Report to the Soils and Crops Workshop from the Saskatchewan Advisory Council on Soils and Agronomy

Non-Peer Reviewe

Envisioning the sign of God: the rhetorical figuration of the cross in the Epistle of Barnabas and the writings of Clement of Alexandria - semiosis, performance, and incarnation

This thesis is a study of how and in what ways some early Christian writers came to envision the cross as a sign, and in this context, how the cross in its shape and form is seen to generate meaning. It focusses on the Epistle of Barnabas and the writings of Clement of Alexandria. It analyses examples from within these writings where the cross is presented as a sign, but in a manner which plays on the shape and materiality of the cruciform - a process referred to as the rhetorical figuration of the cross. It explores how the cross is presented as a phenomenal form which communicates divine meaning, and how it is utilised to encourage a re-orientation of life in the crucified and risen Christ. The thesis develops a novel methodology which draws on contemporary literature on signification, materiality, and performance, to encourage a fresh appreciation of the early Christian rhetorical imaging of the cross, which draws attention to its semiotic and performative dimensions. It suggests that the rhetorical figuration of the cross involves a semiosis and performance of the cross as form and thing. It argues that this semiosis reflects and participates in, the incarnational semiosis and performance of God, as Christ in becoming human enters the world of signs and signification and, in turn, the realm of embodied performativity. It relates the figuration of the cross to the theme of performance specifically, as Barnabas and Clement identify expressions of the cross in performative contexts, in bodily posture, gesture, and object, and in scenes from Greek epic and tragedy. This thesis argues that the imagining of the cross as a sign, and therein as a phenomenal geometric form which conveys theological meaning and even presence, engages the materiality of incarnation as a semiotic and performative happening

Do Stronger Employment Discrimination Protections Decrease Reliance on Social Security Disability Insurance? Evidence from the U.S. Social Security Reforms

The United States Social Security Amendments of 1983 (SSA1983) increased the full retirement age (FRA) and increased penalties for retiring before the FRA. This cut to retirement benefits caused spillover effects on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications and receipt by making SSDI relatively more generous. We explore if stronger disability and age discrimination laws moderated these spillovers, using variation whereby many state laws are broader or stronger than federal law. We estimate the effects of these laws on SSDI applications and receipt using a difference-in-differences approach, comparing cohorts affected by SSA1983 to similarly aged unaffected cohorts, across states. We find that a broader definition of disability, where only a medically diagnosed condition is required to be covered under state law, significantly reduces SSDI applications induced by SSA1983, but has no effect on SSDI receipt, likely because the foregone applications were for those with less severe conditions that were unlikely to have been approved for SSDI. We find some evidence that other broader or stronger features of state disability discrimination laws reduce both SSDI applications and receipt. We do not find much evidence that age discrimination laws reduce spillovers to SSDI. These results suggest that broader and stronger disability discrimination laws reduce employment barriers, allowing older individuals to work longer, possibly reducing reliance on SSDI and costly applications to SSDI

Place of Social, Cultural, and Ecological Water Values for Promoting Water Security in Delhi, India

Economic values have dominated water policy discourse over the last four decades. Very little has been written on social, cultural, and ecological values and their roles in enhancing water security. The primary objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of diverse water values with a case study of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, India. To achieve this, a review of the existing scholarship on water values was conducted to develop a set of water values. Field surveys and interviews were conducted to comprehend the water values held by various stakeholders in Delhi. This paper is an attempt to show that viewing water security through the lens of diverse water values (social, cultural, economic and ecological) provides a better understanding of water policies, and enhanced comprehension could potentially result in better policies to promote water security. In the case of Delhi, we additionally found that the claimed predominance of water values such as efficiency, equity, equality, religiosity, and purity does not mean that these values are also actualized in water practices. Another major finding is that all four sets of values are integrated with one another, and policies underpinned by the identified values would be relatively better than policies solely based on economic values

Rockslide deformation monitoring with fiber optic strain sensors

With micro-strain resolution and the capability to sample at rates of 100 Hz and higher, fiber optic (FO) strain sensors offer exciting new possibilities for in-situ landslide monitoring. Here we describe a new FO monitoring system based on long-gauge fiber Bragg grating sensors installed at the Randa Rockslide Laboratory in southern Switzerland. The new FO monitoring system can detect sub-micrometer scale deformations in both triggered-dynamic and continuous measurements. Two types of sensors have been installed: (1) fully embedded borehole sensors and (2) surface extensometers. Dynamic measurements are triggered by sensor deformation and recorded at 100 Hz, while continuous data are logged every 5 min. Deformation time series for all sensors show displacements consistent with previous monitoring. Accelerated shortening following installation of the borehole sensors is likely related to long-term shrinkage of the grout. A number of transient signals have been observed, which in some cases were large enough to trigger rapid sampling. The combination of short- and long-term observation offers new insight into the deformation process. Accelerated surface crack opening in spring is shown to have a diurnal trend, which we attribute to the effect of snowmelt seeping into the crack void space and freezing at night to generate pressure on the crack walls. Controlled-source tests investigated the sensor response to dynamic inputs, which compared an independent measure of ground motion against the strain measured across a surface crack. Low frequency signals were comparable but the FO record suffered from aliasing, where undersampling of higher frequency signals generated spectral peaks not related to ground motion

