Catholic Grammar School

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. Early in our daughter’s catholic grammar school career, one of her fellow first graders very formally greeted her by smiling and saying “good morning, Ciara”. From that moment on, my husband and I began to notice how our daughter and the other children developed a special bond that was fostered by a very warm and nurturing environment

Far Infrared Spectroscopy

Contains a report on a research project

Degradation by the atmosphere of microwave radiometric observations from space - 0.5 to 20 GHz, volume 2 Final report

Brightness temperatures and emissivities of sea wate

Analysis of aircraft microwave measurements of the ocean surface

A data system was developed to process, from calibrated brightness temperature to computation of estimated parameters, the microwave measurements obtained by the NASA CV-990 aircraft during the 1972 Meteorological Expedition. A primary objective of the study was the implementation of an integrated software system at the computing facility of NASA/GSFC, and its application to the 1972 data. A single test case involving measurements away from and over a heavy rain cell was chosen to examine the effect of clouds upon the ability to infer ocean surface parameters. The results indicate substantial agreement with those of the theoretical study; namely, that the values obtained for the surface properties are consistent with available ground-truth information, and are reproducible except within the heaviest portions of the rain cell, at which nonlinear (or saturation) effects become apparent. Finally, it is seen that uncorrected instrumental effects introduce systematic errors which may limit the accuracy of the method

Drawing the letter

Considering a drawn letter in one of Raymond Pettibon’s works, the article seeks to unravel the putatively facile distinction between drawing and writing. It asserts that the lack of iconic ‘motivation’ of alphabetic characters does not prevent them from harbouring further meanings that are indissociable from their form. The article thus questions the persistent legibility–visibility dichotomy in which writing’s letters are trapped between mere allography, whose graphic appearance beyond readability is irrelevant, and sign, whose semantic value is constituted multiply through its verbal and pictural qualities. Instead, this binary logic is displaced through the recognition of the mark that is both drawn and written, yet irreducible to either, and thus capable of pointing beyond itself and yet refer to its own form. In showing how the mark in Pettibon’s drawing may be read and viewed in multiple non-exclusive ways, the shared graphic capacity of writing and drawing is highlighted. The article promotes a perspective on writing that requires the acknowledgement of its graphic form without demanding a new dubious graphology. The writing of the article itself continuously engages its own inextricable entanglement in the issues discussed by accentuating the play that writing already entails if it is also seen and not merely read

Giant Molecular Clouds are More Concentrated to Spiral Arms than Smaller Clouds

From our catalog of Milky Way molecular clouds, created using a temperature thresholding algorithm on the Bell Laboratories 13CO Survey, we have extracted two subsets:(1) Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs), clouds that are definitely larger than 10^5 solar masses, even if they are at their `near distance', and (2) clouds that are definitely smaller than 10^5 solar masses, even if they are at their `far distance'. The positions and velocities of these clouds are compared to the loci of spiral arms in (l, v) space. The velocity separation of each cloud from the nearest spiral arm is introduced as a `concentration statistic'. Almost all of the GMCs are found near spiral arms. The density of smaller clouds is enhanced near spiral arms, but some clouds (~10%) are unassociated with any spiral arm. The median velocity separation between a GMC and the nearest spiral arm is 3.4+-0.6 km/s, whereas the median separation between smaller clouds and the nearest spiral arm is 5.5+-0.2 km/s.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

A Cluster of Compact Radio Sources in W40

We present deep 3.6 cm radio continuum observations of the HII region W40 obtained using the Very Large Array in its A and B configurations. We detect a total of 20 compact radio sources in a region of 4 x 4 arcmin, with 11 of them concentrated in a band with 30 arcsec of extent. We also present JHK photometry of the W40 cluster taken with the QUIRC instrument on the University of Hawaii 2.2 meter telescope. These data reveal that 15 of the 20 VLA sources have infrared counterparts, and 10 show radio variability with periods less than 20 days. Based on these combined radio and IR data, we propose that 8 of the radio sources are candidate ultracompact HII regions, 7 are likely to be young stellar objects, and 2 may be shocked interstellar gas.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. 10 pages, 4 figures, plus online table in electronic versio

Movement Dependence and Layer Specificity of Entorhinal Phase Precession in Two-Dimensional Environments

As a rat moves, grid cells in its entorhinal cortex (EC) discharge at multiple locations of the external world, and the firing fields of each grid cell span a hexagonal lattice. For movements on linear tracks, spikes tend to occur at successively earlier phases of the theta-band filtered local field potential during the traversal of a firing field - a phenomenon termed phase precession. The complex movement patterns observed in two-dimensional (2D) open-field environments may fundamentally alter phase precession. To study this question at the behaviorally relevant single-run level, we analyzed EC spike patterns as a function of the distance traveled by the rat along each trajectory. This analysis revealed that cells across all EC layers fire spikes that phase-precess;indeed, the rate and extent of phase precession were the same, only the correlation between spike phase and path length was weaker in EC layer III. Both slope and correlation of phase precession were surprisingly similar on linear tracks and in 2D open-field environments despite strong differences in the movement statistics, including running speed. While the phase-precession slope did not correlate with the average running speed, it did depend on specific properties of the animal's path. The longer a curving path through a grid-field in a 2D environment, the shallower was the rate of phase precession, while runs that grazed a grid field tangentially led to a steeper phase-precession slope than runs through the field center. Oscillatory interference models for grid cells do not reproduce the observed phenomena

Understanding spatial structure : identification, transformation, evaluation

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1992.Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-103).This thesis outlines a process of observation and transformation using formalized concepts about space, territory, and position as well as transfonnational rules implicit in these concepts. A set of references is analyzed and explained using a common graphical language which serves to locate the references within a continuum of spatial configurations. Transformational rules are developed which allow for the generation of new configurations. Some proposals are made about inhabiting these configurations and the process of formal observation and trtransformation is placed within the larger context of design.by Edward C. Reifenstein.M.Arch