Precipitation and the growth of oaks at Columbia, Missouri

Publication authorized June 1, 1921.Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references (pages 20-21)

"Can you feel it?" emotional resonance across jazz and literature

This study explores the interpretive dissonance between two forms of Impressionist artistic expression in the twentieth century. Duke Ellington and Ernest Hemingway offer fruitful comparisons of the High Modernist short story and the short instrumental orchestral Jazz compositional forms respectively. The author offers a qualitative account of the direct threads of comparison between the forms, citing specific examples from each artist. Many questions arise that challenge fundamental aspects of critical convention. How are these conventions applied to an inter-disciplinary topic? What is fundamentally different about the process of appreciating music versus literature? How, when we consider each as performative texts, does the distortion of personal experience versus authorial intent confound authoritative claims about Impressionistic work? These comparisons draw direct parallels between the following examples: Ellington’s compositions, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” and “Daybreak Express,” Hemingway’s short stories, “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” This is a broad, exploratory search for loci of meaning that investigate the critical discourse in different interpretive communities. The methodology focuses on detailed readings of music and literature with an eye for threads of connection between the two forms. Historical background and philosophical justifications help substantiate claims throughout. The focus, at times, compares component elements of composition and asks whether they can be held responsible for emotional response. This close reading then contrasts with broader attempts to justify emotional response through general affective reactions. The conclusions suggest that a closer look at the interplay between forms does impact the reading of each text individually. The experience of reading the texts side-by-side connects thematic trends that would otherwise remain hidden. These two artists are shown to be prime examples of both aesthetic complexity and interpretive flexibility. This project fills a gap in the critical discourse that justly compares two prominent artists of the twentieth century that are rarely discussed in the same sentence

Polymer-Filled Metal Foams for Contamination Resistant Aircraft Leading Edges

Adhesion of contaminants has been identified as a ubiquitous issue for aeronautic exterior surfaces. Organic coatings have been demonstrated to enable reduction in insect residue adhesion as well as a reduction in ice adhesion strength. These approaches however, have yet to demonstrate sufficient durability to enable application to commercial aircraft wing leading edges. High durability materials have been developed in parallel to these efforts; contaminant adhesion issues are not addressed. This work describes a first attempt to identify a solution to the seemingly competing issues of contaminant adhesion and durability. A co-continuous network of organic and metallic domains may provide greater durability, while still enabling the changes in surface-contaminant interactions that have been realized. To that end, unique properties have been achieved through fabrication of composite metal foam materials. Likewise, extensive research has been dedicated toward development of polymeric coatings for mitigation of insect residue adhesion.This work describes initial results from infusion of a low surface free energy epoxy resin into a composite metal foam substrate for the purpose of generating a durable contaminant adhesion-resistant material

Cause of the disappearance of cumarin, vanillin, pyridine and quinoline in the soil

Caption title. Includes bibliographical references (p. 62-64). Also available in microfilm under: State agricultural papers

Generation of defects and disorder from deeply quenching a liquid to form a solid

We show how deeply quenching a liquid to temperatures where it is linearly unstable and the crystal is the equilibrium phase often produces crystalline structures with defects and disorder. As the solid phase advances into the liquid phase, the modulations in the density distribution created behind the advancing solidification front do not necessarily have a wavelength that is the same as the equilibrium crystal lattice spacing. This is because in a deep enough quench the front propagation is governed by linear processes, but the crystal lattice spacing is determined by nonlinear terms. The wavelength mismatch can result in significant disorder behind the front that may or may not persist in the latter stage dynamics. We support these observations by presenting results from dynamical density functional theory calculations for simple one- and two-component two-dimensional systems of soft core particles.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figure

An algebraic method for constructing stable and consistent autoregressive filters

In this paper, we introduce an algebraic method to construct stable and consistent univariate autoregressive (AR) models of low order for filtering and predicting nonlinear turbulent signals with memory depth. By stable, we refer to the classical stability condition for the AR model. By consistent, we refer to the classical consistency constraints of Adams-Bashforth methods of order-two. One attractive feature of this algebraic method is that the model parameters can be obtained without directly knowing any training data set as opposed to many standard, regression-based parameterization methods. It takes only long-time average statistics as inputs. The proposed method provides a discretization time step interval which guarantees the existence of stable and consistent AR model and simultaneously produces the parameters for the AR models. In our numerical examples with two chaotic time series with different characteristics of decaying time scales, we find that the proposed AR models produce significantly more accurate short-term predictive skill and comparable filtering skill relative to the linear regression-based AR models. These encouraging results are robust across wide ranges of discretization times, observation times, and observation noise variances. Finally, we also find that the proposed model produces an improved short-time prediction relative to the linear regression-based AR-models in forecasting a data set that characterizes the variability of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a dominant tropical atmospheric wave pattern.Comment: 10 figure

Destruction of vanillin in the soil by the action of soil bacteria

Cover title. Includes bibliographical references (p. 131). Also available in microfilm under: State agricultural papers

Kaldor and Piketty’s Facts: The Rise of Monopoly Power in the United States

The macroeconomic data of the last fifty years have overturned at least two of Kaldor’s famous stylized growth facts: constant interest rates, and a constant labor share. At the same time, the research of Piketty and others has introduced several new and surprising facts: an increase in the financial wealth-to-output ratio in the US, an increase in measured Tobin’s Q, and a divergence between the marginal and average returns on capital. In this paper, we argue that these trends can be explained by an increase in market power and pure profits in the US economy—that is, the emergence of a non-zero-rent economy—along with forces that have led to a persistent long-term decline in real interest rates. We make three parsimonious modifications to the standard neoclassical model to explain these trends. Using recent estimates of the increase in markups and the decrease in real interest rates, we show that our model can quantitatively match these new stylized macroeconomic facts.acceptedVersio

The dopamine D2/D3 receptor agonist quinpirole increases checking-like behaviour in an operant observing response task with uncertain reinforcement: a novel possible model of OCD.

Excessive checking is a common, debilitating symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In an established rodent model of OCD checking behaviour, quinpirole (dopamine D2/3-receptor agonist) increased checking in open-field tests, indicating dopaminergic modulation of checking-like behaviours. We designed a novel operant paradigm for rats (observing response task (ORT)) to further examine cognitive processes underpinning checking behaviour and clarify how and why checking develops. We investigated i) how quinpirole increases checking, ii) dependence of these effects on D2/3 receptor function (following treatment with D2/3 receptor antagonist sulpiride) and iii) effects of reward uncertainty. In the ORT, rats pressed an 'observing' lever for information about the location of an 'active' lever that provided food reinforcement. High- and low-checkers (defined from baseline observing) received quinpirole (0.5mg/kg, 10 treatments) or vehicle. Parametric task manipulations assessed observing/checking under increasing task demands relating to reinforcement uncertainty (variable response requirement and active-lever location switching). Treatment with sulpiride further probed the pharmacological basis of long-term behavioural changes. Quinpirole selectively increased checking, both functional observing lever presses (OLPs) and non-functional extra OLPs (EOLPs). The increase in OLPs and EOLPs was long-lasting, without further quinpirole administration. Quinpirole did not affect the immediate ability to use information from checking. Vehicle and quinpirole-treated rats (VEH and QNP respectively) were selectively sensitive to different forms of uncertainty. Sulpiride reduced non-functional EOLPs in QNP rats but had no effect on functional OLPs. These data have implications for treatment of compulsive checking in OCD, particularly for serotonin-reuptake-inhibitor treatment-refractory cases, where supplementation with dopamine receptor antagonists may be beneficial