Increasing Healthy Coping in At Risk Adolescents

At-risk youth lack healthy coping skills needed to manage stress. This lack of skills leaves adolescents vulnerable to more risky behaviors such as substance use. Therefore, I created a two-day lesson on healthy coping skills for adolescents at Mount Toro High School in Salinas, California

Slow energy relaxation of macromolecules and nano-clusters in solution

Many systems in the realm of nanophysics from both the living and inorganic world display slow relaxation kinetics of energy fluctuations. In this paper we propose a general explanation for such phenomenon, based on the effects of interactions with the solvent. Within a simple harmonic model of the system fluctuations, we demonstrate that the inhomogeneity of coupling to the solvent of the bulk and surface atoms suffices to generate a complex spectrum of decay rates. We show for Myoglobin and for a metal nano-cluster that the result is a complex, non-exponential relaxation dynamics.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Heuristic remedial actions in the reliability assessment of high voltage direct current networks

Planning of high voltage direct current (HVDC) grids requires inclusion of reliability assessment of alternatives under study. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the adequacy of voltage source converter/VSC-HVDC networks. The methodology analyses the performance of the system using N-1 and N-2 contingencies in order to detect weaknesses in the DC network and evaluates two types of remedial actions to keep the entire system under the acceptable operating limits. The remedial actions are applied when a violation of these limits on the DC system occurs; those include topology changes in the network and adjustments of power settings of VSC converter stations. The CIGRE B4 DC grid test system is used for evaluating the reliability/adequacy performance by means of the proposed methodology in this paper. The proposed remedial actions are effective for all contingencies; then, numerical results are as expected. This work is useful for planning and operation of grids based on VSC-HVDC technology

Demographic Change and the Structure of Wages: A Demand-Theoretic Analysis for Brazil

With rapidly declining fertility and increased longevity the age structure of the labor force in developing countries has changed rapidly. Changing relative supply of workers by age group, and by educational attainment, can have profound effects on labor costs. Their impacts on earnings have been heavily studied in the United States but have received little attention in Asia and Latin America, where supply shocks are at least as large and have often proceeded less evenly across the economy. We use data on 502 local Brazilian labor markets from Censuses 1970-2000 to examine the extent of substitution among demographic groups as relative supply has changed. The results suggest that age-education groups are imperfect substitutes, so that larger age-education cohorts see depressed wage rates, particularly among more-educated groups. The extent of substitution has increased over time, so that the decreasing size of the least-skilled labor force today is barely raising its remaining members' wages.