Solar Orientation in Home Design

An introduction to solar orientation can be no more than a discussion of the physical principles underlying the subject. A few "solar houses" have been built, with apparently satisfactory results. The University of Illinois has not as yet investigated heating problems in houses of this type. Several points should be noted: A. Solar orientation may be applied to any kind of architectural design, but is best achieved in non-traditional types which permit the use of large glass areas, or groups of windows. B. "Glass areas" may be achieved, at varying costs, with ordinary windows, plate glass, or structural glass. Improvements in the manufactureof glass offer many possibilities of design. C. A "solar house" is not a "glass house," but is one in which glass areas are carefully placed, and protected from summer sun and winter storms. D. The professional advice of an arc hi teet is desirable in planning for solar orientation. An unskilled planner can make serious mistakes by using large glass areas in a manner which results in excessive heat loss. glare, or lack of privacy

Virtual Vistas: High School Students Describing Their Experiences In Online Courses.

Current research indicates that distance education courses can be as effective as traditional courses when the method and technologies used are appropriate to the instructional tasks. The number of states, counties, and school districts that provide online courses for high school students has rapidly expanded during the last ten years. The number of students, who enroll in these courses, has often grown by double digits each year. Understanding K-12 students\u27 experiences in, and expectations of, online learning is important for many reasons. Online learning is certainly growing and may become a graduation requirement in more states. Currently Michigan requires every student must participate in some form of online learning as a high school graduation requirement. High school students enrolling in online courses may have a measurable influence on higher education courses in the future, as students become more experienced with online learning. A great deal has been written about the development of virtual high schools, some of the issues surrounding them and basic student demographics. There are only a few studies that have interviewed students in detail as to why they have chosen to participate in a virtual school and examined how this choice has impacted them. The purpose of this study was to describe from the student\u27s perspective, why they had enrolled in online courses and allowed them to characterize their experiences. Further, this study sought to identify the personality types and traits of the students enrolled in online high school courses and reported on one measure of the student\u27s cognitive style or cognitive tempo. Forty-three students who were enrolled in a state sponsored virtual high school participated in this study. The study used three online instruments to collect data. The Matching Familiar Figures Test-20 was used to measure the impulsive or reflective responses of the students. The Long-Dziuban Reactive Behavioral Survey was used to determine the students\u27 personality types. The third instrument was an online questionnaire of open-ended questions asking the students about their online experiences. In addition, twelve students participated in follow-up interviews. The study found that the students enrolled in online courses for a variety of reasons; students were concerned about and wanted control over the timing and pacing of their learning. Students\u27 comments suggested that there may be a relationship between cognitive tempo as classified by the MFFT-20, and the students\u27 preference for pacing through the online course materials. In addition, the distribution of personality types and cognitive styles represented in this sample were different from the general school population suggesting that perhaps some students are more interested in online learning than others are. After reviewing the results of the students responses to the MFFT-20, it may be that students may are becoming faster at processing visual information with fewer errors. More research is needed in this area. There does seem to be a trend in this direction and this could have implications for students enrolled in virtual high school courses. Finally, the students in this study characterized their online learning experiences as positive but did not feel that online learning should be a high school graduation requirement for all students

