Automatic Romaine Heart Harvester

The Romaine Robotics Senior Design Team developed a romaine lettuce heart trimming system in partnership with a Salinas farm to address a growing labor shortage in the agricultural industry that is resulting in crops rotting in the field before they could be harvested. An automated trimmer can alleviate the most time consuming step in the cut-trim-bag harvesting process, increasing the yields of robotic cutters or the speed of existing laborer teams. Leveraging the Partner Farm’s existing trimmer architecture, which consists of a laborer loading lettuce into sprungloaded grippers that are rotated through vision and cutting systems by an indexer, the team redesigned geometry to improve the loading, gripping, and ejection stages of the system. Physical testing, hand calculations, and FEA were performed to understand acceptable grip strengths and cup design, and several wooden mockups were built to explore a new actuating linkage design for the indexer. The team manufactured, assembled, and performed verification testing on a full-size metal motorized prototype that can be incorporated with the Partner Farm’s existing cutting and vision systems. The prototype met all of the established requirements, and the farm has implemented the redesign onto their trimmer. Future work would include designing and implementing vision and cutting systems for the team’s metal prototype

Creation : by, for, and before God

Postprin

NOTHING UNDER THE SUN THAT IS MADE OF MAN

Many have accused patent law of impermissibly treating human beings, and aspects thereof, as property by allowing human inventions to constitute patentable subject matter, thus contravening moral and ethic principles and violating laws such as the Thirteenth Amendment. Although patents have issued claiming human subject matter, patent law has consistently limited, or even eliminated, such patents, and reformed the patent law doctrines or practices that allowed such patenting mistakes. In addition to prohibiting the patenting of human beings per se, patent law has increasingly limited claims to human genes, human embryonic stem cells, human thought, and human in vivo conversion. Despite charges to the contrary, patent law provides little support for patent servitude. Rather, patent law has tended to be sensitive to the prohibitions of, and largely in compliance with, the Thirteenth Amendment

A Kierkegaardian guide to reading scripture

Kierkegaard is well known for being critical of a scholarly reading of the bible. It is generally understood that his primary concern was that “objective” biblical scholarship was undermining the possibility of a reader’s subjective life being affected, challenged and provoked by its message. That is, it encourages an overly detached reading of Scripture that distracts persons from responding to its call to discipleship. It is indeed the case that Kierkegaard devoted himself to challenging the fact that the nominal Christians in Denmark were not actively responding Scripture. However, I shall argue that there is something much more fundamental to his critique of biblical scholarship. For Kierkegaard, the faithful reader is not primarily called to respond to the message of Scripture but to the living God who communicates to persons through Scripture. This paper will look at how Kierkegaard sought to remind Christians that Scripture is not an end in itself but a witness to the living God (who is the primary focus of the Christian life).PostprintPeer reviewe

Attending to the story of Adam, Eve, and the Fall

In response to Hud Hudson's The Fall and Hypertime, I raise the question as to whether it is constructive to to use the story of Adam, Eve, and the Fall to make a specific apologetic point that draws attention to a reading of the story that we would not otherwise want to affirm?Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Beyond existentialism: Kierkegaard on the human relationship with the God who is wholly other

Recent scholarship argues that, for Kierkegaard, God's absolute alterity is a consequence of sin that is overcome by the redemptive activity of Jesus Christ. On such a reading, the work of Christ delivers individuals to lives of faith that are not infinitely qualitatively different from God. This fails to recognize that the absolute otherness of God is overcome not simply by the redemptive work of Christ but in and through the person of Christ. The failure to grasp this has tied Kierkegaard to an anthropocentric theology that prioritizes Christ's contribution to existential human development. This article challenges this perception by establishing Kierkegaard's emphasis that God would remain infinitely removed from humanity were it not for the continuing mediation of Jesus Christ.PostprintPeer reviewe

Kierkegaard on the Christian response to the God who establishes kinship with us in time

When reading through certain areas of Kierkegaard’s writings, there is room to misinterpret his vision of Christianity as being grounded solely in a person’s subjective commitment to her own idea of what Christianity is. In large part, this has contributed to the perception of Kierkegaard as an existentialist who disregards the objective reality of Christianity. In this essay, I contend that Kierkegaard understands the Christian faith as being grounded in a human response to the (mind-independent) reality of the living God who personally involves himself with persons, in history, and does so over against independent or predetermined human ideas of God. To do so, I begin with a close reading of Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in which I focus on the ways that Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, distinguishes Christianity from immanent forms of religiousness. Following a detailed exposition of Climacus’ argument, I then consider, albeit very briefly, two ways in which Kierkegaard employed this position in his own authorship, looking specifically at his understanding of sin-consciousness and repentance.PostprintPeer reviewe

Can a person prepare to become a Christian? A Kierkegaardian response

Is it possible to prepare oneself to become a Christian? For Kierkegaard, there is no straightforward answer to this question, especially since such a transition depends upon a divine activity that is outside the realm of human control. Despite the challenge that this question poses, Kierkegaard's writings do provide us with a way to respond, and this response will be the subject matter of this article. Following an analysis of his position, this article will conclude that, although Kierkegaard recognizes that there are precedent ways of existing that are more conducive to becoming a Christian, it is not helpful to describe them as preparatory.PostprintPeer reviewe

Gene Concepts, Gene Talk, and Gene Patents

Full-text available at SSRN. See link in this record.Since the existence of a discrete unit of heredity was first proposed by Gregor Mendel, scientific concepts of the “gene” have undergone rapid evolution. Beyond obvious epistemic and operational importance to the scientific community, changing gene concepts have exerted strong effects on institutions such as medicine, the biotechnology industry, politics, and the law. A particularly rich example of this is the interplay between gene concepts and patent law. Over the last century, biology has elaborated gene concepts that variously emphasized genes as discretely material, genes as information, and genes as extremely complex. By contrast, patent law has steadily adhered to a simpler, more stable concept of the gene since the advent of gene patents in the late 1970s. In fact, while the biology community has increasingly engaged in vigorous internal debate regarding the gene’s complexity and uncertainty, it has tended simultaneously to emphasize the simplicity and certainty of the gene to constituencies outside the biology community, most notably the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Federal courts. Rather than allow gene concepts to become contested by constituencies outside biology, the biology community appears to have used its authority to maintain a portrayal of the gene that facilitates the appropriation of rents from genes through the patent system. This use of “gene talk” has undergirded the growth of biotechnology into a powerful industry that has economically rewarded investors, academic institutions, and biologists. Not only may gene talk have facilitated the patenting of genes, but the prominence of gene patents describing a relatively simpler gene concept may have fed back into biological science to promote a simpler, and more patentable, concept of the gene even among members of the biology community

Open Source Human Evolution

Part I of this Article introduces the biology of evolutionary change. Part II discusses the current state of genetic engineering and its potential application to human genetic enhancement. Parts III and IV discuss the legal contours of proprietary patent and open source genetics models of innovation, respectively, and consider what differences the two alternative models might have on rates of genetic innovation and access to genetic innovations. Part V analyzes the effects that proprietary patent models and open source genetics models could have on the future trajectory of human genetic enhancement, and suggests that open source genetics would likely yield a relatively lower rate of genetic innovation coupled with democratized wider access to the resulting smaller number of genetic enhancements