An Archaeological Model of the Construction of Monks Mound and Implications for the Development of the Cahokian Society (800 - 1400 A.D.)

This dissertation presents a model for the development of Cahokian society through the lens of monumental construction. Previous models of Cahokian society have emphasized the accumulation of individual power and domination of the many by a few. Using analogies from the ethnography and ethnohistory of Dhegian Siouan speakers, I argue the Cahokian system likely contained both achieved and ascribed statuses mediated through a worldview that emphasized balance and integration of the whole. In the face of a growing population, this kind of structural organization may have precluded the development of class conflict and, at the same time, permitted the development of large-scale societies. The analysis of monumental construction focuses primarily on the construction of Monks Mound. Through a combination of stratigraphic and chronometric data, the construction of Monks Mound is argued to be a definable and discrete event in the history of Cahokia. In this view, Monks Mound is a ritual vehicle created to integrate a large population

Excavations at the Bayou Grande Cheniere Mounds (16PL159): a Coles Creek period mound complex

The Bayou Grande Cheniere Mounds are a large Coles Creek mound group in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Excavations in January 2003 returned materials that allowed the site to be dated. Further analysis also suggests how these materials were used at the mounds. A settlement pattern study was undertaken and the results indicate that the social organization of coastal Coles Creek culture was sharply different than Coles Creek culture in the Lower Mississippi Valley. When viewed together, the material analysis and settlement analysis illustrates the processes and people that built the Bayou Grande Cheniere mounds

Conflict in the Catholic Hierarchy : a study of coping strategies in the Hunthausen affair, with preferential attention to discursive strategies

Conflicts within the Roman Catholic hierarchy poses risks to the organizational effectiveness of the Church, but the hierarchys approach to conflict handling has rarely been subjected to systematic, empirically grounded study. This research addresses that deficit by means of case study, wherein a six-year-long conflict is examined in the light of theoretical expectations generated through a literature survey, and with the help of critical discourse analysis and conflict theory. The research identifies organizational and societal pressures on bishops conflict handling and various strategies that bishops employ in center-periphery conflicts: that is, in conflicts between the Vatican and bishop leaders of local churches. The theoretical literature conceptually places center-periphery conflict in the context of the Church organization and in the broader context of the modern world. On the basis of the theoretical literature, expectations about the strategies bishops are likely to adopt in center-periphery conflict situations are specified. These expectations are then tested against the empirical example of the Rome-Hunthausen case (1983-89), which involved the papacy of John Paul II, Archbishop Raymond of Seattle and the American Bishops Conference. Documents produced by multiple bishop participants in the conflict serve as an embedded unit of analysis in the case study. These are subjected to critical discourse analysis (following the approach of Norman Fairclough, Lancaster University), conflict analysis and validation techniques with control documents. Hunthausens conflict with the Vatican (1983-1989) focused on Romes effort to establish greater pastoral discipline within the local church. Hunthausen was popularly known as the progressive leader of a progressive archdiocese and he gained much personal attention as an outspoken opponent of the Reagan administration nuclear arms build-up. (He protested by refusing to pay half of his income tax to the government.) To achieve its objectives in Seattle, which ostensibly focused on liturgical, Church teaching and governance and Church legal issues, Rome appointed an auxiliary bishop and forced Hunthausen to hand key powers of archdiocesan leadership over to the auxiliary. Hunthausen fought this redistribution of power and took his case to the national bishops conference. Remarkably, Hunthausen was able to make the Vatican retreat and restore his power, but not without making concessions of his own, which included acceptance of a coadjutor archbishop with right of succession. Adding intrigue to the case was the suspicion that the Reagan administration asked the Vatican to put pressure on Hunthausen in return for recognition of the Vatican ambassador (which was granted by the US in 1984). This speculation has never died, but evidence for this belief is, at the present time, circumstantial at best. The investigation concludes that Catholic bishops show a strong tendency to protect the power and appearance of the Church organization and of their own personal position in conflict situations. Bishops place a high priority on legitimating their actions in ways in keeping with the Churchs normative character. The research highlights nine key strategies that bishops employ to manage conflicts. These are (1) showing deference to the structural order and mindset of the Church, (2) associating ones own efforts with the best interest of the Church, (3) minimizing the appearance of conflict, (4) showing fraternity, (5) practicing courtesy, (6) employing secrecy, (7) recruiting allies, (8) using persuasive argumentation and (9) asserting personal identity. Other strategies used include: gamesmanship, establishing procedural control, avoidance, revealing and threats. For each strategy, specific tactics of application are identified, as illustrated by concrete examples from the case

