Presidential Leadership in the Space Age

Mankind’s quest to reach the moon consisted of many people in leadership positions. In the US, however, many of the decisions behind the space race, especially funding for it, were made by four men: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Richard Nixon. While some presidents (namely Kennedy) receive more credit than others for their work on bringing man to the moon, each of them passed influential policy that was vital in the development of Apollo: Eisenhower founded NASA and began research on the Saturn V, Kennedy gave vision and urgency to the program, Johnson gave massive funding to it, and Nixon oversaw the program and decided what would come next

The evolving maintenance of certification process: update on the financial status of the medical boards

Medical board organizations have accumulated large asset balances, in part due to the monetization of physician board recertification, as well as capital gains in positive investment conditions. Physicians across the country have raised concerns regarding the effectiveness and efficiency of existing recertification processes, to which the American Board of Medical Specialties and independent accreditation boards have responded with newly instituted changes. The present article analyzes the publicly available F990 tax forms of the medical boards in an effort to provide data to the ongoing debate. Although some boards have begun to mobilize assets in recent years, many continue to accumulate wealth. It remains to be seen whether the new recertification programs will bring about change or perpetuate organizational wealth

Beneath the Tower: The Story of a Campus Icon

A history of Glatfelter Hall, one of the most iconic buildings on the Gettysburg College campus. This paper also aims to compare Glatfelter with a similarly iconic building on the campus of UVA, the Rotunda. Finally, it proposes a series of interpretive markers about the history of Glatfelter Hall both in terms of content and placement

To Bigotry No Sanction, To Persecution No Assistance: Jews in the American Revolutionary Period

While Jews were a small minority in the American colonies, they nonetheless participated in the American Revolution on both sides. This paper aims to evaluate the role of Jewish people in the conflict, contextualizing the experiences of this small minority within the larger narrative of the American Revolution and establishing their importance in the development of religious freedom in the United States. Through the examination of these topics, this paper aims to explore the Revolutionary period from the perspective of the Jewish-American, discussing their often-overlooked experiences in this watershed period within U.S. history

Dr. Seuss and Uncle Sam

This is an examination of the WWII era political cartoons of Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), which covered a variety of topics ranging from isolationism to anti-Axis propaganda to racism and bigotry at home. The project further investigates the attitudes of German-Americans towards Hitler, using Geisel\u27s very vocal hatred of the Nazi leader to compare his sentiments with many of his contemporary peers

Simultaneous mapping of multiple gene loci with pooled segregants

The analysis of polygenic, phenotypic characteristics such as quantitative traits or inheritable diseases remains an important challenge. It requires reliable scoring of many genetic markers covering the entire genome. The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies provides a new way to evaluate large numbers of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as genetic markers. Combining the technologies with pooling of segregants, as performed in bulked segregant analysis (BSA), should, in principle, allow the simultaneous mapping of multiple genetic loci present throughout the genome. The gene mapping process, applied here, consists of three steps: First, a controlled crossing of parents with and without a trait. Second, selection based on phenotypic screening of the offspring, followed by the mapping of short offspring sequences against the parental reference. The final step aims at detecting genetic markers such as SNPs, insertions and deletions with next generation sequencing (NGS). Markers in close proximity of genomic loci that are associated to the trait have a higher probability to be inherited together. Hence, these markers are very useful for discovering the loci and the genetic mechanism underlying the characteristic of interest. Within this context, NGS produces binomial counts along the genome, i.e., the number of sequenced reads that matches with the SNP of the parental reference strain, which is a proxy for the number of individuals in the offspring that share the SNP with the parent. Genomic loci associated with the trait can thus be discovered by analyzing trends in the counts along the genome. We exploit the link between smoothing splines and generalized mixed models for estimating the underlying structure present in the SNP scatterplots

A Country Torn Asunder: Deliberations Over the Fate of Post-WWII Germany

This diplomatic history examines the development of Germany’s post-WWII borders. Beginning in 1941, this thesis traces the myriad of proposals and debates about German territory, focusing particularly on the matter of division and dismemberment. This work focuses on two main topics: Allied proposals and counterproposals for a divided Germany and zones of occupation, and the relationship and interactions between the Big Three leaders and powers, focusing on how East-West tensions affected the diplomatic talks

Anomalous Microfluidic Phonons Induced by the Interplay of Hydrodynamic Screening and Incompressibility

We investigate the acoustic normal modes ("phonons") of a 1D microfluidic droplet crystal at the crossover between 2D flow and confined 1D plug flow. The unusual phonon spectra of the crystal, which arise from long-range hydrodynamic interactions, change anomalously under confinement. The boundaries induce weakening and screening of the interactions, but when approaching the 1D limit we measure a marked increase in the crystal sound velocity, a sign of interaction strengthening. This non-monotonous behavior of the phonon spectra is explained theoretically by the interplay of screening and plug flow.Comment: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.124502 http://www.weizmann.ac.il/complex/tlusty/papers/PhysRevLett2007.pd

Monuments of Legitimacy: 17th Century Tokugawa-Sponsored Architecture as Political Objects

This work aims to synthesize art history, historical memory, and Tokugawa-era Japanese politics with an art history approach and cultural analysis. It takes a more complete look at the politics of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s death and the significance of memorial and religious architecture as political works. It examines the utilization of architecture as a way to elevate and legitimize the Tokugawa, demonstrating that policy was not the only way for the Tokugawa to solidify their legacy and suggesting that key figures like Ieyasu were more important to the religious and political structures of Tokugawa Japan in death than they were in life. This paper begins by discussing the immediate political effects of Ieyasu’s death and the establishment of the Nikko Toshogu before discussing the physical aspects of the shrine and comparing it with the Ise Shrine to establish the relationship between the shogun and the Emperor. Finally, it examines the mausoleum of Sūgen-in, Tokugawa Iemitsu’s mother, in order to contextualize the shift of the architectural style of female mausoleums to emulate those of their male counterparts, showing a growing inclusivity towards women in establishing the legacy of the Tokugawa during the early Edo Period

RLZAP: Relative Lempel-Ziv with Adaptive Pointers

Relative Lempel-Ziv (RLZ) is a popular algorithm for compressing databases of genomes from individuals of the same species when fast random access is desired. With Kuruppu et al.'s (SPIRE 2010) original implementation, a reference genome is selected and then the other genomes are greedily parsed into phrases exactly matching substrings of the reference. Deorowicz and Grabowski (Bioinformatics, 2011) pointed out that letting each phrase end with a mismatch character usually gives better compression because many of the differences between individuals' genomes are single-nucleotide substitutions. Ferrada et al. (SPIRE 2014) then pointed out that also using relative pointers and run-length compressing them usually gives even better compression. In this paper we generalize Ferrada et al.'s idea to handle well also short insertions, deletions and multi-character substitutions. We show experimentally that our generalization achieves better compression than Ferrada et al.'s implementation with comparable random-access times