Maxon and roton measurements in nanoconfined 4^4He

We investigate the behavior of the collective excitations of adsorbed $^4$He in an ordered hexagonal mesopore, examining the crossover from a thin film to a confined fluid. Here we present the inelastic scattering results as a function of filling at constant temperature. We find a monotonic transition of the maxon excitation as a function of filling. This has been interpreted as corresponding to an increasing density of the adsorbed helium, which approaches the bulk value as filling increases. The roton minimum exhibits a more complicated behavior that does not monotonically approach bulk values as filling increases. The full pore scattering resembles the bulk liquid accompanied by a layer mode. The maxon and roton scattering, taken together, at intermediate fillings does not correspond to a single bulk liquid dispersion at negative, low, or high pressure.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

Addressing Students’ Mental Health Needs in Faculty-Led Study Abroad Courses

The increased enrollment of students with mental health needs in U.S. higher education, paired with increasing emphasis on study abroad participation has led campus mental health professionals to consider how their services might extend to serve students with mental health needs who are studying abroad. When it comes to faculty led courses, instructors can play a key role in providing on-the-ground support for students experiencing mental health challenges. The findings from this study provide key insights that college mental health professionals can use to better understand and support these instructors as they serve on the front lines of addressing students’ mental health needs while they are away from campus. In particular, our findings point to key ways that college mental health professionals can partner with education abroad offices to provide effective pre-departure training and in-country support for faculty instructors

A Theory of Participation: Joining the Cast of \u27Heavy Rain\u27

Video game scholars have gone through an arduous process of defining video games as their own art form that communicates to its audience in as different a way to other art forms as they to each other. This article compiles much of this research and engages in a ludonarrative analysis of Heavy Rain to show that video games offer a unique narrative structure where players step vicariously into the positions of video game characters and create their own story through that interactive relationship. Heavy Rain, specifically, uses an innovative system of controller mechanic interaction and visual cues to encourage this transformative performance and challenges players and game developers to further the interactive power of the game narrative

Students’ writing self-efficacy, motivation, and experience: Predictors in journalism education

The field of journalism has gone through several years of turmoil as new technology, platforms, and economic hardships have swept away traditional journalistic practices and models. Print media continues to hemorrhage jobs and money while media outlets adjust to technology-enhanced reporting. College journalism majors often face changing curriculum and graduate feeling unprepared to be competitive in the journalistic job market. While many things have changed in the field, one pillar of journalism that has not changed is the need for journalists to possess an excellent writing ability, supplemented with the ability to think analytically. The connection between students’ ability to write well and their self-efficacy belief towards their writing ability is well documented. This study examines factors that play into journalistic writing self-efficacy, such as background, strategies for classroom success, and experiences, as well as looks at the variables that determine a student’s ability to write well in a journalistic format. Findings show that classroom education is the most important variable in developing actual journalistic writing ability. Also, students who write well journalistically tend to have lower critical thinking skills, causing a conundrum for journalism industry leaders who desire both skills in reporters

Sulfate reducing communities in aquifer systems can be reliably stimulated by addition of complex nutrients

The disseration presented below is the summation of research into the potential roles of microbial communities associated with aquifers of Bangladesh contaminated with naturally occuring arsenic. These investigations also included experimental microcosm experiments to assess the role of nutrients supplementation of complex carbon sources (molasses), and inorganic sulfate (MgSO4), on both the solubility of arsenic to determine the feasibility of this method for the goal of performing in situ bioremediation. Community structure and functional gene profiling was performed on all samples, as well as detection of community shifts following amendments predicted to encourage the growth of sulfate reducting microorganisms (SRM). This included community profiling via 16S analysis, as well as presence and quantification of a number of genes involved in respiratory sulfate reduction and genes involved in arsenic cycling. Investigation of samples gathered from contaminated aquifers seems to indicate that even in a community with relatively simple distribution of organisms, there is no distinct linkage between examined functional genes and concentrations of any detected elements in the aquifers. Examination of the effects of nutrient supplementation on sediments gathered from one impacted aquifer shows that stimulation of the system with either nutrient tested is sufficient to stimulate growth of sulfate reducing microbes, as indicated by conserved genes in the respiratory sulfate reduction pathway. These shifts can be closely associated with an initial decrease in detectable soluble arsenic levels, as well as a commensurate decrease in soluble metals. However, only the addition of both a complex carbon source and magnesium sulfate in equal molar portions seemed to show prolonged removal of these elements from the soluble phase. Community shifts appear to have occurred by 14 days of incubation, and were coupled with expected changes in the color and consistency of sediment as black particulate can serve as an indicator of sulfidic minerals formed as a result of excess sulfides produced by SRM. Increased SRM numbers were maintained through 96 days of incubation. Due to the ability of any perturbation of a microcosm system to produce increased density of SRM in the samples, a bioinformatic investigation of the identified subsystems encoded by all sequenced and finished bacteria capable of carrying out the most conserved steps in sulfate reduction was performed. These analyses indicated that there are a number of SRM capable of directly reducing complex carbon sources, both in syntrophic communities, as well as without additional aid from the environment. These results indicate that sulfate reducing microbes are present, detectable and easily stimulated to grow in aquifer sediment, and that these communities of SRM are able to create conditions capable of removing arsenic from the soluble phase. The rate of growth and ability to maintain this immobilization supports the theory that SRM detected in the environment are capable of growth on complex nutrients, and require additional nutrients to successfully remediate arsenic for long periods of time

Durkheim\u27s Refutation of Spencerian Methodological Individualism: A Critical Evaluation.

The famed French classical social theorist Emile Durkheim\u27s academic reputation is based largely on his critical rejection of the British utilitarian tradition and specifically the writings of the classical British sociologist Herbert Spencer. In this thesis I critically evaluate Durkheim\u27s critique of Herbert Spencer\u27s methodological individualism. It is found that while select Durkheimian claims merit continued allegiance, his broader critique of Spencer\u27s methodological individualism must be viewed as logically and empirically deficient. In conclusion I examine the implications for Durkheimian sociology and the broader social theoretical enterprise directed at analyzing and conceptualizing the nature of sociality and the social bond

LambdaNet: A Novel Architecture for Unstructured Change Detection

The goal of this thesis is the development of LambdaNet, a new type of network architecture for the performance of unstructured change detection. LambdaNet combines concepts from Siamese and semantic segmentation architectures, and is capable of identifying and localizing the significant differences between image pairs while simultaneously disregarding background noise. Changes are marked at the pixel level, by interpreting change detection as a binary (change/no change) classification problem. Development of this architecture began with an evaluation of several candidate models, inspired by other successful network architectures and layers, including VGG, ResNet, and the Res2Net layer. Once the best performing LambdaNet architecture was determined, it was extended to incorporate a multi-class version of change detection. Referred to as directional change, this technique allows segmentation-based output of change information in four different classes: No change, additive change, subtractive change, and exchange. Lastly, change detection is not the only unstructured operation of interest. One of the most successful unstructured techniques is that of artistic style transfer. This method allows information from a style image to be merged into a supplied content image. In order to implement this technique, a new variant of LambdaNet was developed, called LambdaStyler. This network is capable of learning multiple artistic styles, which can then be selected for application to the desired content image