The Use and Value of Data Warehousing in Higher Education

Industry is experiencing a dramatic increase in the use of data warehousing techniques, but higher education has been slow to follow suit. This paper illustrates some common uses of data warehousing in industry, provides higher education analogues and suggests the potential value of data warehousing techniques to colleges and universities

Thick films of YSZ electrolytes by dip-coating process

Yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ, 8% Y2O3) thick films were coated on porous Ni-YSZ substrates using the dip-coating process and a suspension with a new formulation. The suspension was obtained by addition of a polymeric matrix in a stable suspension of a commercial YSZ (Tosoh) powders dispersed in an azeotropic MEK-EtOH mixture. The green layers were densified after an optimization of the suspension composition. YSZ Tosoh particles encapsulated by a zirconium alkoxide sol and added with colloidal alkoxide precursor are used to load the suspension. The in situ growth of these colloids increases significantly the layers density after an appropriated heat treatment. The obtained films are continuous, homogeneous and 20 μm thick. Different microstructures are obtained depending on the synthesis parameters of the suspension

Around the world business process education and research has taken off, except in the USA. Why?

Today’s leading organizations are investing millions of dollars in Business Process Management (BPM) related services and software products. The BPM area is expected to be a $26B industry next year and grow by at least 12% for the foreseeable future. However, the bulk of BPM research and university-level course offerings are not in the USA. Why is there so little BPM education and research in the USA? Why are top recruiting firms for this area in the USA going to Europe or to Ops Management or Industrial Engineering? Are we laggards in the USA, or do we know something the rest of the world fails to see? These questions and the other questions and related topics will be addressed in this panel session.(undefined

Plug flow and the breakdown of Bagnold scaling in cohesive granular flows

Cohesive granular media flowing down an inclined plane are studied by discrete element simulations. Previous work on cohesionless granular media demonstrated that within the steady flow regime where gravitational energy is balanced by dissipation arising from intergrain forces, the velocity profile in the flow direction scales with depth in a manner consistent with the predictions of Bagnold. Here we demonstrate that this Bagnold scaling does not hold for the analogous steady-flows in cohesive granular media. We develop a generalization of the Bagnold constitutive relation to account for our observation and speculate as to the underlying physical mechanisms responsible for the different constitutive laws for cohesive and noncohesive granular media.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure

Spitzer observations of extragalactic H II regions - III. NGC 6822 and the hot star, H II region connection

Using the short-high module of the Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope, we have measured the [S IV] 10.51, [Ne II] 12.81, [Ne III] 15.56, and [S III] 18.71-micron emission lines in nine H II regions in the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 6822. These lines arise from the dominant ionization states of the elements neon (Ne$^{++}$, Ne$^+$) and sulphur (S$^{3+}$, S$^{++}$), thereby allowing an analysis of the neon to sulphur abundance ratio as well as the ionic abundance ratios Ne$^+$/Ne$^{++}$ and S$^{3+}$/S$^{++}$. By extending our studies of H II regions in M83 and M33 to the lower metallicity NGC 6822, we increase the reliability of the estimated Ne/S ratio. We find that the Ne/S ratio appears to be fairly universal, with not much variation about the ratio found for NGC 6822: the median (average) Ne/S ratio equals 11.6 (12.2$\pm$0.8). This value is in contrast to Asplund et al.'s currently best estimated value for the Sun: Ne/S = 6.5. In addition, we continue to test the predicted ionizing spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from various stellar atmosphere models by comparing model nebulae computed with these SEDs as inputs to our observational data, changing just the stellar atmosphere model abundances. Here we employ a new grid of SEDs computed with different metallicities: Solar, 0.4 Solar, and 0.1 Solar. As expected, these changes to the SED show similar trends to those seen upon changing just the nebular gas metallicities in our plasma simulations: lower metallicity results in higher ionization. This trend agrees with the observations.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures. To be published in MNRAS. reference added and typos fixed. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0804.0828, which is paper II by Rubin et al. (2008

