Limitations on Creditors\u27 Rights To Require Spouses\u27 Signatures Under the ECOA and Washington Community Property Law

This article examines the federal regulations\u27 interaction with Washington community property law to determine when a creditor can require the signature of a Washington applicant\u27s spouse on either a loan instrument or security agreement in five common situations: (1) a married applicant\u27s request for credit secured by community property, (2) a married applicant\u27s request for credit secured by separate property, (3) a married applicant\u27s request for general unsecured credit, (4) a married applicant\u27s request for unsecured credit in specific reliance upon his or her income flow, and (5) a married applicant\u27s request for unsecured credit in specific reliance upon the income flow of his or her spouse

Transient Heat Storage Systems

Phase change materials (PCM) have many applications in transient cooling systems, including those with high transient heat loads and low duty cycles. These materials allow a system to remain within a narrow temperature range with a relatively low weight compared to conventional heat sinks or high-power cooling systems. This senior capstone project includes the design of a PCM based thermal energy storage system to integrate into an existing cooling loop, as well as a determination of viable PCM’s for the application. This report contains the necessary information to build the test apparatus

How Virtual Reality Impacts the Landscape Architecture Design Process during the Phases of Analysis and Concept Development at the Master Planning Scale

Virtual reality (VR) can offer many benefits for designers. In the field of landscape architecture, the technology is primarily being used as a tool for design review in the late stages of the design process, yet many of the benefits that make VR valuable in the later stages of the design process suggest that VR may be equally valuable when used in earlier stages such as analysis and concept development. This research examined incorporating VR into the design phases of analysis and concept development, and integrated its use with traditional landscape architecture methods to measure its impacts on a large scale master planning project. This research explores the advantages and limitations of VR and suggests a positive outlook for VR as a design tool

Fast and flexible: Human program induction in abstract reasoning tasks

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a challenging program induction dataset that was recently proposed by Chollet (2019). Here, we report the first set of results collected from a behavioral study of humans solving a subset of tasks from ARC (40 out of 1000). Although this subset of tasks contains considerable variation, our results showed that humans were able to infer the underlying program and generate the correct test output for a novel test input example, with an average of 80% of tasks solved per participant, and with 65% of tasks being solved by more than 80% of participants. Additionally, we find interesting patterns of behavioral consistency and variability within the action sequences during the generation process, the natural language descriptions to describe the transformations for each task, and the errors people made. Our findings suggest that people can quickly and reliably determine the relevant features and properties of a task to compose a correct solution. Future modeling work could incorporate these findings, potentially by connecting the natural language descriptions we collected here to the underlying semantics of ARC.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

Using electronic surveys: advice from survey professionals

The study reports the perceptions and recommendations of sixty-two experienced survey researchers from the American Educational Research Association regarding the use of electronic surveys. The most positive aspects cited for the use of electronic surveys were reduction of costs (i.e., postage, phone charges), the use of electronic mail for pre-notification or follow-up purposes, and the compatibility of data with existing software programs. These professionals expressed limitations in using electronic surveys pertaining to the limited sampling frame as well as issues of confidentiality, privacy, and the credibility of the sample. They advised that electronic surveys designed with the varied technological background and capabilities of the respondent in mind, follow sound principles of survey construction, and be administered to pre-notified, targeted populations with published email addresses. Accessed 73,957 times on https://pareonline.net from January 02, 2002 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right

Development of New Rocket Engine Liner Materials Based on Copper Alloys with Diamond Particle Additions

Novel copper-diamond materials containing particulate dispersions of diamond within a copper alloy matrix have been produced as next-generation rocket engine combustion chamber liner materials. These Copper-Diamond (Cu-D) composite materials have significantly higher thermal conductivity than conventional liner materials and have the potential to increase the engine performance significantly. Liner fabrication techniques include hot pressing and spark plasma sintering (SPS), which are capable of scale up to full-size production parts. The materials have been evaluated for thermal cycling resistance and ease of manufacturing. The results indicate great promise of these materials and associated economics to replace state-of-the-art combustion chamber liner materials such as GRCop-84 and NARloy-Z. Combustion chamber fabrication processes are also discussed, including SPS and additive manufacturing

Fibronectin and Cyclic Strain Improve Cardiac Progenitor Cell Regenerative Potential In Vitro.

Cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs) have rapidly advanced to clinical trials, yet little is known regarding their interaction with the microenvironment. Signaling cues present in the microenvironment change with development and disease. This work aims to assess the influence of two distinct signaling moieties on CPCs: cyclic biaxial strain and extracellular matrix. We evaluate four endpoints for improving CPC therapy: paracrine signaling, proliferation, connexin43 expression, and alignment. Vascular endothelial growth factor A (about 900 pg/mL) was secreted by CPCs cultured on fibronectin and collagen I. The application of mechanical strain increased vascular endothelial growth factor A secretion 2-4-fold for CPCs cultured on poly-L-lysine, laminin, or a naturally derived cardiac extracellular matrix. CPC proliferation was at least 25% higher on fibronectin than that on other matrices, especially for lower strain magnitudes. At 5% strain, connexin43 expression was highest on fibronectin. With increasing strain magnitude, connexin43 expression decreased by as much as 60% in CPCs cultured on collagen I and a naturally derived cardiac extracellular matrix. Cyclic mechanical strain induced the strongest CPC alignment when cultured on fibronectin or collagen I. This study demonstrates that culturing CPCs on fibronectin with 5% strain magnitude is optimal for their vascular endothelial growth factor A secretion, proliferation, connexin43 expression, and alignment

Rabi oscillations between ground and Rydberg states with dipole-dipole atomic interactions

We demonstrate Rabi oscillations of small numbers of 87Rb atoms between ground and Rydberg states with n≤43. Coherent population oscillations are observed for single atoms, while the presence of two or more atoms decoheres the oscillations. We show that these observations are consistent with van der Waals interactions of Rydberg atoms

Climate Change and Biosphere Response: Unlocking the Collections Vault

Natural history collections (NHCs) are an important source of the long-term data needed to understand how biota respond to ongoing anthropogenic climate change. These include taxon occurrence data for ecological modeling, as well as information that can be used to reconstruct mechanisms through which biota respond to changing climates. The full potential of NHCs for climate change research cannot be fully realized until high-quality data sets are conveniently accessible for research, but this requires that higher priority be placed on digitizing the holdings most useful for climate change research (e.g., whole-biota studies, time series, records of intensively sampled common taxa). Natural history collections must not neglect the proliferation of new information from efforts to understand how present-day ecosystems are responding to environmental change. These new directions require a strategic realignment for many NHC holders to complement their existing focus on taxonomy and systematics. To set these new priorities, we need strong partnerships between NHC holders and global change biologists