Undergraduate Student Works in Institutional Repositories: An Analysis of Coverage, Prominence and Discoverability

Institutional repositories (IRs) have evolved to showcase a wide-variety of authors and types of material. The early years of IR development focused on collecting and presenting faculty research, primarily in the form of research papers. Graduate theses and dissertations soon began to be incorporated into the scope of IR collection policies and have become as common in IRs as faculty research. Undergraduate research, however, appears to be much less common than faculty or graduate work. This paper examines the extent to which undergraduate student works (USW) are represented in the IRs of U.S. colleges and universities that use bepress’ Digital Commons product. Types and sizes of collections, span of coverage, prominence, and discoverability are considered. The authors hypothesize that USW are underrepresented in IRs and are not easily discoverable due to lack of available cataloging

Statistically challenged: The need for an electronic resources management standard

The authors review changes in the standards for measuring electronic resources through an examination of the 1990-2000 IPEDS Academic Library Survey forms. During that decade, academic libraries have moved from counting electronic resources by the number of bibliographic and physical units to measuring usage. Local attempts to capture electronic resource usage are described

ARLISS Competition Canister Vehicle

For our project, we designed a canister vehicle that fits the design specifications of the ARLISS competition. For the ARLISS competition, the vehicles are loaded into a rocket, launched approximately 10,000 feet into the air, released, and then must autonomously navigate to a predetermined target on the ground. Because of our time restraint, we are focused on designing a vehicle of the correct dimensions (a maximum mass of 1050g, a maximum diameter of 146mm, and a maximum height of 240mm) that can simply travel on the ground over multiple types of terrain. Additionally, we designed a parachute release mechanism so that the vehicle would be able to land safely on the ground after falling from thousands of feet in the air. We began by conducting research for product design by analyzing existing product concepts as well as conducting an interview with the customer, Dr. Potter. After analyzing the user needs, we generated four different potential concept designs and evaluated them based on our selected criterion. Upon choosing a concept, we applied various engineering relationships and arrived at the concept embodiment. We then developed three performance goals before working on our prototype. Our goals were: the vehicle can withstand a 1 meter drop on surface of the turf, the vehicle can travel one mile without needing to recharge the battery, and the vehicle can travel at 3 mph. Our final prototype met all three of these performance goals

Hadronic interactions, precocious unification, and cosmic ray showers at Auger energies

At Auger energies only model predictions enable us to extract primary cosmic ray features. The simulation of the shower evolution depends sensitively on the first few interactions, necessarily related to the quality of our understanding of high energy hadronic collisions. Distortions of the standard ``soft semi-hard'' scenario include novel large compact dimensions and a string or quantum gravity scale not far above the electroweak scale. Na\"{\i}vely, the additional degrees of freedom yield unification of all forces in the TeV range. In this article we study the influence of such precocious unification during atmospheric cascade developments by analyzing the most relevant observables in proton induced showers.Comment: 16 pages latex. 4 eps figure

Sunbeams from Space Mirrors Feeding Solar Farms on the Ground at Dusk and Dawn

For 40 years, the systems designers of space solar power have given their greatest attention to wireless power as microwave transmission from space to earth. The approach taken in this application is to place space satellites in lower sunsyncronous orbits for the purpose of gathering and focusing sun’s rays into a beam of reflected sunlight. The simple idea and application of this design is to extend the solar day of terrestrial solar farms, thereby increasing solar production capacity to 60 percent and reducing solar electricity costs to under 6 cents/kWh by delivering sunlight to a given location some 14 (rather than 6 or 7) hours per day. Advisors: Lewis Fraas, Prof. Don Flournoy, Kyle Perkins Reflected Sunlight from Space Journal on Vimeo

Immunohistochemical and Biochemical Characterization of Mucin in Pseudomyxoma Peritonei: A Case Study

