The Pen Pal Project

In the early 1990’s, at a CUNY writing center conference, I heard about a pen pal project between writing center tutors at an Eastern Pennsylvanian University and children from an inner-city primary school. I was intrigued by the description and filed the idea as one that I would like to try if ever I could create the opportunity. By the fall of 2002, conditions and circumstances seemed right to experiment at last with organizing a service-learning project that would connect writing center tutors from my university with children from an inner-city elementary school in a neighborhood that adjoins my university’s.University Writing Cente

Efficient transient simulation of transmission lines

The paper focuses on revealing the salient structural aspects of a new transmission-line model with a view to exploiting them for gains in efficiency and accuracy. The new transmission-line model has as its basis the Telegraphers Equations but the manner of solution is what distinguishes the new approach from existing transmission-line simulation techniques. The technique is based on identifying natural modes of oscillation on the transmission line. The result is a model structure which can be tailored to the accuracy requirements of a simulation and which is amenable to tuning to fit measured admittance data

Relation between dust and radio luminosity in optically selected early type galaxies

We have surveyed an optical/IR selected sample of nearby E/S0 galaxies with and without nuclear dust structures with the VLA at 3.6 cm to a sensitivity of 100 $\mu$Jy. We can construct a Radio Luminosity Function (RLF) of these galaxies to ~10^19 W/Hz and find that ~50% of these galaxies have AGNs at this level. The space density of these AGNs equals that of starburst galaxies at this luminosity. Several dust-free galaxies have low luminosity radio cores, and their RLF is not significantly less than that of the dusty galaxies.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Asymptotic expansion of the difference of two Mahler measures

We show that for almost every polynomial P(x,y) with complex coefficients, the difference of the logarithmic Mahler measures of P(x,y) and P(x,x^n) can be expanded in a type of formal series similar to an asymptotic power series expansion in powers of 1/n. This generalizes a result of Boyd. We also show that such an expansion is unique and provide a formula for its coefficients. When P has algebraic coefficients, the coefficients in the expansion are linear combinations of polylogarithms of algebraic numbers, with algebraic coefficients.Comment: 25 pages. V2: Demoted previous Corollary 1 to a comment, after realizing that Boyd had already proved that bit. Made small corrections to Lemma 5, streamlined the proof of Lemma 9, and reworded section 9.

In Defense of His Holiness: The Cellini Plaque

The plaque depicting Cellini was donated to Gettysburg College by Reverend Jeremiah Zimmerman, Class of 1873, who later became a lecturer at Syracuse University and a frequent benefactor of Gettysburg College. A highly educated alum, Reverend Zimmerman became a clergyman and traveled the world for over a decade to further his studies, ranging from Asian culture to ancient coinage. The plaque itself measures 32” x 26.75” x 2.5”, is of considerable weight for a porcelain plate, and is painted in the 19th century academic style to offer a dramatic interpretation of Benvenuto Cellini’s actions during the 1527 Sack of Rome. Specifically, the scene captures a dramatized (or even perhaps imagined) moment of Cellini outside the Castel Sant’Angelo, the site of a fortress used by the Holy See to defend against outside invaders. [excerpt

SUB LEGE TO SUB GRATIA: An Iconographic Study of Van Eyck’s Annunciation

When the Archangel Gabriel descended from heaven to inform the Virgin Mary of her status as God’s chosen vehicle for the birth of Jesus Christ, she was immediately filled with a sense of apprehension. Gabriel’s words, “...invenisti enim gratiam apud Deum [you have found favor with God],” reassured the Virgin that she would face no harm, and the scene of the Annunciation (what this moment has come to be called) has forever been immortalized in Christian belief as a watershed moment in the New Testament. While many Byzantine icons of the Medieval period sought to depict this snapshot in time and commemorate its importance, the most notable artistic examples of The Annunciation began to appear in the 15th century as the stylistic and symbolic traditions of the Renaissance began to take shape. While the works of artists such as Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci have come to generally be known as the touchstones of this early Renaissance period, the talents and contributions of northern masters must not be overlooked

Pollution control legislation and the capital-appropriations- expenditure lag

Pollution ; Environmental policy

Earthtime

Quantification of geological time represents one of the fundamental challenges for earth scientists as it permits the determination of rates of change, integration of disparate geological datasets and assessment of coincidence (or lack thereof) so often central to hypothesis testing. Knowing the age of certain rocks, be it a thick accumulation of volcanic lava or an extinction layer, allows us to say something about causality. The extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period, ‘about’ 66 million years ago is the poster child for such cause-and-effect arguments. At ‘about’ the same time, a large asteroid struck what is now the Gulf of Mexico, however a series of voluminous volcanic eruptions in India are also ‘about’ the same age. Both are viable kill mechanisms, and both are closely correlated in time with the extinction, but knowing they are ‘about’ the same age is not good enough