Revealing the news: How online news changes without you noticing

This paper describes an ongoing design project relating to online news and how alterations to news stories are hidden from the reader. As the delivery and consumption of news content online continues to overtake other channels in reader numbers and market penetration, so methods of transparency and reliability developed over centuries continue also to be tested by digital media. We have conducted content analysis on existing stories and examined how news organisations and channels handle rapidly evolving news stories. We have proceeded to develop low-fidelity prototypes and an interaction model to test our design approach. The outcomes are in production and will result in a digital artifact that reveals editorial changes to news items (the News Inspector). These changes will be made visible within the browser. The implications of the project relate to the wider question of news truth-telling, trust and online news credibility

UAS-SfM for coastal research : geomorphic feature extraction and land cover classification from high-resolution elevation and optical imagery

© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Remote Sensing 9 (2017): 1020, doi:10.3390/rs9101020.The vulnerability of coastal systems to hazards such as storms and sea-level rise is typically characterized using a combination of ground and manned airborne systems that have limited spatial or temporal scales. Structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry applied to imagery acquired by unmanned aerial systems (UAS) offers a rapid and inexpensive means to produce high-resolution topographic and visual reflectance datasets that rival existing lidar and imagery standards. Here, we use SfM to produce an elevation point cloud, an orthomosaic, and a digital elevation model (DEM) from data collected by UAS at a beach and wetland site in Massachusetts, USA. We apply existing methods to (a) determine the position of shorelines and foredunes using a feature extraction routine developed for lidar point clouds and (b) map land cover from the rasterized surfaces using a supervised classification routine. In both analyses, we experimentally vary the input datasets to understand the benefits and limitations of UAS-SfM for coastal vulnerability assessment. We find that (a) geomorphic features are extracted from the SfM point cloud with near-continuous coverage and sub-meter precision, better than was possible from a recent lidar dataset covering the same area; and (b) land cover classification is greatly improved by including topographic data with visual reflectance, but changes to resolution (when <50 cm) have little influence on the classification accuracy.This project was funded by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coastal and Marine Geology Program and the Department of the Interior Northeast Climate Science Center

The single-cell pathology landscape of breast cancer.

Single-cell analyses have revealed extensive heterogeneity between and within human tumours1-4, but complex single-cell phenotypes and their spatial context are not at present reflected in the histological stratification that is the foundation of many clinical decisions. Here we use imaging mass cytometry5 to simultaneously quantify 35 biomarkers, resulting in 720 high-dimensional pathology images of tumour tissue from 352 patients with breast cancer, with long-term survival data available for 281 patients. Spatially resolved, single-cell analysis identified the phenotypes of tumour and stromal single cells, their organization and their heterogeneity, and enabled the cellular architecture of breast cancer tissue to be characterized on the basis of cellular composition and tissue organization. Our analysis reveals multicellular features of the tumour microenvironment and novel subgroups of breast cancer that are associated with distinct clinical outcomes. Thus, spatially resolved, single-cell analysis can characterize intratumour phenotypic heterogeneity in a disease-relevant manner, with the potential to inform patient-specific diagnosis

Directly photoexcited Dirac and Weyl fermions in ZrSiS and NbAs

We report ultrafast optical measurements of the Dirac line-node semimetal ZrSiS and the Weyl semimetal NbAs, using mid-infrared pump photons from 86 meV to 500 meV to directly excite Dirac and Weyl fermions within the linearly dispersing bands. In NbAs, the photoexcited Weyl fermions initially form a non-thermal distribution, signified by a brief spike in the differential reflectivity whose sign is controlled by the relative energy of the pump and probe photons. In ZrSiS, electron-electron scattering rapidly thermalizes the electrons, and the spike is not observed. Subsequently, hot carriers in both materials cool within a few picoseconds. This cooling, as seen in the two materials’ differential reflectivity, differs in sign, shape, and timescale. Nonetheless, we find that it may be described in a simple model of thermal electrons, without free parameters. The electronic cooling in ZrSiS is particularly fast, which may make the material useful for optoelectronic applications