The Eartha M. M. White Virtual Reality Experience

A presentation about the creation of the Eartha M.M. White VR Experience. The VR narrative biography tells the story of Ms. White\u27s life and all of her accomplishments. It also gives a glimpse into her home and base of operations which is now the Eartha M.M. White Museum located in Jacksonville FL. This VR experience was made possible by a 2023 Innovative Project Award from the Northeast Florida Information Network (NEFLIN).In cooperation with the Eartha M.M. White Museum, The University of North Florida Thomas G. Carpenter Library Special Collections and University Archives, and the UNF Virtual Learning Center

Model-based spacecraft and mission design for the evaluation of technology

In order to meet the future vision of robotic missions, engineers will face intricate mission concepts, new operational approaches, and technologies that have yet to be developed. The concept of smaller, model driven projects helps this transition by including life-cycle cost as part of the decision making process. For example, since planetary exploration missions have cost ceilings and short development periods, heritage flight hardware is utilized. However, conceptual designs that rely solely on heritage technology will result in estimates that may not be truly representative of the actual mission being designed and built. The Laboratory for Spacecraft and Mission Design (LSMD) at the California Institute of Technology is developing integrated concurrent models for mass and cost estimations. The purpose of this project is to quantify the infusion of specific technologies where the data would be useful in guiding technology developments leading up to a mission. This paper introduces the design-to-cost model to determine the implications of various technologies on the spacecraft system in a collaborative engineering environment. In addition, comparisons of the benefits of new or advanced technologies for future deep space missions are examined

ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2010 Preliminary Qualitative Determination

A preliminary qualitative analysis of all addenda to American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)/Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) Standard 90.1-2007 (Standard 90.1-2007 or 2007 edition) that were included in ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2010 (Standard 90.1-2010 or 2010 edition) was conducted. All 109 addenda processed by ASHRAE in the creation of Standard 90.1-2010 from Standard 90.1-2007 were evaluated by DOE for their impact on energy efficiency. DOE preliminarily determined whether that addenda would have a positive, neutral, or negative impact on overall building efficiency

Nanoscale surface element identification and dopant homogeneity in the high-TcT_{c} superconductor PrxCa1−xFe2As2Pr_xCa_{1−x}Fe_2As_2

We use scanning tunneling microscopy to determine the surface structure and dopant distribution in $Pr_xCa_{1−x}Fe_2As_2$, the highest-Tc member of the 122 family of iron-based superconductors. We identify the cleaved surface termination by mapping the local tunneling barrier height, related to the work function. We image the individual Pr dopants responsible for superconductivity, and show that they do not cluster, but in fact repel each other at short length scales. We therefore suggest that the low volume fraction high-Tc superconducting phase is unlikely to originate from Pr inhomogeneity.Physic

The Impacts of Shopbots on Online Consumer Search

Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Online consumer clickstream data from ComScore Inc. demonstrate that consumers are increasingly using shopbots to conduct search. This phenomenon raises such questions as "how do shopbots change consumers' search behavior?" and "do they reduce consumers' online search?" Conventional wisdom suggests that consumers are expected to search less because shopbots have displayed prices and other relative information from retailers on the search result page(s). Surprisingly, this study demonstrates the opposite result. That is, consumers are actually visiting more online retailer web sites after using shopbots. This finding suggests that after searching for an item through a shopbot and receiving the price information, consumers will continue to look for detailed information about the online retailers by visiting their web sites. The empirical finding is explained by an analytical model, which shows that on the one hand shopbots reduce the marginal benefit of searching additional online stores; on the other hand they reduce the cost of search. Therefore whether shopbots reduce consumer search depends on the cost of reducing per unit of risk, which is decided by a number of factors, such as marginal search costs, price dispersion and quality differentiation among stores, price and quality correlation, and consumers' relative preference for service quality. The model also gives sufficient and necessary conditions under which shopbots increase consumer surplus

Bayesian Inference of Spatial Organizations of Chromosomes

Knowledge of spatial chromosomal organizations is critical for the study of transcriptional regulation and other nuclear processes in the cell. Recently, chromosome conformation capture (3C) based technologies, such as Hi-C and TCC, have been developed to provide a genome-wide, three-dimensional (3D) view of chromatin organization. Appropriate methods for analyzing these data and fully characterizing the 3D chromosomal structure and its structural variations are still under development. Here we describe a novel Bayesian probabilistic approach, denoted as “Bayesian 3D constructor for Hi-C data” (BACH), to infer the consensus 3D chromosomal structure. In addition, we describe a variant algorithm BACH-MIX to study the structural variations of chromatin in a cell population. Applying BACH and BACH-MIX to a high resolution Hi-C dataset generated from mouse embryonic stem cells, we found that most local genomic regions exhibit homogeneous 3D chromosomal structures. We further constructed a model for the spatial arrangement of chromatin, which reveals structural properties associated with euchromatic and heterochromatic regions in the genome. We observed strong associations between structural properties and several genomic and epigenetic features of the chromosome. Using BACH-MIX, we further found that the structural variations of chromatin are correlated with these genomic and epigenetic features. Our results demonstrate that BACH and BACH-MIX have the potential to provide new insights into the chromosomal architecture of mammalian cells.Statistic