Smoothing the Transition to Mandatory Electronic Theses

After a year of voluntary submissions, Caltech is requiring electronic thesis submission for all graduate students effective July 1, 2002. Website development, user education, collaboration between library and campus computing staff, and with faculty and the dean's office are all integral to the transition

Who's Making It: The Academic Achievement of Recent Boston Public School Graduates in the Early College Years

Examines the persistence, progress, and performance of Boston public school graduates in the first two years of college; contributing factors, including academic preparation, colleges' selectivity, and full-time or part-time attendance; and implications

Planning in probabilistic domains using a deterministic numeric planner

In the probabilistic track of the IPC5 - the last International planning competitions - a probabilistic planner based on combining deterministic planning with replanning - FF-REPLAN - out performed the other competitors. This probabilistic planning paradigm discarded the probabilistic information of the domain, just considering for each action its nominal effect as a deterministic effect

Perfusion Cell Seeding and Expansion in Dual Mechanical Stimulation Bioreactor for In Vitro Tissue Development

BACKGROUND: Engineered tissues are an exciting potential source of small diameter vascular grafts due to limited supply and patency of available alternatives. Engineered tissue vascular grafts (ETVGs) will provide physiological function that resembles native arteries and maintain the required mechanical properties as they integrate with host tissue. Mechanical stimulation during incubation encourages proper cell alignment and increases extracellular matrix deposition. The enhanced organization of the engineered tissue leads to improved compliance over synthetic alternatives without sacrificing strength and may lead to better integration in vivo. METHODS: We have developed a bioreactor that mechanically trains grafts during incubation. To test the seeding efficiency of the bioreactor, rat vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) were seeded onto electrospun PCL scaffolds by perfusion at various cell concentrations then incubated Page | 15 for 1 week under static conditions. We assessed gross morphology with H&E; collagen with picrosirius red; and VSMC density with DAPI. ETVGs were further evaluated with mechanical testing and scanning electron microscopy to evaluate mechanical and microstructural properties. RESULTS: Cells were successfully seeded evenly onto the luminal surface of electrospun PCL scaffolds. Cells remained viable and continued to proliferate and deposit ECM throughout incubation. CONCLUSIONS: Progress in the ETVG paradigm requires a systematic approach toward better understanding of the cause-effect interplay between implant properties, host reactions, and their modulation with controllable parameters. Future directions involve the assessment of the effects of mechanical training on growth and remodeling of engineered tissues in vitro and subsequent effects on the foreign body response post-implantation in a murine model.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1115/thumbnail.jp

Experimental Investigation of Sublimation of Ice at Subsonic and Supersonic Speeds and Its Relation to Heat Transfer

An experimental investigation was conducted in a 3.84- by 10-inch tunnel to determine the mass transfer by sublimation, heat transfer, and skin friction for an iced surface on a flat plate for Mach numbers of 0.4, 0.6, and 0.8 and pressure altitudes to 30,000 feet. Measurements of rates of sublimation were also made for a Mach number of 1.3 at a pressure altitude of 30,000 feet. The results show that the parameters of sublimation and heat transfer were 40 to 50 percent greater for an iced surface than was the bare-plate heat-transfer parameter. For iced surfaces of equivalent roughness, the ratio of sublimation to heat-transfer parameters was found to be 0.90. The sublimation data obtained at a Mach number of 1.3 showed no appreciable deviation from that obtained at subsonic speeds. The data obtained indicate that sublimation as a means of removing ice formations of appreciable thickness is usually too slow to be of mach value in the de-icing of aircraft at high altitudes

Topology of Neutral Hydrogen Within the Small Magellanic Cloud

In this paper, genus statistics have been applied to an HI column density map of the Small Magellanic Cloud in order to study its topology. To learn how topology changes with the scale of the system, we provide the study of topology for column density maps at varying resolution. To evaluate the statistical error of the genus we randomly reassign the phases of the Fourier modes while keeping the amplitudes. We find, that at the smallest scales studied ($40 {pc}\leq\lambda\leq 80 {pc}$) the genus shift is in all regions negative, implying a clump topology. At the larger scales ($110 {pc}\leq\lambda\leq 250 {pc}$) the topology shift is detected to be negative in 4 cases and positive (``swiss cheese'' topology) in 2 cases. In 4 regions there is no statistically significant topology shift at large scales

Phase diagram of a dilute ferromagnet model with antiferromagnetic next-nearest-neighbor interactions

We have studied the spin ordering of a dilute classical Heisenberg model with spin concentration $x$, and with ferromagnetic nearest-neighbor interaction $J_1$ and antiferromagnetic next-nearest-neighbor interaction $J_2$. Magnetic phases at absolute zero temperature $T = 0$ are determined examining the stiffness of the ground state, and those at finite temperatures $T \neq 0$ are determined calculating the Binder parameter $g_L$ and the spin correlation length $\xi_L$. Three ordered phases appear in the $x-T$ phase diagram: (i) the ferromagnetic (FM) phase; (ii) the spin glass (SG) phase; and (iii) the mixed (M) phase of the FM and the SG. Near below the ferromagnetic threshold $x_{\rm F}$, a reentrant SG transition occurs. That is, as the temperature is decreased from a high temperature, the FM phase, the M phase and the SG phase appear successively. The magnetization which grows in the FM phase disappears in the SG phase. The SG phase is suggested to be characterized by ferromagnetic clusters. We conclude, hence, that this model could reproduce experimental phase diagrams of dilute ferromagnets Fe$_x$Au$_{1-x}$ and Eu$_x$Sr$_{1-x}$S.Comment: 9 pages, 23 figure

High-Resolution Simulations of Cosmic Microwave Background non-Gaussian Maps in Spherical Coordinates

We describe a new numerical algorithm to obtain high-resolution simulated maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), for a broad class of non-Gaussian models. The kind of non-Gaussianity we account for is based on the simple idea that the primordial gravitational potential is obtained by a non-linear but local mapping from an underlying Gaussian random field, as resulting from a variety of inflationary models. Our technique, which is based on a direct realization of the potential in spherical coordinates and fully accounts for the radiation transfer function, allows to simulate non-Gaussian CMB maps down to the Planck resolution ($\ell_{\rm max} \sim 3,000$), with reasonable memory storage and computational time.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to ApJ. A version with higher quality figures is available at http://www.pd.infn.it/~liguori/content.htm