Insights into Space Solar Cell Durability Using SPICE Simulation Seeded by Current-Voltage Characteristics Parametrized Using the Lambert W Special Function

We developed and validated an automated routine for the fitting of I-V curve data to the single diode model according to an exact analytical solution. Our fitting routine was validated to show good noise immunity and high accuracy usingsimulated values from LTSPICE. We are thus able to automate parameter extraction from a dataset or arbitrary size. This parameterization allows for better simulation of performance of real cells and arrays and provides utility for a host of applications relevant to space arrays. We will use this methodology to determine the array performance of radiated cells over time, and simulate the performance of the arrays with bypass diodes and power electronics

Proceedings International Sorghum and Millet CRSP Conference

On behalf of the INTSORMIL Board of Directors, Principal Investigators and the Management Entity Office, it gives me great pleasure this moming to welcome you to this opening session of the 1991 INTSORMIL International SorghumIMlllet CRSP Conference. INTSORMIL initiated the Biennial CRSP conference series in 1983. Attendance has grown with each meeting. Today we have 199 persons registered from 12 States in the U.S. and 27 different countries. There are representatives from three International Agricultural Research Centers (lCRISAT, IFPRI, and ICRISAT), four private seed companies and the U.S. National Grain Sorghum Producers Association (NGSPA). I look around this audience and see new faces and old friends. I see senior sorghum and millet scientists from Africa and ICRISAT. I see senior NARS administrators who value the collaborative research relationship between INTSORM IL and their staff. I see graduate students from around the world. I see INTSORMIL graduates who have accepted major administrative responsibilities in the NARS of their home countries. I see the cream of the crop of developed and developing world sorghum and millet science. We have come to share our ideas and concepts about how to make further contributions to resolution of hunger and poverty In those developing countries where sorghum and millet are major food grain crops

A single polyploidization event at the origin of the tetraploid genome of Coffea arabica is responsible for the extremely low genetic variation in wild and cultivated germplasm

The genome of the allotetraploid species Coffea arabica L. was sequenced to assemble independently the two component subgenomes (putatively deriving from C. canephora and C. eugenioides) and to perform a genome-wide analysis of the genetic diversity in cultivated coffee germplasm and in wild populations growing in the center of origin of the species. We assembled a total length of 1.536 Gbp, 444 Mb and 527 Mb of which were assigned to the canephora and eugenioides subgenomes, respectively, and predicted 46,562 gene models, 21,254 and 22,888 of which were assigned to the canephora and to the eugeniodes subgenome, respectively. Through a genome-wide SNP genotyping of 736 C. arabica accessions, we analyzed the genetic diversity in the species and its relationship with geographic distribution and historical records. We observed a weak population structure due to low-frequency derived alleles and highly negative values of Taijma's D, suggesting a recent and severe bottleneck, most likely resulting from a single event of polyploidization, not only for the cultivated germplasm but also for the entire species. This conclusion is strongly supported by forward simulations of mutation accumulation. However, PCA revealed a cline of genetic diversity reflecting a west-to-east geographical distribution from the center of origin in East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. The extremely low levels of variation observed in the species, as a consequence of the polyploidization event, make the exploitation of diversity within the species for breeding purposes less interesting than in most crop species and stress the need for introgression of new variability from the diploid progenitors

Mycobacterium tuberculosis Transmission from Human to Canine

A 71-year-old woman from Tennessee, USA with a 3-week history of a productive, nonbloody cough was evaluated. Chest radiograph showed infiltrates and atelectasis in the upper lobe of the right lung. A tuberculosis (TB) skin test resulted in a 14-mm area of induration. Sputum stained positive for acid-fast bacilli (AFB) and was positive for Mycobacterium tuberculosis by DNA probe and culture. Treatment was initiated with isoniazid, rifampicin, and pyrazinamide. After 14 days of daily, directly observed therapy, the patient complained of nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. Treatment adjustments were made, and therapy was completed 11 months later with complete recovery. Six months after the patient\u27s TB diagnosis, she took her three and a half-year-old male Yorkshire Terrier to a veterinary clinic with cough, weight loss, and vomiting of several months\u27 duration. Initial sputum sample was negative on AFB staining. Eight days after discharge from a referral veterinary teaching hospital with a presumptive diagnosis of TB, the dog was euthanized due to urethral obstruction. Liver and tracheobronchial lymph node specimens collected at necropsy were positive for M. tuberculosis complex by polymerase chain reaction. The M. tuberculosis isolates from the dog and its owner had an indistinguishable 10-band pattern by IS6110-based restriction fragment length polymorphism genotyping

