Unraveling Anti-Federalist Ideology through a Conceptual Framework of Natural Rights

This master thesis begins with a detailed telling of the history of the Anti-Federalist movement. At the time, the United States was undergoing a huge change. The entire government was in the process of being replaced with a fundamentally different one. Dismantling all pre-existing state and local governments, and forming one unitary government. Some people were understandably fearful of this and Anti-Federalism was born. The Anti-Federalist group was extremely diverse, with internal disagreements on nearly every concept. The author argues that the one thing that all Anti-Federalists mutually agreed upon was the existence of inalienable natural rights including the natural right to self-ownership and the ownership of legitimately gained property. The Anti-Federalists worried that the Constitution contained unsuitable and unspecified objectives for an excessive government, and therefore threatened these natural rights. It was this worry of the extinguishing of natural rights that the Anti-Federalists universally opposed. The author concludes with reflections on researching and writing for the thesis

Coordination of Brain-Wide Activity Dynamics by Dopaminergic Neurons

Several neuropsychiatric conditions, such as addiction and schizophrenia, may arise in part from dysregulated activity of ventral tegmental area dopaminergic (TH(VTA)) neurons, as well as from more global maladaptation in neurocircuit function. However, whether TH(VTA) activity affects large-scale brain-wide function remains unknown. Here we selectively activated TH(VTA) neurons in transgenic rats and measured resulting changes in whole-brain activity using stimulus-evoked functional magnetic resonance imaging. Applying a standard generalized linear model analysis approach, our results indicate that selective optogenetic stimulation of TH(VTA) neurons enhanced cerebral blood volume signals in striatal target regions in a dopamine receptor-dependent manner. However, brain-wide voxel-based principal component analysis of the same data set revealed that dopaminergic modulation activates several additional anatomically distinct regions throughout the brain, not typically associated with dopamine release events. Furthermore, explicit pairing of TH(VTA) neuronal activation with a forepaw stimulus of a particular frequency expanded the sensory representation of that stimulus, not exclusively within the somatosensory cortices, but brain-wide. These data suggest that modulation of TH(VTA) neurons can impact brain dynamics across many distributed anatomically distinct regions, even those that receive little to no direct TH(VTA) input

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7