Direct reading inductance meter

A direct reading inductance meter comprised of a crystal oscillator and an LC tuned oscillator is presented. The oscillators function respectively to generate a reference frequency, f(r), and to generate an initial frequency, f(0), which when mixed produce a difference equal to zero. Upon connecting an inductor of small unknown value in the LC circuit to change its resonant frequency to f(x), a difference frequency (f(r)-f(x)) is produced that is very nearly a linear function of the inductance of the inductor. The difference frequency is measured and displayed on a linear scale in units of inductance

A Study of Safe Haven Baby Laws in the United States: One Life Saved or Too Many Unknowns to Evaluate?

Safe Haven laws allow parents or guardians to legally relinquish an infant without fear of prosecution at a designated safe site, where the infants are provided with temporary care until placed into the care of Child Service Professionals. This honors thesis project analyzes Safe Haven baby laws in their current form in the United States, finding that Safe Havens laws need to be a complement to other programs, as they alone cannot solve infant abandonment. My findings further recommend the need for policy modifications to Safe Haven laws to ensure data is being tracked to be analyzed and to build greater public awareness of the existence of Safe Havens. Establishing best practices for policy implementation requires data tracking from which to develop a strategy that ensures quality data collection and establishes processes by which to evaluate data regularly. Improving Safe Haven laws depends upon establishing better tracking systems to include accurate numbers of legally and illegally surrendered infants at either a statewide and/or federal level

Y\u27all Come Back Now, Ya Hear: A Reflection on Nashville\u27s History and the Carnivalesque

This thesis seeks to utilize the technique of allegorical image in understanding both the past and present histories of Nashville. By collaging aspects of past and present, the images produced seek to present the emerging alternative. This otherness constructs an in between in which the narratives of both instances begin to merge and mutate. These collages establish a landscape of Nashville which is no longer constricted temporally or spatially, remaining open to interpretations and resisting a clear sense of closure. The designs that I propose are meant to clarify the neglected traumas and occurrences of the past to demonstrate that these moments are not so far removed from the present consciousness as most people would consider. In this way, the pavilions attempt to act as lenses that provide an apparatus in which dialectical images could therefore be produced and experienced

1st Place Essay: True Christian Leadership

The cynics of the world are begging for a leader who simply does what they say they are going to. By rooting oneself in God’s Word and engaging society with a life of love, we can change the world. It certainly won’t be easy; it will require a lifetime of boldness, perseverance, obedience, and integrity, but I feel that accomplishing those goals will have made the journey completely worth it in the end

Discovering Nothing to Create Anything: Gorgias’s On the Nonexistant and the WorldBuilding Power of Logos

This paper begins by tracing instances throughout history wherein the fieldsof rhetoric and philosophy have quarreled, focusing primarily on how theydefine their own studies as well as language and its connection to, or lack of,an objective reality. With a close examination of the theoretical frameworkand definition for logos as presented in Gorgias’s On the Nonexistent or OnNature, it is possible to flesh out a better understanding of the connectionsbetween any medium of communication and the process of creating andconveying both perceptual and virtual realities. Gorgias, in the context of thispaper, refers to the sophist and rhetorician, 483 to 375 BC, and is not to beconfused with the character in Plato’s Gorgias meant to discount sophistry. Inmy argument, backed by game studies scholars such as Ian Bogost and JamesJ. Brown Jr., the rhetorical impact of video games as it is relayed through theauthorship of code can serve as an alternative medium that parallels rhetoricalimpact of speech through the authorship of logos. Viewing video games asexamples of virtually constructed worlds within an outer world can also helpdemonstrate how Platonic suggestions that logos has any direct connection toobjective substantiality are inherently flawed. This dismissal of the primacy oflogos as truth-revealing suggests that rhetoric is an inherent part of all formsof composition and, thus, communication necessarily precedes the ability toconvey any philosophical ideas. Looking through the interpretive act for boththe communicator and the audience, logos can be seen as its own kind ofsubstance with a power far superior to mere persuasion or influence

