Physical Modeling of the Atmospheric Boundary Layer in the University of New Hampshire’s Flow Physics Facility

The atmospheric boundary layer is the lowest part of the atmosphere, and is defined by a region from the surface of the earth to approximately 500-1000m altitude in which air velocity changes from zero at the surface to the velocity of the wind at a certain altitude. The type of atmospheric boundary layer is characterized by the terrain it encounters, varying from open sea and mud flats to suburban areas and city centers with high- and low-rise buildings. The goal of this project is to generate different types of atmospheric boundary layers for scale model testing in the UNH Flow Physics Facility (FPF).The project began with the analysis of smooth wall (baseline) data previously recorded in the FPF. Several arrays of roughness elements were designed to simulate varying roughness lengths experienced by atmospheric boundary layers and tested in the FPF. The resulting velocity profiles in the boundary layer were measured using hot wire anemometry and pitot static tubes. These measured velocity profiles (mean and turbulence) and velocity spectra were compared to atmospheric boundary layers using ASCE Standards (ASCE/SEI 49-12). This application can then be used in the future for wind engineering studies, such as the structural analysis of buildings

Open access and promotion and tenure evaluation plans at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire

Department and program evaluation plans at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire were examined to see if these documents provide evidence that could be used to justify supporting the publication of peer-reviewed open access articles toward tenure and promotion. In an earlier study, the authors reveal that faculty members at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire are more unaware of open access publishing than their counterparts at larger universities. These findings dovetail with other studies that show that faculty members are reluctant to publish in open access journals because of concerns about the quality of those journals. The existing body of scholarship suggests that tenure-line faculty fear publishing in open access journals because it could adversely impact their chances of promotion and tenure. The authors of this current study sought to determine if department and program evaluation plans could influence negative perceptions faculty have of open access journals. The implications of this study for librarians, scholarly communication professionals, tenure-line faculty, departments, and programs are addressed

Identical Profiles, Different Paths: Addressing Self-selection Bias in Learning Community Cohorts

This article presents a method for addressing the self-selection bias of students who participate in learning communities (LCs). More specifically, this research utilizes equivalent comparison groups based on selected incoming characteristics of students, known as bootstraps, to account for self-selection bias. To address the differences in academic preparedness in the fall 2012 cohort, three stratified random samples of students were drawn from the non-LC population to match the LC cohort in mean ACT composite scores and mean high school percentile ranks. This process is called bootstrapping. The study suggests that LCs do impact student academic achievement and retention. The results indicate that LC students with similar entering characteristics to those of the bootstrap sample had higher rates for both GPA and retention than non-LC participants

Social Networks across Chignecto: Applying Social Network Analysis to Acadie, Mi’kma’ki, and Nova Scotia, 1670-1751

This article examines the Acadian community of Beaubassin with a view to better understanding its social hierarchy and the relationships between colonists and their Mi’kmaq neighbours during the period up to 1751. Beaubassin has long been the least understood Acadian community, due in part to its distance from the colonial capital at Port Royal and also because its parish registers are not complete. However, social network analysis can provide new insights. The authors study families across generations, re-interpret a local witchcraft trial, and take a fresh look at the presence of Aboriginal peoples, determining that Beaubassin was a community of growing complexity and with stronger connections to the Mi’kmaq than previously understood.Cette étude examine la communauté acadienne de Beaubassin en vue de mieux comprendre sa hiérarchie sociale et les relations entre les colons et leurs voisins mi’kmaq jusqu’en 1751. Depuis longtemps, Beaubassin est la communauté acadienne la moins connue à cause de sa distance de la capitale coloniale, Port-Royal, et parce que ses registres paroissiaux sont lacunaires. Une analyse des réseaux sociaux peut toutefois apporter un nouvel éclairage. Les auteurs étudient des familles sur plusieurs générations et jettent un regard neuf sur un procès pour sorcellerie et la présence des Amérindiens, pour constater que Beaubassin était une communauté de plus en plus complexe et que ses liens avec les Mi’kmaq étaient plus importants qu’on ne le croyait jusqu’ici

Intensional Polymorphism in Type-erasure Semantics

Intensional polymorphism, the ability to dispatch to different routines based on types at run time, enables a variety of advanced implementation techniques for polymorphic languages, including tag-free garbage collection, unboxed function arguments, polymorphic marshalling, and flattened data structures. To date, languages that support intensional polymorphism have required a type-passing (as opposed to type-erasure) interpretation where types are constructed and passed to polymorphic functions at run time. Unfortunately, type-passing suffers from a number of drawbacks: it requires duplication of constructs at the term and type levels, it prevents abstraction, and it severely complicates polymorphic closure conversion.We present a type-theoretic framework that supports intensional polymorphism, but avoids many of the disadvantages of type passing. In our approach, run-time type information is represented by ordinary terms. This avoids the duplication problem, allows us to recover abstraction, and avoids complications with closure conversion. In addition, our type system provides another improvement in expressiveness; it allows unknown types to be refined in place thereby avoiding certain beta-expansions required by other frameworksEngineering and Applied Science

Validation of a hairy roots system to study soybean-soybean aphid interactions

The soybean aphid (Aphis glycines) is one of the main insect pests of soybean (Glycine max) worldwide. Genomics approaches have provided important data on transcriptome changes, both in the insect and in the plant, in response to the plant-aphid interaction. However, the difficulties to transform soybean and to rear soybean aphid on artificial media have hindered our ability to systematically test the function of genes identified by those analyses as mediators of plant resistance to the insect. An efficient approach to produce transgenic soybean material is the production of transformed hairy roots using Agrobacterium rhizogenes; however, soybean aphids colonize leaves or stems and thus this approach has not been utilized. Here, we developed a hairy root system that allowed effective aphid feeding. We show that this system supports aphid performance similar to that observed in leaves. The use of hairy roots to study plant resistance is validated by experiments showing that roots generated from cotyledons of resistant lines carrying the Rag1 or Rag2 resistance genes are also resistant to aphid feeding, while related susceptible lines are not. Our results demonstrate that hairy roots are a good system to study soybean aphid-soybean interactions, providing a quick and effective method that could be used for functional analysis of the resistance response to this insect