John Donne the preacher.

In the year 1573 when Shakespeare and Marlowe were already boys of nine, Chapman in adolescence, Spenser, Lyly and Richard Hooker men of twenty, John Donne, then important to only a few but destined to the company of royalty, was born. Walton says, in his very excellent but inadequate and often inaccurate “Lives of Dr. John Donne, etc.,” that his father as descended “from an ancient and worth family in Wales.” Gosse, however, calls this simply “a pious wish” because nothing is known of his father’s parentage. He was prosperous iron merchant of London, who died in 1576 leaving his family in very comfortable circumstances. The poet’s mother’s great-grandmother was a sister to Sir Thomas More, sometime Lord Chancellor of England. She maintained her Catholic faith, as had her family ever since the days of Henry VIII, all her life. Her family had been persecuted more than once for fidelity to Rome and in his preface to Pseudo Martyr John Donne asserts that his own family had seen as great persecution as any of the same size and position in England. In 1593 Henry Donne, a younger brother of John, died of a fever which he contracted while in prison for having concealed a Jesuit priest in his room. John was given the first part of his education under a private tutor in his father’s house. When ten years of age he was sent to Oxford. After four years there he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he stayed until his seventeenth year. He was a good student and worth of degrees, but his Catholic inclinations prevented his taking the oath required of those receiving degrees at that time

Interview with Edna Trexler

An interview with Edna Trexler regarding her experiences in a one-room school househttps://scholars.fhsu.edu/ors/1005/thumbnail.jp

Agroforestry Systems for the Midwest

The purposes of this article are to present the concept of “Agroforestry and to introduce two agroforestry projects that have been initiated by researchers from the Department of Forestry and other departments in the Colleges of Agriculture, Design, and Engineering at Iowa State University. A more detailed discussion of these two projects follow a general discussion of agroforestry

Land Application of Sludge to Forest and Herbaceous Energy Crops

A cooperative study involving the City of Ames, Iowa State University, and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources has been initiated to utilize municipal sludge as “fertilizer” to increase the productivity of fast-growing trees and herbaceous crops. The tree and herbaceous crops are grown to produce renewable biomass useful as energy feedstock. The design of the planting and the growth characteristics of the tree and herbaceous biomass system are expected to effectively minimize the contamination potential of the sludge to surface and groundwater. Located at the new Ames Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant, this system can be called an “agroforestry energy system. An arrangement using alternating strips of forage crops and trees is designed to produce greater yields of both crops than if each crop is grown individually. The tree crop benefits the agricultural crop by reducing wind and, therefore, water losses, whereas the herbaceous crop, next to the trees, increases the amount of sunlight able to reach the trees along the edges, therefore, increasing the woody biomass productivity. Approximately 40 acres of prime agricultural land will be devoted to the study. The tree species being used is a cottonwood hybrid (Populous x euramericana-clone NC-5326). The herbaceous crops consist of switch grass, forage sorghum and rye, and crambe (an industrial oil seed crop). The herbaceous crops are planted between the tree strips to provide the benefits mentioned above. The spacing arrangement is also designed to allow access for the sludge application truck (see figure 1). Three plantings will be made, one each in 1990, 1991, and 1992. Various agronomic rates of sludge will be applied starting the spring of 1991

Reproducibility of hospital rankings based on centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Compare measures as a function of measure reliability

Importance: Unreliable performance measures can mask poor-quality care and distort financial incentives in value-based purchasing. Objective: To examine the association between test-retest reliability and the reproducibility of hospital rankings. Design, Setting, and Participants: In a cross-sectional design, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Compare data were analyzed for the 2017 (based on 2014-2017 data) and 2018 (based on 2015-2018 data) reporting periods. The study was conducted from December 13, 2020, to September 30, 2021. This analysis was based on 28 measures, including mortality (acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and coronary artery bypass grafting), readmissions (acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and coronary artery bypass grafting), and surgical complications (postoperative acute kidney failure, postoperative respiratory failure, postoperative sepsis, and failure to rescue). Exposures: Measure reliability based on test-retest reliability testing. Main Outcomes and Measures: The reproducibility of hospital rankings was quantified by calculating the reclassification rate across the 2017 and 2018 reporting periods after categorizing the hospitals into terciles, quartiles, deciles, and statistical outliers. Linear regression analysis was used to examine the association between the reclassification rate and the intraclass correlation coefficient for each of the classification systems. Results: The analytic cohort consisted of 28 measures from 4452 hospitals with a median of 2927 (IQR, 2378-3160) hospitals contributing data for each measure. The hospitals participating in the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (n = 3195) had a median bed size of 141 (IQR, 69-261), average daily census of 70 (IQR, 24-155) patients, and a median disproportionate share hospital percentage of 38.2% (IQR, 18.7%-36.6%). The median intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.78 (IQR, 0.72-0.81), ranging between 0.50 and 0.85. The median reclassification rate was 70% (IQR, 62%-71%) when hospitals were ranked by deciles, 43% (IQR, 39%-45%) when ranked by quartiles, 34% (IQR, 31%-36%) when ranked by terciles, and 3.8% (IQR, 2.0%-6.2%) when ranked by outlier status. Increases in measure reliability were not associated with decreases in the reclassification rate. Each 0.1-point increase in the intraclass correlation coefficient was associated with a 6.80 (95% CI, 2.28-11.30; P = .005) percentage-point increase in the reclassification rate when hospitals were ranked into performance deciles, 4.15 (95% CI, 1.16-7.14; P = .008) when ranked into performance quartiles, 1.47 (95% CI, 1.84, 4.77; P = .37) when ranked into performance terciles, and 3.70 (95% CI, 1.30-6.09; P = .004) when ranked by outlier status. Conclusions and Relevance: In this study, more reliable measures were not associated with lower rates of reclassifying hospitals using test-retest reliability testing. These findings suggest that measure reliability should not be assessed with test-retest reliability testing

Proton Decay, Yukawa Couplings and Underlying Gauge Symmetry in String Theory

In string theory, massless particles often originate from a symmetry breaking of a large gauge symmetry G to its subgroup H. The absence of dimension-4 proton decay in supersymmetric theories suggests that (\bar{D},L) are different from \bar{H}(\bar{\bf 5}) in their origins. In this article, we consider a possibility that they come from different irreducible components in $\mathfrak{g}/\mathfrak{h}$. Requiring that all the Yukawa coupling constants of quarks and leptons be generated from the super Yang--Mills interactions of G, we found in the context of Georgi--Glashow H=SU(5) unification that the minimal choice of G is E_7 and E_8 is the only alternative. This idea is systematically implemented in Heterotic String, M theory and F theory, confirming the absence of dimension 4 proton decay operators. Not only H=SU(5) but also G constrain operators of effective field theories, providing non-trivial information.Comment: 73 page