Charles A. Dana, the Civil War Era, and American Republicanism

When Charles A. Dana bought the New York Sun in 1868, he used it to support the presidential candidacy of Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Party ticket to unify the post-Civil War nation. After a victory for the Civil War general and Republican Party, though, the first fifteen months of the new administration turned the editor against the president and his party. Dana’s Sun criticized Grant and his allies as corrupt, of using the military for political ends, and of growing the size and power of government beyond traditional American practice. Against the backdrop of Reconstruction, Dana also decried the Grant administration’s foreign policy, especially regarding the ongoing war in Cuba. This dissertation explores how Dana’s interpretation of republican values clashed with the American response to transatlantic politics to justify further criticism of the president and his party between March 1869 and the election of 1872

Training Graduate Students in Utilization of Analytical Instruments in a Failure Analysis Course

Department of Engineering Technology at University of North Texas offers a graduate course on failure analysis (MSET 5150) during spring semesters. Partial requirement for the course is for students to submit a term paper based on their collected data related to a term project. Case studies are given to groups of students to work on actual failed components received from area industries. Results of their findings are presented at the end of the semester in both oral presentation form and written term paper form followed the format of a well-established technical papers. Results of such exercises allows graduate students devote skills in using scientific instruments and practice manuscript preparations for publication. This paper presents examples of a case studies done by groups of students who worked on failure analysis of components failed in an oil and gas industry. Students developed skills in utilization of scanning electron microscope (SEM), Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS), and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometry. This exercise has proven highly effective in introducing young engineers to real world problems in oil and gas industry and help them develop skills needed in performing failure analysis and steps involved.Cockrell School of Engineerin

A kk-polycosymplectic Marsden-Weinstein reduction

This work reviews and slightly improves the known $k$-polysymplectic Marsden-Weinstein reduction theory by removing some technical conditions concerning $k$-polysymplectic momentum maps and the existence of manifold structures. This is mainly accomplished by developing a theory of affine Lie group actions for $k$-polysymplectic momentum maps, which removes the necessity of their co-adjoint equivariance. Then, we focus on the analysis of a particular case of $k$-polysymplectic manifolds, the so-called fibred ones, and we study their $k$-polysymplectic Marsden-Weinstein reductions. Previous results allow us to devise a k-polycosymplectic Marsden-Weinstein reduction theory, which represents one of our main results. Our findings are applied to study coupled vibrating strings and, more generally, $k$-polycosymplectic Hamiltonian systems with field symmetries. As a very relevant byproduct, we show that $k$-polycosymplectic geometry can be understood as a particular type of $k$-polysymplectic geometry.Comment: 49 pages. Revised version. Added a reduction procedure of the space-time coordinate

Excitation of confined modes on particle arrays

We describe both theoretically and experimentally the existence and excitation of confined modes in planar arrays of gold nanodisks. Ordered 2D lattices of monodispersive nanoparticles are manufactured, embedded in a silica matrix, and exposed to evanescent prism-coupling illumination, leading to dark features in the reflectivity, which signal the presence of confined modes guided along the arrays. We find remarkable agreement between theory and experiment in the frequency-momentum dispersion of the resonances. Direct excitation of these modes reveals long propagation distances and deep extinction features. This combined experimental and theoretical characterization of guidedmodes shows a good understanding of the optical response of metallic particles arrays, which can be beneficial in future designs of optical-signal and distant-sensing applications. © 2013 Optical Society of America.This work has been supported in part by the European Union (NMP4-2006-016881-SPANS, NMP4-SL-2008-213669-ENSEMBLE,FP7-ICT-2009-4-248909-LIMA, and FP7-ICT-2009-4-248855-N4E), the Spanish MEC (MAT2010-14885 and Consolider Nano-Light.es), and the research program of the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM), which is financially supported by the Netherlands Organization for Fundamental Research (NWO) and is part of an industrial partnership program between Philips and FOM. It is also supported in part by NanoNextNL, a micro and nanotechnology consortium of the Government of the Netherlands and 130 partners. X.M.B. acknowledges a Spanish CSIC-JAE grant.Peer Reviewe

The Responses of Medical General Practitioners to Unreasonable Patient Demand for Antibiotics - A Study of Medical Ethics Using Immersive Virtual Reality