Remote Sensing of Icebergs in Greenland\u27s Fjords and Coastal Waters

Increases in ocean water temperature are implicated in driving recent accelerated rates of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Icebergs provide a key tool for gaining insight into ice-ocean interactions and until recently have been relatively understudied. Here we develop several methods that exploit icebergs visible in optical satellite imagery to provide insight on the ice--ocean environment and explore how iceberg datasets can be used to examine the physics of iceberg decay and parent glacier properties. First, a semi-automated algorithm, which includes a machine learning-based cloud mask, is applied to six years (2000-2002 and 2013-2015) of the Landsat archive to derive iceberg size distributions for Disko Bay. These data show an increase in the total number of icebergs and suggest a change in the shape of the iceberg size distribution, concurrent with a shift in the dominant calving style of Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Isbrae), their parent glacier. Second, bathymetry is qualitatively and quantitatively inferred using icebergs as drifters; regions of iceberg drifting and stranding indicate relative bathymetric lows and highs, respectively. To quantify water depth in shallow regions, iceberg draft is inferred from iceberg freeboard under the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium where very high-resolution stereo image pairs of icebergs are available to construct digital elevation models. Although this results in water depths with relatively large uncertainties, the method provides valuable quantitative data in regions where bathymetric observations are unavailable, improving our understanding of sill locations and the consequent ability of warm ocean waters to reach glacier termini. Third, we use the iceberg datasets derived using the previously described methods to probe the spatial patterns of iceberg size distributions. Rigorous discrimination between power law and lognormal size distributions is challenging, but our datasets corroborate the idea that as icebergs move farther from the parent glacier and the primary control on iceberg size transitions from fracture to melting, their size distribution shifts from power law to lognormal. Overall, our analysis suggests that future thorough investigations of iceberg size distributions will serve as a valuable tool to gain insights into the physics of iceberg decay and properties of the parent glacier

Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America

Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men’s and women’s places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing. William Scheick explores logonomic conflict in the works of northeastern colonial women, whose writings often register anxiety not typical of their male contemporaries. This study features the poetry of Mary English and Anne Bradstreet, the letter-journals of Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince, the autobiographical prose of Elizabeth Hanson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, and the political verse of Phyllis Wheatley. These works, along with the writings of other colonial women, provide especially noteworthy instances of bifurcations emanating from American colonial women’s conflicted confiscation of male authority. Scheick reveals subtle authorial uneasiness and subtextual tensions caused by the attempt to draw legitimacy from male authorities and traditions. William J. Scheick, J.R. Miliken Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Design in Puritan American Literature. Addresses the question of how to understand colonial women’s writing given the gendered constraints they faced in their creative endeavors. —American Literature Small and compact, with an excellent index and bibliography, this book joins such similar titles as Amy Lang\u27s Prophetic Women and American Women Writers to 1800, ed. by Sharon Harris. Highly recommended for both undergraduates and advanced scholars. —Choice Offers material of great interest to students and scholars interested in emergent women’s voices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. —Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography It is hard to see that criticism can do more: this is a book which should be read by anyone with an interest in colonial writing; I hope it will be turned to by others well beyond the field. —Journal of American Studies Colonialists and specialists in American women\u27s writing, as well as those who believe in an ethos of looking closely and with respect at the object of study, will come away from this book enriched and encouraged. —Journal of English and Germanic Philology Scheick has made an important and welcome contribution to the growing literature on early American women, writing, and authority. —New England Quarterly Reveals a great deal about the presence of female voices and the struggle between orthodox and individual authority. —Rocky Mountain Review A provocative book which corroborates some of our earlier ideas about female writing in colonial America and finds some new ways of looking at familiar verse and prose. —Seventeenth-Century News The book is short, to the point, timely and rooted in careful attention to primary texts. —South Atlantic Review Should prove a useful book to a variety of readers. Scheick nuances and complicates past feminist readings of authors like Anne Bradstreet, while contributing new readings of writers like Mary English, Esther Burr, Elizabeth Hanson, and Phillis Wheatley. —Teresa A. Toulouse Scheick convincingly demonstrates the ways in which these early texts express the uncertainties of female authorization in colonial America. —The American Cultural Association Journal Provocative, tightly argued, and well written. . . . It models a productive blend of solid historical and cultural contextualizing with the often neglected practice of close, attentive reading. —William and Mary Quarterly This is required reading for scholars in the period. —Year’s Work in English Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_literature/1008/thumbnail.jp

Investigation of the Semicoa 2N7616 and 2N7425 and the Microsemi 2N7480 for Single-Event Gate Rupture and Single-Event Burnout

