A Literature Review of the Health Effects of a Plant Based Diet versus an Animal Based Diet

Health and nutrition can mean a myriad of things to many people in today’s culture. The majority of the time people are unaware of the proper nutrients their body needs and how to get them from food. This thesis will seek to expose the health benefits that are associated with consuming a raw plant-based die, offering a more profound and encompassing view on nutrition. Investigating further into today’s most common diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer and autoimmune disorders, it will seek to discover and answer why we have so many health issues. This thesis will discuss the importance of using our food medicinally and examining the problems with our current health care system. What we put into our bodies is what we will get out of them. By radically changing our diets we could radically impact the health of our nation

The Power of Point of Sale Improving Growth, Profit, and Customer Service in a Retail Business

For many small businesses, creating a captivating retail experience is the key to success, and finding the right technologies to enable that experience is crucial for sustaining a competitive advantage. This project is a case study designed to evaluate and select a Point of Sale (POS) system and Inventory Management (IM) system for a small business based upon its specific industry needs. The project creates a three step framework leading up to the real world implementation of these systems and uses the Rhode Island based company - Wildwood Inc. - as the subject of the study. Wildwood Inc. is a garden center and nursery that uses manual processes for both its checkout and inventory management practices, but due to its growth is experiencing difficulties in serving its customers effectively. The project looks at specific challenges facing Wildwood and creates a roadmap for POS and IM implementation that can be generalized for businesses looking to upgrade their systems. The framework for the implementation includes (1) initial research and current process analysis, (2) new system evaluation and process comparison, and (3) a final recommendation for management. The project explores the necessary capabilities of POS and IM systems within the retail agriculture industry; creates a comparison matrix of potential product offerings based upon hardware components, software features, technical support, and price points; and develops a final recommendation for Wildwood considering its specific needs. Upon completion, Wildwood will have the information necessary to purchase a computerized system that can: (1) Maintain a database of all inventory, including plant characteristics, units in stock, price, supplier, and SKU number, (2) facilitate a more efficient checkout method that eliminates handwritten receipts of purchases and digitally records all sales within the system, expedites the checkout process for both customers and employees, and 4 communicates with the IM system to allow for real-time inventory updates upon completion of POS transactions, and (3) runs a variety of reports on the collected data so that management has greater accuracy and success when making business decisions

The Healing Power of Storytelling: An Exploration into the Autoethnographic Process

I came to an epiphany as a writer and a person through autoethnography, a research and writing process that analyzes personal experience in the interest of understanding cultural experience. Drawn to a course by pure chance, I was given the opportunity to explore the genre of autoethnography by writing and researching through my experience with major depression.To write the full twenty-eight page manuscript of my autoethnography titled “Depressed—Proceed With Caution: An Autoethnography of Depression” I dove into my elephant-like memory for stories and read literature written by others who have lived with major depressive disorder. In the process, I learned more about depression, in myself and in others, than I ever expected to. I also saw the benefits of reading stories of another’s experience. Writing through my experience of depression was healing in a way that other writers cite. In myself, I have experienced a much-needed change in perspective through my research and self-reflection. In others, I have seen raw emotion in response to the pain found in my narrative accounts. My hope is to bring my story to a larger audience, to bring peace of mind to those who desperately need its light

Spectroscopic Binaries in Globular Clusters. I. A Search for Ultra-Hard Binaries on the Main Sequence in M4

A search for spectroscopic binaries on the main sequence of the nearby globular cluster M4 has been undertaken with Argus, the multi-object spectrograph on the CTIO 4.0m telescope. A pair of radial velocities (median precision $\simeq$ 2 km/s) separated by 11 months have been obtained for 33 turnoff dwarfs in the magnitude range 16.9 $\le$ V $\le$ 17.4. Monte-Carlo simulations have been used to derive a binary fraction, X, for systems with periods in the range 2 days \lae {\rm P} \lae 3 years and mass ratios between 0.2 and 1.0. This short-period cutoff is more than an order of magnitude smaller than those of existing radial velocity surveys and is comparable to the shortest periods possible for main-sequence turnoff stars. Our survey therefore provides a first glimpse into the abundance of ``ultra-hard" spectroscopic binaries in globular clusters. Although no star shows a velocity variation larger than 14 km/s, two objects are observed to have chi-square probabilities below 0.1\%. No such stars are expected in a sample of 33. We find a best-fit binary fraction of X $\simeq$ 0.15, a value which is consistent with recent estimates based on deep HST color-magnitude diagrams, as well as with the binary fraction of X $\simeq$ 0.1 for nearby solar-type stars having similar periods and mass ratios. Our derived binary fraction suggests that exchange interactions with pre-existing binaries are a plausible means of explaining the origin of the hierarchical triple system containing the pulsar PSR 1620-26.Comment: 25 pages; TeX and PS figures. Also available at http://www.dao.nrc.ca/DAO/SCIENCE/science.htm

The Nimbus 4 IRLS meteorological experiment

The Nimbus 4 interrogation, recording, and location system is designed to locate and collect measurement data of upper atmospheric parameters through the tracking of free floating, constant level balloons flying at altitudes of 20.5 and 24.1 km and carrying specially designed interrogation packages. The basic elements of the system include a ground acquisition and command station, the Nimbus satellite, and the remote sensing platforms. Addresses of platforms as they come into view are programmed into the satellite on an orbit by orbit basis from the central ground station. Sensory data are transmitted to the satellite for storage and readout from balloon interrogation units

High speed excited multi-solitons in nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations

We consider the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation with a general nonlinearity. In dimension higher than 2, this equation admits travelling wave solutions with a fixed profile which is not the ground state. This kind of profiles are called excited states. In this paper, we construct solutions to NLS behaving like a sum of N excited states which spread up quickly as time grows (which we call multi-solitons). We also show that if the flow around one of these excited states is linearly unstable, then the multi-soliton is not unique, and is unstable

Planning Against Fictitious Players in Repeated Normal Form Games

Planning how to interact against bounded memory and unbounded memory learning opponents needs different treatment. Thus far, however, work in this area has shown how to design plans against bounded memory learning opponents, but no work has dealt with the unbounded memory case. This paper tackles this gap. In particular, we frame this as a planning problem using the framework of repeated matrix games, where the planner's objective is to compute the best exploiting sequence of actions against a learning opponent. The particular class of opponent we study uses a fictitious play process to update her beliefs, but the analysis generalizes to many forms of Bayesian learning agents. Our analysis is inspired by Banerjee and Peng's AIM framework, which works for planning and learning against bounded memory opponents (e.g an adaptive player). Building on this, we show how an unbounded memory opponent (specifically a fictitious player) can also be modelled as a finite MDP and present a new efficient algorithm that can find a way to exploit the opponent by computing in polynomial time a sequence of play that can obtain a higher average reward than those obtained by playing a game theoretic (Nash or correlated) equilibrium