Interpreting Contemporary Pilgrimage as Spiritual Journey or Aesthetic Tourism Along the Appalachian Trail

Pilgrimage and tourism can be interpreted as overlapping travel experiences. Given all the changes mass transportation and communication technologies have brought, understanding the phenomenon of pilgrimage becomes fraught with ambiguity. Is pilgrimage better understood as a tourist excursion that affords instances of religious devotion? Pilgrimage routes and long distance scenic trails have their aesthetic appeal, which pilgrims and tourists enjoy. Is there a difference in the way these two groups walk these trails that become manifest through aesthetic experiences and encounters? Looking at long distance hiking on the Appalachian Trail as spiritual journey opens up a reinterpretation of both pilgrimage and tourism, disentangling them. In taking a phenomenological approach to describing and interpreting the two kinds of travel, they are shown to be dissimilar. The liminal journey of the pilgrim opens them to an encounter with both symbols and beings that is distinct from the scenic orientation of the tourist

Lynch Syndrome

Poster project on Lynch Syndrome

Commission Meeting, Jim Redick

Commission Meeting: Report on Climate Change Progress in Virgini

Apollo 15 contingency procedures

As a result of recent activities involving Boydbolts for A-2, an additional step in the crew procedures should be added in the event that a spindle does not depress.R. L. Redick

PID Controlled Adaptive Time-Stepping in Coupled Surface-Subsurface Simulation: A Tool for Reducing Non-Physical Oscillation

Surface-subsurface coupling in simulation is required to model large, complex and often offshore projects. The most optimal form of coupling is the partially implicit method. The partially implicit method typically balances accuracy and computational costs. However, the partially implicit method can suffer from non-physical oscillations. Nonphysical oscillations are a result of incorrect assumptions made during coupled simulation. Non-physical oscillations are solely artifacts of less than ideal coupled simulation- they do not have physical significance. As such, non-physical oscillations in coupling are treated as simulation complications, as opposed to reservoir or network dynamics. Although many coupling solutions exist, many are complex and difficult to implement in commercial software packages. In this study, we investigate the use of PID control to select time-steps in coupled surface-subsurface simulation. PID control is not often used in oil and gas applications, however it is well established in other engineering fields. The PID controller performs automatic, adaptive time-stepping in the coupled simulation. The controller operated by reducing oscillations in coupling error. The results show that the PID controlled time-stepping reduces non-physical oscillations, the total number of time-steps executed, and the computational cost of coupled simulation. Importantly, one PID controlled experiment decreased simulation time by 300%, with less than 0.5% error (in cumulative production) as compared to Schlumberger’s standard coupling settings. We performed a set of manual tuning experiments that highlight opportunity for controller optimization, as well as motivate future work. The PID controlled coupled simulation we created can be implemented in any software where the user can select the time-steps

Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Reading Comprehension of Electronic Texts

Technology is unquestionably changing the nature of education. Computers, tablets, e-readers, and cell phones are rapidly replacing print text and handwritten notes. These devices are not only the dominating sources of communication in current society; they also represent a connecting point between information and the minds of modern students. The term working memory refers to the immediate, transitory processing and storage that takes place as an individual completes higher-order cognitive tasks. Working memory has a clear relationship with learning, reasoning, and comprehension in the classroom (Baddeley, 1992). However, each individual has a working memory capacity (WMC) which limits how much information he or she can store and manipulate in a given period of time (Turner & Engle, 1989). Individuals with lower WMC, meaning the amount of simultaneous information they are able to process is limited, often have difficulties with reading comprehension (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), are likely to experience distraction from extraneous information (Sanchez & Wiley, 2002), and are more prone to wind-wandering (McVay & Kane, 2009). At the same time, individuals with high WMC are less likely to experience these difficulties to such a debilitating degree. The majority of current research focuses on reading comprehension using print material. This study examines individual differences among WMC, reading duration, and comprehension using electronic texts in an effort to explore the role technology has on learning. An additional goal of this research is to determine if there is a relationship between WMC and eye fixation patterns while reading text, interacting with graphs, and viewing images. Participants first completed Operation Span to measure WMC, read selections from an electronic textbook while their eye fixations were monitored by a Tobii TX300 eye tracking system, answered questions about the material, and completed a demographics questionnaire. Data collection is ongoing

Do European Union Non-Tariff Barriers Create Economic Nuisances in the United States?

The European Union\u27s new traceability system for biotech crops will lead to the proliferation of non-tariff barriers affecting biotech crops. This, in turn, will lead to economic dislocation and attendant liability in the United States, which is losing billions of dollars in export trade. A chain of complex legal problems will arise for United States-based companies as they strive to trace particular genetically modified (GM) events and avoid commingling. The European Union (E. U) tracing law for biotech crops applies at each stage of commodity commerce, from grain shippers leading back through elevators, growers, and seed companies. Warranty liability could arise from denial of entry in the ports of the E. U, and any trading partners following a similar zero tolerance approach (e.g., China, New Zealand, Japan, etc.) as shippers denied entry use the E. U-imposed tracing system to trace unapproved-in-E. U, biotech crops back to growers or biotech seed companies. Nuisance liability could arise as growers look to their neighbors for the source of their warranty violation. E. U-mandated documentation will expedite the process of establishing liability for commingling of the variety of biotech crop

Videogame interventions and spatial ability interactions

Numerous research studies have been conducted on the use of videogames as tools to improve one’s cognitive abilities. While meta-analyses and qualitative reviews have provided evidence that some aspects of cognition such as spatial imagery are modified after exposure to videogames, other evidence has shown that matrix reasoning measures of fluid intelligence do not show evidence of transfer from videogame training. In the current work, we investigate the available evidence for transfer specifically to nonverbal intelligence and spatial ability measures, given recent research that these abilities may be most sensitive to training on cognitive and working memory tasks. Accordingly, we highlight a few studies that on the surface provide evidence for transfer to spatial abilities, but a closer look at the pattern of data does not reveal a clean interpretation of the results. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to research design and statistical analysis practices