Assessing the need for neutralizing KCl filter testing aerosol

American Association for Aerosol Research 28th Annual Conference, Minneapolis (MN), 26-30 October 2009, Abstract #81

The NuSTAR View of the Seyfert 2 Galaxy NGC 4388

We present analysis of NuSTAR X-ray observations in the 3-79 keV energy band of the Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 4388, taken in 2013. The broadband sensitivity of NuSTAR, covering the Fe K$\alpha$ line and Compton reflection hump, enables tight constraints to be placed on reflection features in AGN X-ray spectra, thereby providing insight into the geometry of the circumnuclear material. In this observation, we found the X-ray spectrum of NGC 4388 to be well described by a moderately absorbed power law with non-relativistic reflection. We fit the spectrum with phenomenological reflection models and a physical torus model, and find the source to be absorbed by Compton-thin material (N$_{H} = (6.5\pm0.8)\times10^{23}$ cm$^{-2}$) with a very weak Compton reflection hump (R $<$ 0.09) and an exceptionally large Fe K$\alpha$ line (EW $= 368^{+56}_{-53}$ eV) for a source with weak or no reflection. Calculations using a thin-shell approximation for the expected Fe K$\alpha$ EW indicate that an Fe K$\alpha$ line originating from Compton-thin material presents a possible explanation.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Understanding the Learner in the Language Laboratory

Much research and money has been poured into equipment sincelanguage laboratories first burst onto the language-learning scene. Therewas at first great optimism that students would now learn languages withan ease and rapidity never observed in conventional classroom situations.Unfortunately, in many areas students voted against laboratories withyawns and sighs. Technological wonders cannot assist learning withouteffective courseware, that is, a carefully designed and executed languagesequence that provides authentic language materials which are interestingenough to retain the student's attention and encourage perservance. Wemust understand how students learn languages, appreciate what theyneed to learn to achieve their objectives in undertaking language learning,and provide materials which bridge the gap between the two

Early Integration of Palliative Care for Patients Diagnosed With Life-limiting Illness

There are numerous reasons conversations regarding the early implementation of palliative care for patients diagnosed with life-limiting illness do not occur early in the disease trajectory. A literature search was conducted to support the benefits of earlier implementation of palliative care, specifically, implementation by patient’s primary care providers upon a qualifying disease diagnosis. The literature review revealed generous benefits of early implementation of palliative care and provided support for this scholarly project. For this scholarly project, a palliative care questionnaire and PowerPoint presentation were designed, administered, and presented to health care providers including nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, and consultants who work in palliative care. The group was engaged in discussion/dialogue regarding the barriers to offering palliative care to patients who would benefit. The barriers include that many primary care providers are not comfortable initiating the conversation about palliative care, feel under-educated about the topic of palliative care, and do not want to take hope away from the patient by starting a conversation about palliative care. Information gathered from the questionnaire was used to create an educational pamphlet about which diseases qualify a patient for palliative care, why and how to have the conversation about palliative care, and resources available to further knowledge on the topic of palliative care. The goal of the scholarly project is to help primary care providers facilitate conversations, initiation, and the use of palliative care as part of the collaborative care team in patient care

Suzaku Confirms NGC~3660 is an Unabsorbed Seyfert 2

An enigmatic group of objects, unabsorbed Seyfert 2s may have intrinsically weak broad line regions, obscuration in the line of sight to the BLR but not to the X-ray corona, or so much obscuration that the X-ray continuum is completely suppressed and the observed spectrum is actually scattered into the line of sight from nearby material. NGC 3660 has been shown to have weak broad optical/near infrared lines, no obscuration in the soft X-ray band, and no indication of "changing look" behavior. The only previous hard X-ray detection of this source by Beppo-SAX seemed to indicate that the source might harbor a heavily obscured nucleus. However, our analysis of a long-look Suzaku observation of this source shows that this is not the case, and that this source has a typical power law X-ray continuum with normal reflection and no obscuration. We conclude that NGC 3660 is confirmed to have no unidentified obscuration and that the anomolously high Beppo-SAX measurement must be due to source confusion or similar, being inconsistent with our Suzaku measurements as well as non-detections from Swift-BAT and RXTE.Comment: Accepted to PAS

Mild acute stress improves response speed without impairing accuracy or interference control in two selective attention tasks: Implications for theories of stress and cognition.

Acute stress is generally thought to impair performance on tasks thought to rely on selective attention. This effect has been well established for moderate to severe stressors, but no study has examined how a mild stressor-the most common type of stressor-influences selective attention. In addition, no study to date has examined how stress influences the component processes involved in overall selective attention task performance, such as controlled attention, automatic attentional activation, decision-making, and motor abilities. To address these issues, we randomly assigned 107 participants to a mild acute stress or control condition. As expected, the mild acute stress condition showed a small but significant increase in cortisol relative to the control condition. Following the stressor, we assessed attention with two separate flanker tasks. One of these tasks was optimized to investigate component attentional processes using computational cognitive modeling, whereas the other task employed mouse-tracking to illustrate how response conflict unfolded over time. The results for both tasks showed that mild acute stress decreased response time (i.e., increased response speed) without influencing accuracy or interference control. Further, computational modeling and mouse-tracking analyses indicated that these effects were due to faster motor action execution time for chosen actions. Intriguingly, however, cortisol responses were unrelated to any of the observed effects of mild stress. These results have implications for theories of stress and cognition, and highlight the importance of considering motor processes in understanding the effects of stress on cognitive task performance

On the Path-Integral Derivation of the Anomaly for the Hermitian Equivalent of the Complex PTPT-Symmetric Quartic Hamiltonian

It can be shown using operator techniques that the non-Hermitian $PT$-symmetric quantum mechanical Hamiltonian with a "wrong-sign" quartic potential $-gx^4$ is equivalent to a Hermitian Hamiltonian with a positive quartic potential together with a linear term. A naive derivation of the same result in the path-integral approach misses this linear term. In a recent paper by Bender et al. it was pointed out that this term was in the nature of a parity anomaly and a more careful, discretized treatment of the path integral appeared to reproduce it successfully. However, on re-examination of this derivation we find that a yet more careful treatment is necessary, keeping terms that were ignored in that paper. An alternative, much simpler derivation is given using the additional potential that has been shown to appear whenever a change of variables to curvilinear coordinates is made in a functional integral.Comment: LaTeX, 12 pages, no figure