We previously reported the presence of MUC2, MUC5AC and, for the first time, MUC5B in a 58-year-old male with pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP). This is a report on the biochemical and immunohistochemical characterization of mucin in a 50-year-old female with the same rare illness. A right oophorectomy and appendicectomy and a resection of the involved omentum were performed. Approximately a litre of crude material in the sol and gel phases was obtained from the patient during laparotomy. This was briefly homogenized in 6 M guanidinium hydrochloride and proteolytic inhibitors and purified by density gradient centrifugation in caesium chloride. At laparotomy it was noted that the patient had appendiceal and ovarian masses as well as extensive mucinous deposits in the omentum and peritoneum. A mucinous adenocarcinoma of the appendix and ovary was confirmed on histology. The cells expressed both sulphated and non-sulphated acidic mucins. The presence of MUC2, MUC5AC, MUC5B and a-1-acid glycoprotein was shown by Western blotting and MUC4 by immunohistochemical staining. MUC1 and MUC6 were not detectable in the tissue. The study confirms that MUC2, MUC5AC and MUC5B are produced in the mucus of patients with PMP. The expression of MUC4 in this disease has not been previously reported

Neutrino-Induced Giant Air Showers in Large Extra Dimension Models

In models based on large extra dimensions where massive spin 2 exchange can dominate at high energies, the neutrino-proton cross section can rise to typical hadronic values at energies above 10^20 eV. The neutrino then becomes a candidate for the primary that initiates the highest energy cosmic ray showers. We investigate characteristics of neutrino-induced showers compared to proton-induced showers. The comparison includes study of starting depth, profile with depth, lateral particle distribution at ground and muon lateral distribution at ground level. We find that for cross sections above 20 mb there are regions of parameter space where the two types of showers are essentially indistinguishable. We conclude that the neutrino candidate hypothesis cannot be ruled out on the basis of shower characteristics.Comment: 24 pages, latex, 19 figures; text discussion and references added, typos corrected; figures and conclusions unchange

p-Branes and the GZK Paradox

In spacetimes with asymmetric extra dimensions, cosmic neutrino interactions may be extraordinarily enhanced by p-brane production. Brane formation and decay may then initiate showers deep in the Earth's atmosphere at rates far above the standard model rate. We explore the p-brane discovery potential of cosmic ray experiments. The absence of deeply penetrating showers at AGASA already provides multi-TeV bounds on the fundamental Planck scale that significantly exceed those obtained from black hole production in symmetric compactification scenarios. This sensitivity will be further enhanced at the Auger Observatory. We also examine the possibility that p-brane formation resolves the GZK paradox. For flat compactifications, astrophysical bounds exclude this explanation. For warped scenarios, a solution could be consistent with the absence of deep showers only for extra dimensions with fine-tuned sizes well below the fundamental Planck length. In addition, it requires moderately penetrating showers, so far not reported, and ~100% modifications to standard model phenomenology at 100 GeV energies.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

From Uranium Enrichment To Renewable Energy

The goal of this Science/Engineering visualization is to show how gigawatt quantities of renewable energy can be generated at former nuclear processing sites as they are repurposed into industrial scale electrical power generation stations. The breakthrough product of this research is the design of an integrated terrestrial solar/space energy receiving station that will produce “baseload” electricity 24 hours a day. This research focuses attention on a Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility located on 3,700 acres of land in a rural area of SE Ohio. This site is judged to be suitable for research leading to the first-ever combination ground-based and space-based solar energy production facility. Were this research to be successful in designing, constructing and testing a space solar power receiving antenna (rectenna) mated to the operational structures of a terrestrial photovoltaic farm, this facility (and others like it) could be transformed from an environmental hazard to a societal benefit. In the case of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS), it is projected that the site has the capability to produce as much renewable energy as it once consumed in the form of coal-produced electricity, when two plants were installed on the Ohio River to sustain its operation. Faculty Mentors Don Flournoy and Kyle Perkin

The Precursors and Products of Justice Climates: Group Leader Antecedents and Employee Attitudinal Consequences

Drawing on the organizational justice, organizational climate, leadership and personality, and social comparison theory literatures, we develop hypotheses about the effects of leader personality on the development of three types of justice climates (e.g., procedural, interpersonal, and informational), and the moderating effects of these climates on individual level justice- attitude relationships. Largely consistent with the theoretically-derived hypotheses, the results showed that leader (a) agreeableness was positively related to procedural, interpersonal and informational justice climates, (b) conscientiousness was positively related to a procedural justice climate, and (c) neuroticism was negatively related to all three types of justice climates. Further, consistent with social comparison theory, multilevel data analyses revealed that the relationship between individual justice perceptions and job attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction, commitment) was moderated by justice climate such that the relationships were stronger when justice climate was high