Personal Space at Parkland College

Through three observations of social cues of students in a community college lounge area, the author concludes that personal space is not mutually exclusive with rudeness. Rather, allowing others their personal space is a way of showing respect

The Other Migration: Internal Displacement in Chiapas and Health

Objectives: To analyze the forced displacement of people in Chiapas for political reasons and to describe the health impacts on the impacted populations

The New Meteor Radar at Penn State: Design and First Observations

In an effort to provide new and improved meteor radar sensing capabilities, Penn State has been developing advanced instruments and technologies for future meteor radars, with primary objectives of making such instruments more capable and more cost effective in order to study the basic properties of the global meteor flux, such as average mass, velocity, and chemical composition. Using low-cost field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), combined with open source software tools, we describe a design methodology enabling one to develop state-of-the art radar instrumentation, by developing a generalized instrumentation core that can be customized using specialized output stage hardware. Furthermore, using object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and open-source tools, we illustrate a technique to provide a cost-effective, generalized software framework to uniquely define an instrument s functionality through a customizable interface, implemented by the designer. The new instrument is intended to provide instantaneous profiles of atmospheric parameters and climatology on a daily basis throughout the year. An overview of the instrument design concepts and some of the emerging technologies developed for this meteor radar are presented

On the succinctness of query rewriting over shallow ontologies

We investigate the succinctness problem for conjunctive query rewritings over OWL2QL ontologies of depth 1 and 2 by means of hypergraph programs computing Boolean functions. Both positive and negative results are obtained. We show that, over ontologies of depth 1, conjunctive queries have polynomial-size nonrecursive datalog rewritings; tree-shaped queries have polynomial positive existential rewritings; however, in the worst case, positive existential rewritings can be superpolynomial. Over ontologies of depth 2, positive existential and nonrecursive datalog rewritings of conjunctive queries can suffer an exponential blowup, while first-order rewritings can be superpolynomial unless NP �is included in P/poly. We also analyse rewritings of tree-shaped queries over arbitrary ontologies and note that query entailment for such queries is fixed-parameter tractable

Statistical Properties of Many Particle Eigenfunctions

Wavefunction correlations and density matrices for few or many particles are derived from the properties of semiclassical energy Green functions. Universal features of fixed energy (microcanonical) random wavefunction correlation functions appear which reflect the emergence of the canonical ensemble as the number of particles approaches infinity. This arises through a little known asymptotic limit of Bessel functions. Constraints due to symmetries, boundaries, and collisions between particles can be included.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Quantum Conductance Steps in Solutions of Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes

We have prepared solutions of multiwalled carbon nanotubes in Aroclor 1254, a mixture of polychlorinated biphenyls. The solutions are stable at room temperature. Transport measurements were performed using a scanning--tunneling probe on a sample prepared by spin--coating of the solution on gold substrates. Conductance steps were clearly seen. An histogram of a high number of traces shows maximum peaks at integer values of the conductance quantum $G_0 = 2e^2/h$, demonstrating ballistic transport at room temperature along the carbon nanotube over distances longer than $1.4\mu m$.Comment: 4 pages and 2 figure

Comprehensive Software Simulation on Ground Power Supply for Launch Pads and Processing Facilities at NASA Kennedy Space Center

A multi-threaded software application has been developed in-house by the Ground Special Power (GSP) team at NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to separately simulate and fully emulate all units that supply VDC power and battery-based power backup to multiple KSC launch ground support systems for NASA Space Launch Systems (SLS) rocket