Together, Apart. A Review of On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss, Edited by Jonathan Wyatt and Tony E. Adams

In this essay, I offer a review of the book, On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss, edited by Jonathan Wyatt and Tony E. Adams. An important contribution to the field of authethnography, this book will appeal not only to scholars of family and of qualitative inquiry, but also to people struggling to find meaning in the crazy complexities of family relationships

Determination of the vacancy migration energy of aluminum by NMR

Monovacancy diffusion is a thermally activated process characterized by an activation energy E(,d). The diffusion of atoms requires the formation and migration of vacancies. The concentration of vacancies n/N is given by n/N (DBLTURN) exp(-E(,f)/kT). It can be shown that the activation energy E(,d) is the sum of the energy to form a vacancy E(,f) and the energy required for an atomic jump E(,m): E(,d) = E(,f) + E(,m). Furthermore, the atomic jump rate (omega)(,j) can be shown to be thermally activated and given by (omega)(,j) (DBLTURN) (nu)(,o)(n/N)exp(-E(,m)/kT) ((nu)(,o) is the attempt frequency).;NMR offers many techniques to measure the activation energy, E(,d). However, there are no NMR techniques available for the determination of the migration energy. This thesis presents an NMR experiment for the measurement of the migration energy. It is a simple NMR experiment performed on a sample prepared with a nonequilibrium concentration of vacancies. By preparing the sample such that the vacancy concentration does not change with temperature, the jump rate has only one thermally activated term. Thus, the jump rate now has an activation energy equal to the migration energy E(,m).;This experiment was performed on pure aluminum metal. The migration energy was found to be .69 ev (+OR-) 20% (the accepted value is .67 ev); however, we do not consider this an accurate determination. We do consider the experiment successful and promising. The activation energy of self diffusion was also determined; its value is 1.33 ev

Investigating the Effect of Greediness on the Coordinate Exchange Algorithm for Generating Optimal Experimental Designs

Design of Experiments (DoE) is the field of statistics concerned with helping researchers maximize the amount of information they gain from their experiments. Recently, researchers have been turning to optimal experimental designs instead of classical/catalog experimental designs. One of the most popular algorithms used today to generate optimal designs is the Coordinate Exchange (CEXCH) Algorithm. CEXCH is known to be a greedy algorithm, which means it tends to favor immediate, locally best designs instead of globally optimal designs. Previous research demonstrated that this tradeoff was efficacious in that it reduced the cost of a single run of CEXCH and allowed more independent runs of the algorithm in a reasonable time. We devote part of this thesis to implementing and validating CEXCH in the Julia programming language. Different versions of CEXCH are examined, each with a different level of greediness. We implement a large computing study on 21 distinct design scenarios and two optimality criterion to benchmark the efficacy of CEXCH under different levels of greediness. We found that less greedy implementations of CEXCH generate optimal designs with greater probability at a moderate increase to cost