Whole mantle shear structure beneath the East Pacific Rise

We model broadband seismograms containing triplicated S, S2, and S3 along with ScS to produce a pure path one‐dimensional model extending from the crust to the core‐mantle boundary beneath the East Pacific Rise. We simultaneously model all body wave shapes and amplitudes, thereby eliminating depth‐velocity ambiguities. The data consist of western North American broadband recordings of East Pacific Rise (EPR) affiliate transform events that form a continuous record section out to 82° and sample nearly the entire East Pacific Rise. The best fitting synthetics contain attenuation and small changes in lithospheric thickness needed to correct for variation in bounce point ages. The 660‐km discontinuity is particularly well resolved and requires a steep gradient (4%), extending down to 745 km. We find no discernible variation in apparent depths of the 405‐ and 660‐km discontinuities over ridge‐orthogonal distances on the order of 1000 km (or 20 Ma lithosphere). Body waveform comparisons indicate that we can resolve discontinuity depths to less than ±10 km, providing an upper limit to transition zone topography. These depth estimates, in conjunction with the fan shot nature of the ray paths, lower the detection limit from S2 precursor analysis of the lateral length scale over which short‐wavelength topographic variation could occur and indicate the sub‐EPR Transition Zone and upper mantle are remarkably homogeneous. The lower mantle beneath the East Pacific Rise is well modeled by PREM, with the greatest variation occurring in ScS, reflecting strong heterogeneity along the core‐mantle boundary. Together, these observations require that the East Pacific Rise spreading ridge cannot be actively supplied from the local lower mantle and that tomographically imaged lateral variation beneath the ridge likely reflects lateral smearing of outlying velocity gradients. Dynamically, the transition zone therefore appears vertically decoupled from the overlying East Pacific Rise spreading system

MORB generation beneath the ultraslow spreading Southwest Indian Ridge (9–25°E) : major element chemistry and the importance of process versus source

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 9 (2008): Q05004, doi:10.1029/2008GC001959.We report highly variable mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) major element and water concentrations from a single 1050-km first-order spreading segment on the ultraslow spreading Southwest Indian Ridge, consisting of two supersegments with strikingly different spreading geometry and ridge morphology. To the east, the 630 km long orthogonal supersegment (<10° obliquity) dominantly erupts normal MORB with progressive K/Ti enrichment from east to west. To the west is the 400 km long oblique supersegment (up to 56° obliquity) with two robust volcanic centers erupting enriched MORB and three intervening amagmatic accretionary segments erupting both N-MORB and E-MORB. The systematic nature of the orthogonal supersegments' ridge morphology and MORB composition ends at 16°E, where ridge physiography, lithologic abundance, crustal structure, and basalt chemistry all change dramatically. We attribute this discontinuity and the contrasting characteristics of the supersegments to localized differences in the upper mantle thermal structure brought on by variable spreading geometry. The influence of these differences on the erupted composition of MORB appears to be more significant at ultraslow spreading rates where the overall degree of melting is lower. In contrast to the moderate and rather constant degrees of partial melting along the orthogonal supersegment, suppression of mantle melting on the oblique supersegment due to thickened lithosphere means that the bulk source is not uniformly sampled, as is the former. On the oblique supersegment, more abundant mafic lithologies melt deeper thereby dominating the more enriched aggregate melt composition. While much of the local major element heterogeneity can be explained by polybaric fractional crystallization with variable H2O contents, elevated K2O and K/Ti cannot. On the basis of the chemical and tectonic relationship of these enriched and depleted basalts, their occurrence requires a multilithology mantle source. The diversity and distribution of MORB compositions, especially here at ultraslow spreading rates, is controlled not only by the heterogeneity of the underlying mantle, but also more directly by the local thermal structure of the lithosphere (i.e., spreading geometry) and its influence on melting processes. Thus at ultraslow spreading rates, process rather than source may be the principle determiner of MORB composition.This work was originally funded in large part by NSF grants OCE-9907630 and OCE-0526905 and more recently by OPP-0425785