Determiniation of Flouride Ion in Well Waters of Eastwood School District, Wood, County, Ohio

Author Institution: Eastwood Local Schools ; Chemistry Department, University of ToledoThe purpose of this investigation was to determine the amount of fluoride ion present in the well water of Eastwood Local School District, Wood County, Ohio. Ninety-two water samples were gathered from separate wells in the district and analyzed for fluoride content. Fluoride determination was made with a fluoride ion-selective electrode using a direct potentiometric method. pH measurements were also made upon the samples. Fluoride levels were found to range from 0.6 to 3.8 parts per million. pH measurements varied from 6.91 to 8.30

Supporting reflection and creative thinking by carers of older people with dementia

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects

What Have We Learned from Policy Transfer Research? Dolowitz and Marsh Revisited

Over the last decade, policy transfer has emerged as an important concept within public policy analysis, guiding both theoretical and empirical research spanning many venues and issue areas. Using Dolowitz and Marsh's 1996 stocktake as its starting point, this article reviews what has been learned by whom and for what purpose. It finds that the literature has evolved from its rather narrow, state-centred roots to cover many more actors and venues. While policy transfer still represents a niche topic for some researchers, an increasing number have successfully assimilated it into wider debates on topics such as globalisation, Europeanisation and policy innovation. This article assesses the concept's position in the overall ‘tool-kit’ of policy analysis, examines some possible future directions and reflects on their associated risks and opportunities

Introducing creativity techniques and software apps to the care of people with dementia

This poster reports research to introduce creative problem solving techniques and software to the care for people with dementia in residential homes

Soluble tau species, not neurofibrillary aggregates, disrupt neural system integration in a tau transgenic model

Neurofibrillary tangles are a feature of Alzheimer disease and other tauopathies, and while they are generally believed to be markers of neuronal pathology, there is little evidence evaluating whether tangles directly impact neuronal function. To investigate the response of cells in hippocampal circuits to complex behavioral stimuli, we used an environmental enrichment paradigm to induce expression of an immediate-early gene, Arc, in the rTg4510 mouse model of tauopathy. These mice reversibly overexpress P301L tau and exhibit substantial neurofibrillary tangle deposition, neuronal loss, and memory deficits. Employing fluorescent in situ hybridization to detect Arc mRNA, we found that rTg4510 mice have impaired hippocampal Arc expression both without stimulation and in response to environmental enrichment; this likely reflects the combination of functional impairments of existing neurons and loss of neurons. However, tangle-bearing cells were at least as likely as non-tangle-bearing neurons to exhibit Arc expression in response to enrichment. Transgene suppression with doxycycline for 6 weeks resulted in increased percentages of Arc-positive cells in rTg4510 brains compared to untreated transgenics, restoring enrichment-induced Arc mRNA levels to that of wild-type controls despite the continued presence of neurofibrillary pathology. We interpret these data to indicate that soluble tau contributes to impairment of hippocampal function, while tangles do not preclude neurons from responding in a functional circuit

Suspended Nanoscale Field Emitter Devices for High-Temperature Operation

In this work, we demonstrate suspended two- and four-terminal field emission devices for high-temperature operation. The planar structures were fabricated with tungsten on a 200-nm silicon nitride membrane. The insulator in the vicinity of the terminals was removed to minimize undesirable Frenkel–Poole emission and increase the resistance of leakage current pathways. The effects of temperatures up to 450 °C on Fowler–Nordheim emission characteristics and parasitic leakage resistance were studied. Turn-on voltages with magnitudes under 15 V that further decreased as a function of increasing temperature for the two-terminal device were reported. Gating at temperatures of 150 °C and 300 °C was shown for the four-terminal device, and corresponding transconductance and cutoff frequency values were computed

Suspended Nanoscale Field Emitter Devices for High-Temperature Operation

In this work, we demonstrate suspended two- and four-terminal field emission devices for high-temperature operation. The planar structures were fabricated with tungsten on a 200-nm silicon nitride membrane. The insulator in the vicinity of the terminals was removed to minimize undesirable Frenkel–Poole emission and increase the resistance of leakage current pathways. The effects of temperatures up to 450 °C on Fowler–Nordheim emission characteristics and parasitic leakage resistance were studied. Turn-on voltages with magnitudes under 15 V that further decreased as a function of increasing temperature for the two-terminal device were reported. Gating at temperatures of 150 °C and 300 °C was shown for the four-terminal device, and corresponding transconductance and cutoff frequency values were computed

Evidence for Cosmic Acceleration is Robust to Observed Correlations Between Type Ia Supernova Luminosity and Stellar Age

Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) are powerful standardizable candles for constraining cosmological models and provided the first evidence of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Their precision derives from empirical correlations, now measured from $>1000$ SNe Ia, between their luminosities, light-curve shapes, colors and most recently with the stellar mass of their host galaxy. As mass correlates with other galaxy properties, alternative parameters have been investigated to improve SN Ia standardization though none have been shown to significantly alter the determination of cosmological parameters. We re-examine a recent claim, based on 34 SN Ia in nearby passive host galaxies, of a 0.05 mag/Gyr dependence of standardized SN Ia luminosity on host age which if extrapolated to higher redshifts, would be a bias up to 0.25 mag, challenging the inference of dark energy. We reanalyze this sample of hosts using both the original method and a Bayesian hierarchical model and find after a fuller accounting of the uncertainties the significance of a dependence on age to be $\leq2\sigma$ and $\sim1\sigma$ after the removal of a single poorly-sampled SN Ia. To test the claim that a trend seen in old stellar populations can be applied to younger ages, we extend our analysis to a larger sample which includes young hosts. We find the residual dependence of host age (after all standardization typically employed for cosmological measurements) to be consistent with zero for 254 SNe Ia from the Pantheon sample, ruling out the large but low significance trend seen in passive hosts.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