The Literary Apprenticeship of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Fifty years after the publication of Laura Ingalls Wilder\u27s first book, Little House in the Big Woods, that volume and ten succeeding volumes of the author\u27s writings, are American classics. The Little House books have been read, re-read, translated, adapted, admired and worshipped by multitudes world-wide. Of Wilder\u27s books, which portray frontier existence during the last great American Expansionist era, it is safe to say that they have given a notion of what pioneer life was like to far more Americans than ever heard of Frederick Jackson Turner. Laura Ingalls Wilder\u27s fame and the success of her books have been spiraling phenomenons in American publishing history. In 1953, 500,000 of the Little House books had· been printed; by 1959, the quantity had nearly doubled, and in 1976, it was estimated that 20,000,000 of Wilder\u27s books had been published. In lists of American best-sellers of the twentieth century, the Little House books are included. The mystique of Laura Ingalls Wilder has spread into far-flung areas. Her appeal is global. First translated by the United States State Department as a post-World War II re-education program for Germany and Japan, the Little House books are now printed in approximately forty some of Wilder\u27s supporters. The well-meaning preservation of Wilder\u27s public image denied her miraculous and admirable evolution as a writer, and created certain falsifications that surely would have amused, if not amazed, Laura Ingalls Wilder herself. Curiously, among those who most stridently denied Wilder\u27s multi-faceted metamorphosis from capable country woman to talented writer, was the individual who had most shaped and aided the emergence of Laura Ingalls Wilder as an author. All her lifetime, Laura Ingalls Wilder\u27s daughter Rose Wilder Lane, contributed to a composite image of her mother that, while wholly admirable, was not fully accurate. Historical evidence has periodically suggested discrepancies between the Little House books and recorded facts. None is major and none diminishes the essence of truth and reality which shines from the pages of Wilder\u27s books

Money Grab: How The G20/OECD Inclusive Framework for Taxation Could Unnecessarily Disrupt Corporate Incentives and Misallocate Taxing Rights

The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is proposing a dramatic shift to international corporate taxation that both sets a floor for corporate tax rates across the globe and transforms how countries obtain taxing rights over large multinational corporations. This Note focuses on the proposed framework for re-allocating taxing rights over corporations away from the traditional requirement of a physical presence in a country to mere revenues in a country. This Note identifies problems with the proposal as it relates to artificially altering corporate incentives and structures, as well as the proposal\u27s incompatibility with theories of taxation- including Adam Smith\u27s views on the necessity and evaluation of taxes. To resolve these problems, this Note suggests modifying the OECD proposal by removing the segmentation rule for companies that would not otherwise qualify for Pillar One taxation and allocating taxing rights to countries based on jurisdiction-specific profits, not revenues. While the OECD proposal will face obstacles, these suggestions should reduce the obstacles by limiting the proposal\u27s disruptive impact on US corporations and addressing legislators\u27 concerns about disproportionate impact on the United States

Path Dependence in Personal Selling : A Meso-Analysis of Vertical Integration

We examine an unusual form of path dependence, in which suppliers that take different decision paths end up in the same position: excessive vertical integration of the personal selling function. We argue that this is the case even though outsourcing is more seriously considered than ever, and economic arguments for outsourcing the sales function are compelling. We develop an institutional explanation at the meso level (a combination of individual, organization, and environmental forces, explicitly considering how these levels combine). This meso-analysis focuses on four forces driving firms toward being locked into employee sales forces. We enumerate and classify these mechanisms, illustrating them with a simple simulation of how outsourcing sales becomes rare. We close with testable propositions about which firms are most likely to break their dependence on a vertically integrated path.path dependence; personal selling; outsourcing; sales function

