Religion and Party Realignment: Are Catholics Realigning into the Republican Party?

This thesis examines the influence of religion on party realignment in the United States focusing on Catholic voting behavior. A statistical analysis utilizing bivariate analysis and logistical regressions examines if religion and party realignment is an ecumenical trend expanding beyond Evangelicals to Catholics. It measures scientifically the party trends of the Catholic voter. With data pooled from the National Election Studies from 1960 to 2004, it tests the hypothesis that church attending Catholics are realigning over time into the Republican Party both in vote choice and party identification, because of their pro-life position on abortion. The analysis shows that church attending Catholics have dealigned from the Democratic Party over time because of their pro-life position on abortion. The thesis is a model for examining the religion and party realignment question for other traditional Democratic religious denominations such as African-American Evangelicals and Jews

Exploring people’s beliefs about the experience of time

Philosophical debates about the metaphysics of time typically revolve around two contrasting views of time. On the A-theory, time is something that itself undergoes change, as captured by the idea of the passage of time; on the B-theory, all there is to time is events standing in before/after or simultaneity relations to each other, and these temporal relations are unchanging. Philosophers typically regard the A-theory as being supported by our experience of time, and they take it that the B-theory clashes with how we experience time and therefore faces the burden of having to explain away that clash. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether these intuitions about the experience of time are shared by the general public. We asked directly for people’s subjective reports of their experience of time – in particular, whether they believe themselves to have a phenomenology as of time’s passing – and we probed their understanding of what time’s passage in fact is. We find that a majority of participants do share the aforementioned intuitions, but interestingly a minority do not

Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future : The Development of Past-Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but prefer their pleasure to lie in the past, and do not predict that others’ levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible

Analyses of Kennedy Space Center Tropospheric Doppler Radar Wind Profiler Data for Space Launch System Program Certification

This paper documents the methodology and results of analyses used to certify the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Tropospheric Doppler Radar Wind Profiler (TDRWP) as input to launch commit evaluations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations (NASA) Space Launch System Program (SLSP). These analyses, and the requirements that they address, were designed by the Marshall Space Flight Center Natural Environments Branch (MSFC NE) to certify that the TDRWP provides data of sufficient accuracy and resolution for SLSP, and that the instrument provides enough reliability to support Day-of- Launch Initialization Loads Update (DOLILU) operations. On day-of-launch (DOL), space launch vehicle operators have used data from wind profilers to reverse a previous GO call in prelaunch loads and trajectory assessments due to the profilers capability to quickly identify changes in the wind profile within a rapidly changing wind environment. Certification of the TDRWP would allow SLSP to use DOL wind data generated by the TDRWP to design the vehicle trajectory and to verify trajectory and load constraints during the countdown for launch commit decision

New Efforts to Update NASA's Global Reference Atmospheric Models (GRAM)

NASA is at the forefront of planetary exploration. The inability to test planetary spacecraft in the flight environment prior to a mission requires engineers to rely on ground-based testing and models of the vehicle and expected environments. One of the most widely used engineering models of the atmosphere for many NASA projects is the Global Reference Atmospheric Model (GRAM) developed by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). Over the past decade GRAM upgrades and maintenance have depended on inconsistent and waning project-specific support. Recently, the NASA Science Mission Directorate agreed to provide funding support in Fiscal Year 2018 and 2019 to upgrade the GRAMs. This poster summarizes the objectives, tasks and milestones of this effort

New Efforts to Update NASA's Global Reference Atmospheric Models (GRAM)

NASA is at the forefront of planetary exploration. The inability to test planetary spacecraft in the flight environment prior to a mission requires engineers to rely on ground-based testing and models of the vehicle and expected environments. One of the most widely used engineering models of the atmosphere for many NASA projects is the Global Reference Atmospheric Model (GRAM) developed by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). Over the past decade GRAM upgrades and maintenance have depended on inconsistent and waning project-specific support. Recently, the NASA Science Mission Directorate agreed to provide funding support in Fiscal Year 2018 and 2019 to upgrade the GRAMs. This poster summarizes the objectives, tasks and milestones of this effort

Analyses of Kennedy Space Center Tropospheric Doppler Radar Wind Profiler Data for Space Launch System Program Certification

No abstract availabl

Miscellany

Art Writinghttps://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/miscell/1000/thumbnail.jp

Catching Element Formation In The Act

Gamma-ray astronomy explores the most energetic photons in nature to address some of the most pressing puzzles in contemporary astrophysics. It encompasses a wide range of objects and phenomena: stars, supernovae, novae, neutron stars, stellar-mass black holes, nucleosynthesis, the interstellar medium, cosmic rays and relativistic-particle acceleration, and the evolution of galaxies. MeV gamma-rays provide a unique probe of nuclear processes in astronomy, directly measuring radioactive decay, nuclear de-excitation, and positron annihilation. The substantial information carried by gamma-ray photons allows us to see deeper into these objects, the bulk of the power is often emitted at gamma-ray energies, and radioactivity provides a natural physical clock that adds unique information. New science will be driven by time-domain population studies at gamma-ray energies. This science is enabled by next-generation gamma-ray instruments with one to two orders of magnitude better sensitivity, larger sky coverage, and faster cadence than all previous gamma-ray instruments. This transformative capability permits: (a) the accurate identification of the gamma-ray emitting objects and correlations with observations taken at other wavelengths and with other messengers; (b) construction of new gamma-ray maps of the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies where extended regions are distinguished from point sources; and (c) considerable serendipitous science of scarce events -- nearby neutron star mergers, for example. Advances in technology push the performance of new gamma-ray instruments to address a wide set of astrophysical questions.Comment: 14 pages including 3 figure

Parthenogenic Blastocysts Derived from Cumulus-Free In Vitro Matured Human Oocytes

Approximately 20% of oocytes are classified as immature and discarded following intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedures. These oocytes are obtained from gonadotropin-stimulated patients, and are routinely removed from the cumulus cells which normally would mature the oocytes. Given the ready access to these human oocytes, they represent a potential resource for both clinical and basic science application. However culture conditions for the maturation of cumulus-free oocytes have not been optimized. We aimed to improve maturation conditions for cumulus-free oocytes via culture with ovarian paracrine/autocrine factors identified by single cell analysis..Human cumulus-free oocytes from hormone-stimulated cycles are capable of developing to blastocysts when cultured with ovarian factor supplementation. Our improved IVM culture conditions may be used for obtaining mature oocytes for clinical purposes and/or for derivation of embryonic stem cells following parthenogenesis or nuclear transfer