A full-scale fire program to evaluate new furnishings and textile materials developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

A program of experimental fires was carried out to establish the advantages offered by new materials for improved fire safety. Four full-scale bedrooms, differing only in the materials used to furnish them, were built and burned to provide comparative data on the fire hazards produced. Cost and availability differences were not considered. The visual evidence provided by TV and photographic coverage of the four experimental room fires showed clearly that the rooms responded very differently to a common ignition condition. Resistance to the ignition and spread of fire was substantially improved in the rooms furnished completely or partially with the new materials

"A Path to Community Development, The Community Reinvestment Act, Lending Discrimination, and the Role of Community Development Banks"

The establishment of a system of federally regulated, for-profit, community development banks (CDBs) would help to fill the financial gap in areas inadequately served by traditional banks, requirements of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) notwithstanding. These organizations would be charged with delivering credit, payment, and savings opportunities and providing basic financing to households and small businesses in underserved areas. Such a system would not substitute for the CRA, but rather act as a supplement to current regulation. Proposed exemptions from CRA compliance for depository institutions that invest in the equity of a CDB would weaken the existing law by diluting the investment of the depository institution in its own particular community. Such proposals (under which "investment" has been defined to be as little as one-quarter of one percent of total assets) are not consistent with the spirit of the CRA and would negate the beneficial dialogue that takes place between the institution and the community in which it operates.

"An Alternative in Small Business Finance, Community-Based Factoring Companies and Small Business Lending"

According to Papadimitriou, Phillips, and Wray, at a time when small businesses are suffering from a credit crunch, "niche" financial institutions are filling the void left by more traditional sources of financing, such as commercial banks. The authors argue that the most important of these niche players are community-based factor companies, which are rapidly expanding from their client base in apparel and textiles to finance a range of firms in everything from electronics to health care. The purchase of accounts receivable by factors enhances the balance sheets of their clients, making it easier for the clients to obtain bank financing. Also, because factors are more interested in the creditworthiness of a client's customers than of the client itself, they are willing to extend loans in excess of collateral to rapidly growing businesses. Because factors are becoming an increasingly important source of financing for small and start-up businesses, the authors propose that factors be encouraged to play a broader role in financing firms in distressed communities by (1) making some factors eligible for funding and assistance under legislation regulating community development financial institutions and (2) by allowing investments by banks in factors to count toward compliance under the Community Reinvestment Act.

"The Community Reinvestment Act, Lending Discrimination, and the Role of Community Development Banks"

The Community Development Banks (CDBs) should not be seen as a substitute for the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) or for other programs designed to revitalize lower income areas. Rather, they should be seen as a complement for existing programs and for other programs that will be proposed by the Clinton administration. As discussed above, the CRA process ensures that a dialogue takes place among regulators, financial institutions, and served communities: it ensures that banks identify their communities and that they satisfy some of the needs of these communities. Moreover, it helps to expand the awareness of bankers such that their expectations about presently undeserved areas are revised. It is unrealistic to expect that any financial institution can meet all the needs of any community; this, there is a role for a CDB to play in some communities that supplements the role played by traditional financial institutions. Similarly, while we believe that CDBs have an important role to play in revitalizing low income communities, we certainly do not see these as a substitute for the wide range of programs (both public and private) that will be needed to reverse long trends of deterioration experienced by some distressed communities. Finally, the CDBs are not intended to be welfare programs but to provide services to the community's residents, and consequently, they must meet the long-run market tests of profitability. Aside from the service aspect, community development banks will: (i)improve the well-being of our citizens not now served because of unresponsive, yet traditional loan qualification norms, and (ii) directly increase the opportunities for potential entrepreneurs and potential employees. The basic assumption underlying the community development bank is that all areas of the country need banks that are clearly oriented toward the small customer: households that have a small net worth, a small IRA account, and a small transactions account, and businesses that need financing measured in thousands rather then millions or billions of dollars.

