Vandalia, Illinois: Western Terminus of the National Road

No abstract provided by author

Hybridizing matter-wave and classical accelerometers

We demonstrate a hybrid accelerometer that benefits from the advantages of both conventional and atomic sensors in terms of bandwidth (DC to 430 Hz) and long term stability. First, the use of a real time correction of the atom interferometer phase by the signal from the classical accelerometer enables to run it at best performances without any isolation platform. Second, a servo-lock of the DC component of the conventional sensor output signal by the atomic one realizes a hybrid sensor. This method paves the way for applications in geophysics and in inertial navigation as it overcomes the main limitation of atomic accelerometers, namely the dead times between consecutive measurements

Case Studies in Athletic-Academic Integration: A Closer Look at Schools That Implement COIA’s Best Practices

This research follows a 2009 survey jointly conducted by the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA) and the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State to assess the “best practices” of FBS institutions in regard to the integration of athletics into academics. Case studies of the six highest-scoring institutions—the University of Houston, University of Illinois, University of Maryland, Oklahoma State University, University of South Carolina, and Southern Methodist University—were conducted. The aim of these case studies was to highlight those institutions that implement more of COIA’s best practices than other surveyed schools. Further, the aim was to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between COIA’s suggested practices, the “Athletics Integration into Academics” survey, and the local conditions of FBS institutions

Integration of Athletics and Academics: Survey of Best Practices at FBS Schools

The Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), an alliance of 57 university faculty senates, was founded in 2002 to provide a faculty voice in the national discussion about how to best maintain academic integrity in big-time college sports. COIA’s most recent white paper, Framing the Future: Reforming Intercollegiate Athletics (2007), proposes best practices for individual universities to help ensure that college sports are more fully integrated into their academic goals, values and missions. Reported here are the results of a national survey that gauged the extent to which COIA’s best practices have been adopted by schools participating in the Football Bowl Subdivision. The findings suggest that big-time athletics programs have a number of underutilized tools at their disposal that can assist them in protecting core academic values and standards at universities competing at the highest level of intercollegiate sport

A comparative study of available digital signal processor chips

Call number: LD2668 .T4 EECE 1988 H37Master of ScienceElectrical and Computer Engineerin

Monovalent cation induced structural transitions in telomeric DNAs: G-DNA folding intermediates

Telomeric DNA consists of G- and C-rich strands that are always polarized such that the G-rich strand extends past the 3’ end of the duplex to form a 12-16-base overhang. These overhanging strands can self-associate in vitro to form intramolecular structures that have several unusual physical properties and at least one common feature, the presence of non-Watson-Crick G-G base pairs. The term “G-DNA” was coined for this class of structures (Cech, 1988). On the basis of gel electrophoresis, imino proton NMR, and circular dichroism (CD) results, we find that changing the counterions from sodium to potassium (in 20 mM phosphate buffers) specifically induces conformational transitions in the G-rich telomeric DNA from Tetrahymena, d(T2G4)4 (TET4), which results in a change from the intramolecular species to an apparent multistranded structure, accompanied by an increase in the melting temperature of the base pairs of \u3e 2 5 O , as monitored by loss of the imino proton NMR signals. NMR semiselective spin-lattice relaxation rate measurements and HPLC size-exclusion chromatography studies show that in 20 mM potassium phosphate (pH 7) buffer (KP) TET4 is approximately twice the length of the form obtained in 20 mM sodium phosphate (pH 7) buffer (Nap) and that mixtures of Na+ and K+ produce mixtures of the two forms whose populations depend on the ratio of the cations. Since K+ and NH4+ are known to stabilize a parallel-stranded quadruplex structure of poly[r(I),], we infer that the multistranded structure is a quadruplex. Our results indicate that specific differences in ionic interactions can result in a switch in telomeric DNAs between intramolecular hairpin-like or quadruplex-containing species and intermolecular quadruplex structures, all of which involve G G base pairing interactions. We propose a model in which duplex or hairpin forms of G-DNA are folding intermediates in the formation of either 1-, 2-, or 4-stranded quadruplex structures. In this model monovalent cations stabilize the duplex and quadruplex forms via two distinct mechanisms, counterion condensation and octahedral coordination to the carbonyl groups in stacked planar guanine “quartet” base assemblies. Substituting one of the guanosine residues in each of the repeats of the Tetrahymena sequence to give the human telomeric DNA, d(T2AG,)4, results in less effective K+-dependent stabilization. Thus, the ion-dependent stabilization is attenuated by altering the sequence. Upon addition of the Watson-Crick (WC) complementary strand, only the Na+-stabilized structure dissociates quickly to form a WC double helix. This demonstrates that under some circumstances the K+-stabilized G-DNA structure can be kinetically preferred over WC DNA

Kinetic metallic glass evolution model

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-227).The structure of metallic glass controls its mechanical properties; this structure can be altered by thermomechanical processing. This manuscript presents a model for this structural evolution of metallic glass under thermal and mechanical stimuli. The foundation of this model is a potential energy landscape; this consists of three pieces: a function for the energy of any given stable state, a density of states function across the landscape, and a model for the energetic barriers between stable states. All three of these pieces are parameterized in terms of the configurational potential energy of the glass, which is split into isochoric and dilatative degrees of freedom. Under a thermal or mechanical stimulus, the glass traverses the potential energy landscape by way of isotropic relaxation or excitation events, and by shear transformations. The rates of these events are calculated using transition state theory. This model is first implemented in homogeneous form, treating the glass nanostructure as a statistical distribution; this implementation, while devoid of spatial detail, is nonetheless able to fit many of the experimental results on homogeneous flow previously in the literature. The second implementation of the model is in a mesoscale discrete shear transformation zone dynamics framework; this couples the model's rate equations to discrete points in a finite element model under realistic thermomechanical loading, and propagates the effects of local events via static elasticity. Emphasis is placed on efficient computer implementation of the new model's physics, improving on the previous state of the art with stiffness matrix factor caching and geometric multigrid methods. These numerical improvements produce a 200x speedup over previous algorithms, enable rapid simulations of glass with evolving elastic properties, and facilitate the first-ever metallic glass simulations of physical nanomechanical experiments with matching length and time scales.by Thomas James Hardin.Ph. D