Inexpensive, removable coating for plaster tooling

Procedure for thinning and spaying a vinyl material provides strippable film for plaster surfaces. Coating is low-cost, effective seal against moisture and other sources of damage. Coating consists of a mixture of hot-spray vinyl material and 30 to 50 percent by volume of methyl ethyl ketone

Effect of habituation on the susceptibility of the rat to restraint ulcers

The frequency and gravity of restraint ulcers were found to significantly diminish in rats previously exposed to brief periods of immobilization. The rats' becoming habituated to restraint conditions probably explains this phenomenon

Effect of C60_{60} giant resonance on the photoabsorption of encaged atoms

The absolute differential oscillator strengths (DOS's) for the photoabsorption of the Ne, Ar, and Xe atoms encapsulated in the C$_{60}$ have been evaluated using the time-dependent-density-functional-theory, which solves the quantum Liouvillian equation with the Lanczos chain method. The calculations are performed in the energy regions both inside and outside the C$_{60}$ giant resonance. The photoabsorption spectra of the atoms encaged in the C$_{60}$ demonstrate strong oscillations inside the energy range of the C$_{60}$ giant resonance. This type of oscillation cannot be explained by the confinement resonance, but is due to the energy transfer from the C$_{60}$ valence electrons to the photoelectron through the intershell coupling

Energy density in density functional theory: Application to crystalline defects and surfaces

We propose a method to decompose the total energy of a supercell containing defects into contributions of individual atoms, using the energy density formalism within density functional theory. The spatial energy density is unique up to a gauge transformation, and we show that unique atomic energies can be calculated by integrating over Bader and charge-neutral volumes for each atom. Numerically, we implement the energy density method in the framework of the Vienna ab initio simulation package (VASP) for both norm-conserving and ultrasoft pseudopotentials and the projector augmented wave method, and use a weighted integration algorithm to integrate the volumes. The surface energies and point defect energies can be calculated by integrating the energy density over the surface region and the defect region, respectively. We compute energies for several surfaces and defects: the (110) surface energy of GaAs, the mono-vacancy formation energies of Si, the (100) surface energy of Au, and the interstitial formation energy of O in the hexagonal close-packed Ti crystal. The surface and defect energies calculated using our method agree with size-converged calculations of the difference between the total energies of the system with and without the defect. Moreover, the convergence of the defect energies with size can be found from a single calculation.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure

Do More Effective Teachers Earn More Outside of the Classroom?

We examine earnings records for 90,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001–02 and 2006–07 school years, roughly 20,000 of whom left teaching during that time. Among grade 4–8 teachers leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in estimated value-added to student achievement is associated with 6–9 percent higher earnings outside of teaching. The relationship between effectiveness and earnings is stronger in other industries than it is for the same teachers while in the classroom, suggesting that existing compensation systems do not account for the higher opportunity wages of effective teachers.

Alkaline fuel cell performance investigation

An exploratory experimental fuel cell test program was conducted to investigate the performance characteristics of alkaline laboratory research electrodes. The objective of this work was to establish the effect of temperature, pressure, and concentration upon performance and evaluate candidate cathode configurations having the potential for improved performance. The performance characterization tests provided data to empirically establish the effect of temperature, pressure, and concentration upon performance for cell temperatures up to 300 F and reactant pressures up to 200 psia. Evaluation of five gold alloy cathode catalysts revealed that three doped gold alloys had more that two times the surface areas of reference cathodes and therefore offered the best potential for improved performance