Rebel Organizations in Crackdown and Truce

In the past three decades, more than two dozen civil conflicts have ended in a long-term truce between the government and rebels. In these agreements, neither side disarms or makes any substantial concessions. Instead, rebel forces are permitted to recruit, fund themselves, and patrol territory without punishment so long as they leave government forces alone. Governments typically offer these agreements when they have few domestic or political interests in the conflict (as in remote separatist regions) or when they face short-run international pressure to reduce violence (as in high-profile conflicts). What happens to rebel organizations when the government permits them to operate and recruit freely? Governments and scholars believe that forbearance benefits rebel organizations, allowing them to gather new funds and new members who will empower them on the battlefield and at the bargaining table. This book argues instead that these periods of truce undermine rebel organizations by changing the types of recruits they attract. Truces do indeed make life safer and easier for rebel soldiers, attracting an influx of new rebel recruits. But they also undermine a key screening process in rebel recruitment. Rebel leaders need rebel soldiers to sacrifice their own desires (safety, pleasure, and profit) for the movement’s goals (battlefield victory, territorial control, and bargaining credibility). The safety and material benefits of truce disproportionately attract selfish opportunists who are prone to desert, defect, and disobey in the long run. Constrained by recruitment competition and bureaucratic incapacity, rebel leaders struggle to screen or control these new soldiers. I lay out this argument in a formal model of rebel recruitment, competition, and screening, validated with dozens of interviews of current and former rebels in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. I examine the effects of long-term truces on rebel organizations using three forms of evidence. First, I test how truces affect the behavior and motivations of rebel recruits with an innovative recruitment experiment in three separatist regions in Northeast India. By mimicking local rebel recruiting strategies in civic organizations and public gathering places, I gather nearly 400 likely rebel recruits. These recruits then evaluated randomly-generated hypothetical rebel groups, testing what factors make them more willing to join. The results shows that the safety and material benefits of truce disproportionately attract recruits who are less community-oriented, both in past behavior and self-assessments. Second, I explore the broader impacts of these recruit-side motivations on rebel organizations with 76 in-depth case interviews in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. These interviewees include rebel leaders, current and former rebel soldiers, and civilians interacting with rebel groups. By comparing over time (before and after truce agreements) and between movements, I track how truces shape rebel recruitment and control. Third, I construct an original worldwide dataset of civil conflict endings since 1946. This exercise shows just how common long-term truces are: since the end of the Cold War, more civil conflicts have ended in a truce than in a rebel victory or peace agreement. I also combine this data with existing conflict data, demonstrating that after a truce rebel groups are more likely to fragment, struggle in clashes with the government, and abuse civilians. This book challenges several key assumptions that scholars and policymakers hold about conflict resolution, rebel organizations, and state development. By shining a light on the largely ignored phenomenon of long-term truces in civil conflicts, it demonstrates what happens when reducing violence does not resolve a conflict. With innovative experimental evidence of rebel recruits’ motivations, it shows how changing resources can shift the quantity and quality of recruits rebels attract. By tracking rebel organizations before and after truce, it shows how a government can more effectively undermine a rebel movement in the long run with forbearance than with violent crackdown

Class Size and Relationships That Occur During Instruction

Class size has long been a concern among education stakeholders. Although assumptions about the value of smaller class sizes abound, existing research does not offer clear conclusions about the effects of class size on learning. With respect to instruction, researchers have principally focused on differences in teachers’ practice or the enacted curriculum as a function of class size. In this study, I focused on whether and how class size impacts relationships between teachers and students as well as relationships among students. Relationships are an integral part of instruction. This study sought to analyze empirical evidence about the relationship between class size and aspects of instruction that education stakeholders might naturally wonder about. To study this aspect of the relationship between class size and instruction, I used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). This dataset comprises a representative sample of children who attended elementary school in the United States. These data thus provide information about class size on a national level for an age at which many researchers suspect the effects of class size might be the most prominent (see, e.g., Finn and Achilles (1990)). Measures of relationships between teachers’ and students and among students available in the ECLS data include surveys of both teachers and students. Based on the nature of these surveys, I selected analytic methods to, as much as possible, control for relevant factors that are unobserved in the data. Specifically, I used linear regression and Bayesian Additive Regression Trees for cross-sectional data, and I used event history analysis and fixed effects linear regression for longitudinal data. Using these models, I examine the average relationship between class size and instruction as well as the possibility of heterogeneous relationships based on race, ethnicity, sex, and family SES. Results from this analysis reveal some significant relationships between class size and instruction. These significant results include differences in the relationship between class size and the relationship between teachers’ and students among males and females. Although these statistically significant relationships are small enough to be of questionable practical relevance, they are suggestive of areas that merit deliberate research in the future to understand the relationship between class size and instruction. Future research could build on the findings of this study in multiple ways. Qualitative researchers might, for example, use findings from this study to find areas where it is valuable to uncover details about the experiences of students and teachers in larger and smaller classrooms. Quantitative researchers might learn from the results of this study to design scales that are more likely to detect the effects of class size than the scales I used in this study.PHDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163022/1/kjgadd_1.pd

Identification of spermatozoa on sexual assault swabs: a comparative analysis of traditional tube extraction and direct slide elution methods

