Voting by Overseas Citizens and Deployed Military Personnel

The principal problem in serving overseas citizens and military voters is how best to return a marked ballot to local election officials. Prior to 2009, insufficient time was provided for an overseas voter’s ballot to be delivered and make it back in time to be counted. While the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) of 1986 required all states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories to permit U.S. citizens abroad to register to vote and to vote by absentee ballot, it did not provide for uniform standards by which states must abide in ensuring overseas voters could exercise their vote. The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act of 2009 attempted to solve the problem by enacting four primary provisions: +eliminating the requirement for notarization of overseas ballots. +requiring all states to make voter registration at applications for absentee ballots available electronically along with a Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB) in case the official ballots do not arrive in time. +requiring overseas and military voters to re-register for each election cycle instead of every two election cycles. +requiring all states to make provision to have ballots available for sending to overseas and military voters at least 45 days before the scheduled election day

Somatic Experiences and the Source of Religious Conviction

In an American Anthropologist article (Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary Christianity) (2010) Tanya Luhrmann highlights ways in which the body can play an integral part in creating conviction for modern day Evangelical Christians. In order to experience God in a personal, intimate way, believers may “identify… the presence of God (in) the body’s responses” through “the absorbed state we call “trance”” and general “bodily and emotional experiences.” From comments made during services at an Evangelical church, a study was conducted into whether or not somatic experiences (goose-bumps, tingles/prickling sensations, heat, etc.) could create conviction in the minds of believers. Interviews were conducted with fourteen attendees of Crossroads Christian Church in Elma, NY. It was found that ten out of fourteen individuals described one or more somatic experiences as a personal source of conviction for them. The importance of such things in creating a general sense of conviction varied. For three individuals, a somatic experience was their first evidence of the truth of Christianity. This research extends Lurhmann’s conclusions in showing that even physiological reactions of the human body may play a role in creating a general sense of a higher reality in Evangelical circles

Positive Sasakian Structures on Links of Weighted Complete Intersection Singularities

Links of isolated singularities defined by weighted homogeneous polynomials have a natural Sasakian structure. Since it is known that Sasaki-Einstein metrics have positive Ricci curvature, and since positive Sasakian structures give rise to Sasakian metrics with positive Ricci curvature, it is useful to determine which links have a positive Sasakian structure. This corresponds to the Fano index of the associated weighted projective variety being positive. Links of dimension $2n-1$ are $(n-2)$-connected. In dimension 5, there is a complete classification of simply connected spin manifolds due to Smale. Hypersurface singularities yielding links of dimension 5 have been treated by Boyer, Galicki, Koll\\u27{a}r, Nakamaye, and others. This paper investigates isolated singularities of codimension 2 complete intersections with 5 dimensional links of positive index and provides a complete list up to degree 600, hence a complete (up to degree 600) list of types of links having positive Sasakian structures

Exploring micropolitan areas as a source of population growth in Iowa

As sluggish growth persists in the state of Iowa, micropolitan areas may provide a viable source for expanding development. This thesis has two primary objectives: to better understand those factors driving population growth among micropolitan areas and to explore micropolitan areas in the state of Iowa as compared to micropolitan areas in other parts of the country. The analyses show a relationship between four of the five growth factors (agglomeration, recreation, immigration, education and diversification) and effective growth rate, the difference between micropolitan population growth and statewide population growth. As the number of qualifying categories increase for a micropolitan area, effective growth rates also increase. Recreation-related factors had the strongest relationship to growth both in Iowa and nationwide. Agglomeration factors performed better in Iowa than nationally, but education factors performed worse. Many Iowa micropolitan areas can capitalize on existing resources in an effort to stimulate population growth

La Belle: Rigging in the days of the spritsail topmast, a reconstruction of a seventeenth-century ship's rig

La Belle’s rigging assemblage has provided a rare and valuable source of knowledge of 17th-century rigging in general and in particular, French and small-ship rigging characteristics. With over 400 individual items including nearly 160 wood and iron artifacts, this assemblage stands out as one of the most substantial and varied among all available rigging assemblages and currently is the only assemblage of 17th-century French rigging published. Furthermore, French rigging in general has not been as well defined as English rigging, nor has the 17th century been as well researched as the 18th. As such, La Belle’s rigging assemblage has provided a valuable source of knowledge whose research will hopefully provide a valuable foundation on which future studies can be built. Specifically, this project has attempted to catalogue these artifacts and reconstruct a plausible 17th-century French rig. This project has further attempted to define the differences between the better known English rigging features and those more characteristic of the French and Dutch. The reconstruction is based on the specific details derived from La Belle’s artifacts as well as contemporary French and other continental sources such as rigging assemblages, ship models, treatises, and nautical dictionaries. Together, these have suggested that La Belle probably carried a relatively simple rig with decidedly seventeenth-century characteristics and a Dutch influence

Intestinal colonization and acute immune response in commercial turkeys following inoculation with Campylobacter jejuni constructs encoding antibiotic-resistance markers

Consumption of contaminated poultry products is one of the main sources of human campylobacteriosis, of which Campylobacter jejuni subsp. jejuni (C. jejuni) is responsible for approximately 90% of the cases. At slaughter, the ceca of commercial chickens and turkeys are the main anatomical site where C. jejuni asymptomatically colonizes. We have previously colonized commercial turkey poults with different isolates of C. jejuni and evaluated different media to best enumerate Campylobacter from intestinal samples, but the host-response is unknown in turkeys. Enumeration of Campylobacter(colony forming units (cfu)/gram of intestinal contents) can be challenging, and can be confounded if animals are colonized with multiple species of Campylobacter. In order to precisely enumerate the C. jejuni isolate used to experimentally colonize turkeys, constructs of C. jejuni (NCTC 11,168) were tagged with different antibiotic resistance markers at the CmeF locus (chloramphenicol (CjCm) or kanamycin (CjK)). We sought to examine the kinetics of intestinal colonization using the antibiotic resistant constructs, and characterize the immune response in cecal tissue of turkeys. In vitroanalysis of the tagged antibiotic-resistant constructs demonstrated no changes in motility, morphology, or adherence and invasion of INT-407 cells compared to the parent isolate NCTC 11,168. Two animal experiments were completed to evaluate intestinal colonization by the constructs. In experiment 1, three-week old poults were colonized after oral gavage for 14 days, and CjCm and CjK cfu were recovered from cecal, but not ileal contents. In experiment 2, nine-week old poults were orally inoculated with CjCm, and the abundance of CjCm cfu/g of cecal contents significantly decreased beyond 14 days after inoculation. Significant lesions were detected in CjCm colonized poults at day 2 post-colonization. Using immunohistochemistry, Campylobacter antigen was detected in between cecal villi by day 7 of CjCm colonized poults. Quantitative RT-PCR of CjCm-colonized cecal tissue demonstrated significant down-regulation of IL-1β, IL-10 and IL-13 mRNA, and significant up-regulation of IL-6, IL-8, IL-17 A, IL-22 and IFNγ mRNA on day 2, and for some on day 7 post-colonization. All differentially expressed genes were similar to mock-infected poults by day 14. These data suggest that C. jejuni induced a brief inflammatory response in the cecum of poults that quickly resolved. Results from this study provide valuable insight into host-response and persistent colonization of the turkey cecum. These findings will help to develop and test strategies to promote food safety in commercial turkeys