“Reds Driven Off”: the US Media’s Propaganda During the Gulf of Tonkin Incident

In 2008, the Annenburg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a poll to determine just how informed voters were following that year’s presidential election. One of the most shocking things they found was that 46.4% of those polled still believed that Saddam Hussein played a role in the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11th, 2001. No evidence had ever emerged linking him to it after 5 years of war in Iraq, but that did not matter, as “voters, once deceived, tend to stay that way despite all evidence.” Botched initial reporting can permanently entrench false information into the public’s mind and influence them to come to faulty conclusions as a result. This power of first impressions gives journalists an immense and solemn responsibility when conveying events. A misleading headline or an unsubstantiated report can sway the public towards similarly flawed conclusions with disastrous results

Be Good: Hatred and Hope in the Letters of Gerald Koster

To tell an informative story about someone’s life is difficult at the best of times. Gerald “Gerry” Koster’s correspondence during his last year of service in the US Navy towards the end of the Pacific War can thus only paint an incomplete portrait of who he was and what exactly the war meant to him. Nevertheless, there are things that his letters can teach readers, not only about Koster’s role and daily activities in the military, but about his personal character and how that manifested in his interactions with the defeated Japanese and his family. And perhaps, through his personal character, it is possible to discern something larger about the culture of his specific time and place in history

An automated tool for the design and assessment of space systems

Space systems can be characterized as both large and complex but they often rely on reusable subcomponents. One problem in the design of such systems is the representation and validation of the system, particularly at the higher levels of management. An automated tool is described for the representation, refinement, and validation of such complex systems based on a formal design theory, the Theory of Plausible Design. In particular, the steps necessary to automate the tool and make it a competent, usable assistant, are described

Are there Carbon Savings from US Biofuel Policies? Accounting for Leakage in Land and Fuel Markets

This paper applies the insights of the carbon leakage literature to study the emissions consequences of biofuel policies. We develop a simple analytic framework to decompose the intended emissions impacts of biofuel policy from four sources of carbon leakage: domestic fuel markets, domestic land markets, world land markets and world crude oil markets. A numerical simulation model illustrates the magnitude of each source of leakage for combinations of two current US biofuel policies: the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC) and the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). In the presence of both land and fuel market leakage, current US biofuel policies are unlikely to reduce greenhouse gases. Four of the five policy scenarios we consider lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. That is, total leakage was greater than 100%. The single scenario that generates emissions savings, the removal of the VEETC in conjunction with a binding RFS, only does so because negative leakage in the domestic fuel market offset the remaining positive sources of leakage.Multi-market, carbon leakage, biofuels, greenhouse gases, Agricultural and Food Policy, Land Economics/Use, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q42, Q54, Q58,

Alien Registration- Landry, Alvina M. (Millinocket, Penobscot County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/8155/thumbnail.jp

Dusky Grouse Population Ecology and Thermal Landscape Ecology in the Great Basin Ecosystem

Dusky Grouse are a mountainous forest grouse found throughout the western, inland mountain ranges of the United States and Canada. While a few studies have looked at Dusky Grouse in the Rocky Mountain Ecosystem of their range, there have been no prior studies of the Dusky Grouse in the Great Basin Ecosystem aside from a brief survey by Zwickel and Bendell in 2004 in the Duck Creek Range of Nevada. With the available habitats differing in both species diversity and availability on the landscape between the two Ecosystems, I wanted to assess characteristics about the Dusky Grouse populations at the southwestern edge of their range in the Great Basin Ecosystem. Thus, I estimated the abundance of Dusky Grouse in the Schell Creek, Duck Creek, and Egan Ranges of White Pine County, Nevada, as well as created a monitoring protocol for continued monitoring of abundance in these areas. I estimated a density of 5 males/km2. I also assessed the seasonal habitat selection of Dusky Grouse in the White Pine County study areas during breeding, nesting, brooding, and over winter. Dusky Grouse used aspen, conifers, and mountain shrubland habitat types the most across the seasons. Finally, I determined the varying temperatures of the study area’s landscape during peak summer and identified possible thermal refuge, or areas that protect species from extreme heat, for an array of wildlife taxa on the landscape. Aspen and conifer stands offered the coolest thermal refuge during peak hours of the summer compared to mountain mahogany, pinyon-juniper, and mountain shrublands. This research is new for the Great Basin Ecosystem, as well as for Dusky Grouse literature as a whole

Phonon Band Structure and Thermal Transport Correlation in a Layered Diatomic Crystal

To elucidate the relationship between a crystal's structure, its thermal conductivity, and its phonon dispersion characteristics, an analysis is conducted on layered diatomic Lennard-Jones crystals with various mass ratios. Lattice dynamics theory and molecular dynamics simulations are used to predict the phonon dispersion curves and the thermal conductivity. The layered structure generates directionally dependent thermal conductivities lower than those predicted by density trends alone. The dispersion characteristics are quantified using a set of novel band diagram metrics, which are used to assess the contributions of acoustic phonons and optical phonons to the thermal conductivity. The thermal conductivity increases as the extent of the acoustic modes increases, and decreases as the extent of the stop bands increases. The sensitivity of the thermal conductivity to the band diagram metrics is highest at low temperatures, where there is less anharmonic scattering, indicating that dispersion plays a more prominent role in thermal transport in that regime. We propose that the dispersion metrics (i) provide an indirect measure of the relative contributions of dispersion and anharmonic scattering to the thermal transport, and (ii) uncouple the standard thermal conductivity structure-property relation to that of structure-dispersion and dispersion-property relations, providing opportunities for better understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms and a potential tool for material design.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figure

Navigating Life with HIV: The Lived Experiences of Youth Living with HIV

Youth and young adults living with HIV, between the ages of 15 and 29 represent one-quarter of the new infection rates in Canada, but little is known about the safer sex practices, HIV disclosure processes and coping mechanisms used by this important but often neglected group to manage the every day realities of living with HIV. The primary objectives of this study were to gather qualitative data about the lived experiences of Canadian youth who are living with HIV and enhance our understanding of their experiences of becoming HIV-positive, navigating issues related to safer sex and HIV disclosure, and managing life as someone living with HIV. This research employed a phenomenological approach to data collection and analysis to understand the lived experiences of participants. This study utilized qualitative methods for data collection and analysis. Eighteen youth living with HIV (14 males, 3 females and 1 transgender female) between the ages of 22 and 29 were recruited for this study through AIDS Service Organizations in Ontario and British Columbia. Each participant engaged in an in-depth individual interview. The findings from this study highlight four global themes that were representative of the lived experience of what it means to live with HIV for the youth in this study. Becoming HIV-Positive includes the participants’ perspectives regarding being diagnosed with HIV and the impact of finding out they are HIV-positive, which included isolation, depression and thoughts about suicide. Navigating HIV focuses on how the participants’ lives have changed since they found out they have HIV, including coming to terms with being HIV-positive, learning to negotiate dating and other relationships, and determining responsibility for condom use. HIV Disclosure Management features the participants’ experiences regarding the management of disclosing or not disclosing their HIV status within various relationships. Finding New Meaning in Life After HIV Diagnosis focused on how the participants have found or made new meaning in their lives since becoming HIV-positive, including transforming their lives, creating positive changes and future hopes. The findings from this study contribute new knowledge and provide us with a detailed understanding of the lives of youth living with HIV, beginning from when they found out their HIV status through to the many challenges associated with being HIV-positive, and the strategies they use to manage living with HIV