Interview of Dominic Galante

Mr. Dominic Galante was born in 1944 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The youngest of three children and a first-generation Italian-American, the majority of his life, both professional and private, was spent in Philadelphia. As a child Mr. Galante was raised in a devout Catholic home and attended Catholic grade school in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia. Upon graduating from Northeast Catholic High School in 1962 he planned on joining the workforce, as attending college was not financially possible. In the fall of 1962, with the help of his high school typing teacher, he was interviewed and hired at LaSalle College as an Administrative Assistant to the Office of the College Registrar. Mr. Galante spent the next seven years attending the evening school at La Salle College. He received a B.A. in Management in 1969 at which time he was promoted to Assistant Registrar. In 1983 he was again promoted, this time to head the Office of the University Registrar. November 5, 2012, marked his 50th year of employment at La Salle University but his decision to interview at La Salle in 1962 also impacted his private life. In the summer of 1963 he met Ms. Mary Walter while she was working in the Admissions Office and on June 25, 1966, they were married. The Galantes raised their three children, Michael, Patricia, and Christine, in the Juniata Park neighborhood of Philadelphia; all three attended and graduated from LaSalle University. In 1990 he and his wife moved to Abington, Pennsylvania. The oral history that follows addresses the many changes to La Salle University, particularly the Office of the Registrar, over the past 50 years. Other topics addressed include what it was like growing up as part of the baby boom generation in Philadelphia, the influence of the Christian Brotherhood on Mr. Galante’s experience at La Salle, and how his decision to work at La Salle ended up shaping the majority of his adult life. Mr. Galante’s story will become an invaluable piece to the social history of Philadelphia and history of La Salle University

Effects of Gamma Ray Bursts in Earth Biosphere

We continue former work on the modeling of potential effects of Gamma Ray Bursts on Phanerozoic Earth. We focus on global biospheric effects of ozone depletion and show a first modeling of the spectral reduction of light by NO2 formed in the stratosphere. We also illustrate the current complexities involved in the prediction of how terrestrial ecosystems would respond to this kind of burst. We conclude that more biological field and laboratory data are needed to reach even moderate accuracy in this modelingComment: Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Scienc

Study of the performance and capability of the new ultra-fast 2 GSample/s FADC data acquisition system of the MAGIC telescope

In February 2007 the MAGIC Air Cherenkov Telescope for gamma-ray astronomy was fully upgraded with an ultra fast 2 GSamples/s digitization system. Since the Cherenkov light flashes are very short, a fast readout can minimize the influence of the background from the light of the night sky. Also, the time structure of the event is an additional parameter to reduce the background from unwanted hadronic showers. An overview of the performance of the new system and its impact on the sensitivity of the MAGIC instrument will be presented.Comment: Contribution to the 30th ICRC, Merida Mexico, July 2007 on behalf of the MAGIC Collaboratio

A Multi-Objective Approach to Optimize a Periodic Maintenance Policy

The present paper proposes a multi-objective approach to find out an optimal periodic maintenance policy for a repairable and stochastically deteriorating multi-component system over a finite time horizon. The tackled problem concerns the determination of the system elements to replace at each scheduled and periodical system inspection by ensuring the simultaneous minimization of both the expected total maintenance cost and the expected global system unavailability time. It is assumed that in the case of system elements failure they are instantaneously detected and repaired by means of minimal repair actions in order to rapidly restore the system. A non-linear integer mathematical programming model is developed to solve the treated multi-objective problem whereas the Pareto optimal frontier is described by the Lexicographic Goal Programming and the \u3b5-constraint methods. To explain the whole procedure a case study is solved and the related considerations are given

Co2 capture and electrochemical conversion using superbasic [p-66614]-[124triz]

