Reformation - A Novel

A novel grounded in the restoration of a country through mandated use of pharmaceutical drugs in humanity’s increasingly fervent desire for unattainable perfection at the expense of emotional and physical stature. Reformation explores the far-reaching consequences of everyday human decisions and their collective development into a dystopian society. Because the value of emotion is a fundamental question in this project, I structured my writing process around the creative arts of music, literature, and paintings. Music artists of The Naked and Famous were a major influence in the disconnected tone and themes of power struggles through argumentation with the song “Waltz” on the album In Rolling Waves. Emotion is best conjured through creativity, and in exploring the importance of emotion for my characters, I studied its importance in myself. The ambitions of my antagonist center around combating climate change, and his means of achieving this lay in pharmaceutical drugs. Clean water, for example, is becoming rare in many parts of the world, as was exemplified in the Flint, Michigan scandal. Pharmaceutical drugs yield massive profits for very little cost. With this artificial resource, I wanted to investigate a fictional scenario where well-intended means are warped in everyday decisions to gradually produce a dystopia. Very few dystopian novels try this. The appendix includes world-building notes and reveals process

Perceptions and Participation: Mistaken Beliefs, Encouragement Designs, and Demand for Index Insurance.

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/20/10.International Development, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Consumer Preferences for Pasture-Raised Animal Products: Results from Michigan

The pasture-based model of agriculture potentially offers opportunities for small- and medium-scale livestock producers in local, regional, and national markets. Our data indicate that many consumers value the attributes associated with locally produced pasture-raised products. We used ordered probit and binary probit analyses of these data to identify the demographic segments that showed the greatest interest in these attributes. This interest suggests a broad education and marketing effort to articulate salient attributes and to differentiate and increase the availability of these products in the marketplace.Demand and Price Analysis, Livestock Production/Industries,

Direct CFD Predictions of Low Frequency Sounds Generated by a Helicopter Main Rotor

The use of CFD to directly predict helicopter main rotor noise is shown to be quite promising as an alternative mean for low frequency source noise evaluation. Results using existing state-of-the-art grid structures and finite-difference schemes demonstrated that small perturbation pressures, associated with acoustics radiation, can be extracted with some degree of fidelity. Accuracy of the predictions are demonstrated via comparing to predictions from conventional acoustic analogy-based models, and with measurements obtained from wind tunnel and flight tests for the MD-902 helicopter at several operating conditions. Findings show that the direct CFD approach is quite successfully in yielding low frequency results due to thickness and steady loading noise mechanisms. Mid-to-high frequency contents, due to blade-vortex interactions, are not predicted due to CFD modeling and grid constraints

Polynomial systems admitting a simultaneous solution

We provide a complete description of the ideal that serves as the resultant ideal for n univariate polynomials of degree d. We in particular describe a set of generators of this resultant ideal arising as maximal minors of a set of cascading matrices formed from the coefficients of the polynomials, generalising the classical Sylvester resultant of two polynomials.Comment: 9 page