Exploratory Hydrothermal Synthesis and Crystal Growth of Refractory Rare-Earth Oxides with Tetravalent and Pentavalent Metal Oxide Building Blocks

The crystal growth of large, defect-free and optically transparent materials has been an active area of research for over two centuries. A multitude of crystal growth techniques have been employed during this time, each submitting advantages and disadvantages to the solid-state community. As the heart of solid state lasers, communication devices and semiconductors, synthetically grown crystals for optical and magnetic applications hold the key for future innovation and design. There are large classes of materials that display recumbent characteristics that inhibit their manipulation by most current solid state techniques on the market. These refractory oxides display extreme melting ranges (\u3e 2000 â°C), which inhibit solubility in the melt-based solid-state techniques typically engineered in crystal growth laboratories. Herein, this dissertation employs the high temperature and high pressure technique to drive the solubility of select refractory oxides into solution several hundred degrees prior to the melting point being attained. The investigation of pentavalent and tetravalent oxides (Nb2O5, Ta2O5, TiO2, GeO2, and SiO2) with rare-earth oxides (La - Lu, Sc) under hydrothermal conditions has led to the discovery of several new compounds previously unattainable by conventional solid-state growth techniques. These included, but are not limited to, RENbO4 (RE = La-Lu), La5Ti4O15(OH), Lu5Ti2O11(OH), and Ba2Lu2Si4O12F2 single crystals. The discovery of new classes of materials will lead to further investigation of optical properties. Furthermore, the ability to solubilize metal oxides, hundreds of degrees below their melting point, is leading to high-quality, defect-free, bulk single crystal growth of new and existing materials. As the solution chemistry of metal oxides continues to be investigated and explored under hydrothermal conditions, new optical and magnetic materials continue to emerge and display desirable traits in applied sciences

The Rhetorical Strategies of Pregnancy Support Centers Including the Visual Rhetoric of Fetal Ultrasound Technology

This study examined the rhetorical strategies, including verbal and visual rhetoric, of pregnancy support centers that provide clients with fetal ultrasounds to persuade those who may be considering abortion as a means of resolving their unplanned pregnancy to carry to term. Qualitative data were gathered from 12 interviews of directors and ultrasound personnel from 7 states as well as from television advertisements and printed material. Eighteen research questions investigating the rhetorical transactions between centers and clients were answered. Rhetorical analyses were performed on the verbal and visual messages used in client interactions. The grounded theory approach of inquiry resulted in the discovery of 10 major themes. First, centers offer holistic Christian ministry to clients. Second, centers provide professional health services. Third, a quest for uncertainty reduction and information brings clients to the centers. Fourth, centers maintain safe supportive environments. Fifth, personnel are trained to demonstrate sensitivity in sharing information. Sixth, staff exercise care in their deliberate choice of terms. Seventh, members recognize the importance of interpersonal communication in building relationships with and mentoring clients. Eighth, centers use persuasive arguments and artifacts. Ninth, ultrasound serves to reify the pregnancy for clients. Tenth, empowering clients to make their own decisions is a center goal. A rhetorical critique was performed using three approaches. First, the rhetorical functions communicated by the visual artifacts were explored. Second, the individual elements of the visuals were examined for persuasive potential. Third, the possibility that the visual of the ultrasound image fills the eye of the beholder with a single dominant meaning was considered. The conclusion is that the apparent persuasive success of the ultrasound can be partially explained by the client\u27s recognition of baby schema characteristics present in the fetus, recognition of the fetal heartbeat, and recognition of the beating heart as a symbol of life. The persuasive potential of the fetal position and fetal movement were also discussed. The role of storytelling was examined. The possibility of client self-persuasion was also evaluated

Routine outcome monitoring and clinical supervision: do therapists really care about their patients?

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017Psychotherapy has repeatedly been shown to be an acceptable form of treatment for a variety of psychiatric conditions. However, despite the success of psychotherapy, not all patients improve during a course of treatment. In fact, research has suggested that some patients actually become worse while engaged in psychotherapy. Thus, it becomes important to identify patient deterioration and provide this information back to therapists. Additionally, the ability to detect patient deterioration cannot be solely the result of clinician judgment. Research has shown that utilizing actuarial methods of identifying patient non-responders is superior to that of clinician judgment alone. In turn, the field has moved toward implementing routine outcome monitoring tools/management systems to assist in the process of identifying patients who are failing to respond to treatment. The present study explored potential relationships between routine outcome monitoring, deliberate practice, and routine clinical supervision. Results suggest that the vast majority of practicing therapists do not utilize routine outcome monitoring tools/management systems as part of their daily practices of psychotherapy, and most do not incorporate feedback results into their personal clinical supervision experiences. Additionally, results suggest that therapists who have received formalized training with routine outcome monitoring tools and/or are required to engage in weekly supervision, are more likely to monitor their patient outcome as part of their daily practices of psychotherapy. Moreover, self-assessment bias seems to be present within the sample in regards to identifying patient improvement, non-response, and deterioration. Implications for clinical practice and research are discussed, along with limitations and future directions

