicated that the type of component and location on the test board affects reliability more than the type of solder. The melting temperature of lead-free solder with varying amounts of lead tin contamination can change significantly, up to 30°C, making rework and repair operations difficult to control. The implication of these results on the use of leadfree solder for military applications will be summarized

Effects of Long-Term Stowage on the Deployment of Bistable Tape Springs

In the context of strain-energy-deployed space structures, material relaxation effects play a significant role in structures that are stowed for long durations, for example, in a space vehicle prior to launch. Here, the deployment of an ultrathin carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) tape spring is studied, with the aim of understanding how long-duration stowage affects its deployment behavior. Analytical modeling and experiments show that the deployment time increases predictably with stowage time and temperature, and analytical predictions are found to compare well with experiments. For cases where stress relaxation is excessive, the structure is shown to lose its ability to deploy autonomously

Polynomial supertree methods in phylogenomics: algorithms, simulations and software

One of the objectives in modern biology, especially phylogenetics, is to build larger clades of the Tree of Life. Large-scale phylogenetic analysis involves several serious challenges. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to some of the open problems in this context. In computational phylogenetics, supertree methods provide a way to reconstruct larger clades of the Tree of Life. We present a novel polynomial time approach for the computation of supertrees called FlipCut supertree. Our method combines the computation of minimum cuts from graph-based methods with a matrix representation method, namely Minimum Flip Supertrees. Here, the input trees are encoded in a 0/1/?-matrix. We present a heuristic to search for a minimum set of 0/1-flips such that the resulting matrix admits a directed perfect phylogeny. In contrast to other polynomial time approaches, our results can be interpreted in the sense that we try to minimize a global objective function, namely the number of flips in the input matrix. We extend our approach by using edge weights to weight the columns of the 0/1/?-matrix. In order to compare our new FlipCut supertree method with other recent polynomial supertree methods and matrix representation methods, we present a large scale simulation study using two different data sets. Our findings illustrate the trade-off between accuracy and running time in supertree construction, as well as the pros and cons of different supertree approaches. Furthermore, we present EPoS, a modular software framework for phylogenetic analysis and visualization. It fills the gap between command line-based algorithmic packages and visual tools without sufficient support for computational methods. By combining a powerful graphical user interface with a plugin system that allows simple integration of new algorithms, visualizations and data structures, we created a framework that is easy to use, to extend and that covers all important steps of a phylogenetic analysis