William Hobson and the founding of Quakerism in the Pacific Northwest

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityWilliam Hobson (1820-1891) joined the ante bellum exodus of Quakers from North Carolina, migrating to Iowa in his late youth where he served as a pioneer minister of Friends until 1875. He then began the formation of a settlement of Quakers at Newberg, Oregon, which grew rapidly and eventually resulted in the establishment of Oregon Yearly Meeting of Friends. Because so little was known of the early life of William Hobson, and because nineteenth century revivalism radically altered the Quakerism of Hobson's lifetime, he is not well understood by contemporary Friends. This dissertation therefore attempts to describe his early years and ministry and their relation to trends within American Quakerism, and to estimate his significance as the founder of Quakerism in the Pacific Northwest. The study is based on Hobson's autobiography, his diaries and sources of information not previously considered. These latter are his correspondence and personal papers, the journals of his Quaker contemporaries, public documents, school records and the official minutes of Friends Meetings to which he belonged in North Carolina, Iowa and Oregon. The new sources have made possible a biographical synthesis which presents William Hobson in a truer perspective than he has heretofore been seen. William Hobson was reared in the back-country of North Carolina under the strict standards of the Society of Friends. Educational opportunities and literature were both very limited, and arter learning to read, he had little save the Scriptures and standard works or Quakerism to study. These, in addition to two years at New Garden Boarding School, confirmed him in the beliers and customs of his ancestors. Attracted by the agricultural prospects or the Trans-Mississippi Vest and moved by a hatred or slavery, he migrated to Iowa in 1847-1848. Throughout the third quarter or the nineteenth century Hobson was a pioneer farmer and minister of Friends, journeying throughout the Friends settlements or Iowa, to North Carolina and to Kansas during the troubled days or border warfare. As an itinerant minister of Friends, his work was carried on in the quietistic spirit typical of early nineteenth century Quakerism. He welcomed the evidences of new life which came to Quakerism with the Awakening of the 1860's and 1870's, but regretted and resisted the innovations which revivalism produced. Hobson made the first of his three journeys to the Far West in 1870-1871, spending seven months surveying the Pacific Coast in the interest of establishing a Quaker settlement. Discouragement led him to conclude that Friends should stay in the Midwest, but within two years his mind was again occupied with the need for a Friends community on the Pacific Coast. In 1875-1876 he made a second journey, determined to overcome all obstacles to his projected settlement. After studying six regions in Oregon and in Washington Territory, he eventually chose the Chehalem Valley, near Portland, Oregon. As a result of his enthusiastic correspondence with Quakers throughout the Far West and Midwest, settlers began pouring into the valley, and by the time of his death in 1891, the membership of Newberg Meeting was over five hundred. William Hobson was well qualified to establish a frontier religious settlement due to his rugged physique and lifetime of experience under frontier conditions. He had a keen awareness of the material basis of a happy society, and carefully studied the resources of the Pacific Northwest before founding a settlement. Possessing the sense of community normative to Quakerism, he frankly advertised the settlement as a religious community and made it succeed as such without limiting it to Friends. The permanent value of his work is indicated in the Quaker institutions of Church, school and civil order which developed in the Chehalem Valley and which became influential throughout the Pacific Northwest

William Hobson and the Founding of Quakerism in the Pacific Northwest

This study is based on Hobson\u27s autobiography, his diaries and sources of information not previously considered. These latter are his correspondence and personal papers, the journals of his Quaker contemporaries, public documents, school records and the official minutes of Friends Meetings to which he belonged in North Carolina, Iowa, and Oregon. The new sources have made possible a biographical synthesis which presents William Hobson in a truer perspective than he has heretofore been seen.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/quakerbooks/1081/thumbnail.jp

A Concept for the Use and Integration of Super-Conducting Magnets in Structural Systems in General and Maglev Guideway Mega-Structures in Particular

Recent breakthroughs in several different fields now make it possible to incorporate the use of superconducting magnets in structures in ways which enhance the performance of structural members or components of structural systems in general and Maglev guideway mega-structures in particular. The building of structural systems which connect appropriately scaled superconducting magnets with the post-tensioned tensile components of beams, girders, or columns would, if coupled with 'state of the art' structure monitoring, feedback and control systems, and advanced computer software, constitute a distinct new generation of structures that would possess the unique characteristic of being heuristic and demand or live-load responsive. The holistic integration of powerful superconducting magnets in structures so that they do actual structural work, creates a class of 'technologically endowed' structures that, in part - literally substitute superconductive electric power and magnetism for concrete and steel. The research and development engineering, and architectural design issues associated with such 'technologically endowed' structural system can now be conceptualized, designed, computer simulates built and tested. The Maglev guideway mega-structure delineated herein incorporates these concepts, and is designed for operation in the median strip of U.S. Interstate Highway 5 from San Diego to Seattle an Vancouver, and possibly on to Fairbanks, Alaska. This system also fits in the median strip of U.S. Interstate Highway 55 and 95 North-South, and 80 and 10, East-West. As a Western Region 'Peace Dividend' project, it could become a National or Bi-National research, design and build, super turnkey project that would create thousands of jobs by applying superconducting, material science, electronic aerospace and other defense industry technologies to a multi-vehicle, multi-use Maglev guideway megastructure that integrates urban mass transit Lower Speed (0-100 mph), High Speed (100-200 mph), Super Speed (200-400 mph), and Hypersonic evacuated tube (400-10,000 mph) Maglev systems

The Tall Building: The Effects of Scale

The project described in this thesis is a new structural type for tall buildings in reinforced concrete. Both structure and function have been analyzed to show their influence on the height of the building and their influence on the architectural expression

An Inertial-Optical Tracking System for Quantitative, Freehand, 3D Ultrasound

Three dimensional (3D) ultrasound has become an increasingly popular medical imaging tool over the last decade. It offers significant advantages over Two Dimensional (2D) ultrasound, such as improved accuracy, the ability to display image planes that are physically impossible with 2D ultrasound, and reduced dependence on the skill of the sonographer. Among 3D medical imaging techniques, ultrasound is the only one portable enough to be used by first responders, on the battlefield, and in rural areas. There are three basic methods of acquiring 3D ultrasound images. In the first method, a 2D array transducer is used to capture a 3D volume directly, using electronic beam steering. This method is mainly used for echocardiography. In the second method, a linear array transducer is mechanically actuated, giving a slower and less expensive alternative to the 2D array. The third method uses a linear array transducer that is moved by hand. This method is known as freehand 3D ultrasound. Whether using a 2D array or a mechanically actuated linear array transducer, the position and orientation of each image is known ahead of time. This is not the case for freehand scanning. To reconstruct a 3D volume from a series of 2D ultrasound images, assumptions must be made about the position and orientation of each image, or a mechanism for detecting the position and orientation of each image must be employed. The most widely used method for freehand 3D imaging relies on the assumption that the probe moves along a straight path with constant orientation and speed. This method requires considerable skill on the part of the sonographer. Another technique uses features within the images themselves to form an estimate of each image’s relative location. However, these techniques are not well accepted for diagnostic use because they are not always reliable. The final method for acquiring position and orientation information is to use a six Degree-of-Freedom (6 DoF) tracking system. Commercially available 6 DoF tracking systems use magnetic fields, ultrasonic ranging, or optical tracking to measure the position and orientation of a target. Although accurate, all of these systems have fundamental limitations in that they are relatively expensive and they all require sensors or transmitters to be placed in fixed locations to provide a fixed frame of reference. The goal of the work presented here is to create a probe tracking system for freehand 3D ultrasound that does not rely on any fixed frame of reference. This system tracks the ultrasound probe using only sensors integrated into the probe itself. The advantages of such a system are that it requires no setup before it can be used, it is more portable because no extra equipment is required, it is immune from environmental interference, and it is less expensive than external tracking systems. An ideal tracking system for freehand 3D ultrasound would track in all 6 DoF. However, current sensor technology limits this system to five. Linear transducer motion along the skin surface is tracked optically and transducer orientation is tracked using MEMS gyroscopes. An optical tracking system was developed around an optical mouse sensor to provide linear position information by tracking the skin surface. Two versions were evaluated. One included an optical fiber bundle and the other did not. The purpose of the optical fiber is to allow the system to integrate more easily into existing probes by allowing the sensor and electronics to be mounted away from the scanning end of the probe. Each version was optimized to track features on the skin surface while providing adequate Depth Of Field (DOF) to accept variation in the height of the skin surface. Orientation information is acquired using a 3 axis MEMS gyroscope. The sensor was thoroughly characterized to quantify performance in terms of accuracy and drift. This data provided a basis for estimating the achievable 3D reconstruction accuracy of the complete system. Electrical and mechanical components were designed to attach the sensor to the ultrasound probe in such a way as to simulate its being embedded in the probe itself. An embedded system was developed to perform the processing necessary to translate the sensor data into probe position and orientation estimates in real time. The system utilizes a Microblaze soft core microprocessor and a set of peripheral devices implemented in a Xilinx Spartan 3E field programmable gate array. The Xilinx Microkernel real time operating system performs essential system management tasks and provides a stable software platform for implementation of the inertial tracking algorithm. Stradwin 3D ultrasound software was used to provide a user interface and perform the actual 3D volume reconstruction. Stradwin retrieves 2D ultrasound images from the Terason t3000 portable ultrasound system and communicates with the tracking system to gather position and orientation data. The 3D reconstruction is generated and displayed on the screen of the PC in real time. Stradwin also provides essential system features such as storage and retrieval of data, 3D data interaction, reslicing, manual 3D segmentation, and volume calculation for segmented regions. The 3D reconstruction performance of the system was evaluated by freehand scanning a cylindrical inclusion in a CIRS model 044 ultrasound phantom. Five different motion profiles were used and each profile was repeated 10 times. This entire test regimen was performed twice, once with the optical tracking system using the optical fiber bundle, and once with the optical tracking system without the optical fiber bundle. 3D reconstructions were performed with and without the position and orientation data to provide a basis for comparison. Volume error and surface error were used as the performance metrics. Volume error ranged from 1.3% to 5.3% with tracking information versus 15.6% to 21.9% without for the version of the system without the optical fiber bundle. Volume error ranged from 3.7% to 7.6% with tracking information versus 8.7% to 13.7% without for the version of the system with the optical fiber bundle. Surface error ranged from 0.319 mm RMS to 0.462 mm RMS with tracking information versus 0.678 mm RMS to 1.261 mm RMS without for the version of the system without the optical fiber bundle. Surface error ranged from 0.326 mm RMS to 0.774 mm RMS with tracking information versus 0.538 mm RMS to 1.657 mm RMS without for the version of the system with the optical fiber bundle. The prototype tracking system successfully demonstrated that accurate 3D ultrasound volumes can be generated from 2D freehand data using only sensors integrated into the ultrasound probe. One serious shortcoming of this system is that it only tracks 5 of the 6 degrees of freedom required to perform complete 3D reconstructions. The optical system provides information about linear movement but because it tracks a surface, it cannot measure vertical displacement. Overcoming this limitation is the most obvious candidate for future research using this system. The overall tracking platform, meaning the embedded tracking computer and the PC software, developed and integrated in this work, is ready to take advantage of vertical displacement data, should a method be developed for sensing it