Land Grant Application- Davis, Nicholas (Hollis)

Land grant application submitted to the Maine Land Office on behalf of Nicholas Davis for service in the Revolutionary War, by their widow Abigail.https://digitalmaine.com/revolutionary_war_me_land_office/1240/thumbnail.jp

Sensitive detection of methane at 3.3 μm using an integrating sphere and interband cascade laser

Detection of methane at 3.3μm using a DFB Interband Cascade Laser and gold coated integrating sphere is performed. A 10cm diameter sphere with effective path length of 54.5cm was adapted for use as a gas cell. A comparison between this system and one using a 25cm path length single-pass gas cell is made using direct TDLS and methane concentrations between 0 and 1000 ppm. Initial investigations suggest a limit of detection of 1.0ppm for the integrating sphere and 2.2ppm for the single pass gas cell. The system has potential applications in challenging or industrial environments subject to high levels of vibration

Old Dogs, New Tricks: Authoritarian Regime Persistence Through Learning

How does diffusion lead to authoritarian regime persistence? Political decisions, regardless of what the actors involved might believe or espouse, do not happen in isolation. Policy changes, institutional alterations, regime transitions-- these political phenomena are all in some part a product of diffusion processes as much as they are derived from internal determinants. As such, political regimes do not exist in a vacuum, nor do they ignore the outside world. When making decisions about policy and practice, we should expect competent political actors to take a look at the wider external world. This dissertation project presents a theory of regime learning and authoritarian persistence to augment the extant literature on diffusion and democratization. While this literature provides important links between the outcomes across borders, it also falls short in explaining if and how diffusion can explain the absence of change-- authoritarian persistence. The new theoretical approach is rooted in concepts drawn from the democratization literature as well as the psychology of learning, and distinguishes simplistic learning (emulation)-- based on the availability heuristic-- and a more sophisticated learning process rooted in the representativeness heuristic. To test the implications of this theory, I develop a pair of new measures of change: liberalization (making concessions) and deliberalization (increasing repression). Using a combination of human and machine coding of yearly Freedom House country reports, I determine whether authoritarian regimes made liberalizing or deliberalizing moves which fall short of the significant regime changes that aggregate measures such as POLITY, Freedom House, and similar capture. An empirical examination employing these new measures reveals that diffusion does exist among authoritarian regimes at the regional level, among contiguous neighborhoods, and within more carefully confined groups of peers. These results add to our understanding of persistent authoritarianism and establish that emulation can be identified. Although authoritarian regimes seem to be be copying the liberalization and deliberalization strategies of their peers, there is not clear support for more sophisticated learning processes at this time

Using Communities of Practice to Support At-Home Gospel Learning from a Release Time Seminary Classroom

This mixed-methods action research study examines the effect of communities of practice on the development of home-centered gospel learning activities from the perspective of twelve release-time Seminary teachers for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from October—December 2021. Beginning in 2019, leaders of Seminaries and Institutes began to implement a Churchwide initiative to encourage home-centered, Church-supported gospel learning. Although Seminary leaders have made several systemwide adjustments, teachers have commonly made minimal adjustments to support this approach. Throughout the mixed-methods study, participants learned about the importance of this home-centered gospel learning approach, in addition to principles of design thinking and successful communities of practice. In both their communities of practice and monthly faculty inservice meetings, study participants discussed what they had done to encourage a home-centered, Seminary-supported gospel-learning approach and how effective they felt those efforts were. It appears that the process of design thinking and communities of practice greatly enhanced the teachers’ ability to positively reinforce home-centered gospel learning experiences within the lives of their students

The context dependence of network response properties in the primary visual cortex of the primate and cat

In the mammalian visual system, stimulus context was investigated with respect to the ways it influenced neuronal mean response magnitude (the average number of spikes fired per second), response temporal structure (the timing of spikes with respect to one another), and the extent to which distributed neurones fired spikes synchronous due to synaptic interaction between them. Neurones were presented with bipartite grating stimuli, in which the spatio-temporal relationship between the grating activating the excitatory receptive field and that presented to the surrounding visual space could be varied systematically. Simultaneous extracellular recordings were made of the responses of up to four single neurones separated by 750-1000µm, in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus in the cat, or the primary visual cortex (V1) of non-human primates or cats. Changing context systematically influenced the activity of groups of cells. The responses of 83% of primate V1 cells to discontinuous stimuli, in which the centre/surround orientation difference was greater than 45°, contained stronger oscillations at frequencies below 80Hz, than responses to continuous stimuli. Many cat and primate V1 neurones exhibited elevated response magnitudes to such stimuli. In primate V1, the strength of a cell's oscillatory discharge was dependent on stimulus configuration rather than response magnitude. In the LGN and V1, cell pairs with different orientation preferences fired synchronised responses when stimulated by specific discontinuous grating configurations. Stimulus specific synchronised LGN input, and reciprocal excitatory and inhibitory cortico-cortical connections could generate these properties of cells, and the network in which they exist. A model is proposed to account for the function significance of contour discontinuities in generating coherent neural representations of objects in the visual world. It involves response synchronisation in horizontal, feedforward and feedback interactions, within and between the LGN, V1, V2 and V4

