Catalyzing Collaboration: The Developing Infrastructure for Federal Public Private Partnerships

There is growing interest on the part of government, philanthropy and business to work together to achieve greater impact. Partnerships that span the sectors have the potential to achieve more than any sector can achieve on its own by leveraging the strengths of each. However, such partnerships also give rise to added costs and entail greater risks. To address these challenges, offices of strategic partnerships are emerging at the federal level to provide an infrastructure to catalyze cross-sectoral partnerships. This report examines 21 such offices in federal departments and agencies whose purpose is to facilitate and accelerate partnerships with philanthropy and business -- ranging from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education, to the Department of State and the Agency for International Development, to the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The formation of these offices has been driven by champions within government -- many with prior experience in philanthropy or business -- that have witnessed the power of working collaboratively with other sectors. Their actions have often been reinforced by executive orders and other directives conducive to their growth. In the case of those offices that have been created in the last few years, they have also been encouraged by the examples of their more established counterparts

An Age-Period-Cohort Database of Inter-Regional Migration in Australia and Britain, 1976-96

Report prepared as part of a collaborative project on "Migration Trends in Australia and Britain: Levels and Trends in an Age-Period-Cohort Framework" funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Australian Research Council. This paper describes the way in which parallel databases of inter-regional migration flows for Australia and Britain, classified by five year ages and birth cohorts for four five year periods between 1976 and 1996. The data processing involves estimation of migration data for comparable spatial units, the reduction of the number of those units to a reduced set for ease of analysis, the extraction of migration data from official data files supplied by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Office for National Statistics, and the filling of gaps in these files through iterative proportional fitting for some of the British data. The final stage in preparation of the migration databases was to estimate the numbers of transitions (Australia) or movements (Britain) for age-period-cohort spaces. In principle, this last estimation involves a fairly simple interpolation or aggregation of age-time classified migration data, but in practice a great deal of detailed attention is required. A final section specifies the populations at risk to be used for each age-period-cohort observation plan to compute migration intensities

Harmonising Databases for the Cross National Study of Internal Migration: Lessons from Australia and Britain

This project involves the development of a Web interface to origin-destination statistics from the 1991 Census (in a form that will be compatible with planned 2001 outputs). It provides the user with a set of screen-based tools for setting the parameters governing each data extraction (data set, areas, variables) in the form of a query. Traffic light icons are used to signal what the user has set so far and what remains to be done. There are options to extract different types of flow data and to generate output in different formats. The system can now be used to access the interaction flow data contained in the 1991 Special Migration Statistics Sets 1 and 2 and Special Workplace Statistics Set C. WICID has been demonstrated at the Origin-Destination Statistics Roadshows organised by GRO Scotland and held during May/June 2000 and the Census Offices have expressed interest in using the software in the Census Access Project

Lattice quark propagator with staggered quarks in Landau and Laplacian gauges

We report on the lattice quark propagator using standard and improved Staggered quark actions, with the standard, Wilson gauge action. The standard Kogut-Susskind action has errors of \oa{2} while the ``Asqtad'' action has \oa{4}, \oag{2}{2} errors. The quark propagator is interesting for studying the phenomenon of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and as a test-bed for improvement. Gauge dependent quantities from lattice simulations may be affected by Gribov copies. We explore this by studying the quark propagator in both Landau and Laplacian gauges. Landau and Laplacian gauges are found to produce very similar results for the quark propagator.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figure

A bodner-partom visco-plastic dynamic sphere benchmark problem

Developing benchmark analytic solutions for problems in solid and fluid mechanics is very important for the purpose of testing and verifying computational physics codes. Our primary objective in this research is to obtain a benchmark analytic solution to the equation of motion in radially symmetric spherical coordinates. An analytic solution for the dynamic response of a sphere composed of an isotropic visco-plastic material and subjected to spherically symmetric boundary conditions is developed and implemented. The radial displacement u is computed by solving the equation of motion, a linear second-order hyperbolic PDE. The plastic strains εp and εp are computed by solving two non-linear first-order ODEs in time. We obtain a solution for u in terms of the plastic strain components and boundary conditions in the form of an infinite series. Computationally, at each time step, we set up an iteration scheme to solve the PDE-ODE system. The linear momentum equation is solved using the plastic strains from the previous iteration, then the plastic strain equations are solved numerically using the new displacement. We demonstrate the accuracy and convergence of our benchmark solution under spatial mesh, time step, and eigenmode refinement

Thermal Modeling in Polymer Extrusion

In this paper we consider thermal effects of polymer flows through a cylindrical die. First, we derive a model for the oscillatory behavior of polymer flow in an extruder given a functional relation between the pressure and flow rate. A simple isothermal but temperature dependent model is constructed to find this relation. Unfortunately, the model is shown to be invalid in the physical regime of interest. We present several arguments to suggest that the isothermal assumption is reasonable but that a more detailed understanding of the small-scale molecular dynamics near the boundary may be required. Second, we show that a simplified model for thermoflow multiplicity in a cooled tube is inconsistent, when the stationary non-Newtonian flow is assumed to be incompressible without radial pressure gradients and without radial velocity. This inconsistency can be removed by allowing for weak compressibility effects in the down-steam area

Graphene as a Novel Single Photon Counting Optical and IR Photodetector

Bilayer graphene has many unique optoelectronic properties , including a tuneable band gap, that make it possible to develop new and more efficient optical and nanoelectronic devices. We have developed a Monte Carlo simulation for a single photon counting photodetector incorporating bilayer graphene. Our results show that, conceptually it would be feasible to manufacture a single photon counting photodetector (with colour sensitivity) from bilayer graphene for use across both optical and infrared wavelengths. Our concept exploits the high carrier mobility and tuneable band gap associated with a bilayer graphene approach. This allows for low noise operation over a range of cryogenic temperatures, thereby reducing the cost of cryogens with a trade off between resolution and operating temperature. The results from this theoretical study now enable us to progress onto the manufacture of prototype photon counters at optical and IR wavelengths that may have the potential to be groundbreaking in some scientific research applications.Comment: Conference Proceeding in Graphene-Based Technologies, 201

Mechanisms of burst release from pH-responsive polymeric microparticles.

Microencapsulation of drugs into preformed polymers is commonly achieved through solvent evaporation techniques or spray drying. We compared these encapsulation methods in terms of controlled drug release properties of the prepared microparticles and investigated the underlying mechanisms responsible for the “burst release” effect. Using two different pH-responsive polymers with a dissolution threshold of pH 6 (Eudragit L100 and AQOAT AS-MG), hydrocortisone, a model hydrophobic drug, was incorporated into microparticles below and above its solubility within the polymer matrix. Although, spray drying is an attractive approach due to rapid particle production and relatively low solvent waste, the oil-in-oil microencapsulation method is superior in terms of controlled drug release properties from the microparticles. Slow solvent evaporation during the oil-in-oil emulsification process allows adequate time for drug and polymer redistribution in the microparticles and reduces uncontrolled drug burst release. Electron microscopy showed that this slower manufacturing procedure generated non-porous particles whereas thermal analysis and X-ray diffractometry showed that drug loading above the solubility limit of the drug in the polymer generated excess crystalline drug on the surface of the particles. Raman spectral mapping illustrated that drug was homogeneously distributed as a solid solution in the particles when loaded below saturation in the polymer with consequently minimal burst release