Assessing physical symptoms during the postpartum period: reliability and validity of the primary health questionnaire somatic symptom subscale (PHQ-15)

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupIntroduction: This study aimed at establishing the reliability and validity of the primary health questionnaire (PHQ-15) somatic symptom severity subscale for postpartum women. Methods: Women (N = 495) completed the PHQ-15 approximately 6 weeks postpartum during the baseline phase of a randomized controlled trial evaluating a writing intervention for postnatal health in England. Reliability was assessed using internal consistency statistics and convergent validity by comparing differences in self-reported physical health, health-related quality of life (QoL) and primary care usage by PHQ-15 symptom severity category. Results: Cronbach’s α for the PHQ-15 was 0.73 and item-total statistics met recommended guidelines. Validity analyzes showed 6% of women reported severe symptoms, 17% medium, 50% low and 27% minimal symptoms. Women with severe symptoms reported poorer overall physical health, poorer physical health-related QoL and greater use of primary care. Women with severe symptoms also rated their baby’s health as worse and used primary care more for their baby. Discussion: This study suggests the PHQ-15 has the potential to be a useful and valid measure of physical symptoms in postpartum women in high-income countries

NASA Perspective and Modeling of Thermal Runaway Propagation Mitigation in Aerospace Batteries

NASA has traditionally sought to reduce the likelihood of a single cell thermal runaway (TR) in their aerospace batteries to an absolute minimum by employing rigorous screening program of the cells. There was generally a belief that TR propagation resulting in catastrophic failure of the battery was a forgone conclusion for densely packed aerospace lithium-ion batteries. As it turns out, this may not be the case. An increasing number of purportedly TR propagation-resistant batteries are appearing among NASA partners in the commercial sector and the Department of Defense. In the recent update of the battery safety standard (JSC 20793) to address this paradigm shift, the NASA community included requirements for assessing TR severity and identifying simple, low-cost severity reduction measures. Unfortunately, there are no best-practice guidelines for this work in the Agency, so the first project team attempting to meet these requirements would have an undue burden placed upon them. A NASA engineering Safety Center (NESC) team set out to perform pathfinding activities for meeting those requirements. This presentation will provide contextual background to this effort, as well as initial results in attempting to model and simulate TR heat transfer and propagation within battery designs

Memory, metamemory, and social cues: between conformity and resistance [forthcoming]

When presented with responses of another person, people incorporate these responses into memory reports: a finding termed memory conformity. Research on memory conformity in recognition reveals that people rely on external social cues to guide their memory responses when their own ability to respond is at chance. In this way, conforming to a reliable source boosts recognition performance but conforming to a random source does not impair it. In the present study we assessed whether people would conform indiscriminately to reliable and unreliable (random) sources when they are given the opportunity to exercise metamemory control over their responding by withholding answers in a recognition test. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found the pattern of memory conformity to reliable and unreliable sources in two variants of a free-report recognition test, yet at the same time the provision of external cues did not affect the rate of response withholding. In Experiment 3, we provided participants with initial feedback on their recognition decisions, facilitating the discrimination between the reliable and unreliable source. This led to the reduction of memory conformity to the unreliable source, and at the same time modulated metamemory decisions concerning response withholding: participants displayed metamemory conformity to the reliable source, volunteering more responses in their memory report, and metamemory resistance to the random source, withholding more responses from the memory report. Together, the results show how metamemory decisions dissociate various types of memory conformity and that memory and metamemory decisions can be independent of each other

Inter-similarity between coupled networks

Recent studies have shown that a system composed from several randomly interdependent networks is extremely vulnerable to random failure. However, real interdependent networks are usually not randomly interdependent, rather a pair of dependent nodes are coupled according to some regularity which we coin inter-similarity. For example, we study a system composed from an interdependent world wide port network and a world wide airport network and show that well connected ports tend to couple with well connected airports. We introduce two quantities for measuring the level of inter-similarity between networks (i) Inter degree-degree correlation (IDDC) (ii) Inter-clustering coefficient (ICC). We then show both by simulation models and by analyzing the port-airport system that as the networks become more inter-similar the system becomes significantly more robust to random failure.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure