The Dark Side of the Moon: Unpacking Civil Rights and Student Antiwar Criticism of the Apollo Program

July 20, 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of man landing on the moon. To commemorate this historic anniversary, NASA held festivals, and people published books and released movies that reflected the triumph of the Apollo 11 mission. However, this celebratory media fails to illustrate the dissent against the program that existed during the 1960s. This era marked a contentious decade in American history, and the world at large, with a rise in protests and civil unrest fueled by the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. At this same time, the United States was engaged in the space race with the Soviet Union amidst the Cold War. Despite being painted as a nationalistic, patriotic endeavor by government leaders, such as President Kennedy, the Apollo program was not accepted as progress for all Americans, and activists took issue with what the pursuit of space meant for American society. While at this time some Americans saw the Apollo program as a glorious depiction of American superiority and progress, others found these efforts in space to be an example of wasteful government spending and indicative of government officials’ discriminatory priorities at a time when many Black Americans were facing racism and poverty. Others viewed government officials and media outlets’ treatment of the Apollo program as hypocritical given the United States’ involvement in Vietnam and saw the moonshot as evidence of further American imperialism. This research seeks to complicate popular memory of the Apollo program by bringing to light these critical voices

“Leaves From my Journal”: William T. Beatty’s Civil War Account of the 2nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry

During his time in service, Beatty kept a journal and meticulously recorded dates and key events, though Beatty was not unique in doing so, as diaries, journals, and letters were essential correspondence during the Civil War (Maness and Combs 2010). However, Beatty, who moved to Gibbon, Nebraska following the war in 1872, later shared his original journal entries which were reprinted in the Buffalo County Beacon (Gibbon, Nebraska’s newspaper). Over the course of thirty-three newspaper articles – running from February 1, 1883 to September 21, 1883 – Beatty provided his personal account in the Buffalo County Beacon and referred to each article as “Leaves From my Journal” (Fig. 2).1 These first-hand accounts serve as a unique way to track both physical and political landscapes during the Civil War

The role of attention in affect perception: an examination of Mirsky\u27s four factor model of attention in chronic schizophrenia

Attention and affect perception was examined in a sample of sixty-five persons with chronic schizophrenia. Attentional skills may be related to deficits in affect perception due to a lack of attention to important information contained in the face. Deficits of this sort can dramatically inhibit appropriate social functioning. However, there is a lack of empirical research on this topic. Mirsky\u27s four factor model of attention was used as a broad-based assessment of attentional functioning. The four factors of attention were: 1) Focus-Execute, 2) Encode, 3) Sustain, and 4) Shift. Neuropsychological measures reflective of attentional factor were administered. In this study, Mirsky\u27s four factor model of attention was replicated, and four clear factors of attention emerged from the analysis. In addition, a regression analysis showed that all four attentional factors and psychiatric diagnosis were significantly related to affect perception scores. In contrast, psychiatric symptoms, medication levels, demographic variables, verbal fluency, and face perception scores were unrelated to affect perception. The four factors of attention accounted for 78% of the variance in affect perception scores. Finally, persons who scored high and low on the affect perception measures were also found to differ on the attentional measures as well. All of these results point to the important role that attentional abilities play in the recognition of emotional states for persons with schizophrenia

Letter from Gilbert R. Combs

Letter of recommendation for instructor in Music Department

Testing validation tools on CLIPS-based expert systems

The Expert Systems Validation Associate (EVA) is a validation system which was developed at the Lockheed Software Technology Center and Artificial Intelligence Center between 1986 and 1990. EVA is an integrated set of generic tools to validate any knowledge-based system written in any expert system shell such as C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS), ART, OPS5, KEE, and others. Many validation tools have been built in the EVA system. In this paper, we describe the testing results of applying the EVA validation tools to the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) Fault Diagnosis, Isolation, and Reconfiguration (FDIR) expert system, written in CLIPS, obtained from the NASA Johnson Space Center

Building validation tools for knowledge-based systems

The Expert Systems Validation Associate (EVA), a validation system under development at the Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center for more than a year, provides a wide range of validation tools to check the correctness, consistency and completeness of a knowledge-based system. A declarative meta-language (higher-order language), is used to create a generic version of EVA to validate applications written in arbitrary expert system shells. The architecture and functionality of EVA are presented. The functionality includes Structure Check, Logic Check, Extended Structure Check (using semantic information), Extended Logic Check, Semantic Check, Omission Check, Rule Refinement, Control Check, Test Case Generation, Error Localization, and Behavior Verification

