Spirituality, Religion, and Pursuing Purpose: Connecting African American Males’ Educational Pursuits to a Higher Power

As Black men continually face challenges while seeking to graduate from college, researchers and educational leaders have continuously sought ways to understand and remedy the issues. Spirituality and religion have been found to have positive influences on Black students’ success in college. This study was designed to explore the role of spirituality and religion in the lives of Black men at a large research-oriented institution in Texas. The article examines how spirituality and religion among Black undergraduate men influenced their ability to persist. Interviews were conducted with 10 Black undergraduate men who identified as being spiritual and/or religious. The findings suggest that seeking and understanding purpose from a higher being positively influences persistence for Black undergraduate men

Direct investment: a doubtful alternative to international debt

The paper considers a model in which private foreign investors make direct long-lived capital investments in a small developing country that is subject to stochastic shocks to production. Depending upon the preferences of the host country, we find that expropriation can occur because of either desperation or opportunism. We show that under reasonable assumptions, increased investment makes expropriation less likely to occur and that the level of investment chosen by atomistic foreign investors may be nonoptimal.International finance ; Developing countries

Space augmentation of military high-level waste disposal

Space disposal of selected components of military high-level waste (HLW) is considered. This disposal option offers the promise of eliminating the long-lived radionuclides in military HLW from the earth. A space mission which meets the dual requirements of long-term orbital stability and a maximum of one space shuttle launch per week over a period of 20-40 years, is a heliocentric orbit about halfway between the orbits of earth and Venus. Space disposal of high-level radioactive waste is characterized by long-term predictability and short-term uncertainties which must be reduced to acceptably low levels. For example, failure of either the Orbit Transfer Vehicle after leaving low earth orbit, or the storable propellant stage failure at perihelion would leave the nuclear waste package in an unplanned and potentially unstable orbit. Since potential earth reencounter and subsequent burn-up in the earth's atmosphere is unacceptable, a deep space rendezvous, docking, and retrieval capability must be developed

Examining the Contributions of Glacial Till Water to Storm Runoff using Two- and Three-Component Hydrograph Separations

Two- and three-component hydrograph separations based on 18O and dissolved silica are used to investigate the contributions of glacial till water to the storm runoff of a headwater stream on the Canadian Shield. Two-component isotopic hydrograph separations based on 18O indicate that the volume and flux of event water could be accounted for by direct precipitation onto saturated areas. Three-component hydrograph separations distinguish between event water, preevent soil water, and preevent till water. These results show that groundwater flow through coarse-textured glacial tills can make a significant contribution to stream discharge during runoff events (29 and 62% in this study) despite the lower hydraulic conductivities of the tills compared to the overlying soils. The three-component hydrograph separations also demonstrate that the relative contributions of preevent soil water and preevent till water changed during one runoff event such that the average water chemistry of the preevent component varied during the event. Two-component hydrograph separations using dissolved silica indicate that seasonal changes in the till water contributions also occur and are related to groundwater levels. Measurements of vertical hydraulic gradients during runoff events indicate that the increase in flow from the tills to the soils is minimal and cannot account for the large and rapid increase in till water flow into the stream. Till water that has discharged to the soils prior to the event is probably being flushed from the soils into the stream during events

Analysis of air quality management with emphasis on transportation sources

The current environment and practices of air quality management were examined for three regions: Denver, Phoenix, and the South Coast Air Basin of California. These regions were chosen because the majority of their air pollution emissions are related to mobile sources. The impact of auto exhaust on the air quality management process is characterized and assessed. An examination of the uncertainties in air pollutant measurements, emission inventories, meteorological parameters, atmospheric chemistry, and air quality simulation models is performed. The implications of these uncertainties to current air quality management practices is discussed. A set of corrective actions are recommended to reduce these uncertainties

Small-scale star formation at low metallicity

Massive star formation in a low metallicity environment is investigated by studying the morphology of small HII regions in the Small Magellanic Cloud. A classification scheme based upon the symmetry of form in the light of H-alpha is proposed to make possible an examination of the properties of blister candidates with respect to nebulas embedded in a more uniform medium. A new diagnostic of size is developed to derive quantitative information about the ionized gas and ionizing stars. The asymmetrical surface-brightness distribution of many HII regions demonstrates that massive stars often form at the edge of dense neutral clouds. However, the existence of many symmetrical nebulas with similar sizes, luminosities, and surface brightnesses shows that massive star formation often occurs within these clouds. Nevertheless, the statistics of the two different forms indicate that the rate of massive star formation declines less steeply with radius across host clouds than in the Milky Way, suggesting that external triggering may play a larger role in initiating star formation

Experimental Generation and Observation of Intrinsic Localized Spin Wave Modes in an Antiferromagnet

By driving with a microwave pulse the lowest frequency antiferromagnetic resonance of the quasi 1-D biaxial antiferromagnet (C_2 H_5 NH_3)_2 CuCl_4 into an unstable region intrinsic localized spin waves have been generated and detected in the spin wave gap. These findings are consistent with the prediction that nonlinearity plus lattice discreteness can lead to localized excitations with dimensions comparable to the lattice constant.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Impulse-induced localized nonlinear modes in an electrical lattice

Intrinsic localized modes, also called discrete breathers, can exist under certain conditions in one-dimensional nonlinear electrical lattices driven by external harmonic excitations. In this work, we have studied experimentally the efectiveness of generic periodic excitations of variable waveform at generating discrete breathers in such lattices. We have found that this generation phenomenon is optimally controlled by the impulse transmitted by the external excitation (time integral over two consecutive zerosComment: 5 pages, 8 figure