Improved ceramic heat exchange material

Improved corrosion resistant ceramic materials that are suitable for use as regenerative heat exchangers for vehicular gas turbines is reported. Two glass-ceramic materials, C-144 and C-145, have superior durability towards sulfuric acid and sodium sulfate compared to lithium aluminosilicate (LAS) Corning heat exchange material 9455. Material C-144 is a leached LAS material whose major crystalline phase is silica keatite plus mullite, and C-145 is a LAS keatite solid solution (S.S.) material. In comparison to material 9455, material C-144 is two orders of magnitude better in dimensional stability to sulfuric acid at 300 C, and one order of magnitude better in stability to sodium sulfate at 1000 C. Material C-145 is initially two times better in stability to sulfuric acid, and about one order of magnitude better in stability to sodium sulfate. Both C-144 and C-145 have less than 300 ppm delta L/L thermal expansion from ambient to 1000 C, and good dimensional stability of less than approximately 100 ppm delta L/L after exposure to 1000 C for 100 hours. The glass-ceramic fabrication process produced a hexagonal honeycomb matrix having an 85% open frontal area, 50 micrometer wall thickness, and less than 5% porosity

ER IN TAIWAN: SEARCHING FOR FERTILE GROUND

Taiwan’s National Development Council recently announced plans for the country to become bilingual by the year 2030. However, the Council did not lay out a clear road map for how this major accomplishment is to be achieved, and the curriculum presently in place does not seem to meet the challenge. This article will review the current status of English education in Taiwan as well as extensive reading’s under-utilized role in the present curriculum. It will then look at how ER is currently being implemented at one major university on the island and will conclude by arguing that, regardless of the kinds of curricular changes the Ministry of Education decides to adopt, extensive reading deserves an intrinsic role in the new design

Moral Enhancement by Technological Means: Possible, Permissible, a Duty?

Attempts to enhance individual and communal morality are as old as human communal living itself. But only recently have philosophers, bioethicists and scientists begun to seriously consider the possibilities and implications of employing technological interventions into the human body, especially the brain, in order to enhance traits and capabilities that underlie what we might term as moral reasoning, action and behavior. Some illicit drugs, prescription pharmaceuticals and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques have been shown to have effects on diminishing or enhancing certain of our mental traits that constitute moral thinking, action and behavior in healthy adults. This hints at the possibility of targeted interventions that might predictably improve individual and communal morality and through it societal cooperation. The first part of the paper will delve into some of the conceptual issues connected with moral enhancement as part of the broader trend of cognitive enhancement and human enhancement in general. The second part will look at some experiments and interventions that support the plausibility of technologically enhancing moral reasoning and moral behavior. The third part will present some of the arguments that have been written both for and against moral enhancement, including whether we might in certain situations have a duty to morally enhance ourselves. The final part looks at some further dilemmas of whether we might already be enhancing ourselves morally through some commonly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs, and what a (further) “medicalization” of moral deficits might mean

Predicting Author Traits Through Topic Modeling of Multilingual Social Media Text

One source of insight into the motivations of a modern human being is the text they write and post for public consumption online, in forms such as personal status updates, product reviews, or forum discussions. The task of inferring traits about an author based on their writing is often called "author profiling." One challenging aspect of author profiling in today’s world is the increasing diversity of natural languages represented on social media websites. Furthermore, the informal nature of such writing often inspires modifications to standard spelling and grammatical structure which are highly language-specific. These are some of the dilemmas that inspired a series of "shared task" competitions, in which many participants work to solve a single problem in different ways, in order to compare their methods and results. This thesis describes our submission to one author profiling shared task in which 22 teams implemented software to predict the age, gender, and certain personality traits of Twitter users based on the content of their posts to the website. We will also analyze the performance and implementation of our system compared to those of other teams, all of which were described in open-access reports. The competition organizers provided a labeled training dataset of tweets in English, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian, and evaluated the submitted software on a similar but hidden dataset. Our approach is based on applying a topic modeling algorithm to an auxiliary, unlabeled but larger collection of tweets we collected in each language, and representing tweets from the competition dataset in terms of a vector of 100 topics. We then trained a random forest classifier based on the labeled training dataset to predict the age, gender and personality traits for authors of tweets in the test set. Our software ranked in the top half of participants in English and Italian, and the top third in Dutch

