Rural land use activities in Missouri

Cover title.Includes bibliographical references

The Long Road: Eisenhower’s Inter-American Highway: The Path to Economic Investment, Political Stability, and Collective Security in Central America

This paper explores the anti-communist Cold War tactics of public diplomacy as undertaken by the Eisenhower Administration. The focus of this paper is the Inter-American Highway: a program which the U.S. government funded and constructed to develop Central America economically, politically, and beyond. Funding for this program was increased and supported by the president because it fit the axiom of spending as little money as possible in the Cold War, but spending it in a way to be effective in the battle against Soviet communism. The stance of the U.S. government was to provide Central America with increased infrastructure development in an effort to make the region attractive to foreign investors, whose capital investments in the region would spur on economic growth and create political stability. The tactic was relatively successful, and eventually led to economic unification through the Central American Common Market (similar to the European Coal and Steel Community). It was believed that the CACM would eventually lead to political unification and collective security in a similar way that the ECSC led to the EU, but nationalism and regional jealousies fragmented the CACM before political unification could be realized. Nevertheless, the Inter-American Highway and resulting CACM did economically benefit all nations involved, and instituted a rare era of regional peace

Metrology and Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Metastable Helium

Ultracold dilute gases provide ideal settings for measurements of atomic structure. Helium has an internal structure sufficiently simple to permit highly accurate predictions of its resonances and transition rates. Precise laser spectroscopy of helium thus yields empirical constraints on such calculations. These are desirable in the ongoing investigations seeking to reconcile the disagreement between independent determinations of nuclear charge radius data in both hydrogenic and helium atoms. Either the size of these particles are truly constant and quantum electrodynamics (QED) is flawed, or the theory is correct and some new physics is at play at the atomic scale. Ultracold bose gases also serve as ideal testing ground to better understand the physics of Bose-Einstein condensation, superfluidity, and the effects of weak interactions in condensed-matter systems. The large internal energy of helium's metastable excited state enables the measurement of the momentum of single atoms, providing a new lens through which to examine both weakly-interacting and strongly-correlated systems. This feature is employed to investigate the quantum depletion of a BEC after expansion into the far-field. Finally, the appendix reports on early progress towards the realization of an optical lattice trap for helium.Comment: PhD thesis. Abstract truncated per arxiv requirement

The historicity of things: a study in the philosophy of Samuel Alexander

There is no part of Alexander's system which he anywhere explicitly characterises as a "philosophy of history"

American Realness Festival—January 2015

Critique théâtrale, janvier 2015 Festival American Realness, 8-18 janvier 2015Performance review, January 2015 American Realness Festival, January 8th-18th 201

In His Image and Into His Likeness: Human Nature\u27s Theosis in C.S. Lewis\u27s Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

C.S. Lewis’s standalone title Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold transforms the Greek mythos “Cupid and Psyche” into a novel about human nature being deified. In TWHF, Lewis presents an arc from pagan dualism through rationalism and finally to our relational God who makes us holy like Him. Lewis studies have suffered from the lack scholarship applying St. Thomas Aquinas’s christened Aristotelianism which would illuminate the metaphysical foundations that Lewis founds his words and builds his worlds upon. In Aristotle metaphysical biology he proposed that the human soul is neither an altogether separable spirit divorced from the bodily flesh, nor is the soul the mere physical matter itself. The soul is rather the form of a natural living body as well as its first actuality and substantive intellect. St. Thomas Aquinas undertakes Aristotle’s buried ideas and consecrates in the resurrection of human nature in Christ. Human nature in full body-soul union has been crucified and resurrected in Christ; therefore, human nature has the final telos of becoming that which God is by partaking in the fullness of God’s Triune life and love. St. Thomas’s hylomorphism and Christian theosis are the twin tenets underpin TWHF. Through these themes, Lewis contends that human nature is a unified body-soul that is destined to become the fullness of the divine nature. Hylomorphism and theosis constitute the tradition of theological anthropology that Lewis received and handed on. The form, matter, and intention of Lewis’s ‘myth retold’ is wound around these principles: the metaphysics of human hylomorphism and the mystery of Christian theosis

Building Belonging

This project comes from a deep love of the idea of creating cultures of belonging, originating from my own relationship with community, in which my life was saved by the loving generosity of the 12-step community. This connects to contemporary research on both the nature of, and need for, a sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself. This project begins with a review of current literature on the experience of belonging in the workplace, and the influence that feeling a sense of belonging within one’s organization has on well-being. It then goes into an exploration of current interventions that can be utilized to create cultures of belonging, most notably high-quality connection (HQC) building and appreciative inquiry. The remainder of the paper is a collection of suggestions for interventions and next steps to take when seeking to create a more comprehensive culture of belonging in the workplace. This work helps to drive deeper the importance of having organizational community and healthy interpersonal dynamics in the workplace. The broader implication is that belonging in the workplace is becoming more of a necessity for organizations, and this work helps to guide organizations on their first steps towards a more nourishing workplace community and a culture of belonging

Synthetic Aperture LADAR Automatic Target Recognizer Design and Performance Prediction via Geometric Properties of Targets

Synthetic Aperture LADAR (SAL) has several phenomenology differences from Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) making it a promising candidate for automatic target recognition (ATR) purposes. The diffuse nature of SAL results in more pixels on target. Optical wavelengths offers centimeter class resolution with an aperture baseline that is 10,000 times smaller than an SAR baseline. While diffuse scattering and optical wavelengths have several advantages, there are also a number of challenges. The diffuse nature of SAL leads to a more pronounced speckle effect than in the SAR case. Optical wavelengths are more susceptible to atmospheric noise, leading to distortions in formed imagery. While these advantages and disadvantages are studied and understood in theory, they have yet to be put into practice. This dissertation aims to quantify the impact switching from specular SAR to diffuse SAL has on algorithm design. In addition, a methodology for performance prediction and template generation is proposed given the geometric and physical properties of CAD models. This methodology does not rely on forming images, and alleviates the computational burden of generating multiple speckle fields and redundant ray-tracing. This dissertation intends to show that the performance of template matching ATRs on SAL imagery can be accurately and rapidly estimated by analyzing the physical and geometric properties of CAD models