Fishes of the Strawberry River System of Northcentral Arkansas

A survey of the fishes of the Strawberry River in northcentral Arkansas was made between August 1967 and November 1973. Field collections, literature records and museum specimens showed the ichthyofauna of the Strawberry River to be made up of 95 species distributed among 17 families. Two erroneous records are deleted. One subspecies, Etheostoma spectabile fragi,, is endemic to the river. Records of Notropis fumeus, Etheostotna nigrum, Etheostoma proeliare and Percina sciera represent extensions of previously known ranges within the state

The Epistemic Dimensions of Moral Responsibility and Respect

What epistemic conditions must one satisfy to be morally responsible for an action or attitude? A common worry is that robust epistemic requirements would have disastrous implications for our responsibility attributing practices: we would be unable to make epistemically justified responsibility attributions, or we would be licensed to disrespectfully excuse agents for their sincerely held beliefs. Those more optimistic about robust epistemic requirements inadvertently make them too demanding to explain the moral successes of ordinary agents. The present project shows how both the pessimists and optimists rely on instructively mistaken assumptions in epistemology, ethics, and action theory, and it culminates in a theoretical framework for responsibility for right action (or moral worth) from which well-motivated and unproblematic epistemic requirements fall out. A right action is morally worthy, I argue, just to the extent that it is explained by a reliable tie to the right that is secured through the influence one’s values have (perhaps unreflectively) on one’s informational access and processing. This Value-Secured Reliability framework has wide-reaching import and readily extends to a further variety of moral success: respect

INFLATION, CASH FLOWS, AND GROWTH: SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FARM FIRM

Agribusiness,

Sound Scenes: Performativity, Politics, and Capital in New Music Ensembles

This thesis examines classical music as a cultural practice and centers on my ethnographies of three musical ensembles in the United States: Alarm Will Sound, eighth blackbird, and Yarn/Wire. Each group is a non-profit performing arts organization formed by conservatory-trained members and each performs and promotes new classical music, or new music as it is commonly called. I draw also on my own experience performing and interacting in new music communities. From these mixed domains, I demonstrate new music ensembles as dynamic and complex entities in which individuals negotiate between the elitist conventions of classical music and populist ideals. In particular, I argue that aesthetic differences correspond to political struggles for recognition. Groups perform musical works in certain styles that reflect their respective aesthetics. With such activities, new music ensembles endeavor to make a name for themselves and gain prominence in new music culture. They thus embody a struggle for prestige. The mechanism for these pursuits entails a circulation of symbolic capital and its conversion into real capital. I frame the activities of the three ensembles within an established history of practice and examine the documented tensions between classical composers and commercial musics, and between internal struggles of modernist and postmodern composers and performers. Finally, I problematize evolutionary concepts of modern and postmodern by portraying the older groups, Alarm Will Sound and eighth blackbird as postmodern, and the younger group, Yarn/Wire, as comparatively modernist

Imaging White Blood Cells using a Snapshot Hyper-Spectral Imaging System

Automated white blood cell (WBC) counting systems process an extracted whole blood sample and provide a cell count. A step that would not be ideal for onsite screening of individuals in triage or at a security gate. Snapshot Hyper-Spectral imaging systems are capable of capturing several spectral bands simultaneously, offering co-registered images of a target. With appropriate optics, these systems are potentially able to image blood cells in vivo as they flow through a vessel, eliminating the need for a blood draw and sample staining. Our group has evaluated the capability of a commercial Snapshot Hyper-Spectral imaging system, specifically the Arrow system from Rebellion Photonics, in differentiating between white and red blood cells on unstained and sealed blood smear slides. We evaluated the imaging capabilities of this hyperspectral camera as a platform to build an automated blood cell counting system. Hyperspectral data consisting of 25, 443x313 hyperspectral bands with ~3nm spacing were captured over the range of 419 to 494nm. Open-source hyperspectral datacube analysis tools, used primarily in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications, indicate that white blood cells\u27 features are most prominent in the 428-442nm band for blood samples viewed under 20x and 50x magnification over a varying range of illumination intensities. The system has shown to successfully segment blood cells based on their spectral-spatial information. These images could potentially be used in subsequent automated white blood cell segmentation and counting algorithms for performing in vivo white blood cell counting

Moral Worth and Consciousness: In Defense of a Value-Secured Reliability Theory

What minimal role—if any—must consciousness of morally significant information play in an account of moral worth? According to one popular view, a right action is morally worthy only if the agent is conscious (in some sense) of the facts that make it right. I argue against this consciousness condition and close cousins of it. As I show, consciousness of such facts requires much more sophistication than writers typically suggest—this condition would bar from moral worth most ordinary, intuitively morally worthy agents. Moreover, I show that the attraction to this flavor of consciousness condition rests on mistaken assumptions about what is required for a right act to be non-accidentally right and attributable to the agent. Drawing some lessons from the discussion, I defend a Value-Secured Reliability Theory of Moral Worth and show how a minimal yet indispensable role for consciousness falls out from it. On this independently plausible theory, an action can be morally worthy even when the agent is unaware of the right-making features of her action