The ionic liquid trihexyltetradecylphosphonium 1,2,4- triazolide, [P66614][124Triz], has been shown to chemisorb CO2 through equimolar binding of the carbon dioxide with the 1,2,4-triazolide anion. This leads to a possible new, low energy pathway for the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to formate and syngas at low overpotentials, utilizing this reactive ionic liquid media. Herein, an electrochemical investigation of water and carbon dioxide addition to the [P66614][124Triz] on gold and platinum working electrodes is reported. Electrolysis measurements have been performed using CO2 saturated [P66614][124Triz] based solutions at -0.9 V and -1.9 V on gold and platinum electrodes. The effects of the electrode material on the formation of formate and syngas using these solutions are presented and discussed18338940

Actigraphic sleep detection: an artificial intelligence approach

Objective: Polysomnography is the gold standard for sleep monitoring, despite its many drawbacks: it is complex, costly and rather invasive. Medical-grade actigraphy represents an acceptably accurate alternative for the estimation of sleep patterns in normal, healthy adult populations and in patients suspected of certain sleep disorders. An increasing number of consumer-grade accelerometric devices populate the “quantified-self” market but the lack of validation significantly limits their reliability. Our aim was to prototype and validate a platform-free artificial neural network (ANN) based algorithm applied to a high performance, open source device (Axivity AX3), to achieve accurate actigraphic sleep detection. Methods: 14 healthy subjects (29.35 14.40 yrs, 7 females) were equipped for 13.3 2.58 h with portable polysomnography (pPSG), while wearing the Axivity AX3. The AX3 was set to record 3D accelerations at 100 Hz, with a dynamic range of 8 g coded at 10 bit. For the automatic actigraphy-based sleep detection, a 4 layer artificial neural network has been trained, validated and tested against the pPSG-based expert visual sleep-wake scoring. Results: When compared to the pPSG gold standard scoring, the ANN-based algorithm reached high concordance (85.3 0.06%), specificity (87.3 0.04%) and sensitivity (84.6 0.1%) in the detection of sleep over 30-sec epochs. Moreover there were no statistical differences between pPSG and actigraphy-based Total Sleep Time and Sleep Efficiency measurements (Wilcoxon test). Conclusions: The high concordance rate between ANN-actigraphy scoring and the standard visual pPSG one suggests that this approach could represent a viable method for collecting objective sleep-wake data using a high performance, open source actigraph

Vortex liquid entanglement in twinned YBa_2Cu_3O_7 /Y_2BaCuO_5 composite superconductors

The angular dependence of the in-plane resistivity ρ(T,H, θ) of melt textured YBa_2Cu_3O_7/Y_2BaCuO_5 composites has been measured in a large range of magnetic fields and temperatures and from them, the intrinsic anisotropy of the superconducting state has been verified following the anisotropic Ginzburg-Landau approach. The influence of correlated defects like twin boundaries and quenched disorder generated by Y_2BaCuO_5 precipitates on the pinning behavior of these composites in the liquid vortex state is analyzed, and the corresponding phase diagram is determined and compared to that of twinned single crystals. We show that the irreversibility line displays an upwards shift due to twin boundary pinning enabling to define a ''quenched'' Bose glass transition. A new region in the vortex liquid state is identified where twin boundary pinning defines a partially entangled liquid vortex state characterized by a short-range c-axis vortex coherence. The transition to the entangled liquid phase is experimentally determined. The relevance of this depinning line and its unique position with respect to twinned single crystals is discussed. [S0163- 1829(99)01741-5]

Finite Density Fat QCD

Lattice formulation of Finite Baryon Density QCD is problematic from computer simulation point of view; it is well known that for light quark masses the reconstructed partition function fails to be positive in a wide region of parameter space. For large bare quark masses, instead, it is possible to obtain more sensible results; problems are still present but restricted to a small region. We present evidence for a saturation transition independent from the gauge coupling $\beta$ and for a transition line that, starting from the temperature critical point at $\mu=0$, moves towards smaller $\beta$ with increasing $\mu$ as expected from simplified phenomenological arguments.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure