Upgrade to Rails 4.1.4

This is a first pass at upgrading the app to Rails 4.1.4.

Being new to the codebase, I am not sure about what areas might be "gotchas" that the test suite doesn't cover, or that might be worth running through manually in the web browser.  If you want to point me in that direction, I am happy to do the legwork.
Can you tell me why this works? This line was one of my hangups in trying to upgrade to 4.1 before.

As long as it works, brilliant. Just curious.