Investigation of Latex Resins for Use in Aerosol Coatings

Latex coatings have made large bounds in their development and have become a staple in architectural and decorative paints. Recent years have seen large growth in industrial and automotive coatings as well. However, one area that has not seen the same growth is aerosol coatings. While there are many consumer products that use latex resins, many latex resins do not product an acceptable coating from an aerosol. This study investigated many latex resins for their performance as an aerosol coating. The properties of the latex resins were examined for those that became a successful coating and those that did not. Latex properties such as resin type, pH, percent solids, and glass transition temperature were compared. Additionally, the influence of the total coating formulation was also explored. It was found that a far greater amount of resins created from condensation polymers made successful coatings as compared to resins created from addition polymers. Other properties of the latex resins had less correlation to success or failure. Overall, the data suggested that the primary influence of a latex resin’s chances of success as an aerosol coating lies within the makeup of the resin polymer itself

New methodology to design ground coupled heat pump systems based on total cost minimization

This paper introduces a method for designing vertical ground heat exchangers and heat pump systems, by minimizing the total cost of the project. The total cost includes an initial cost composed of drilling, excavation, heat pump and piping network. An operational cost is also included to account for the energy consumed for heating/cooling a building. The procedure allows determining the optimal number of boreholes, their depth and spacing, and the optimal size of the heat pump. The method is tested for different ground conductivity and heat demands. The method can also be used to determine the economical viability of a TRT. For tested cases, results show that the excess cost due to uncertainty on ground thermal conductivity increases with the number of boreholes. Also, a cost sensibility analysis shows that the most influential parameters are the number of boreholes and their depth

The SOL Genomics Network Model: Making Community Annotation Work

The concept of community annotation is a growing discipline for achieving participation of the research community in depositing up‐to‐date knowledge in biological databases.
The Solanaceae Genomics Network ("SGN":http://sgn.cornell.edu/) is a clade‐oriented database (COD) focusing on plants of the nightshade family, including tomato, potato, pepper, eggplant, and tobacco, and is one of the bioinformatics nodes of the international tomato genome sequencing project. One of our major efforts is linking Solanaceae phenotype information with the underlying genes, and subsequently the genome. As part of this goal, SGN has introduced a database for locus names and descriptors, and a database for phenotypes of natural and induced variation. These two databases have web interfaces that allow cross references, associations with tomato gene models, and in‐house curated information of sequences, literature, ontologies, gene networks, and the Solanaceae biochemical pathways database ("SolCyc":http://solcyc.sgn.cornell.edu). All of our curator tools are open for online community annotation, through specially assigned “submitter” accounts. 

Currently the community database consists of 5,548 phenotyped accessions, and 5,739 curated loci, out of which more than 300 loci where contributed or annotated by 66 active submitters, creating a database that is truly community driven.
This framework is easily adaptable for other projects working on other taxa (for example see "http://chlamybase.org":http://chlamybase.org), greatly expanding the application of this user‐friendly online annotation system. Community participation is fostered by an active outreach program that includes contacting potential submitters via emails, at meetings and conferences, and by promoting featured user submitted annotations on the SGN homepage. The source code and database schema for all SGN functionalities are freely available. Please contact SGN at "sgn‐feedback[at]sgn.cornell.edu":mailto:[email protected] for more information

Is the research agenda for calendar anomalies “much do about nothing”?

Calendar anomalies are a class of financial market phenomena which links periodic, time-specific dummy variables and variations in the market price of an asset. Prior studies which report a calendar anomaly are seen by some as refutations of the efficient market hypothesis. In this paper, we estimate, test for the presence of, and find no evidence of, the day-the-week effects in the S&P 500, 2013-2023. That is, in this paper, we show that the daily-dummy variables (both individually and collectively) are independent of the S&P 500. This finding supports those who have argued that the day�the-week effects, and (by extension) all calendar anomalies, are “chimera delivered by intensive data mining” or, quite simply, such anomalies are “much ado about nothing.