A Chemist in the Senate: Edwin Fremont Ladd, 1921-1925

Edwin Fremont Ladd, a native of :Maine, migrated to North Dakota in 1890 to join the chemistry faculty of the Agricultural College. In the following three decades, his work in the pure-food crusade and in the fight for fair grain grading and reasonable rail rates earned him a reputation for personal courage and devotion to agriculture. His reputation led the Nonpartisan League to endorse him for the United States Senate in 1920. Following his victory over Senator Asle J. Gronna in the Republican primary, Ladd defeated his Democratic opponent in the general election. From his entry into the Senate in 1921 to his death in 1925, Ladd continued to demonstrate both his courage and his devotion to agriculture. He courageously resisted attempts to suppress 1the Teapot Dome investigation. He stood firm on his unpopular advocacies of recognition of Soviet Russia and private development of Muscle Shoals. As an advocate of aid to agriculture, Ladd supported high agricultural tariffs, increased appropriations for agricultural research, the building of a St. Lawrence Seaway, and the expansion of agricultural credit. He joined the Farm Bloc and generally supported its attempts to improve· agricultural conditions. Ladd\u27s independence and strength of conviction often brought him to oppose administration policies. He was soon recognized as a rebel and was seldom consulted on appointments. His dissatisfaction with the Republican administrations led him to support Robert N. LaFollette\u27s presidential candidacy in 1924. He was subsequently expelled from the Republican caucus and stripped of his seniority privileges

Adaptation to the Edge of Chaos in the Self-Adjusting Logistic Map

Self-adjusting, or adaptive systems have gathered much recent interest. We present a model for self-adjusting systems which treats the control parameters of the system as slowly varying, rather than constant. The dynamics of these parameters is governed by a low-pass filtered feedback from the dynamical variables of the system. We apply this model to the logistic map and examine the behavior of the control parameter. We find that the parameter leaves the chaotic regime. We observe a high probability of finding the parameter at the boundary between periodicity and chaos. We therefore find that this system exhibits adaptation to the edge of chaos.Comment: 3 figure