Experimental investigations in epitaxial growth of crystalline layers final report

Epitaxial growth of crystalline layer

Letter, H. J. Farnsworth to OEB, June 7, 1867

This handwritten letter, dated June 7, 1876, is from H. J. Farnsworth in Atlanta, Georgia to Orville E. Babcock in Washington, D. C. The letter informs Babcock that that the item he requested is enclosed ensuring the order of Colonel J. T. Sprague for the removal of headquarters in Florida.https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/orville-elias-babcock-documents/1002/thumbnail.jp

Special Orders-No. 25, Issued by J. T. Sprague, Signed by H. J. Farnsworth (ADS), March 16, 1867

These handwritten orders establish the removal of records for three offices to St. Augustine, Florida, the reduction of the post at Tallahatchie, Florida, the establishment of supply storage and removal of the 7th Infantry Camp from the facility known as the Commissary Store House, the removal of the Tallahassee hospital the new facility, and other property reassignments throughout Florida. The orders are signed by H. J. Farnsworth on behalf of the Headquarters, District of Florida on March 16, 1867.https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/orville-elias-babcock-documents/1023/thumbnail.jp

Portfolio Performance and Agency

The evaluation and compensation of portfolio managers is an important problem for practitioners. Optimal compensation will induce managers to expend effort to generate information and to use it appropriately in an informed portfolio choice. Our general model points the way towards analysis of optimal performance evaluation and contracting in a rich model. Optimal contracting in the model includes an important role for portfolio restrictions that are more complex than the sharing rule. The agent's compensation gives the agent approximately to benchmark return plus an incentive fee equal to a portfolio measure that is approximately the excess of return above the benchmark. This measure is often used by practitioners but is simpler than the Jensen measure and other measures commonly recommended in the academic literature. In addition to the excess return above the fixed benchmark, the manager is given some additional incentive to take a position that deviates from the benchmark to remove an incentive to tend towards being a "closet indexer." Efficient contracting involves restrictions on what portfolio strategies can be pursued, and prior communication of the information gathered

Atmospheric and oceanic impacts of Antarctic glaciation across the Eocene-Oligocene transition

The glaciation of Antarctica at the Eocene–Oligocene transition (approx. 34 million years ago) was a major shift in the Earth’s climate system, but the mechanisms that caused the glaciation, and its effects, remain highly debated. A number of recent studies have used coupled atmosphere–ocean climate models to assess the climatic effects of Antarctic glacial inception, with often contrasting results. Here, using the HadCM3L model, we show that the global atmosphere and ocean response to growth of the Antarctic ice sheet is sensitive to subtle variations in palaeogeography, using two reconstructions representing Eocene and Oligocene geological stages. The earlier stage (Eocene; Priabonian), which has a relatively constricted Tasman Seaway, shows a major increase in sea surface temperature over the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean in response to the ice sheet. This response does not occur for the later stage (Oligocene; Rupelian), which has a more open Tasman Seaway. This difference in temperature response is attributed to reorganization of ocean currents between the stages. Following ice sheet expansion in the earlier stage, the large Ross Sea gyre circulation decreases in size. Stronger zonal flow through the Tasman Seaway allows salinities to increase in the Ross Sea, deep-water formation initiates and multiple feedbacks then occur amplifying the temperature response. This is potentially a model-dependent result, but it highlights the sensitive nature of model simulations to subtle variations in palaeogeography, and highlights the need for coupled ice sheet–climate simulations to properly represent and investigate feedback processes acting on these time scales

Maintenance Task Classification: Towards Automated Robotic Maintenance for Industry

AbstractThe business model of high-value capital assets is shifting from purchasing a physical product to acquiring a result or a function supported by the product combined with a number of related services. One such service, maintenance, is perhaps the most efficient way to keep the function available during the product lifecycle. Automation has played a vital role in industry throughout history, particularly within the production line. With the movement towards providing product service systems the need for services such as maintenance are increasingly important for a manufactured product, and the pull towards automation may drive down costs and improve performance time. Although currently robotic applications to maintenance beyond monitoring and inspection tasks are not common, this research aims at exploring the feasibility of future maintenance robots that can perform a variety of maintenance tasks. As its first step, this work looks first at investigation, cataloging and classification of a number of maintenance tasks using standard industrial engineering techniques such as time motion, method or workflow analysis. This involves decomposing the maintenance work into a number of ‘unit tasks’ required to be performed in order to accomplish the specified maintenance

The Final SDSS High-Redshift Quasar Sample of 52 Quasars at z>5.7

We present the discovery of nine quasars at $z\sim6$ identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging data. This completes our survey of $z\sim6$ quasars in the SDSS footprint. Our final sample consists of 52 quasars at $5.7<z\le6.4$, including 29 quasars with $z_{\rm AB}\le20$ mag selected from 11,240 deg$^2$ of the SDSS single-epoch imaging survey (the main survey), 10 quasars with $20\le z_{\rm AB}\le20.5$ selected from 4223 deg$^2$ of the SDSS overlap regions (regions with two or more imaging scans), and 13 quasars down to $z_{\rm AB}\approx22$ mag from the 277 deg$^2$ in Stripe 82. They span a wide luminosity range of $-29.0\le M_{1450}\le-24.5$. This well-defined sample is used to derive the quasar luminosity function (QLF) at $z\sim6$. After combining our SDSS sample with two faint ($M_{1450}\ge-23$ mag) quasars from the literature, we obtain the parameters for a double power-law fit to the QLF. The bright-end slope $\beta$ of the QLF is well constrained to be $\beta=-2.8\pm0.2$. Due to the small number of low-luminosity quasars, the faint-end slope $\alpha$ and the characteristic magnitude $M_{1450}^{\ast}$ are less well constrained, with $\alpha=-1.90_{-0.44}^{+0.58}$ and $M^{\ast}=-25.2_{-3.8}^{+1.2}$ mag. The spatial density of luminous quasars, parametrized as $\rho(M_{1450}<-26,z)=\rho(z=6)\,10^{k(z-6)}$, drops rapidly from $z\sim5$ to 6, with $k=-0.72\pm0.11$. Based on our fitted QLF and assuming an IGM clumping factor of $C=3$, we find that the observed quasar population cannot provide enough photons to ionize the $z\sim6$ IGM at $\sim90$\% confidence. Quasars may still provide a significant fraction of the required photons, although much larger samples of faint quasars are needed for more stringent constraints on the quasar contribution to reionization.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa