The Concept Album Continuum

It is clear through the exploration of various one-dimensional definitions that a consensus has not yet been reached that encompasses the exhaustive and eclectic nature of the concept album, nor does it appear that one will develop in the near future. Therefore, I am offering an alternative approach to classify the concept album in a multi-dimensional manner that may solve issues of exclusion. Rather than attempting to provide a lengthy and fallible interpretation of the musical form, I propose that all concept albums be considered as part of a ‘concept album continuum’ that ranges from loose to strict

Effects of Coagulation and Fenton\u27s Oxidation on the Removal of UV-Quenching Substances in Landfill Leachate

Landfills are the primary method to dispose of municipal solid waste, and the water leaching from landfills contains products of physiochemical and biochemical reactions, presenting an important environmental challenge. In many cases, leachate is diverted to publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) for treatment. However, even if leachate contributes less than 1% of the total wastewater flow, recalcitrant dissolved organic matter (DOM) containing ultraviolet-quenching substances (UVQs) remains in the leachate after biological treatment, contributing to a low UV transmittance, thus also decreasing the effectiveness of UV disinfection. To analyze the removal of UVQS of landfill leachate before sent to POTWs, this study researches and compares coagulation/flocculation and Fenton’s oxidation, an advanced oxidation process, to remove UVQS in landfill leachate by analyzing the differences in soluble chemical oxygen demand (sCOD), dissolved organic carbon (DOC), UV absorbance at 254 nm (UVA254), specific UV absorbance at 254 nm (SUVA254) and tryptophan, fulvic acid, tyrosine, and marine humic acid-like fluorescent intensities with an excitation emission matrix (EEM) and functional groups with Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) to better understand the removal mechanisms. This study also evaluates a Fenton’s dimensionless oxidant dose (DOD) of 0.7 for three different leachates to analyze trends in treatment levels. DOD is a normalization of the reactive oxygen present to the initial sCOD. During coagulation studies, three initial pH values (5.5, 6.5, and 8.2) and FeCl3 dosages (1 g/L, 5 g/L, 10 g/L) were studied. Initial pH of 6.5 and 10 g/L FeCl3 dosage reached the maximum DOC removal, and UVA254 and SUVA254 reduction, reaching 65.1%, 2.6 cm-1 (from 22.4 cm-1), and 0.62 L/mg-M (from 1.86 L/mg-M), respectively. This treatment also had large DOM removals with an affinity toward fulvic acids, however it was not effective in removing carboxylic acid functional groups. For Fenton’s oxidation, first, two leachate samples taken from a landfill in Greenville County, SC, at different times, treated with a 24-hour reaction time at a DOD from 0.07-0.72 with a molar ratio of 5:2 for H2O2:FeCl2 at pH 4, were studied. The 0.72 DOD dose led to the highest decrease in UVA254 to 4.2 cm-1 and SUVA254 to 0.63 L/mg-M, with a DOC removal of 48.8%. All treatments targeted fulvic acids above other DOM. The higher the DOD, the more DOM removed, and the better able Fenton’s oxidation was at breaking down the C=C in aromatics and COO- in carboxylic acids. From analyzing the precipitate formed during Fenton’s treatment, it was also found that at lower DOD doses the treatment is partially due to coagulation only, whereas at higher concentrations the treatment oxidation accounted for all DOC removal. When comparing these results to a leachate taken from a landfill in Orange County, FL treated with a 0.7 DOD, the removal trends of DOC, UVA254, and SUVA254 were not consistent, suggesting normalizing treatment requirements for UVQS removal may be better with SUVA254 instead of sCOD This research successfully shows that coagulation/flocculation and Fenton’s oxidation can remove UVQS, but due to the complex nature of the UVQS, neither treatment removes all constituents. The results indicate coagulation/flocculation will result in better treatment, but it is likely Fenton’s oxidation will result in a larger number of biodegradable organics that can be removed during biological treatment at a POTW

Paraprofessional Perceptions of Training and Professional Development

Paraprofessionals, also called teacher’s aides, in Lincoln and Putnam counties in West Virginia were surveyed to gain their perceptions of the effectiveness of the state’s training requirements and professional development. Questions on how well the current requirements prepares paraprofessionals for their jobs and what should be added yielded moderately positive opinions with suggestions for classes on individual disabilities and a practicum being added. Questions on professional development showed moderately positive opinions on the effectiveness of current professional development. The majority of participants felt that additional training would improve their job performance. Training in specific disabilities and interventions was viewed as more helpful than clerical and other general knowledge topics, although more than fifty percent indicated training in these topics would be helpful too

Bounds on changes in Ritz values for a perturbed invariant subspace of a Hermitian matrix

The Rayleigh-Ritz method is widely used for eigenvalue approximation. Given a matrix $X$ with columns that form an orthonormal basis for a subspace \X, and a Hermitian matrix $A$, the eigenvalues of $X^HAX$ are called Ritz values of $A$ with respect to \X. If the subspace \X is $A$-invariant then the Ritz values are some of the eigenvalues of $A$. If the $A$-invariant subspace \X is perturbed to give rise to another subspace \Y, then the vector of absolute values of changes in Ritz values of $A$ represents the absolute eigenvalue approximation error using \Y. We bound the error in terms of principal angles between \X and \Y. We capitalize on ideas from a recent paper [DOI: 10.1137/060649070] by A. Knyazev and M. Argentati, where the vector of absolute values of differences between Ritz values for subspaces \X and \Y was weakly (sub-)majorized by a constant times the sine of the vector of principal angles between \X and \Y, the constant being the spread of the spectrum of $A$. In that result no assumption was made on either subspace being $A$-invariant. It was conjectured there that if one of the trial subspaces is $A$-invariant then an analogous weak majorization bound should only involve terms of the order of sine squared. Here we confirm this conjecture. Specifically we prove that the absolute eigenvalue error is weakly majorized by a constant times the sine squared of the vector of principal angles between the subspaces \X and \Y, where the constant is proportional to the spread of the spectrum of $A$. For many practical cases we show that the proportionality factor is simply one, and that this bound is sharp. For the general case we can only prove the result with a slightly larger constant, which we believe is artificial.Comment: 12 pages. Accepted to SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (SIMAX

Compressed Sensing with Coherent and Redundant Dictionaries

This article presents novel results concerning the recovery of signals from undersampled data in the common situation where such signals are not sparse in an orthonormal basis or incoherent dictionary, but in a truly redundant dictionary. This work thus bridges a gap in the literature and shows not only that compressed sensing is viable in this context, but also that accurate recovery is possible via an L1-analysis optimization problem. We introduce a condition on the measurement/sensing matrix, which is a natural generalization of the now well-known restricted isometry property, and which guarantees accurate recovery of signals that are nearly sparse in (possibly) highly overcomplete and coherent dictionaries. This condition imposes no incoherence restriction on the dictionary and our results may be the first of this kind. We discuss practical examples and the implications of our results on those applications, and complement our study by demonstrating the potential of L1-analysis for such problems