Fatigue and Fracture of Electron Beam Melting Ti-6Al-4V

For applications in the aerospace field, selection of materials for a given design requires an understanding of critical properties, like fatigue and fracture, in addition to static mechanical and physical properties. With the ongoing advancements in metallic additive manufacturing techniques and the interest in applying the process to aerospace applications, there is a clear need to fully characterize properties. Arguably, the most attractive alloy for applications in aerospace is the Ti-6Al-4V alloy. The current dissertation examines the mechanical properties of the alloy, made by the Electron Beam Melting (EBM) Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) method. As illustrated in this work, the EBM Ti-6Al-4V properties vary depending on processing conditions, post-processing treatments (e.g. hot isostatic pressing: HIP), specimen orientation, and chemical content of the powder feedstock. The current dissertation adds significantly to the literature on EBM Ti-6Al-4V, showing that the powder feedstock chemistry (especially oxygen) must be controlled, and engineers must account for the anisotropic behavior of the material as well as inherent material defects and the effects of HIP post-processing when designing for fracture and fatigue critical applications. First, the effects of powder feedstock oxygen content were characterized for a wide range of oxygen mass fraction (0.13 % to 0.47 %) by performing Charpy impact testing and resistance curve (J-R) testing to determine fracture toughness, all while including the effects of specimen orientation and HIP post-processing. The fracture trends showed significant reduction in toughness at the highest oxygen levels, with clear anisotropic effects, and a significant improvement in toughness after HIP. Next, the effects of orientation and HIP post-processing on fatigue performance were characterized by generating Stress-Life (S-N) curves and Fatigue Crack Growth Rate (FCGR) curves. The fatigue study showed limited anisotropy and a strong improvement in performance after HIP due to the closure of internal voids and lack-of-fusion defects. Finally, drawing on the characterization work, a Fracture Mechanics (FM)-based fatigue life model was utilized to compare predictions to as-tested results. Overall, this study demonstrated how an in-depth understanding of material performance properties could be utilized in an efficient FM-based fatigue model for damage tolerant additively manufactured designs

Leading an Open Revolution: Promoting Awareness of Open Resources through an Interdisciplinary Learning Community

This article discusses the case study of an interdisciplinary faculty learning community (FLC) focused on open practices and resources. The community, which was facilitated by three academic librarians, explored the case as a framework for open outreach and advocacy on a university campus. Composed of participants across disciplines and academic departments, the FLC created a setting for librarians and teaching faculty to explore open education topics together from divergent perspectives and degrees of experience. In this article, the authors present the FLC case as a collaborative model for forging relationships on campus and consider its effectiveness as an outreach and advocacy strategy for academic libraries

Enhancing Employee Voice in Government: Transparency, Trust, and Cognitive Empowerment

For organizational change to take root, develop, and realize the desired goals and benefits, employees are increasingly asked to be an integral part of the change process, to speak up and use their voice to point out areas to improve and ways to be more efficient. Organizations and managers must create a climate where this employee voice, a multidimensional construct comprised of promotive and prohibitive voice, is encouraged and heard, and where the employee is empowered to effect change and make improvements. Both types of voice are potent mechanisms for improving public services, and government organizations in particular, as compared to private and other businesses. This quantitative study investigates transparency, a multidimensional view of trust with cognition-based and affect-based trust, and cognitive empowerment and their relationships with both types of employee voice. The setting is a government organization that trains employees to see issues in the workplace and make changes to improve outcomes for citizens, save time and money, and improve the utilization of resources. Trust and transparency matter, until the climate supports psychological safety. Transparency and cognitive empowerment are found to be significantly related to different types of employee voice after controlling for various factors, including propensity to trust, social desirability, and psychological safety

The Weaponization of Attorney’s Fees in an Age of Constitutional Warfare

If you want to win battles in the culture war, you enact legislation that regulates firearms, prohibits abortions, restricts discussion of critical race theory, or advances whatever other substantive policy preferences represent a victory for your side. But to win the war decisively with an incapacitating strike, you make it as difficult as possible for your adversaries to challenge those laws in court. Clever deployment of justiciability doctrines will help to insulate constitutionally questionable laws from judicial review, but some of the challenges you have sought to evade will manage to squeak through. To fully disarm your opponents in an age of cultural and constitutional warfare, you must cut off their access to counsel. Here is how to do it in three easy steps: (1) delineate an entire area of law, such as abortion, in which proponents of the state-favored view may obtain attorney’s fees upon prevailing in litigation while proponents of the opposing view may not; (2) impose joint and several liability on the attorneys for the disfavored side, so that attorneys cannot bring challenges to state law without being personally responsible for what could amount to millions of dollars in the opposing party’s legal fees; and (3) define “prevailing party” so broadly that this shared liability is triggered by the dismissal of even a single claim. This is what the Texas legislature did in S.B. 8, the Texas Heartbeat Law, pioneering a model that several other states have now followed. The extraordinary nature of this scheme has been overshadowed by both the private enforcement mechanism at the core of S.B. 8, intentionally designed to evade judicial review, and by the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, ending constitutional protection for the right to terminate a pregnancy. As this Article shows, it would be a grave mistake to think that S.B. 8’s weaponization of attorney’s fees has lost its relevance. The end of Roe ushered in a new era of legal challenges to abortion regulation, for which Texas and its imitators have already stacked the deck. But perhaps even more significantly, there is little reason to think that the weaponization of attorney’s fees is limited to the abortion context or to conservative causes more broadly. California has already repurposed Texas’s strategy in an effort to deter Second Amendment challenges to its new firearm law, implementing an identical attorney’s fee regime for different ideological purposes. And why should the embrace of this strategy stop there? Can all state legislatures insulate their most troubling laws from judicial scrutiny by making it prohibitively risky for attorneys to challenge them? This Article reveals that the attorney’s fee scheme woven into S.B. 8 is unprecedented and deeply threatening to our legal culture’s ideals of fair play, access to courts, and legitimate contestation of bitterly disputed issues. Accepting its proliferation will result in a profound aggrandizement of state power that is inconsistent with federalism and separation-of-powers principles, as well as due process, equal protection, and First Amendment rights

Modes of listening in the interpretation of electroacoustic music

A cursory look through the literature on modes of listening reveals a wealth of different ways to attend to oneʼs sonic environment. Authors in the literature describe various, nuanced modes to frame oneʼs listening, and yet the terms also have central commonalities. In this essay, I explain that bringing these authors into dialogue with one another in a way that emphasizes these commonalities provides a rich interpretive tool, particularly for electroacoustic music. These different listenings ultimately compose my analysis, and I suggest that consciously engaging with modes of listening can shape listener experiences of electroacoustic music in analytically fruitful ways. Natasha Barrettʼs Deconstructing Dowland for guitar and electronics provides an aural realm in which to consider how one might usefully employ modes of listening as an analytical tool. The music possesses more potential listening experiences than a soundʼs single pass through the auditory system can perceive. When I consciously think about my approach to listening, however, the soundscape becomes a laboratory in which to explore the music from any perceptible angle. After gaining the intimate familiarity with the piece that analysis requires, I can begin the familiar analytical process of examining plausible interpretations to construct a coherent reading. Here, active engagement with modes of listening directs analytical decisions as the music and I construct my reading of the piece by drawing upon the four modes I propose. Overall, the typology I propose allows us access to meaningful analytical engagement with a repertoire whose vocabulary and notational particularities can hinder other methodologies

Protocol for the Promoting Resilience in Stress Management (PRISM) Intervention: A Multi-Site Randomized Controlled Trial for Adolescents and Young Adults with Advanced Cancer

Background Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with cancer are at high risk of poor psychosocial outcomes, and evidence-based interventions designed to meet their psychosocial and communication needs are lacking. The main objective of this project is to test the efficacy of a new adaptation of the Promoting Resilience in Stress Management intervention for AYAs with Advanced Cancer (PRISM-AC). Methods/design The PRISM-AC trial is a 2-arm, parallel, non-blinded, multisite, randomized controlled trial. 144 participants with advanced cancer will be enrolled and randomized to either usual, non-directive, supportive care without PRISM-AC (“control” arm) or with PRISM-AC (“experimental” arm). PRISM is a manualized, skills-based training program comprised of four 30–60 min, one-on-one sessions targeting AYA-endorsed resilience resources (stress-management, goal-setting, cognitive-reframing, and meaning-making). It also includes a facilitated family meeting and a fully equipped smartphone app. The current adaptation includes an embedded advance care planning module. English- or Spanish-speaking individuals 12–24 years old with advanced cancer (defined as progressive, recurrent, or refractory disease, or any diagnosis associated with \u3c 50% survival) receiving care at 4 academic medical centers are eligible. Patients’ caregivers are also eligible to participate in this study if they are able to speak and read English or Spanish, and are cognitively and physically able to participate. Participants in all groups complete surveys querying patient-reported outcomes at the time of enrollment and 3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-months post-enrollment. The primary outcome of interest is patient-reported health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and secondary outcomes of interest include patient anxiety, depression, resilience, hope and symptom burden, parent/caregiver anxiety, depression and health-related quality of life, and family palliative care activation. We will conduct intention-to-treat analysis to compare the group means of primary and secondary outcomes between PRISM-AC arm and control arm with regression models. Discussion This study will provide methodologically rigorous data and evidence regarding a novel intervention to promote resilience and reduce distress among AYAs with advanced cancer. This research has the potential to offer a practical, skills-based curriculum designed to improve outcomes for this high-risk group. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT03668223, September 12, 2018

The Importance of Our Performing Arts

This essay is titled The Importance of Our Performing Arts and it was written in February 2022. I was taking an argumentative writing class at the time where we have free range to choose a topic to write about, so naturally, I choose something I am passionate about, the impact of youth theatre on our adolescents. The prompt was to identify a driving question or phenomenon related to the arts to investigate and develop a complex thesis you could argue in the paper through the use of rhetorical strategies, I decided on the discussion between funding in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields and the arts and humanities, specifically youth theatre, and how the imbalance impacts adolescent development. I incorporate theory revolving around aesthetics theory in Philosophy to better explain why not only the performing arts but art, in general, is a driving force for personal growth and self-discovery. I was able to deepen my understanding of just how important art is to the human condition and although holding no utility, society would be lost without it

Dr. Debak Das

An interview of Dr. Debak Das by our Editor at Large, Elijah Kruger

Reevaluating the God-Human Relationship Through the Psychological Origin of Sin: A Comparative Theology of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard on the Doctrine of Sin

In his The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s decision to have Haufniensis acknowledge Schleiermacher’s contribution to the doctrine of sin continues to raise questions regarding Schleiermacher’s influence on Kierkegaard’s intellectual development. These questions also serve to underscore the general need to locate Kierkegaard properly within the larger context of religious and theological studies in the nineteenth century. Our project here seeks to address these questions with a comparative theology of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard on the Christian doctrine of sin. I argue that Kierkegaard is right to credit Schleiermacher as a source of inspiration in The Concept of Anxiety because of the strong similarities in both form and content between anxiety and Schleiermacher’s concept of the susceptibility to sin as original sin. To this end of a comparative study between Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard, we engage primarily in an analysis of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of sin in his The Christian Faith and Kierkegaard’s contribution to the concept of original sin in his The Concept of Anxiety. In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher advances his dogmatic concept of the susceptibility to sin, defined as a determination of our primordial, religious self-consciousness and located in the sphere of psychology. Furthermore, he systematically covers how the susceptibility to sin functions as original sin. Similarly, in The Concept of Anxiety, where psychology is in service of dogmatics, Haufniensis upholds anxiety as primordial aspect of our religious existence, which, in Kierkegaard’s body of work, is also defined as an act of self-consciousness. Furthermore, he also systematically details the way in which anxiety functions as original sin. Although there are some differences in the general scope of the susceptibility to sin and anxiety, they do not detract from the strong similarities in the way both concepts are defined in psychological terms, that is, as determinations of self-consciousness, and operate within this context of original sin. While, on the one hand, neither anxiety nor the susceptibility to sin are inherited forms of sinfulness, both concepts function identically to a prior sinfulness insofar as they thoroughly condition our temporal and spatial existence in such a way as to increase the possibility of sinning. Furthermore, because both concepts are not prior forms of sinfulness, but rather are grounded in our religious self-consciousness, that is, a primordial and essential part of our human nature, both concepts, on the other hand, are able to hold each person accountable for the fault (Reatus) associated with their own transition from original sin to the appearance of actual sin. In conclusion, an analysis of their primary contributions to the concept of original sin reveals Schleiermacher’s influence on Kierkegaard in the development of the concept of anxiety as original sin. Furthermore, this finding can contribute to areas of ongoing research, such as establishing the intellectual relationship between Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard, and the task of locating Kierkegaard within religious and theological studies in his nineteenth-century context

One Size Does Not Fit All: Self-Archiving Personas Based On Federally Funded Researchers at a Mid-Sized Private Institution

Introduction: This mixed-method study analyzes the self-archiving behaviors and underlying motivations of researchers at an institution very recently recategorized by the Carnegie Classification system from “Doctoral– High Research Activity (R2)” to “Doctoral–Very High Research Activity (R1).” Methods: A quantitative analysis of data provided by CHORUS, a multi-institutional open access (OA) infrastructure project designed to minimize the administrative costs of complying with federal public access mandates, was followed by semi-structured qualitative interviews with researchers to determine the underlying motivations for self-archiving research papers resulting from federal grant support. Results: Fifty-one authors with federal research funding published 71 journal articles; 139 OA versions of these 71 articles were intentionally made available by researchers across nine types of platforms, including and in addition to those provided by publishers. Interviews with 11 investigators revealed motivators such as a dedication to public access to knowledge, learned behaviors in specific disciplines, and enlightened self-interest. Challenges included concern regarding confidentiality, confusion about intellectual property and funder requirements, administrative overhead, and integrity of the scholarly record. Discussion: Despite concerns and a lack of an OA mandate and other drivers more commonly present at larger, more research-intensive universities, several researchers interviewed actively engaged in self-archiving article versions, not always with clear motivations. These findings have implications for both scholarly communications and collection development services. Conclusion: These quantitative and qualitative data informed the creation of three distinct personas intended to help librarians at similar universities design services in a manner that aligns with investigator motivations