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to compare the efficiency of three sperm elution methods on sexual assault swabs; factors such as solvent type, solvent volume, sperm concentration, and duration of extraction and elution method were evaluated with respect to observed sperm recovery. Swabs containing dilutions of semen ranging from 1:10 to 1:1,000 and simulated post-coital swabs were extracted via the traditional tube extraction, as well as two direct slide elution techniques, tapping and swirling. For the slide elution techniques, a swab cutting was placed directly onto a microscope slide, a small volume of water or buffer was added, and sperm were eluted by either tapping the sample with a stirring stick or swirling it around the slide with metal forceps. The tube method requires a minimum of one and one half hours for extraction, while the slide elution techniques require only ten seconds for extraction. The average sperm counts from 1:10 dilutions processed with the tapping elution method were statistically higher than the 1:10 dilutions samples processed with tube and swirling methods. Elution by tapping also recovered a significantly higher amount of sperm cells from the 1:1,000 dilution compared to the tube extraction of the same dilution. The tapping elution method consistently resulted in the greatest number of spermatozoa observed, followed by the swirling method and then tube extraction; additionally, incidents of false negatives (no sperm observed) were observed with the tube and swirling methods. Simulated post-coital samples produced similar results to the semen samples; however, vaginal swabs from one donor resulted in an extremely high ratio of exfoliated epithelial cells that obscured the spermatozoa, especially with the direct slide elution methods. The slide elution methods resulted in similar and consistent relative standard deviations between dilutions in samples, while the tube extraction results suggest an increase in variance as the dilution increases. Overall, slide elution methods yielded the most observed sperm cells in a significantly shorter amount of time

Nutritional Consequences of Various Ingredients in Broilers, Turkeys, and Swine

Experiments were conducted to evaluate various ingredients\u27 effects on broiler, turkey, and porcine performance, as well as feed mill efficacy. In chapter 2, the effects of zinc (Zn) supplement source and corn particle size on broiler performance, breast yield, and tibia ash were assessed from d 1-40. Zinc treatments included a basal diet (no added Zn), 80 mg/kg Zn sulfate, and three diets with 40 mg/kg Zn sulfate + 40 mg/kg of varying Zn amino acid chelates, and corn particle size was either 550 mum or 1,050 mum. Broilers fed diets containing 550 ?m corn had higher feed intake (FI) and live weight gain (LWG) from d 1-22, while feed conversion ratio (FCR) was improved for broilers fed diets with 1,050 ?m corn from d 23-40 and d 1-40. Diets supplemented with 80 mg/kg Zn improved broiler performance compared to the diet without supplemental Zn, but no differences were observed between Zn sources for performance or tibia ash. In chapter 3, a study was conducted to determine mix uniformity, thermal stability, and pellet quality of diets supplemented with two particle sizes (2 or 3 mm) of transgenic phytase corn (TPC) and two concentrations (5,100 or 15,300 FTU/kg -- AOAC 2000.12) of granulated phytase. Mix uniformity was determined by calculating mixer coefficient of variation (CV) using chloride ion concentration and phytase activity of ten mash samples taken from various locations within the mixer. Each phytase diet was steam conditioned and pelleted at 80, 85, and 90°C and activity was measured to determine enzyme recovery. The results indicated that mix uniformity was better for granulated phytases than TPC, and mix uniformity was improved for 2 mm TPC compared to 3 mm TPC. The 2 mm TPC had the highest recovery at 80°C, while granulated phytases were superior to TPC products at 90°C. In chapter 4, three studies were conducted to determine porcine palatability of corn-soybean based diets supplemented with oil-extracted microalgae and subsequent performance. In study 1, Duroc x Yorkshire-Landrace crossbred pigs were fed diets containing either 0, 1, 2, or 4 % oil-extracted microalgae for a 14 d grow-out period. Average daily gain (ADG), average daily feed intake (ADFI), and gain:feed (G:F) were similar among all treatments and pellet durability was numerically higher for the 4 % microalgae diet. In studies 2 and 3, pigs were fed diets containing either 0 or 4 % microalgae. All performance metrics (ADG, ADFI, and G:F) were similar among all treatments suggesting that oil-extracted microalgae can be used as a feed ingredient for swine. In chapter 5, the performance and carcass characteristics of two commercial turkey hen strains (Nicholas and Hybrid) and a test product turkey hen strain were evaluated from d 1-125. Secondary objectives of the study were to determine the effect of an elevated nutrient diet for feathering in the test product strain, and to determine genetic differences in lysine alpha-ketoglutarate reductase (LKR) activity at d 125. Hybrid hens had the largest LWG from wk 1-4, while Nicholas hens had larger LWG from wk 13-16. At d 125, performance, hot breast yield, and fat pad yield were similar among all three hen strains. The LKR activity was not different among strains, likely due to lack of performance differences among treatments