The Big Wish, Concordia College, 2015

The purpose of this Capstone project was to create an event centered on an existing event within the sports industry. The Big Wish - Concordia College an event based off a wish granting experience through the Make-a-Wish Foundation along with a football game at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Further research was conducted to identify how the Make-a-Wish Foundation grants wishes to children. Some of the findings indicated that a child must be between 2.5 and years old, have a life threatening illness, referred by someone, and have not had a wish granted previously. Using the research shown through the wish granting process, the event was created and a child by the name of Jimmy Flowers was identified to have a wish be granted. Through the collaboration of the local Make-a-Wish Foundation, Concordia College, and the Student Athletic Advisory Committee at Concordia, the wish experience for Jimmy Flowers was able to be granted. This Capstone detailed the specifics of the Big Wish - Concordia College event, including items such as: a marketing and risk management plan, budget, ethical analysis, a plan for motivating employees, and a personal reflection

EVOLUZIONE DELLA LAGUNA DI TONNARELLA (MAZARA DEL VALLO, TRAPANI) E SUO ATTUALE VALORE ORNITOLOGICO

Temporal changing of Tonnarella lagoon (Mazara del Vallo, Trapani) and its current ornithological value. Aims of this work were to highlight the importance of a small and artificial recently formed wetland area, that presents different interesting ornithological peculiarities. The Tonnarella lagoon is a breeding site of Little Tern Sternula albifrons and Kentish Plover Charadrius alexandrinus, both classified as “endangered” species in 2011 by the Red List of breeding birds in Italy; the site is considered of “national importance“ for Kentish Plover and “recorded site“ for the Sandwich Tern Sterna sandvicensis, due to the consistency of its wintering populations. Besides, the ornithological importance of this zone increases by the presence of migrating species included in the “Birds” 79/409/CEE Directive and in the Bern, Bonn and Washington international conventions; their status is considered at risk in the near future, according to the most recent estimates in Europe. The value of this area has been also highlighted by the method of evaluation H.A.T., both for breeding and wintering species. Nevertheless, Tonnarella lagoon is at risk of disappearing, because of the competent Authority choices to use it as storage for the dredging of sludge extracted from the harbour of Mazara del Vallo

IL SUCCIACAPRE CAPRIMULGUS EUROPAEUS (Aves Caprimulgiformes) NIDIFICANTE ALLO STAGNONE DI MARSALA (TRAPANI)

First breeding of Nightjar Caprimulgus europaeus (Aves Caprimulgiformes) in the Stagnone di Marsala (Trapani, western Sicily

Interactions of Cosmic Rays in the primary energy range (0.1-1) PeV studied by the ARGO-YBJ Experiment

The ARGO-YBJ detector layout, features and location offer a unique possibility for a detailed study of several characteristics of the hadronic component of the cosmic ray flux in an energy range hardly accessed by direct measurements. The proton-air cross section has already been measured by ARGO-YBJ in an energy region up to ~ 100 TeV where the primary cosmic ray composition is sufficiently well known for that measure to be unbiased. The analog readout of the RPC signals now provides new tools to measure the lateral distribution of particle density (LDF) as close as a few meters from the core and to investigate with unprecedented resolution the shower time structure. This allows to extend the hadronic interaction and mass composition studies up to ~PeV energies in the laboratory rest frame. Moreover, it is shown that the LDF of detected showers can be properly described, even very close to the shower axis, by a NKG-like function, whose shape parameter is clearly related to the shower age and can be used for studying the mass composition of cosmic rays

Energy consumption and environmental impact of Urban Air mobility

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a recent concept proposed for solving urban mobility problems, such as urban traffic pollution, congestion, and noises. The goal of this investigation is to develop a backward model for an electric aerial taxi in order to estimate the electric consumption and the indirect emissions of carbon dioxide in a specified mission. The model takes as input the time histories of speed and altitude and estimates the power at the rotor shaft during the mission with a quasi-static approach. The shaft power is used as input for the electric drive where the motor is modelled with an efficiency map and a transfer function while an equivalent circuit model which includes aging effects is used for the battery. The emissions of CO 2 are calculated as a function of the Greenhouse emission intensity and compared with that of a hybrid electric taxi performing the same mission with the same payload. A plug-in Toyota Prius modelled through the software ADVISOR is considered for the comparison. The results show that the air taxi behaves better than the road taxi not only in terms of trip time but also from the environmental point of view if the charging of the battery is performed with the emission intensity factory expected to be reached in Europe in 2025

White light-emitting diodes for optical stimulation of aluminium oxide in OSL dosimetry

The results of comparative investigations into the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) of anion-defective corundum excited by radiation of blue and white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are reported. The continuous-wave OSL (CW-OSL) measurements showed that the white LED (compared to the blue LED) and the chosen geometry allow the amplitude of the OSL response to increase by a factor of more than 40 and the dosimetric information readout time to decrease by a factor of 20. The effect of deep traps on the behavior of the CW-OSL curves of anion-defective corundum was studied. It was found that the filling of deep traps essentially increases the TL yield with a dosimetric peak at 450 K and the CW-OSL-yield under stimulation with blue and white LEDs. It was also found that this filling causes a considerable change in the shape of the OSL curve and the time parameters of the decay. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The peculiarities of anion vacancy distribution and the relationship between their concentration and the Tld-500 detector Tl output

A procedure has been developed for estimating the uniformity of anion vacancy distribution in TLD-500 detectors on the basis of anion-deficient corundum single crystals. Vacancy distribution topograms were constructed for TLD-500 detectors with different sensitivities to irradiation. Analysis of the topograms provided correlations between average anion vacancy concentrations and thermoluminescent (TL) yields in the main peak with a maximum at 450 K. To confirm the pattern of regularities, the effects of high-temperature annealing of TLD-500 samples in air at T = 1700 K were studied depending on its duration. Increasing the annealing time from 40 to 105 minutes was found to correlatedly reduce the anion vacancy concentrations and TL-yields in the basic and high-temperature peaks at 450 and 830 K, respectively. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.The work was partly supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (Grant No. 18-08-00093-a) and UB RAS (pr. 18-11-2-2)

Nuclear deformation and neutrinoless double-β\beta decay of 94,96^{94,96}Zr, 98,100^{98,100}Mo, 104^{104}Ru, 110^{110}Pd, 128,130^{128,130}Te and 150^{150}Nd nuclei in mass mechanism

The $(\beta ^{-}\beta ^{-})_{0\nu}$ decay of $^{94,96}$Zr, $^{98,100}$Mo, $^{104}$Ru, $^{110}$Pd, $^{128,130}$Te and $^{150}$Nd isotopes for the $0^{+}\to 0^{+}$ transition is studied in the Projected Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov framework. In our earlier work, the reliability of HFB intrinsic wave functions participating in the $\beta ^{-}\beta ^{-}$ decay of the above mentioned nuclei has been established by obtaining an overall agreement between the theoretically calculated spectroscopic properties, namely yrast spectra, reduced $B(E2$:$0^{+}\to 2^{+})$ transition probabilities, quadrupole moments $Q(2^{+})$, gyromagnetic factors $g(2^{+})$ as well as half-lives $T_{1/2}^{2\nu}$ for the $0^{+}\to 0^{+}$ transition and the available experimental data. In the present work, we study the $(\beta ^{-}\beta ^{-})_{0\nu}$ decay for the $0^{+}\to 0^{+}$ transition in the mass mechanism and extract limits on effective mass of light as well as heavy neutrinos from the observed half-lives $T_{1/2}^{0\nu}(0^{+}\to 0^{+})$ using nuclear transition matrix elements calculated with the same set of wave functions. Further, the effect of deformation on the nuclear transition matrix elements required to study the $(\beta ^{-}\beta ^{-})_{0\nu}$ decay in the mass mechanism is investigated. It is noticed that the deformation effect on nuclear transition matrix elements is of approximately same magnitude in $(\beta ^{-}\beta ^{-})_{2\nu}$ and $(\beta ^{-}\beta ^{-})_{0\nu}$ decay.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figur