“War in the Modern World, 1990-2014 (Book Review)” by Jeremy Black

Review of War in the Modern World, 1990-2014 by Jeremy Blac

Control of corn diseases in Illinois

"In cooperation with Office of Cereal Crops and Diseases, Bureau of Plant Industry, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Farmers’ Tool: Changing Values of Rural Oregon Granges in Benton County: 1938-1948

As the United States moved from the Great Depression into World War Two, and then emerged as a leading global military and economic power in the Post War era, the Grange and its members experienced a transformation of their political and social values. The priorities of the agricultural industry shifted from the economic hardship of the Great Depression to supporting the war effort and maintaining superiority during and after World War Two. The Patrons of Husbandry, as a community institution, experienced a shift in political and social values from liberal concerns and social critiques to espousing conservative ideals such as fervent nationalism, familial and religiously based morality, and defending American society as the ideal status quo

The Use of Hand Bacteria as a Human Biometric Identifier

Molecular and bio-molecular biometrics are an advancing field that involves the analysis of a person\u27s unique biological markers at a molecular level to ascertain identity. Bacteria communities found on the skin of the human hand have shown to be highly diverse and to have a low percentage of similarity between individuals. The goal of this research effort is to see if a person\u27s demographics, primarily ethnicity, share a relationship with the bacteria communities that exist on their hand. A sample collection was carried out in which the left and right inner palms of 250 individuals were swabbed to obtain a total of 500 bacteria samples. Of these, 104 samples covering a range of age, gender, and ethnicity of the participants, were sequenced using 150 paired-end multiplex reads on an Illumina MiSeq. The reads contained the third hypervariable region DNA of the microbial 16S rRNA gene commonly used for microbial identification. Sequences were analyzed using a combination of commercial and custom bioinformatics tools. Results indicated that women that participated in the sample collection had a 15.7% higher diversity of bacteria at the genus level than men. Using a support vector machine with a 60% train and 40% test approach, ethnicities of individuals who provided samples could be classified with a range of 64-93% accuracy depending on the method used. Principal coordinate plots generated by using the unique fraction (UniFrac) algorithm devised by Lozupone et al at University of Colorado at Boulder showed that similar clustering appeared with people of Turkish, Asian Indian, and Middle Eastern descent and less clustering with people of Caucasian and African American descent. Although focused on a small subset of the human population with no temporal variance in bacterial diversity explored, these results provide a basis for performing identification based on human bacteria that can be expanded upon using time varying sampling and other regions of the 16S rRNA gene

Chapter 2 A Forgotten Fleet

Africa, Cape of Good Hope, maritime security, naval history, piracy, Suez Cana

Advanced Solid State Lighting for AES Deep Space Hab Project

The advanced Solid State Lighting (SSL) assemblies augmented 2nd generation modules under development for the Advanced Exploration Systems Deep Space Habitat in using color therapy to synchronize crew circadian rhythms. Current RGB LED technology does not produce sufficient brightness to adequately address general lighting in addition to color therapy. The intent is to address both through a mix of white and RGB LEDs designing for fully addressable alertness/relaxation levels as well as more dramatic circadian shifts