BACKGROUND: Dealing with insistent patient demand for antibiotics is an all too common part of a General Practitioner's daily routine. This study explores the extent to which portable Immersive Virtual Reality technology can help us gain an accurate understanding of the factors that influence a doctor's response to the ethical challenge underlying such tenacious requests for antibiotics (given the threat posed by growing anti-bacterial resistance worldwide). It also considers the potential of such technology to train doctors to face such dilemmas. EXPERIMENT: Twelve experienced GPs and nine trainees were confronted with an increasingly angry demand by a woman to prescribe antibiotics to her mother in the face of inconclusive evidence that such antibiotic prescription is necessary. The daughter and mother were virtual characters displayed in immersive virtual reality. The specific purposes of the study were twofold: first, whether experienced GPs would be more resistant to patient demands than the trainees, and second, to investigate whether medical doctors would take the virtual situation seriously. RESULTS: Eight out of the 9 trainees prescribed the antibiotics, whereas 7 out of the 12 GPs did so. On the basis of a Bayesian analysis, these results yield reasonable statistical evidence in favor of the notion that experienced GPs are more likely to withstand the pressure to prescribe antibiotics than trainee doctors, thus answering our first question positively. As for the second question, a post experience questionnaire assessing the participants' level of presence (together with participants' feedback and body language) suggested that overall participants did tend towards the illusion of being in the consultation room depicted in the virtual reality and that the virtual consultation taking place was really happening

Associations between sources of particle number and mortality in four European cities

BACKGROUND: The evidence on the association between ultrafine (UFP) particles and mortality is still inconsistent. Moreover, health effects of specific UFP sources have not been explored. We assessed the impact of UFP sources on daily mortality in Barcelona, Helsinki, London, and Zurich. METHODS: UFP sources were previously identified and quantified for the four cities: daily contributions of photonucleation, two traffic sources (fresh traffic and urban, with size mode around 30 nm and 70 nm, respectively), and secondary aerosols were obtained from data from an urban background station. Different periods were investigated in each city: Barcelona 2013-2016, Helsinki 2009-2016, London 2010-2016, and Zurich 2011-2014. The associations between total particle number concentrations (PNC) and UFP sources and daily (natural, cardiovascular [CVD], and respiratory) mortality were investigated using city-specific generalized linear models (GLM) with quasi-Poisson regression. RESULTS: We found inconsistent results across cities, sources, and lags for associations with natural, CVD, and respiratory mortality. Increased risk was observed for total PNC and natural mortality in Helsinki (lag 2; 1.3% [0.07%, 2.5%]), CVD mortality in Barcelona (lag 1; 3.7% [0.17%, 7.4%]) and Zurich (lag 0; 3.8% [0.31%, 7.4%]), and respiratory mortality in London (lag 3; 2.6% [0.84%, 4.45%]) and Zurich (lag 1; 9.4% [1.0%, 17.9%]). A similar pattern of associations between health outcomes and total PNC was followed by the fresh traffic source, for which we also found the same associations and lags as for total PNC. The urban source (mostly aged traffic) was associated with respiratory mortality in Zurich (lag 1; 12.5% [1.7%, 24.2%]) and London (lag 3; 2.4% [0.90%, 4.0%]) while the secondary source was associated with respiratory mortality in Zurich (lag 1: 12.0% [0.63%, 24.5%]) and Helsinki (4.7% [0.11%, 9.5%]). Reduced risk for the photonucleation source was observed for respiratory mortality in Barcelona (lag 2, -8.6% [-14.5%, -2.4%]) and for CVD mortality in Helsinki, as this source is present only in clean atmospheres (lag 1, -1.48 [-2.75, -0.21]). CONCLUSIONS: We found inconsistent results across cities, sources and lags for associations with natural, CVD, and respiratory mortality

Ga+, In+ and Tl+ Impurities in Alkali Halide Crystals: Distortion Trends

A computational study of the doping of alkali halide crystals (AX: A = Na, K; X = Cl, Br) by ns2 cations (Ga+, In+ and Tl+) is presented. Active clusters of increasing size (from 33 to 177 ions) are considered in order to deal with the large scale distortions induced by the substitutional impurities. Those clusters are embedded in accurate quantum environments representing the surrounding crystalline lattice. The convergence of the distortion results with the size of the active cluster is analyced for some selected impurity systems. The most important conclusion from this study is that distortions along the (100) and (110) crystallographic directions are not independent. Once a reliable cluster model is found, distortion trends as a function of impurity, alkali cation and halide anion are identified and discussed. These trends may be useful when analycing other cation impurities in similar host lattices.Comment: LaTeX file. 7 pages and 2 pictures. Accepted for publication in J. Chem. Phy