Mt. Pleasant Church, Conewago Township

About two miles south of McSherrystown and a similar distance southwest of Hanover, in Conewago Township, lies the small village of Mt. Pleasant. The community developed at and near the intersection of State Route 194, commonly called the Hanover-Littlestown Pike, and Legislative Route 01005, known in days past as the road from McSherrystown to Gitt\u27s Mill and its segment south of the intersection called in recent times Narrow Drive. In the eastern quadrant of the intersection, a church was built in 1878; nearby and adjacent to the crossroads sat a public school, which had been built sometime before 1858. The school was known by two names, Mt. Pleasant and Schwartz\u27s, and the village itself was also called by some people Schwartz\u27s or Schwartz\u27s Schoolhouse. Further, like the church, the school had religious significance to residents of the vicinity. [excerpt

March into Oblivion: A Footnote

In the above-titled work in 2006, this writer briefly discussed the possibility that President George Washington traversed present Adams County in October 1794, during his return from Bedford to Philadelphia, a belief long and widely held locally. No credible assertion of the President\u27s presence here in 1794 was possible at that time. Recently however, a forgotten narrative was rediscovered ; its author, Jacob Eyster, gives some substance to the previous mere speculation. After extensive research, this writer was graciously requested to produce a sequel to his prior speculative writing. [excerpt

Linguistics and LIS: A Research Agenda

Linguistics and Library and Information Science (LIS) are both interdisciplinary fields that draws from areas such as languages, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, computer science, anthropology, education, and management. The theories and methods of linguistic research can have significant explanatory power for LIS. This article presents a research agenda for LIS that proposes the use of linguistic analysis methods, including discourse analysis, typology, and genre theory

March into Oblivion

The Whiskey Rebellion often is assigned, even by historians, to an obscurity which belies its significance. Its importance was major not only to the people most affected by its cause and those most intimately involved in the playing out of the events, but also to the young federal government, which had to demonstrate its authority yet not trample its own citizens. The situation held a very real potential for tearing apart the fragile nation. President George Washington felt strongly enough about it to involve himself personally in the beginnings of the military action. In the last few years of the century, rapid improvement in economics, safety, and foreign relations, surely spurred in part by the government\u27s reactions to the insurrection, underscored the importance to the nation as a whole. [excerpt

Scanning Ultrafast Electron Microscopy: A Novel Technique to Probe Photocarrier Dynamics with High Spatial and Temporal Resolutions

The dynamics of photo-excited charge carriers, particularly their transport and interactions with defects and interfaces, play an essential role in determining the performance of a wide range of solar and optoelectronic devices. A thorough understanding of these processes requires tracking the motion of photocarriers in both space and time simultaneously with extremely high resolutions, which poses a significant challenge for previously developed techniques, mostly based on ultrafast optical spectroscopy. Scanning ultrafast electron microscopy (SUEM) is a recently developed photon-pump-electron-probe technique that combines the spatial resolution of scanning electron microscopes (SEM) and the temporal resolution of femtosecond ultrafast lasers. Despite many recent excellent reviews for the ultrafast electron microscopy, we dedicate this article specifically to SUEM, where we review the working principle and contrast mechanisms of SUEM in the secondary-electron-detection mode from a users' perspective and discuss the applications of SUEM to directly image photocarrier dynamics in various materials. Furthermore, we propose future theoretical and experimental directions for better understanding and fully utilizing the SUEM measurements to obtain detailed information about the dynamics of photocarriers. To conclude, we envision the potential of expanding SUEM into a versatile platform for probing photophysical processes beyond photocarrier dynamics.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Multivariate type G Mat\'ern stochastic partial differential equation random fields

For many applications with multivariate data, random field models capturing departures from Gaussianity within realisations are appropriate. For this reason, we formulate a new class of multivariate non-Gaussian models based on systems of stochastic partial differential equations with additive type G noise whose marginal covariance functions are of Mat\'ern type. We consider four increasingly flexible constructions of the noise, where the first two are similar to existing copula-based models. In contrast to these, the latter two constructions can model non-Gaussian spatial data without replicates. Computationally efficient methods for likelihood-based parameter estimation and probabilistic prediction are proposed, and the flexibility of the suggested models is illustrated by numerical examples and two statistical applications

The rational SPDE approach for Gaussian random fields with general smoothness

A popular approach for modeling and inference in spatial statistics is to represent Gaussian random fields as solutions to stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) of the form $L^{\beta}u = \mathcal{W}$, where $\mathcal{W}$ is Gaussian white noise, $L$ is a second-order differential operator, and $\beta>0$ is a parameter that determines the smoothness of $u$. However, this approach has been limited to the case $2\beta\in\mathbb{N}$, which excludes several important models and makes it necessary to keep $\beta$ fixed during inference. We propose a new method, the rational SPDE approach, which in spatial dimension $d\in\mathbb{N}$ is applicable for any $\beta>d/4$, and thus remedies the mentioned limitation. The presented scheme combines a finite element discretization with a rational approximation of the function $x^{-\beta}$ to approximate $u$. For the resulting approximation, an explicit rate of convergence to $u$ in mean-square sense is derived. Furthermore, we show that our method has the same computational benefits as in the restricted case $2\beta\in\mathbb{N}$. Several numerical experiments and a statistical application are used to illustrate the accuracy of the method, and to show that it facilitates likelihood-based inference for all model parameters including $\beta$.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figure