Single-event-effect test results for hi-rel total-dose-hardened power MOSFETs are presented in this report. The 2N7616 and the 2N7425 from Semicoa and the 2N7480 from International Rectifier were tested to NASA test condition standards and requirements. The 2N7480 performed well and the data agree with the manufacture's data. The 2N7616 and 2N7425 were entry parts from Semicoa using a new device architecture. Unfortunately, the device performed poorly and Semicoa is withdrawing power MOSFETs from it line due to these data. Vertical metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are the most commonly used power transistor. MOSFETs are typically employed in power supplies and high current switching applications. Due to the inherent high electric fields in the device, power MOSFETs are sensitive to heavy ion irradiation and can fail catastrophically as a result of single-event gate rupture (SEGR) or single-event burnout (SEB). Manufacturers have designed radiation-hardened power MOSFETs for space applications. See [1] through [5] for more information. The objective of this effort was to investigate the SEGR and SEB responses of two power MOSFETs recently produced. These tests will serve as a limited verification of these parts. It is acknowledged that further testing on the respective parts may be needed for some mission profiles

Whitman and the Afterlife: "Sparkles from the Wheel"

Reads "Sparkles from the Wheel" as a poem "about time, especially in relation to the afterlife," that views life as "an ongoing sequence of spiraling trajectories in which every ending is always a new beginning.

Design in Puritan American Literature

Puritan American writers faced a dilemma: they had an obligation to use language as a celebration of divine artistry, but they could not allow their writing to become an iconic graven image of authorial self-idolatry. In this study William Scheick explores one way in which William Bradford, Nathaniel Ward, Anne Bradstreet, Urian Oakes, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards mediated these conflicting imperatives. They did so, he argues, by creating moments in their works when they and their audience could hesitate and contemplate the central paradox of language: its capacity to intimate both concealed authorial pride and latent deific design. These ambiguous occasions served Puritan writers as places where the threat of divine wrath and the promise of divine mercy intersected in unresolved tension. By the nineteenth century the heritage of this Christlike mingling of temporal connotation and eternal denotation had mutated. A peculiar late eighteenth-century narrative by Nathan Fiske and a short story by Edward Bellamy both suggest that the binary nature of language exploited by their Puritan ancestors was still a vital authorial concern; but neither of these writers affirms the presence of an eternal denotative signification hidden within the conflicting historical contexts of their apparently allegorical language. For them, appreciation of the mystery of a divine revelation possibly concealed in words yielded to puzzlement over language itself, specifically over the inadequacy of language to signify more than its own instability of design. This book is a tightly focused study of an important aspect of Puritan American writers\u27 use of language by one of the leading scholars in the field of early American literature. William J. Scheick is J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and editor of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. A magisterial study of the uses of language by the major early American puritan writers—among them Bradford, Ward, Bradstreet, Taylor, and Edwards—by one of the leading scholars of their period —Kenneth Cherryhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1026/thumbnail.jp

The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

The half-blood—half Indian, half white—is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed half Indian, half white, and half devil —or a bright link between the races from which would emerge a new American prototype? In this important first study of the fictional half-blood, William J. Scheick examines works ranging from the enormously popular dime novels” and the short fiction of such writers as Bret Harte to the more sophisticated works of Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and others. He discovers that ambivalence characterized nearly all who wrote of the half-blood. Some writers found racial mixing abhorrent, while others saw more benign possibilities. The use of a half-blood in spirit —a character of untainted blood who joined the virtues of the two races in his manner of life—was one ingenious literary strategy adopted by a number of writers, Scheick also compares the literary portrayal of the half-blood with the nineteenth-century view of the mulatto. This pioneering examination of an important symbol in popular literature of the last century opens up a previously unexplored repository of attitudes toward American civilization. An important book for all those concerned with the course of American culture and literature. William J. Scheick, J. R. Miliken Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Design in Puritan American Literature and Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America. Straightforward and concise exploration of how the nineteenth-century American mind responded to the actual and symbolic mingling of red and white blood, barbaric and civilized societies. —The South Carolina Review Suggestive for anyone interested in the vocabulary of race relations. —Journal of American Historyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1015/thumbnail.jp