A Full-Scale Fire Program to Evaluate New Furnishings and Textile Materials Developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The plans for the present series of full-scale experimental fires were initiated at the suggestion of NASA following the presentation of a film and discussion illustrating Battelle-Columbus' recent work in fire research. That film showed bedroom-type fires carried out as a part of a program to determine the influence of the cyclic characteristics of real fires under limited ventilation on the burning and pyrolysis properties of the room furnishings. A new series of fires was suggested by NASA designed to show the performance of new fire resistant and fire retardant materials by providing comparative fire and smoldering environmental conditions. More recently, the goal for the new series of fires was written in a meeting with NASA personnel and others at Battelle on May 3 and 4, 1972. The goal was as follows: To establish the need for special materials of improved fire safety in domiciliary settings of public concern, and to assess, in a professionally acceptable manner, the potential of materials arising from the new space-age technology for this purpose. It was anticipated that some new materials arising from the space-age technology and not yet available through conventional commercial channels might provide significant improvements in fire safety if the best of the commercially available materials showed important shortcomings in this area. It was the intent of this program to assess the benefits that could accrue from the use of these new materials. Fire safety is a matter requiring the evaluation of a number of factors. For example, fire resistance and fire spread, visibility during the fire, toxicity of evolved gases, and the fire-fighting problem that is created must be evaluated before the relative hazard can be assessed. The plan of the program provided for sampling and instrumentation to evaluate these factors, consistent with the goal of technological utilization that has been specified. Arrangements were made with the Columbus Fire Department to use an existing six-story concrete building', designed and used as a fire training tower, as the site for the experimental fires. The visual evidence provided by TV and photographic coverage of the four experimental room fires showed clearly that the rooms responded very differently to a common ignition condition. In particular: (1) The Typical room, furnished from conventional retail sources, ignited easily and burned rapidly so that after 8 minutes the contents of the room were nearly destroyed. (2) The Improved room, furnished with materials selected as being among the best commercially available, showed substantial improvement over the Typical room in that there was slower fire spread. However, the relatively complete destruction of the room contents that resulted, and the large amounts of smoke, made it clear that substantial further improvements were needed. This fire was stopped after 29 minutes. (3) The Space-age room, furnished completely with new materials that were not yet commercially available, did not ignite under the common ignition condition and soon demonstrated the substantial improvement in fire resistance available for those components close to the ignition source. A second and larger ignition arrangement showed that this room can burn, but the difficulty with which this was brought about confirmed the improved fire resistance available with use of these materials. (4) The Mixed room ensemble, furnished with 'materials identical to the Typical room except for the substitution of the bed from the Space-age room, illustrated the improvement in control of fire spread available by careful placement of fire materials in the important paths of fire development of an otherwise ordinary room. The most significant hazards at early times in each fire were due to the rapid rise in heat flux and the abrupt obscuration of vision by smoke. The most consistent toxicity hazard was due to CO and its importance would depend on the ability of the occupant to survive the initial heat and smoke menace which characterized each fire room. Other gases and vapors were shown to reach hazardous levels in certain fire rooms and, again, their significance to an occupant, would relate to the times in which such hazards occurred, and probably to the synergistic nature of the hazard arising from mixtures of such gases. Fire retardant items in the room are caused to pyrolyze by the heat of burning from other items in the room and so contribute to combustible and toxic vapor accumulations, even though they may not have entered into the burning process. This effect of a mixture of combustible materials to produce burning and pyrolysis not characteristic of any one item individually we have chosen to call the "ensemble effect". Further full-scale fire trials may be expected to show the significant changes that control the burning and pyrolytic processes and in that event a programmed fire chamber should be developed to yield realistic laboratory results

"Community Development Banking, A Proposal to Establish a Nationwide System of Community Development Banks"

This brief proposes that the establishment of a nationwide system of community development banks (CDBs) would advance the capital development of the economy. The proposal is based on the notion that a critical function of the financial system is not being adequately performed by existing institutions for low-income citizens, inner-city minorities, and entrepreneurs who seek modest financing for small businesses. The primary goals of the CDBs are to deliver credit, payment, and savings opportunities to communities not well served by banks and to provide financing throughout a designated area for businesses too small to attract the interest of the investment banking and normal commercial banking communities.