Partisanship, Ideology, and the Sorting of the American Mass Public

This dissertation is a story about the divisions that characterize the mass public. Specifically, it explores how Americans think about politics, and, in particular, how citizens connect their attitudes, beliefs, and, vitally, ideological identity to their partisan affiliation—a phenomenon known as sorting. Practically, this project proceeds in two parts. In Part 1, I investigate the nature of partisan sorting in the mass public. Chapter 2 reviews the extant scholarly literature regarding partisanship and ideology, or the raw materials of sorting. Drawing on this research, I operationalize two types of sorting in Chapter 3 and compare how different measurement protocols affect the characterization of public opinion. This distinction culminates in Chapter 4, which provides a series of empirical tests that justify partitioning sorting into identity- and policy-based constructs. The second part of this dissertation is devoted to the study of identity-based sorting. Chapter 5 takes up the question of why individuals’ identities converge and conveys that sorting is related to asymmetric perceptions of out-group dissimilarity rather than relative perceptions of between-group differences. Chapter 6 explores how this sorting affects compromise. I discover that, even in the absence of consistent policy preferences, identity sorting is sufficient to decrease an individual’s willingness to accept bipartisanship. Finally, Chapter 7 examines how identity sorting alters the decisional criteria that voters utilize to select political candidates. Here, I show that sorting produces a disconnect between the perceived and objective ideological congruence between voters and their preferred candidate. Sorting, then, is a sufficient condition for pushing citizens toward more extreme candidates—even when individuals’ issue preferences suggest that their “best” candidate is considerably more moderate. Taken as a whole, this dissertation both refines the extant logic of sorting and pushes this research into new territory. In demonstrating that identity-based sorting constitutes a unique and particularly powerful political phenomenon, I reveal why concern over the systematic coherency of mass opinion is, perhaps, misplaced. Instead, it is this identity sorting that contributes to the intemperate and polarized atmosphere that characterizes the state of American politics

Policy uncertainty: a new indicator

The damaging impact of economic uncertainty on growth has been reasonably well studied - but what happens when there is uncertainty about economic policy-making? Nicholas Bloom and colleagues have developed a measure of this distinct kind of uncertainty, one that shows the value of restoring stability to current policy actions.US economic policy, global financial markets,

Mid-infrared spectroscopic instrumentation for airborne monitoring of atmospheric gas species

Methane is a colourless, odourless gas that can be found extensively in nature. The average global concentration of methane is currently approximately 1.8ppm, the highest concentration for over 800,000 years. Although this concentration is signi cantly lower than that of CO₂ (391ppm), methane has a global warming potential up to 34 times greater over a hundred year period. As a result, trace detection of atmospheric methane has gained increased attention as a form of environmental protection. The purpose of this thesis is to undertake investigations into the development of instrumentation to make observations of background levels of atmospheric methane. Newly available wavelength sources along with alternative gas cells are investigated for potential use in this instrument. Laboratory analysis of a new external cavity Bragg-stabilised laser (ECBSL) operating at 1651nm was performed, with comparisons made against against a bre-coupled distributed feedback (DFB) laser diode. The ECBSL showed promise for use in the detection of methane in the laboratory, with a limit of detection of 8ppm using a 25cm pathlength single-pass gas cell being comparable to that of the DFB laser diode. Issues with alignment stability were however observed with this laser, limiting the measurements that could be made and restricting its use outside of laboratory conditions, with utilisation on light aircraft deemed to be impossible in its current con guration. Investigations were then performed into the performance of a newly available interband cascade laser (ICL), with emission at 3311nm. A full characterisation of the ICL was performed, alongside measurements of methane using both a 25cm pathlength single-pass cell and an integrating sphere with e ective pathlength of 54.5cm, with single-point limits of detection of 2.2ppm and 1.0ppm being determined respectively. A combination of an Allan variance and absorption line- tting techniques were utilised to improve the limit of detection using the integrating sphere, resulting in a 0.3ppm limit of detection for a 25 second average. The design and development of instrumentation to perform measurements of background concentrations of atmospheric methane utilising the combination of ICL and integrating sphere is then described. The reasoning behind the selection of components and progression of the instrument design is described. Once assembled, laboratory testing of the instrument showed a single-point limit of detection of 1.6ppm, higher than that seen with the previous set-up, however this was still below the background methane concentration. An initial shakedow flight was carried out once the instrument had been certi ed and installed in the aircraft. Due to failures of two electrical components, further flight testing was postponed until improvements to component isolation have been made. This flight demonstrated, however, that the instrument has the potential to provide measurements of atmospheric methane, as the majority of components operated as expected, including both the laser and the cell optics

EXPEDITIONARY LOGISTICS: A LOW-COST, DEPLOYABLE, UNMANNED AERIAL SYSTEM FOR AIRFIELD DAMAGE ASSESSMENT

Airfield Damage Repair (ADR) is among the most important expeditionary activities for our military. The goal of ADR is to restore a damaged airfield to operational status as quickly as possible. Before the process of ADR can begin, however, the damage to the airfield needs to be assessed. As a result, Airfield Damage Assessment (ADA) has received considerable attention. Often in a damaged airfield, there is an expectation of unexploded ordnance, which makes ADA a slow, difficult, and dangerous process. For this reason, it is best to make ADA completely unmanned and automated. Additionally, ADA needs to be executed as quickly as possible so that ADR can begin and the airfield restored to a usable condition. Among other modalities, tower-based monitoring and remote sensor systems are often used for ADA. There is now an opportunity to investigate the use of commercial-off-the-shelf, low-cost, automated sensor systems for automatic damage detection. By developing a combination of ground-based and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle sensor systems, we demonstrate the completion of ADA in a safe, efficient, and cost-effective manner.http://archive.org/details/expeditionarylog1094561346Outstanding ThesisLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited