A Series of Dialogues for Foreign Students Who Have Just Arrived in the United States

From my experience with beginning or intermediate students who have just arrived in the States, I have found that they lack confidence in dealing with real situations outside the ESL classroom and in interacting with Americans because of their inability to speak or understand normal spoken English. They need some preparation and encouragement to ease the cultural shock they will encounter. In this project, I have used a series of dialogues to prepare the students for the most common situations they will experience almost immediately, such as opening a checking account or eating in a restaurant. Another purpose of these dialogues is to improve the students\u27 listening comprehension. They have to identify key words that are missing from each dialogue. As a result, they have to concentrate while they are listening. At the same time, they gain confidence in their ability to understand normal spoken English. After this, the students have to answer the questions about each dialogue. This leads into cross-cultural discussions in which students can compare their way of life to the American way of life. The students also learn valuable vocabulary that they should know in order to adapt to their new environment. I have recommended a set procedure for teaching these dialogues in the ESL classrooms, but the ESL teacher can select which dialogues and exercises he or she thinks are most suitable in the classroom. ESL teachers can also develop their own exercises to supplement the ones in this project

Polling bias and undecided voter allocations: US Presidential elections, 2004 - 2016

Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each candidate in a simple, deterministic manner. Historically this may have been adequate because the undecided were comparatively small enough to assume that they do not affect the relative proportions of the decided voters. However, in the presence of high numbers of undecided voters, these static rules may in fact bias election predictions from election poll authors and meta-poll analysts. In this paper, we examine the effect of undecided voters in the 2016 US presidential election to the previous three presidential elections. We show there were a relatively high number of undecided voters over the campaign and on election day, and that the allocation of undecided voters in this election was not consistent with two-party proportional (or even) allocations. We find evidence that static allocation regimes are inadequate for election prediction models and that probabilistic allocations may be superior. We also estimate the bias attributable to polling agencies, often referred to as "house effects".Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures, 6 table

Hydrogen absorption in solid aluminum during high-temperature steam oxidation

Hydrogen is emitted by aluminum heated in a vacuum after high-temperature steam treatment. Wire samples are tested for this effect, showing dependence on surface area. Two different mechanisms of absorption are inferred, and reactions deduced

Abandon Statistical Significance

We discuss problems the null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) paradigm poses for replication and more broadly in the biomedical and social sciences as well as how these problems remain unresolved by proposals involving modified p-value thresholds, confidence intervals, and Bayes factors. We then discuss our own proposal, which is to abandon statistical significance. We recommend dropping the NHST paradigm--and the p-value thresholds intrinsic to it--as the default statistical paradigm for research, publication, and discovery in the biomedical and social sciences. Specifically, we propose that the p-value be demoted from its threshold screening role and instead, treated continuously, be considered along with currently subordinate factors (e.g., related prior evidence, plausibility of mechanism, study design and data quality, real world costs and benefits, novelty of finding, and other factors that vary by research domain) as just one among many pieces of evidence. We have no desire to "ban" p-values or other purely statistical measures. Rather, we believe that such measures should not be thresholded and that, thresholded or not, they should not take priority over the currently subordinate factors. We also argue that it seldom makes sense to calibrate evidence as a function of p-values or other purely statistical measures. We offer recommendations for how our proposal can be implemented in the scientific publication process as well as in statistical decision making more broadly

Host plant pubescence: Effect on silverleaf whitefly, Bemisia argentifolii, fourth instar and pharate adult dimensions and ecdysteroid titer fluctuations

The ability to generate physiologically synchronous groups of insects is vital to the performance of investigations designed to test insect responses to intrinsic and extrinsic stimuli. During a given instar, the silverleaf whitefly, Bemisia argentifolii, increase in depth but not in length or width. A staging system to identify physiologically synchronous 4(th) instar and pharate adult silverleaf whiteflies based on increasing body depth and the development of the adult eye has been described previously. This study determined the effect of host plant identity on ecdysteroid fluctuations during the 4(th) instar and pharate adult stages, and on the depth, length and width dimensions of 4(th) instar/pharate adult whiteflies. When grown on the pubescent-leafed green bean, tomato and poinsettia plants, these stages were significantly shorter and narrower, but attained greater depth than when grown on the glabrous-leafed cotton, collard and sweet potato plants. Thus, leaf pubescence is associated with reduced length and width dimensions, but increased depth dimensions in 4(th) Abbreviation: / EIA: enzyme immunoassa

Cosmology with the lights off: Standard sirens in the Einstein Telescope era

We explore the prospects for constraining cosmology using gravitational-wave (GW) observations of neutron-star binaries by the proposed Einstein Telescope (ET), exploiting the narrowness of the neutron-star mass function. Double neutron-star (DNS) binaries are expected to be one of the first sources detected after "first-light" of Advanced LIGO and are expected to be detected at a rate of a few tens per year in the advanced era. However the proposed ET could catalog tens of thousands per year. Combining the measured source redshift distributions with GW-network distance determinations will permit not only the precision measurement of background cosmological parameters, but will provide an insight into the astrophysical properties of these DNS systems. Of particular interest will be to probe the distribution of delay times between DNS-binary creation and subsequent merger, as well as the evolution of the star-formation rate density within ET's detection horizon. Keeping H_0, \Omega_{m,0} and \Omega_{\Lambda,0} fixed and investigating the precision with which the dark-energy equation-of-state parameters could be recovered, we found that with 10^5 detected DNS binaries we could constrain these parameters to an accuracy similar to forecasted constraints from future CMB+BAO+SNIa measurements. Furthermore, modeling the merger delay-time distribution as a power-law, and the star-formation rate (SFR) density as a parametrized version of the Porciani and Madau SF2 model, we find that the associated astrophysical parameters are constrained to within ~ 10%. All parameter precisions scaled as 1/sqrt(N), where N is the number of cataloged detections. We also investigated how precisions varied with the intrinsic underlying properties of the Universe and with the distance reach of the network (which may be affected by the low-frequency cutoff of the detector).Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures, 6 tables. Minor changes to reflect published version. References updated and correcte

The hydrogenation of metals upon interaction with water

Hydrogen evolution at 600 deg and 5 x 10 to the 7th power - 10 to the 6th power torr from AVOOO Al samples, which were pickled in 10 percent NaOH, is discussed. An H evolution kinetic equation is derived for samples of equal vol. and different surfaces (5 and 20 sq cm). The values of the H evolution coefficient K indicated an agreement with considered H diffusion mechanism through an oxide layer. The activation energy for the H evolution process, obtained from the K-temp. relation, was 13,000 2000 cal/g-atom

Matter formed at the BNL relativistic heavy ion collider

We suggest that the "new form of matter" found just above $T_c$ by RHIC is made up of tightly bound quark-antiquark pairs, essentially 32 chirally restored (more precisely, nearly massless) mesons of the quantum numbers of $\pi$, $\sigma$, $\rho$ and $a_1$. Taking the results of lattice gauge simulations (LGS) for the color Coulomb potential from the work of the Bielefeld group and feeding this into a relativistic two-body code, after modifying the heavy-quark lattice results so as to include the velocity-velocity interaction, all ground-state eigenvalues of the 32 mesons go to zero at $T_c$ just as they do from below $T_c$ as predicted by the vector manifestation (VM in short) of hidden local symmetry. This could explain the rapid rise in entropy up to $T_c$ found in LGS calculations. We argue that how the dynamics work can be understood from the behavior of the hard and soft glue.Comment: Final versio