Scholars GeoPortal: A New Platform for Geospatial Data Discovery, Exploration and Access in Ontario Universities

The need to support and promote the use of geospatial data and available collections has grown at Ontario Universities in recent years. These data, along with numeric data collections, are used to enhance research and expand the skill set of students graduating from a broad array of disciplines. Providing access to these types of data collections has proven challenging, and access points available to large groups of people inside academia, in government and public domains have been made possible through online portal implementations. The defined need for a geospatial portal at Ontario Universities is outlined in the first part of this paper, followed by components of the Geospatial Portal Project vision and specific requirements and technical aspects of the project. How metadata is handled is also discussed, as is the implementation of the portal’s web application. Additional project components include health data collections that are available to researchers and which could be used in conjunction with the portal. Finally, project governance and future growth beyond the Ontario user base are also discussed

Preliminary report on IUE spectra of the Crab Nebula

The Crab Nebula is marginally observable with the IUE. Observations of the optically brightest filamentary regions, made with IUE in August 1979, show the C IV lambda 1549, He II lambda 1640, and C III lambda 1909 emission lines. The intensities of these lines were compared with the visual wavelength data. It appears that carbon is not overabundant in the Crab; carbon/oxygen is approximately normal and oxygen is slightly scarcer than normal as a fraction of the total mass

Writing through the Walls: Shirley Jackson, House/Wife

Shirley Jackson’s writing career was haunted by questions of genre. The mid-century New England writer is best known for her eerie novels about women whose selves splintered under the pressure of the houses they inhabited—a story famously told in The Haunting of Hill House (1959). But she also wrote humorous sketches of family life for popular women’s magazines, selections of which she collected into the memoirs Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). As Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin (2016) observes, this supposed schism bothered critics, who regularly commented on Jackson’s split writer/housewife persona. But Jackson’s memoirs sound some of the same uncanny notes as her fictions—a new family home “insists” that the furniture is arranged just so—and her fictions derive their creeping dread from the writer’s experiences of the everyday violence of small-town life and the patriarchal family form. Shirley Jackson’s generic dexterity results in a body of work that depicts the family home as a locus of warmth, comfort, imagination, constraint, and entrapment—an undecidability mirrored in the writer’s own struggles with agoraphobia near the end of her life. Beginning with “an expanded concept of the autobiographical signature or trace” (Brophy and Hladki 2014, 6), this paper reads across the generic seams of Jackson’s writing. Articulating key scenes from her memoirs with details from her two final novels—Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)—I frame Jackson as reaching towards a new “home” capacious enough to give her multiple, conflicting selves room to breathe. Following Marlene Kadar (1992), I argue that Jackson’s writings “manifest various subject-locations for the self to inhabit” (131). By endlessly revising the story of a woman and a house, she conjures “witchy” new feminine subjectivities—and worlds inventive enough to house them

The Dark Matter Problem in Light of Quantum Gravity

We show how, by considering the cumulative effect of tiny quantum gravitational fluctuations over very large distances, it may be possible to: ($a$) reconcile nucleosynthesis bounds on the density parameter of the Universe with the predictions of inflationary cosmology, and ($b$) reproduce the inferred variation of the density parameter with distance. Our calculation can be interpreted as a computation of the contribution of quantum gravitational degrees of freedom to the (local) energy density of the Universe.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, (3 figues, not included

Preliminary Report on IUE Spectra of Crab Nebula

The Crab Nebula is marginally observable with the IUE. Observations of the optically brightest filamentary regions, made with IUE in August 1979, show the C IV x1549, He II x1640, and C III] x1909 emission lines. The intensities of these lines have been compared with visual-wavelength data. It appears that carbon is not overabundant in the Crab; carbon/- oxygen is approximately normal oxygen is slightly scarcer than normal as a fraction of the total mass.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1005/thumbnail.jp

Core-Collapse Simulations of Rotating Stars

We present the results from a series of two-dimensional core-collapse simulations using a rotating progenitor star. We find that the convection in these simulations is less vigorous because a) rotation weakens the core bounce which seeds the neutrino-driven convection and b) the angular momentum profile in the rotating core stabilizes against convection. The limited convection leads to explosions which occur later and are weaker than the explosions produced from the collapse of non-rotating cores. However, because the convection is constrained to the polar regions, when the explosion occurs, it is stronger along the polar axis. This asymmetric explosion can explain the polarization measurements of core-collapse supernovae. These asymmetries also provide a natural mechanism to mix the products of nucleosynthesis out into the helium and hydrogen layers of the star. We also discuss the role the collapse of these rotating stars play on the generation of magnetic fields and neutron star kicks. Given a range of progenitor rotation periods, we predict a range of supernova energies for the same progenitor mass. The critical mass for black hole formation also depends upon the rotation speed of the progenitor.Comment: 16 pages text + 13 figures, submitted to Ap

Non-stationary Rayleigh-Taylor instability in supernovae ejecta

The Rayleigh-Taylor instability plays an important role in the dynamics of several astronomical objects, in particular, in supernovae (SN) evolution. In this paper we develop an analytical approach to study the stability analysis of spherical expansion of the SN ejecta by using a special transformation in the co-moving coordinate frame. We first study a non-stationary spherical expansion of a gas shell under the pressure of a central source. Then we analyze its stability with respect to a no radial, non spherically symmetric perturbation of the of the shell. We consider the case where the polytropic constant of the SN shell is $\gamma=5/3$ and we examine the evolution of a arbitrary shell perturbation. The dispersion relation is derived. The growth rate of the perturbation is found and its temporal and spatial evolution is discussed. The stability domain depends on the ejecta shell thickness, its acceleration, and the perturbation wavelength.Comment: 16 page

Prospectus, September 24, 1980

RODNEY DANGERFIELD GETS SOME RESPECT FROM PC; PCF group greets newcomers; Parkland offers COSMOS telecourse; Clerks to be on campus to register voters; Women\u27s Program discusses importance of adequate diet; Breakdown of budget: Where does all your money go?; Women\u27s Program presents last of self-care series; Parkland College Board of Trustees meets; Members needed; A friend is someone who...; Family Life Program offers Living in Step ; Chimera Inc. offers workshop; PACT presents seminar for expectant parents; Steve Goodman: A talented performer; The Ducks have a good time; Rodney Dangerfield: I don\u27t get no respect; He will always get respect in Champaign-Urbana ; Francis named Outstanding Young Men of America ; Eisner to hold celebration; Classifieds; Showcase and workshop Oct. 8; PACT presents program: Early childhood; Volleyballers win two; Upsets spoil Fast Freddy; All you lost freshman-- pay attention to this story; Fast Freddy Contesthttps://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_1980/1020/thumbnail.jp