Independent Spirit

Don Lewis has spent most of his 75 years trying to get away from it all. At least that\u27s what most of society would say. The problem is, not everybody has the same definition of the word all

Past Is Prologue

After years of struggle and disarray, Furman\u27s women\u27s golf program is returning to its roots -- and its identity -- as a powerhouse

One Rhim to Rule Them All

How far this sophomore cyclist could go is starting to become everybody\u27s guess

How do Humans Determine Reflectance Properties under Unknown Illumination?

Under normal viewing conditions, humans find it easy to distinguish between objects made out of different materials such as plastic, metal, or paper. Untextured materials such as these have different surface reflectance properties, including lightness and gloss. With single isolated images and unknown illumination conditions, the task of estimating surface reflectance is highly underconstrained, because many combinations of reflection and illumination are consistent with a given image. In order to work out how humans estimate surface reflectance properties, we asked subjects to match the appearance of isolated spheres taken out of their original contexts. We found that subjects were able to perform the task accurately and reliably without contextual information to specify the illumination. The spheres were rendered under a variety of artificial illuminations, such as a single point light source, and a number of photographically-captured real-world illuminations from both indoor and outdoor scenes. Subjects performed more accurately for stimuli viewed under real-world patterns of illumination than under artificial illuminations, suggesting that subjects use stored assumptions about the regularities of real-world illuminations to solve the ill-posed problem

Consistent Estimation of Gibbs Energy Using Component Contributions

Standard Gibbs energies of reactions are increasingly being used in metabolic modeling for applying thermodynamic constraints on reaction rates, metabolite concentrations and kinetic parameters. The increasing scope and diversity of metabolic models has led scientists to look for genome-scale solutions that can estimate the standard Gibbs energy of all the reactions in metabolism. Group contribution methods greatly increase coverage, albeit at the price of decreased precision. We present here a way to combine the estimations of group contribution with the more accurate reactant contributions by decomposing each reaction into two parts and applying one of the methods on each of them. This method gives priority to the reactant contributions over group contributions while guaranteeing that all estimations will be consistent, i.e. will not violate the first law of thermodynamics. We show that there is a significant increase in the accuracy of our estimations compared to standard group contribution. Specifically, our cross-validation results show an 80% reduction in the median absolute residual for reactions that can be derived by reactant contributions only. We provide the full framework and source code for deriving estimates of standard reaction Gibbs energy, as well as confidence intervals, and believe this will facilitate the wide use of thermodynamic data for a better understanding of metabolism

Economic Feasibility of Impermeable Lagoon Covers

This draft is dated April 2002.This paper addresses the economic feasibility of complying with the proposed rule of “a zero discharge requirement from the production area that does not allow for an overflow under any circumstances,” presented as “Option 5” on page 3060 of the Federal Register (Vol. 66, No. 9, Friday, January 12, 2001). In the proposed rule, the EPA suggested the strategies of improved water management, covered storage or additional storage to meet the no discharge criteria. While improved water management and additional storage may aid in manure management, covered storage was viewed as the only way to guarantee compliance with the “no overflow under any circumstances” wording of the rule. EPA staff have repeatedly indicated that all swine manure storage structures would need to be covered in some way to meet the rule's requirements

Lattice study of ChPT beyond QCD

We describe initial results by the Lattice Strong Dynamics (LSD) collaboration of a study into the variation of chiral properties of chiral properties of SU(3) Yang-Mills gauge theory as the number of massless flavors changes from $N_f = 2$ to $N_f = 6$, with a focus on the use of chiral perturbation theory.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. Presented at the 6th International Workshop on Chiral Dynamics, University of Bern, Switzerland, July 6-10 200

Toward TeV Conformality

We study the chiral condensate $$ for an SU(3) gauge theory with $N_f$ massless Dirac fermions in the fundamental representation when $N_f$ is increased from 2 to 6. For $N_f=2$, our lattice simulations of $<\bar{\psi} \psi >/F^3$, where $F$ is the Nambu-Goldstone-boson decay constant, agree with the measured QCD value. For $N_f = 6$, this ratio shows significant enhancement, presaging an even larger enhancement anticipated as $N_f$ increases further, toward the critical value for transition from confinement to infrared conformality.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. v2: revised version for PR

WW Scattering Parameters via Pseudoscalar Phase Shifts

Using domain-wall lattice simulations, we study pseudoscalar-pseudoscalar scattering in the maximal isospin channel for an SU(3) gauge theory with two and six fermion flavors in the fundamental representation. This calculation of the S-wave scattering length is related to the next-to-leading order corrections to WW scattering through the low-energy coefficients of the chiral Lagrangian. While two and six flavor scattering lengths are similar for a fixed ratio of the pseudoscalar mass to its decay constant, six-flavor scattering shows a somewhat less repulsive next-to-leading order interaction than its two-flavor counterpart. Estimates are made for the WW scattering parameters and the plausibility of detection is discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Asymmetrically cut crystals as optical elements for highly collimated x‐ray beams

Asymmetrically cut perfect crystals, in both the Laue and Bragg geometries, are examined as single crystal monochromators for x‐ray beams that are collimated to a small fraction of the Darwin width, as is typical in experiments with coherent x rays. Both the Laue and asymmetric Bragg geometries are plagued by an inherent chromatic aberration that increases the beam divergence much beyond that of the symmetric Bragg geometry. Measurements from a recent experiment at the ESRF are presented to compare Si(220) (symmetric Bragg), diamond(111) (asymmetric Laue), and diamond(111) (symmetric Bragg inclined) geometries. © 1995 American Institute of Physics.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/70952/2/RSINAK-66-2-1506-1.pd