Fermi surface topology and low-lying quasiparticle structure of magnetically ordered Fe1+xTe

We report the first photoemission study of Fe1+xTe - the host compound of the newly discovered iron-chalcogenide superconductors. Our results reveal a pair of nearly electron- hole compensated Fermi pockets, strong Fermi velocity renormalization and an absence of a spin-density-wave gap. A shadow hole pocket is observed at the "X"-point of the Brillouin zone which is consistent with a long-range ordered magneto-structural groundstate. No signature of Fermi surface nesting instability associated with Q= pi(1/2, 1/2) is observed. Our results collectively reveal that the Fe1+xTe series is dramatically different from the undoped phases of the high Tc pnictides and likely harbor unusual mechanism for superconductivity and quantum magnetic order.Comment: 5 pages, 4 Figures; Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. (2009

The Mid-IR Spectral Effects of Darkening Agents and Porosity on the Silicate Surface Features of Airless Bodies

We systematically measured the mid-IR spectra of different mixtures of three silicates (antigorite, lizardite, and pure silica) with varying effective porosities and amounts of darkening agent (iron oxide and carbon). These spectra have broad implications for interpretation of current and future mission data for airless bodies, as well as for testing the capabilities of new instruments. Serpentines, such as antigorite and lizardite, are common to airless surfaces, and their mid-IR spectra in the presence of darkening agents and different surface porosities would be typical for those measured by spacecraft. Silica has only been measured in the plumes of Enceladus and presents exciting possibilities for other Saturn-system surfaces due to long range transport of E-ring material. Results show that the addition of the IR-transparent salt, KBr, to simulate surface porosity affected silicate spectra in ways that were not predictable from linear mixing models. The strengthening of silicate bands with increasing pore space, even when only trace amounts of KBr were added, indicates that spectral features of porous surfaces are more detectable in the mid-IR. Combining iron oxide with the pure silicates seemed to flatten most of the silicate features, but strengthened the reststrahlen band of the silica. Incorporating carbon with the silicates weakened all silicate features, but the silica bands were more resistant to being diminished, indicating silica may be more detectable in the mid-IR than the serpentines. We show how incorporating darkening agents and porosity provides a more complete explanation of the mid-IR spectral features previously reported on worlds such as Iapetus

Emergence of Fermi pockets in an excitonic CDW melted novel superconductor

A superconducting (SC) state (Tc ~ 4.2K) has very recently been observed upon successful doping of the CDW ordered triangular lattice TiSe$_2$, with copper. Using high resolution photoemission spectroscopy we identify, for the first time, the momentum space locations of the doped electrons that form the Fermi sea of the parent superconductor. With doping, we find that the kinematic nesting volume increases whereas the coherence of the CDW order sharply drops. In the superconducting doping, we observe the emergence of a large density of states in the form of a narrow electron pocket near the \textit{L}-point of the Brillouin Zone with \textit{d}-like character. The \textit{k}-space electron distributions highlight the unconventional interplay of CDW to SC cross-over achieved through non-magnetic copper doping.Comment: 4+ pages, 5 figures; Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett. (2007

Complete d-Band Dispersion and the Mobile Fermion Scale in NaxCoO2

We utilize fine-tuned polarization selection coupled with excitation-energy variation of photoelectron signal to image the \textit{complete d}-band dispersion relation in sodium cobaltates. A hybridization gap anticrossing is observed along the Brillouin zone corner and the full quasiparticle band is found to emerge as a many-body entity lacking a pure orbital polarization. At low dopings, the quasiparticle bandwidth (Fermion scale, many-body \textit{E$_F$} $\sim$ 0.25 eV) is found to be smaller than most known oxide metals. The low-lying density of states is found to be in agreement with bulk-sensitive thermodynamic measurements for nonmagnetic dopings where the 2D Luttinger theorem is also observed to be satisfied.Comment: 4+ pages, 5 Fig