Field Trials to Determine the Efficacy of an Oral Plague Vaccine for Prairie Dogs

North American prairie dogs (Cynomys spp.) and black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) have been severely affected by plague, an exotic zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis during the last 100 years.  Plague has contributed to population declines of prairie dogs, near extinction of black-footed ferrets, and has caused human illness and fatalities.  An oral sylvatic plague vaccine (SPV) developed and tested jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey, National Wildlife Health Center and University of Wisconsin (Madison, WI) shows great promise as an effective, pre-emptive method for controlling plague in prairie dogs.  Field trials to evaluate the efficacy of SPV were initiated in 2013 and include 4 species of prairie dogs on study areas in 7 states, including Montana.  This presentation is a status report after the second year of a planned 4 year study.  The primary objectives are to measure vaccine/bait uptake and to assess prairie dog survival rates at paired study sites, with and without vaccine application.  At the north-central Montana study site, about 8,000 baits, half with SPV and half placebos, were distributed across 5 pairs of study sites (totaling 81 ha) in 2013 and over 13,000 in 2014 on the same 5 pairs of study sites (totaling 107 ha).  In addition to ear tagging and microchip-marking each individual, flea, hair, whisker and blood samples were collected each year.  A total of 584 individual prairie dogs were marked during 929 capture events in 2013 and 814 individuals during 1,293 capture events in 2014

Sullivan County COVID-19 Needs Assessment

Sullivan responded and continues to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. A community needs assessment was performed through the SOWK 382 course in partnership with United Way of the Wabash Valley. The needs assessment revealed how the community has responded in relation to mental health and addiction, food, schooling, and stability. The assessment reveals how Sullivan should respond to further help the community members during this pandemic

Franklinton HealthCare Committee

Franklinton HealthCare Committee proposes to reinvent Mt. Carmel West by creating a new rehabilitation center to fight drug and alcohol addiction, a wellness center to educate Franklinton residents about nutrition and health issues, and a residence hall to support the expansion of the nursing school

A roadmap for regulatory survival in the 1990s

There have been many changes over the last several years in the ways that we're required to label, handle, and dispose of the products of our manufacturing processes...and we all know there will be more, not fewer, environmental regulations to deal with in the years to come. It is important to be aware of how a chemical is listed by federal or state regulations or recommending bodies. For example, if a chemical has been listed by OSHA, IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer), or NTP (the National Toxicology Program) as a carcinogen, this listing will trigger hazard communication requirements. It may cause restrictions on the levels of a chemical that you may release into the air or water as well as how you manage your plant wastes. Understanding how a chemical is listed is the first critical step in overall compliance. Once a chemical makes one of these lists as a hazardous material or a carcinogen, your emissions, labelling, or MSD sheets may need to be changed in order to comply with federal or state regulations. Being fully aware of how the chemicals you use are listed by all pertinent bodies is the essential compass that you must have to follow the regulatory road map

"S" Glass Manufacturing Technology Transfer

A glass-ceramic-to metal sealing technology patented by Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque (SNLA) was developed by MRC-Mound for use in the manufacture of weapon components. Successful implementation attracted increasingly widespread weapon use of this technology. "S-glass" manufacturing technology was transferred to commercial vendors to ensure that weapons production schedules would be met in the coming years. Such transfer also provided sources of this fledgling technology for the Department of Defense (DOD), aerospace and other commercial uses. The steps involved in the technology transfer are described, from the initial cooperative development work of Sandia and Mound scientists and technologists to the final phase of qualifying commercial vendors for component manufacture