The principles and practice of open fracture care, 2018

The principles of open fracture management are to manage the overall injury and specifically prevent primary contamination becoming frank infection. The surgical management of these complex injuries includes debridement and lavage of the open wound with combined bony and soft tissue reconstruction. Good results depend on early high quality definitive surgery usually with early stable internal fixation and associated soft tissue repair. While all elements of the surgical principles are very important and depend on each other for overall success the most critical element appears to be achieving very early healthy soft tissue cover. As the injuries become more complex this involves progressively more complex soft tissue reconstruction and may even requiring urgent free tissue transfer requiring close co-operative care between orthopaedic and plastic surgeons. Data suggests that the best results are obtained when the whole surgical reconstruction is completed within 48-72 h

Microplasma antennas: characterizing capillary plasma discharges as potential monopole antennas

This thesis investigates the use of capillary plasma elements, in glass and quartz with sub-millimeter inner diameters and 1-5 cm in length, as monopole antenna elements. Plasma elements of this size have not been demonstrated before, as most plasma antennas use fluorescent tubes with inner diameters greater than 2 cm and longer than 30 cm. In order to validate that capillary plasma elements function well as the conductive element in antenna structures, spectroscopic electron density measurements of the Stark broadening in the Balmer series were performed for two capillary antenna elements. Glass tubes operated as a dielectric barrier discharge, or DBD, driven by an AC voltage of 10--40 kHz showed peak electron densities of n_e = 10^(15) cm^(-3). Time-averaged electron densities and conductivities in these tubes remained well below n_e = 10^(14) cm^(-3) and σ_p = 100 S/m, two threshold values for adequate antenna operation. Quartz tubes driven by a 140 MHz RF voltage maintained time-averaged electron densities of 8 x 10^(14) cm^(-3). This result indicates that capillary microplasma discharges in capillary tubes can be used as monopole antennas with electronically variable resonances and radiation patterns, as well as the opportunity to investigate microplasma monopole elements incorporated into arrays once the engineering problems of plasma breakdown and stability have been solved

A Question Answering Framework for Decontextualizing User-facing Snippets from Scientific Documents

Many real-world applications (e.g., note taking, search) require extracting a sentence or paragraph from a document and showing that snippet to a human outside of the source document. Yet, users may find snippets difficult to understand as they lack context from the original document. In this work, we use language models to rewrite snippets from scientific documents to be read on their own. First, we define the requirements and challenges for this user-facing decontextualization task, such as clarifying where edits occur and handling references to other documents. Second, we propose a framework that decomposes the task into three stages: question generation, question answering, and rewriting. Using this framework, we collect gold decontextualizations from experienced scientific article readers. We then conduct a range of experiments across state-of-the-art commercial and open-source language models to identify how to best provide missing-but-relevant information to models for our task. Finally, we develop QaDecontext, a simple prompting strategy inspired by our framework that improves over end-to-end prompting. We conclude with analysis that finds, while rewriting is easy, question generation and answering remain challenging for today's models.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, 8 tables, EMNLP202

Exhaustive state-to-state cross sections for reactive molecular collisions from importance sampling simulation and a neural network representation

High-temperature, reactive gas flow is inherently nonequilibrium in terms of energy and state population distributions. Modeling such con- ditions is challenging even for the smallest molecular systems due to the extremely large number of accessible states and transitions between them. Here, neural networks (NNs) trained on explicitly simulated data are constructed and shown to provide quantitatively realistic descrip- tions which can be used in mesoscale simulation approaches such as Direct Simulation Monte Carlo to model gas flow at the hypersonic regime. As an example, the state-to-state cross sections for N( 4 S) + NO( 2 Π ) → O( 3 P) + N 2 (X 1 Σ + g ) are computed from quasiclassical trajectory (QCT) simulations. By training NNs on a sparsely sampled noisy set of state-to-state cross sections, it is demonstrated that independently generated reference data are predicted with high accuracy. State-specific and total reaction rates as a function of temperature from the NN are in quantitative agreement with explicit QCT simulations and confirm earlier simulations, and the final state distributions of the vibra- tional and rotational energies agree as well. Thus, NNs trained on physical reference data can provide a viable alternative to computationally demanding explicit evaluation of the microscopic information at run time. This will considerably advance the ability to realistically model nonequilibrium ensembles for network-based simulations

Investigating Marine Recreational Fishing Stakeholders\u27 Perspectives Across Three South Carolina Coastal Regions: The First Step Towards Collaboration

Collaborative endeavors are increasingly utilized to assure active involvement of local stakeholders in natural resource planning and management. In order to enhance collaborative capacity and involve marine recreational anglers in resource management, the South Carolina Sea Grant Extension Program conducted semi-structured interviews in three coastal regions of South Carolina in order to determine: 1) the main problems associated with marine recreation fishing and 2) key non-regulatory solutions to those problems. Top themes for problems and non-regulatory solutions across each region as well as implications for Extension and outreach opportunities are included