On the importance of prismatic/basal interfaces in the growth of (-1012) twins in hexagonal close-packed crystals

The growth process of of (-1012) twins is studied in Magnesium using atomistic simulations. Two twin seeds are considered and both cases, a specific interface, which places face-to-face prismatic and basal planes, plays an important role. This interface has a low energy corresponding to a cusp in the orientation-dependent interface energy of a twinned bicrystal. This interface appears in several published twin structures and for instance accommodates the large deviations of twin interfaces from (-1012) planes reported recently [Zhang et al., Scr. Mater. 67 (2012) 862].Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Scripta Materiali

Examining Spillover Effects from Teach For America Corps Members in Miami-Dade County Public Schools

Despite a large body of evidence documenting the effectiveness of Teach For America (TFA) corps members at raising the math test scores of their students, little is known about the program's impact at the school level. TFA's recent placement strategy in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), where large numbers of TFA corps members are placed as clusters into a targeted set of disadvantaged schools, provides an opportunity to evaluate the impact of the TFA program on broader school performance. This study examines whether the influx of TFA corps members led to a spillover effect on other teachers' performance. We find that many of the schools chosen to participate in the cluster strategy experienced large subsequent gains in math achievement. These gains were driven in part by the composition effect of having larger numbers of effective TFA corps members. However, we do not find any evidence that the clustering strategy led to any spillover effect on school-wide performance. In other words, our estimates suggest that extra student gains for TFA corps members under the clustering strategy would be equivalent to the gains that would result from an alternate placement strategy where corps members were evenly distributed across schools

Beyond Selling Medicines

Novartis is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, based in Switzerland, and operating in more than 140 countries worldwide. It is a leading pharmaceutical provider for diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, hypertension and cancer, to list a few. Its medicines reach more than 1.1 billion people each year. Our client is Novartis Brazil, a subsidiary operating in a fast growth emerging market

Charged multiplicity density and number of participant nucleons in relativistic nuclear collisions

The energy and centrality dependences of charged particle pseudorapidity density in relativistic nuclear collisions were studied using a hadron and string cascade model, JPCIAE. Both the relativistic $p+\bar p$ experimental data and the PHOBOS and PHENIX $Au+Au$ data at RHIC energy could be fairly reproduced within the framework of JPCIAE model and without retuning the model parameters. The predictions for $Pb+Pb$ collisions at the LHC energy were also given. We computed the participant nucleon distributions using different methods. It was found that the number of participant nucleons is not a well defined variable both experimentally and theoretically. Thus it may be inappropriate to use the charged particle pseudorapidity density per participant pair as a function of the number of participant nucleons for distinguishing various theoretical models. A discussion for the effect of different definitions in nuclear radius (diffused or sharp) was given.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure