Engaging Democracy: The Trouble with Trump

In its original version, this brief essay was delivered as a talk on the Northwestern College campus. The author reflects on Christian evangelical engagement in politics in “The Age of Trump”—as a believer, a political scientist, and a former candidate for state legislative office. Love, he argues—God’s love for us, and our love for God—is the key. As God’s love for each and all was made manifest in Christ on the cross, evangelicals should not lose sight of such love in engaging in public debate and policy-making. Insofar as uncritical evangelical support for Trump is the case, that is politics in and of the world. Evangelical political engagement needs instead to be done at the foot of the cross

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE IMPACT OF ULCERATIVE COLITIS AND CROHNS DISEASE ON POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER SYMPTOMS MODERATED BY REMISSION STATUS, REMISSION EXPECTATIONS AND POST TRAUMATIC GROWTH

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE IMPACT OF ULCERATIVE COLITIS AND CROHNS DISEASE ON POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER SYMPTOMS MODERATED BY REMISSION STATUS, REMISSION EXPECTATIONS AND POST TRAUMATIC GROWT

Session 2: \u3cem\u3eA Vision Guidance System on Agricultural Sprayers Reduces Operator Stress\u3c/em\u3e

Manually operating an agricultural sprayer is a stressful activity. Operators work an average of 15 hrs/day in peak season [1], navigating 38-cm (15-in) tires in 76-cm (30-in) rows. Guidance systems can relieve operator fatigue [2]. A commercially-available vision guidance system (VSN®, Raven Industries) is available for agricultural vehicles. Human subject protocols were approved by the IRB. Three experienced male operators drove manually and with VSN in the same field. Each wore an Empatica E4 wristband to measure their electrodermal activity (EDA). Sprayer steering status was recorded from the sprayer guidance system (RS1TM, Raven Industries). EDA data was filtered with a Hampel filter to remove artifacts [3] (1 s window before and after) and then with an infinite impulse response (MATLAB filtfilt function) [4] with a window of 1 s. Filtered EDA peaks and valleys were calculated (MATLAB findpeaks function) [5] and stressful events were defined as those which exceeded a magnitude threshold of 0.01 μS [6]. The frequency of stressful events, stressful event characteristics (e.g., magnitude, duration and area under the curve) and frequency of steering adjustments were calculated while driving in straight rows (length \u3e 150 m). An ANOVA was performed on each calculated metric with steering type and participant as predictor variables and p \u3c 0.05 considered significant. Thirty-four passes in four fields were analyzed (16 manual, 18 VSN). Operators steering with VSN had 49% fewer stressful events per time compared to manual driving (3.6 versus 7.1 events/min, p \u3c 0.001, Figure 1). These results suggest that steering with VSN considerably reduces the stress on agricultural operators compared to steering manually

Vision and Radar Steering Reduces Agricultural Sprayer Operator Stress without Compromising Steering Performance

Self-propelled agricultural sprayer operators work an average of 15 h d-1 in peak season, and steering is the task that causes the operator the most stress because of the large number of stimuli involved. Automatic guidance systems help reduce stress and fatigue for operators by allowing them to focus on tasks other than steering. Physiological signals like skin conductance (electrodermal activity, EDA) change with stress and can be used to identify stressful events. The objective of this study was to determine if using a commercially available vision and radar guidance system (VSN®, Raven Industries) reduces agricultural sprayer operators’ stress compared to when they are steering manually. Four male professional sprayer operators participated in this study. Each operator performed his job duties normally in GPS-guidance-planted fields, at his self-selected speed, except to drive some passes manually and others with VSN in the same field. EDA was measured with an Empatica E4 wristband, and stressful events were quantified. Machine data (e.g., speed, RTK-GPS, and VSN metrics) were collected from each sprayer via CAN logs. The steering type, stress rate (e.g., stressful events min-1), and steering performance (crosstrack error standard deviation, XTE SD) were determined for each pass. In total, 51 passes (23 manual, 28 VSN) in six fields were analyzed. Operators using VSN had a significant reduction (48% lower, p \u3c 0.001) in their stress rate compared to when they were steering manually. There was no significant difference in the XTE SD for the steering type. The use of an automatic guidance system such as VSN could have a dramatic positive effect on the health of sprayer operators, especially during the long workdays of the peak spraying season, and could reduce the negative effects that stress and fatigue have on steering performance, mistakes, and accidents

Virginia Woolf as equilibrist : the moment of vision and the androgynous mind

Current assessments based more upon Virginia Woolf's feminism than upon her novels as literature threaten to make of her a cult-heroine, whose image is now printed upon t-shirts and tote bags. This study asserts, however, that Virginia Woolf's novels reflect her fictive search for a balance between what she called the masculine and the feminine sides of the brain. To the masculine side, she ascribed qualities that are rational, factual, prosaic, practical, and analytical; to the feminine side, the more intuitive, imaginative, poetic, sensitive, and creative characteristics. More important, minds reflecting equilibrium between these "opposing forces" are called "androgynous," and through characters whose minds reflect such balance and wholeness, Virginia Woolf conveys the experience of the moment of vision

Almost Lie structures on an anchored Banach bundle

Under appropriate assumptions, we generalize the concept of linear almost Poisson struc- tures, almost Lie algebroids, almost differentials in the framework of Banach anchored bundles and the relation between these objects. We then obtain an adapted formalism for mechanical systems which is illustrated by the evolutionary problem of the "Hilbert snake

Stress Propagation through Frictionless Granular Material

We examine the network of forces to be expected in a static assembly of hard, frictionless spherical beads of random sizes, such as a colloidal glass. Such an assembly is minimally connected: the ratio of constraint equations to contact forces approaches unity for a large assembly. However, the bead positions in a finite subregion of the assembly are underdetermined. Thus to maintain equilibrium, half of the exterior contact forces are determined by the other half. We argue that the transmission of force may be regarded as unidirectional, in contrast to the transmission of force in an elastic material. Specializing to sequentially deposited beads, we show that forces on a given buried bead can be uniquely specified in terms of forces involving more recently added beads. We derive equations for the transmission of stress averaged over scales much larger than a single bead. This derivation requires the Ansatz that statistical fluctuations of the forces are independent of fluctuations of the contact geometry. Under this Ansatz, the $d(d+1)/2$-component stress field can be expressed in terms of a d-component vector field. The procedure may be generalized to non-sequential packings. In two dimensions, the stress propagates according to a wave equation, as postulated in recent work elsewhere. We demonstrate similar wave-like propagation in higher dimensions, assuming that the packing geometry has uniaxial symmetry. In macroscopic granular materials we argue that our approach may be useful even though grains have friction and are not packed sequentially.=17Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, revised vertion for Phys. Rev.