Shockwaves in converging geometries

Plate impact experiments are a powerful tool in equation of state (EOS) development, but are inherently limited by the range of impact velocities accessible to the gun. In an effort to dramatically increase the range of pressures which can be studied with available impact velocities, a new experimental technique is being developed. The possibility of using a confined converging target to focus Shockwaves and produce a large amplitude pressure pulse is examined. When the planar shock resulting from impact enters the converging target the impedance mismatch at the boundary of the confinement produces reflected Mach waves and the subsequent wave interactions produce a diffraction cycle resulting in increases in the shock strength with each cycle. Since this configuration is limited to relatively low impedance targets, a second technique is proposed in which the target is two concentric cylinders designed such that the inner cylinder will have a lower shock velocity than the much larger shock velocity in the outer cylinder. The resulting dispersion in the wave front creates converging shocks, which will interact and eventually result in a steady Mach configuration with an increase in pressure in the Mach disk. Numerical simulations indicate a significant increase in pressure for both methods and show promise for the proposed concepts

Advances in Shock Compression of Mantle Materials and Implications

Hugoniots of lower mantle mineral compositions are sensitive to the conditions where they cross phase boundaries including both polymorphic phase transitions and partial to complete melting. For SiO_2, the Hugoniot of fused silica passes from stishovite to partial melt (73 GPa, 4600 K) whereas the Hugoniot of crystal quartz passes from CaCi_2 structure to partial melt (116 GPa, 4900 K). For Mg_2SiO_4, the forsterite Hugoniot passes from the periclase +MgSiO_3 (perovskite) assemblage to melt before 152 GPa and 4300 K, whereas the wadsleyite Hugoniot transforms first to periclase +MgSiO_3 (post-perovskite) and then melts at 151 GPa and 4160 K. Shock states achieved from crystal enstatite are molten above 160 GPa. High-pressure Grüneisen parameters for molten states of MgSiO_3 and Mg_2SiO_4 increase markedly with compression, going from 0.5 to 1.6 over the 0 to 135 GPa range. This gives rise to a very large (>2000 K) isentropic rise in temperature with depth in thermal models of a primordial deep magma ocean within the Earth. These magma ocean isentropes lead to models that have crystallization initiating at mid-lower mantle depths. Such models are consistent with the suggestion that the present ultra-low velocity zones, at the base of the lowermost mantle, represent a dynamically stable, partially molten remnant of the primordial magma ocean. The new shock melting data for silicates support a model of the primordial magma ocean that is concordant with the Berkeley-Caltech iron core model [1] for the temperature at the center of the Earth

Shock temperatures of preheated MgO

Shock temperature measurements via optical pyrometry are being conducted on single-crystal MgO preheated before compression to 1905–1924 K. Planar shocks were generated by impacting hot Mo(driver plate)-MgO targets with Mo or Ta flyers launched by the Caltech two-stage light-gas gun up to 6.6 km/s. Quasi-brightness temperature was measured with 2–3% uncertainty by a 6-channel optical pyrometer with 3 ns time resolution, over 500–900 nm spectral range. A high-power, coiled irradiance standard lamp was adopted for spectral radiance calibration accurate to 5%. In our experiments, shock pressure in MgO ranged from 102 to 203 GPa and the corresponding temperature varied from 3.78 to 6.53 kK. For the same particle velocity, preheated MgO Hugoniot has about 3% lower shock velocity than the room temperature Hugoniot. Although model shock temperatures calculated for the solid phase exceeded our measurements by ~5 times the uncertainty, there was no clear evidence of MgO melting, up to the highest compression achieved

Linked CSF reduction of phosphorylated tau and IL-8 in HIV associated neurocognitive disorder.

HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND) is a common condition in both developed and developing nations, but its cause is largely unknown. Previous research has inconsistently linked Alzheimer's disease (AD), viral burden, and inflammation to the onset of HAND in HIV-infected individuals. Here we simultaneously measured cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of established amyloid and tau biomarkers for AD, viral copy numbers, and six key cytokines in 41 HIV-infected individuals off combination anti-retroviral therapy (14 with HAND) who underwent detailed clinical and neuropsychological characterization, and compared their CSF patterns with those from young healthy subjects, older healthy subjects with normal cognition, and older people with AD. HAND was associated with the lowest CSF levels of phosphorylated tau (p-Tau181) after accounting for age and race. We also found very high CSF levels of the pro-inflammatory interferon gamma-induced protein 10 (IP-10/CXCL10) in HIV regardless of cognition, but elevated CSF interleukin 8 (IL-8/CXCL8) only in HIV-NC but not HAND. Eleven HIV-infected subjects underwent repeat CSF collection six months later and showed strongly correlated longitudinal changes in p-Tau181 and IL-8 levels (R = 0.841). These data suggest reduced IL-8 relative to IP-10 and reduced p-Tau181 to characterize HAND

T-infinity: The Dependency Inversion Principle for Rapid and Sustainable Multidisciplinary Software Development

The CFD Vision 2030 Study recommends that, NASA should develop and maintain an integrated simulation and software development infrastructure to enable rapid CFD technology maturation.... [S]oftware standards and interfaces must be emphasized and supported whenever possible, and open source models for noncritical technology components should be adopted. The current paper presents an approach to an open source development architecture, named T-infinity, for accelerated research in CFD leveraging the Dependency Inversion Principle to realize plugins that communicate through collections of functions without exposing internal data structures. Steady state flow visualization, mesh adaptation, fluid-structure interaction, and overset domain capabilities are demonstrated through compositions of plugins via standardized abstract interfaces without the need for source code dependencies between disciplines. Plugins interact through abstract interfaces thereby avoiding N 2 direct code-to-code data structure coupling where N is the number of codes. This plugin architecture enhances sustainable development by controlling the interaction between components to limit software complexity growth. The use of T-infinity abstract interfaces enables multidisciplinary application developers to leverage legacy applications alongside newly-developed capabilities. While rein, a description of interface details is deferred until the are more thoroughly tested and can be closed to modification

p21 is decreased in polycystic kidney disease and leads to increased epithelial cell cycle progression: roscovitine augments p21 levels.

BackgroundAutosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is a common genetic disease with few treatment options other than renal replacement therapy. p21, a cyclin kinase inhibitor which has pleiotropic effects on the cell cycle, in many cases acts to suppress cell cycle progression and to prevent apoptosis. Because defects in cell cycle arrest and apoptosis of renal tubular epithelial cells occur in PKD, and in light of earlier reports that polycystin-1 upregulates p21 and that the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor roscovitine arrests progression in a mouse model, we asked whether (1) p21 deficiency might underlie ADPKD and (2) the mechanism of the salutary roscovitine effect on PKD involves p21.Methodsp21 levels in human and animal tissue samples as well as cell lines were examined by immunoblotting and/or immunohistochemisty. Apoptosis was assessed by PARP cleavage. p21 expression was attenuated in a renal tubular epithelial cell line by antisense methods, and proliferation in response to p21 attenuation and to roscovitine was assessed by the MTT assay.ResultsWe show that p21 is decreased in human as well as a non-transgenic rat model of ADPKD. In addition, hepatocyte growth factor, which induces transition from a cystic to a tubular phenotype, increases p21 levels. Furthermore, attenuation of p21 results in augmentation of cell cycle transit in vitro. Thus, levels of p21 are inversely correlated with renal tubular epithelial cell proliferation. Roscovitine, which has been shown to arrest progression in a murine model of PKD, increases p21 levels and decreases renal tubular epithelial cell proliferation, with no affect on apoptosis.ConclusionThe novelty of our study is the demonstration in vivo in humans and rat models of a decrement of p21 in cystic kidneys as compared to non-cystic kidneys. Validation of a potential pathogenetic model of increased cyst formation due to enhanced epithelial proliferation and apoptosis mediated by p21 suggests a mechanism for the salutary effect of roscovitine in ADPKD and supports further investigation of p21 as a target for future therapy

The 4-H Tomato Club

February, 1931.Cover title