Nebraska’s Medicaid Expansion: An Interesting Rural-Urban Divide

Initially established in 1965, Medicaid was expanded in 2010 to include the working poor. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2012, however, ruled that the provision of the Affordable Care Act requiring states to expand Medicaid was unconstitutional. This made it a state option whether or not to expand Medicaid. In Nebraska, the approved expansion is projected to cover approximately 90,000 Nebraskans who are 19 to 64 years of age with annual incomes 138 percent of federal poverty level. In conjunction with current Medicaid expenses, expansion is expected to make the program the second largest general fund appropriation in the state. The spatial aspects of Nebraska’s Initiative 427, the measure regarding expansion in Nebraska, are noteworthy as well. The measure passed with 356,891 in favor compared to 309,533 against. Only nine Nebraska counties, however, voted in favor of Initiative 427 and eighty-four voted against the measure. A similar rural-urban divide also appeared at the legislative district level. Nebraska has forty-nine legislative districts and twenty-eight voted in favor of the measure. Although, simply stating the number of districts for and against hides a sharp rural-urban divide. Twenty-four of the twenty-eight districts that supported Initiative 427 are located in the Omaha and Lincoln metropolitan areas, with only four legislative districts favoring expansion located outside Omaha and Lincoln. A similar pattern was witnessed in the 2018 gubernatorial election in Nebraska as well. Ricketts-R carried the state by a significant margin, winning 59.0 percent to the Democrat challenger’s 41.0 percent, yet a pronounced rural-urban divide was evident

Randomised phase I/II study to evaluate carbon ion radiotherapy versus fractionated stereotactic radiotherapy in patients with recurrent or progressive gliomas: The CINDERELLA trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Treatment of patients with recurrent glioma includes neurosurgical resection, chemotherapy, or radiation therapy. In most cases, a full course of radiotherapy has been applied after primary diagnosis, therefore application of re-irradiation has to be applied cauteously. With modern precision photon techniques such as fractionated stereotactic radiotherapy (FSRT), a second course of radiotherapy is safe and effective and leads to survival times of 22, 16 and 8 months for recurrent WHO grade II, III and IV gliomas.</p> <p>Carbon ions offer physical and biological characteristics. Due to their inverted dose profile and the high local dose deposition within the Bragg peak precise dose application and sparing of normal tissue is possible. Moreover, in comparison to photons, carbon ions offer an increased relative biological effectiveness (RBE), which can be calculated between 2 and 5 depending on the GBM cell line as well as the endpoint analyzed. Protons, however, offer an RBE which is comparable to photons.</p> <p>First Japanese Data on the evaluation of carbon ion radiation therapy for the treatment of primary high-grade gliomas showed promising results in a small and heterogeneous patient collective.</p> <p>Methods Design</p> <p>In the current Phase I/II-CINDERELLA-trial re-irradiation using carbon ions will be compared to FSRT applied to the area of contrast enhancement representing high-grade tumor areas in patients with recurrent gliomas. Within the Phase I Part of the trial, the Recommended Dose (RD) of carbon ion radiotherapy will be determined in a dose escalation scheme. In the subsequent randomized Phase II part, the RD will be evaluated in the experimental arm, compared to the standard arm, FSRT with a total dose of 36 Gy in single doses of 2 Gy.</p> <p>Primary endpoint of the Phase I part is toxicity. Primary endpoint of the randomized part II is survival after re-irradiation at 12 months, secondary endpoint is progression-free survival.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>The Cinderella trial is the first study to evaluate carbon ion radiotherapy for recurrent gliomas, and to compare this treatment to photon FSRT in a randomized setting using an ion beam delivered by intensity modulated rasterscanning.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>NCT01166308</p

A GIScience Approach to Analyzing Spatial Patterns of Voter Turnout in Omaha, Nebraska

Scholars from a variety of disciplines have analyzed voter participation, with most studies focusing on socio-demographic issues to explain turnout . Often overlooked, however, is the geography of voter participation . Omaha, Nebraska presents an economically and ethnically diverse study area to examine geographic factors related to turnout . Over 51 percent of the state’s registered voters live in three counties—Douglas, Sarpy, and Lancaster—which contain the Omaha and Lincoln metropolitan areas . This project employs Geographic Information Science (GIScience) along with electoral geography principles and spatial analysis to evaluate voter participation across the Omaha metropolitan area . Getis-Ord Gi* statistic is utilized to demonstrate statistically significant spatial clustering of high and low values of voter participation and turnout at the census block-group level . This study also examines a number of demographic variables through stepwise regression that help explain voting patterns in the Omaha metropolitan area . Results indicate that, independent of party affiliation, educated, middle-class, white populations in Omaha have higher voter participation rate