The Transition to College Process in PR-CETP Scholars

This article describes a study about the experiences of a group of students during the transition from high school to college. The students are future teachers who evidenced a high level of academic achievement in high school and received merit scholarships from the Puerto Rico Collaborative for Excellence in Teacher Preparation (PR-CETP). Two groups of students were compared: those who sustained a high GPA during their freshman year, and those who did not and, therefore, no longer qualified for the scholarship. The study was carried out through focused interviews with eight students, from three universities, four of whom maintained the scholarship and four who did not. Findings indicate that the main problems encountered were academic and social, and that the students received support from their families during the entire process. Regarding formal support, they pointed out that they felt highly satisfied with the services provided by PR-CETP and the universities, but they also pointed out (particularly those who lost the scholarship) that they needed additional services from the universities. They suggested, for example, better tutoring, and social activities among the scholars. The interviewed students, in general, consider that they faced the transition successfully since most of them described their academic, emotional, and social status as satisfactory at the time of the interviews

Dissipative solitons which cannot be trapped

In this paper we study the behavior of dissipative solitons in systems with high order nonlinear dissipation and show how they cannot survive under the effect of trapping potentials both of rigid wall type or asymptotically increasing ones. This provides an striking example of a soliton which cannot be trapped and only survives to the action of a weak potential

Investigation of thin n-in-p planar pixel modules for the ATLAS upgrade

In view of the High Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), planned to start around 2023-2025, the ATLAS experiment will undergo a replacement of the Inner Detector. A higher luminosity will imply higher irradiation levels and hence will demand more ra- diation hardness especially in the inner layers of the pixel system. The n-in-p silicon technology is a promising candidate to instrument this region, also thanks to its cost-effectiveness because it only requires a single sided processing in contrast to the n-in-n pixel technology presently employed in the LHC experiments. In addition, thin sensors were found to ensure radiation hardness at high fluences. An overview is given of recent results obtained with not irradiated and irradiated n-in-p planar pixel modules. The focus will be on n-in-p planar pixel sensors with an active thickness of 100 and 150 um recently produced at ADVACAM. To maximize the active area of the sensors, slim and active edges are implemented. The performance of these modules is investigated at beam tests and the results on edge efficiency will be shown

The Progenitors of Recent Core-Collapse Supernovae

We present the results of our analysis of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and deep ground-based images to isolate the massive progenitor stars of the two recent core-collapse supernovae 2008 bk and 2008 cn. The identification of the progenitors is facilitated in one of these two cases by high-precision astrometry based on our HST imaging of SNe at late times

Value-at-Risk and Tsallis statistics: risk analysis of the aerospace sector

In this study, we analyze the aerospace stocks prices in order to characterize the sector behavior. The data analyzed cover the period from January 1987 to April 1999. We present a new index for the aerospace sector and we investigate the statistical characteristics of this index. Our results show that this index is well described by Tsallis distribution. We explore this result and modify the standard Value-at-Risk (VaR), financial risk assessment methodology in order to reflect an asset which obeys Tsallis non-extensive statistics.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, to appear in Physica

Exergy cost of mineral resources

Mineral deposits are considered as natural capital whose value can be assessed in exergy terms. Historical industry experience provides evidence that exploitation of mineral deposits and the beneficiation of ores are essentially energy intensive. The persisting decline of the grade of the developed deposits demands increasing exergy replacement and processing costs. The results demonstrate how far processed ores and concentrates are from ideal behaviour, and technologies from reversibility conditions. The exploitation of mineral resources of declining quality for mineral commodities imply a long time trend of increasing mass and exergy inputs spent per unit product output, in line with a law of ‘diminishing returns’ on invested exergy

Cosmological solutions in generalized hybrid metric-Palatini gravity

We construct exact solutions representing a Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robsertson-Walker (FLRW) universe in a generalized hybrid metric-Palatini theory. By writing the gravitational action in a scalar-tensor representation, the new solutions are obtained by either making an ansatz on the scale factor or on the effective potential. Among other relevant results, we show that it is possible to obtain exponentially expanding solutions for flat universes even when the cosmology is not purely vacuum. We then derive the classes of actions for the original theory which generate these solutions.Comment: 14 pages, 17 figure

Hemispherical power asymmetries in the WMAP 7-year low-resolution temperature and polarization maps

We test the hemispherical power asymmetry of the WMAP 7-year low-resolution temperature and polarization maps. We consider two natural estimators for such an asymmetry and exploit our implementation of an optimal angular power spectrum estimator for all the six CMB spectra. By scanning the whole sky through a sample of 24 directions, we search for asymmetries in the power spectra of the two hemispheres, comparing the results with Monte Carlo simulations drawn from the WMAP 7-year best-fit model. Our analysis extends previous results to the polarization sector. The level of asymmetry on the ILC temperature map is found to be compatible with previous results, whereas no significant asymmetry on the polarized spectra is detected. Moreover, we show that our results are only weakly affected by the a posteriori choice of the maximum multipole considered for the analysis. We also forecast the capability to detect dipole modulation by our methodology at Planck sensitivity.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA