Struggle for Sovereignty: An African-American Colonization Attempt and Delicate Independence in Mid-Nineteenth Century Central America

This thesis uses a series of United States foreign relations documents centered around an 1862 attempt by Abraham Lincoln to colonize parts of Central America with freed African Americans. Traditionally, these communications have been used by historians for U.S. foreign relations or Black resettlement history. Here, instead, this collection is used to display the major threats to Central American sovereignty in the mid-nineteenth century in their own words. The collection reveals that two of the threats were foreign imperialistic thought and racial instability. However, the third, and ultimately most destabilizing threat to the region, was the five nations\u27 rivalry amongst each other. This thesis provides an image of Central American history previously overshadowed by other events in the region while explaining how both individual sovereignty and regional autonomy there began to disintegrate in the early 1860’s

BamView: visualizing and interpretation of next-generation sequencing read alignments.

So-called next-generation sequencing (NGS) has provided the ability to sequence on a massive scale at low cost, enabling biologists to perform powerful experiments and gain insight into biological processes. BamView has been developed to visualize and analyse sequence reads from NGS platforms, which have been aligned to a reference sequence. It is a desktop application for browsing the aligned or mapped reads [Ruffalo, M, LaFramboise, T, Koyutürk, M. Comparative analysis of algorithms for next-generation sequencing read alignment. Bioinformatics 2011;27:2790-6] at different levels of magnification, from nucleotide level, where the base qualities can be seen, to genome or chromosome level where overall coverage is shown. To enable in-depth investigation of NGS data, various views are provided that can be configured to highlight interesting aspects of the data. Multiple read alignment files can be overlaid to compare results from different experiments, and filters can be applied to facilitate the interpretation of the aligned reads. As well as being a standalone application it can be used as an integrated part of the Artemis genome browser, BamView allows the user to study NGS data in the context of the sequence and annotation of the reference genome. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) density and candidate SNP sites can be highlighted and investigated, and read-pair information can be used to discover large structural insertions and deletions. The application will also calculate simple analyses of the read mapping, including reporting the read counts and reads per kilobase per million mapped reads (RPKM) for genes selected by the user

Extending CMIP5 projections of global mean temperature change and sea level rise due to the thermal expansion using a physically-based emulator

We present a physically-based emulator approach to extending 21st century CMIP5 model simulations of global mean surface temperature (GMST) and global thermal expansion (TE) to 2300. A two-layer energy balance model that has been tuned to emulate the CO2 response of individual CMIP5 models is combined with model-specific radiative forcings to generate an emulated ensemble to 2300 for RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. Errors in the emulated time series are quantified using a subset of CMIP5 models with data available to 2300 and factored into the ensemble uncertainty. The resulting projections show good agreement with 21st century ensemble projections reported in IPCC AR5 and also compare favourably with individual CMIP5 model simulations post-2100. There is a tendency for the two-layer model simulations to overestimate both GMST rise and TE under RCP2.6, which is suggestive of a systematic error in the applied radiative forcings. Overall, the framework shows promise as a basis for extending process-based projections of global sea level rise beyond the 21st century time horizon that typifies CMIP5 simulations. The results also serve to illustrate the differing responses of GMST and Earth's energy imbalance (EEI) to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. GMST responds relatively quickly to changes in emissions, leading to a negative trend post-2100 for RCP2.6, although temperature remains substantially elevated compared to present day at 2300. In contrast, EEI remains positive under all RCPs, and results in ongoing sea level rise from TE

Introduction to The State of the Syllabus Special Edition

Positioning the syllabus as a key artifact in the modern academy, one that encapsulates many elements of intellectual, scholarly, social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts in which it is enmeshed, we offer in this special issue of Syllabus a set of provocations on the syllabus and its many roles. Including perspectives from full-time and part-time faculty, graduate students, and librarians, the issue offers a multifaceted take on how the syllabus is presently used and might be reimagined

Network + Publication + Ecosystem: Curating Digital Pedagogy, Fostering Community

We are excited to share our work on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (DPiH), which was published on the Humanities Commons in 2020 by the Modern Language Association after almost a decade of work. DPiH is a large-scale scholarly project that presents the stuff of teaching (syllabi, assignments, and resources) through a curated set of keywords such as “Poetry,” “Disability,” “Queer,” and “Annotation,” among many others. For each keyword, a curator or set of curators has selected and annotated ten pedagogical artifacts; created a curator’s selection statement; and presented a list of related resources. With a lengthy introduction to DPiH that historicizes and contextualizes the project, the edited collection, as a whole, presents a broad array of pedagogical practices that engage technology and offer concrete resources to faculty who would like to expand their existing teaching practices. In this piece, we would like to consider how the project, in its design and implementation, challenges existing ideas about scholarship, pedagogy, and our shared ecosystem of scholarly communication

The Nature of the Density Clump in the Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy

We have imaged the recently discovered stellar overdensity located approximately one core radius from the center of the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy using the Magellan Clay 6.5m telescope with the Magellan Instant Camera (MagIC). Superb seeing conditions allowed us to probe the stellar populations of this overdensity and of a control field within Fornax to a limiting magnitude of R=26. The color-magnitude diagram of the overdensity field is virtually identical to that of the control field with the exception of the presence of a population arising from a very short (less than 300 Myr in duration) burst of star formation 1.4 Gyr ago. Coleman et al. have argued that this overdensity might be related to a shell structure in Fornax that was created when Fornax captured a smaller galaxy. Our results are consistent with this model, but we argue that the metallicity of this young component favors a scenario in which the gas was part of Fornax itself.Comment: 24 pages including 8 figures and 3 tables. Accepted by Astronomical Journa

Isolation of Salmonella using pooled pen feces from 37 U.S. swine farms

The purpose of this study was to culture the pooled pen feces of market weight pigs in order to determine the most common Salmonella serotypes being shed and to see if farms positive by culture were also positive by serology. Isolates were analyzed to determine if they had 0-antigens capable of inducing an immune response detectable by the Danish Mix-ELISA

A Generative Deep Learning Approach to Stochastic Downscaling of Precipitation Forecasts

Despite continuous improvements, precipitation forecasts are still not as accurate and reliable as those of other meteorological variables. A major contributing factor to this is that several key processes affecting precipitation distribution and intensity occur below the resolved scale of global weather models. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been demonstrated by the computer vision community to be successful at super-resolution problems, i.e., learning to add fine-scale structure to coarse images. Leinonen et al. (2020) previously applied a GAN to produce ensembles of reconstructed high-resolution atmospheric fields, given coarsened input data. In this paper, we demonstrate this approach can be extended to the more challenging problem of increasing the accuracy and resolution of comparatively low-resolution input from a weather forecasting model, using high-resolution radar measurements as a "ground truth". The neural network must learn to add resolution and structure whilst accounting for non-negligible forecast error. We show that GANs and VAE-GANs can match the statistical properties of state-of-the-art pointwise post-processing methods whilst creating high-resolution, spatially coherent precipitation maps. Our model compares favourably to the best existing downscaling methods in both pixel-wise and pooled CRPS scores, power spectrum information and rank histograms (used to assess calibration). We test our models and show that they perform in a range of scenarios, including heavy rainfall.Comment: Submitted to JAMES 4/4/2