On the Cosmic Nuclear Cycle and the Similarity of Nuclei and Stars

Repulsive interactions between neutrons in compact stellar cores cause luminosity and a steady outflow of hydrogen from stellar surfaces. Neutron repulsion in more massive compact objects made by gravitational collapse produces violent, energetic, cosmological events (quasars, gamma ray bursts, and active galactic centers) that had been attributed to black holes before neutron repulsion was recognized. Rather than evolving in one direction by fusion, nuclear matter on the cosmological scale cycles between fusion, gravitational collapse, and dissociation (including neutron-emission). This cycle involves neither the production of matter in an initial Big Bang nor the disappearance of matter into black holes. The similarity Bohr noted between atomic and planetary structures extends to a similarity between nuclear and stellar structures.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

Observational confirmation of the Sun's CNO cycle

Gamma rays from a solar flare in Active Region 10039 on 23 July 2002 with the RHESSI spacecraft spectrometer indicate that the CNO cycle occurs at the solar surface, in electrical discharges along closed magnetic loops. At the two feet of the loop, H ions are accelerated to energy levels that surpass Coulomb barriers for the C-12[H-1, gamma]N-13 and N-14[H-1, gamma]O-15 reactions. First x-rays appear along the discharge path. Next annihilation of positrons from N-13 and O-15 [half-life = 10 m and 2 m] produce bright spots of 0.511 MeV gammas at the loop feet. As C-13 increases from positron decay of N-13, the C-13[He-4, n]O-16 reaction produces neutrons and then the 2.2 MeV emission line appears from n-capture on H-1. These results suggest that the CNO cycle changed the N-15/N-14 ratio in the solar wind and at the solar surface over geologic time, and this ratio may contain an important historical record of climate changes related to sunspot activity.Comment: 9 pages, 21 references, 2 figures show x-rays and gamma-rays from nuclear reactions in a solar-flare-induced electrical discharge. Replaced to show publication detail

Improving WebIDE through Delightful Design and Gamification

WebIDE is a web-based online learning environment. WebIDE has been used successfully to teach CS0 and CS1 students Java and C concepts and software engineering best practices, specically Test Driven Development. Previous Web- IDE development has concentrated on developing functionality. The main goal of this eort is to improve two non-functional aspects of WebIDE. The rst is to design a more delightful user interface. The second is to add a scoring mecha- nism that encourages students to develop best practices. The scoring mechanism rewards students who answer the question correctly on the rst attempt, dis- couraging them from spamming the answer button. Our objective is to motivate the students to think before answering. The innovations are evaluated through a semi-controlled experiment that was conducted during the Fall quarter of 2012 at Cal Poly

Functionalization of pyridines and other azines via phosphorus ligand-coupling reactions

2019 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Nitrogen heterocycles are ubiquitous in pharmaceutical compounds with pyridine being one of the most frequently occurring examples. The discovery and development of new drugs rely heavily on our ability to modify these commonly occurring structures. The functionalization of pyridine has a long history but despite this, there remain some deficiencies in this area of synthesis. Reactions which expand upon the known methodologies are of tremendous value to medicinal chemists who frequently work with pyridines and similar azines. Chapter one will cover the relevance of pyridines in pharmaceuticals and will explain how structural features contribute to their presence in drugs. Conventional and newer methods to functionalize pyridine are also addressed. Chapter two will describe the work of the McNally lab in the development of heterocyclic phosphonium salts as reagents to selectively functionalize pyridines. An application of these salts is as precursors to form C−O bonds from alkoxide nucleophiles. Chapter three presents the development of a strategy to construct bis-heterobiaryls using phosphorus ligand-coupling. This method offers an alternative to the widely used metal-catalyzed approaches which often struggle in the synthesis of bis-heterobiaryls. Lastly, chapter four will expand upon this work showing a new approach to prepare bis-heterobiaryls using heteroaryl halides. This route enables easy access to 2,2'-bipyridines which are difficult to synthesize using conventional methods

Literacy, Poverty, and Brain Development: Toward a New, Place-Based Educational Intervention

This paper provides an overview of emerging research focused on how living in an area of concentrated poverty can impact brain development and explores some possible applications of this research to education policy. One of the key findings is that state and federal policy-makers may need to adopt programs that integrate educational policy with housing and planning policy in order to protect and fulfill each child\u27s educational rights. In order to impress upon readers the scale of the nation\u27s current educational failures and the need for a significant change in policy, this paper first addresses adult illiteracy in the United States. After defining functional illiteracy according to metrics derived from the National Adult Literacy Survey, this paper then explores the various ways in which high rates of functional illiteracy negatively impact our society. The negative effects of living in an area of concentrated poverty, which correlates with functional illiteracy, and the difficulty inherent in escaping such areas of concentrated poverty are also briefly examined. The paper then proceeds to discuss the evolution of educational rights, and how federal and state courts have interpreted state obligations to provide a fair, equal, and meaningful opportunity to a sound basic education. The paper also examines the effectiveness of various remedies instituted as a result of successful education litigation. This discussion aims to establish not only the existence of educational rights, but also the inadequacy of previous efforts to implement and enforce such rights. The key problem identified in the paper is that previous approaches to effectuate educational rights, including court-ordered remedies, have failed to account for circumstantial factors relating to the socio-economic conditions within particular school districts. Finally, the paper provides an overview of emerging neuroscience research related to cognitive development and socioeconomic status, which illustrates how the circumstances in which a child is raised can significantly inhibit that child\u27s educational opportunities. While the field of neuroscience has only just begun to investigate the effects of socioeconomic status, including both family and community wealth, on brain development and function, preliminary studies indicate a correlation between socioeconomic status and some aspects of brain development which may have an impact on student performance in typical school settings

An evaluation of interactive test-driven labs with webIDE in CS0

WebIDE is a framework that enables instructors to develop and deliver online lab content with interactive feedback. The ability to create lock-step labs enables the instructor to guide students through learning experiences, demonstrating mastery as they proceed. Feedback is provided through automated evaluators that vary from simple regular expression evaluation to syntactic parsers to applications that compile and run programs and unit tests. This paper describes WebIDE and its use in a CS0 course that taught introductory Java and Android programming using a test-driven learning approach. We report results from a controlled experiment that compared the use of dynamic WebIDE labs with more traditional static programming labs. Despite weaker performance on pre-study assessments, students who used WebIDE performed two to twelve percent better on all assessments than the students who used traditional labs. In addition, WebIDE students were consistently more positive about their experience in CS0