Digital Commons Network^™

Tipping Point Of A Conifer-Based Ecosystem Under Severe Drought, Kaicheng Huang, Chuixiang Yi, Donghai Wu, Tao Zhou, Xiang Zhao, William J. Blanford, Suhua Wei, Hao Wu, Du Ling, Zheng Li

Publications and Research

Drought-induced tree mortality has recently received considerable attention. Questions have arisen over the necessary intensity and duration thresholds of droughts that are sufficient to trigger rapid forest declines. The values of such tipping points leading to forest declines due to drought are presently unknown. In this study, we have evaluated the potential relationship between the level of tree growth and concurrent drought conditions with data of the tree growth-related ring width index (RWI) of the two dominant conifer species (Pinus edulis and Pinus ponderosa) in the Southwestern United States (SWUS) and the meteorological drought-related standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index …

Educational Psychology, Tony Perez, Bradley W. Bergey, Ting Dai, Jennifer G. Cromley

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Hydrodynamics With Gauge Anomaly: Variational Principle And Hamiltonian Formulation, V. Parameswaran Nair, Gustavo Monteiro, Alexander G. Abanov

Publications and Research

We present a variational principle for relativistic hydrodynamics with gauge-anomaly terms for a fluid coupled to an Abelian background gauge field. For this we utilize the Clebsch parametrization of the velocity field. We also set up the Hamiltonian formulation and the canonical framework for the theory. While the equations of motion only involve the density and velocity fields, i.e., the Clebsch potentials only appear in the combination which is the velocity field, the generators of symmetry transformations (including the Hamiltonian) depend explicitly on one of the Clebsch potentials, if the background field is time-dependent. For the special case of time-independent …

Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …

Peers Inspiring Peers: Why A Summer Bridge-To-College Program Benefits From This Partnership, Janet Liou-Mark, A.E. Dreyfuss, Mursheda Ahmed, Christopher Chan, Karmen Yu

Publications and Research

A Bridge-to-College Summer Academy for Teaching Assistant Scholars, who serve as Peer Leaders and small-group instructors in several New York City high schools, was designed and held at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. The Summer Academy was designed to acclimate the Teaching Assistant Scholars (TAS), many of whom are underrepresented minority students, to college life. College Peer Leaders assisted in motivating and encouraging incoming freshmen in gaining the academic skills needed to successfully navigate a college environment. The Peer Leaders also facilitated three-day mathematics preparatory workshops that provided students with the confidence to excel in their first credit-bearing …

Bayesian Nonparametric Cross-Study Validation Of Prediction Methods, Lorenzo Trippa, Levi Waldron, Curtis Huttenhower, Giovanni Parmigiani

Publications and Research

We consider comparisons of statistical learning algorithms using multiple data sets, via leave-one-in cross-study validation: each of the algorithms is trained on one data set; the resulting model is then validated on each remaining data set. This poses two statistical challenges that need to be addressed simultaneously. The first is the assessment of study heterogeneity, with the aim of identifying a subset of studies within which algorithm comparisons can be reliably carried out. The second is the comparison of algorithms using the ensemble of data sets. We address both problems by integrating clustering and model comparison. We formulate a Bayesian …

The Effect Of Milling Additives On Powder Properties And Sintered Body Microstructure Of Nio, L. Jay Deiner, Michael A. Rottmayer, Bryan C. Eigenbrodt

Publications and Research

The evolution of powder particle size, crystal structure, and surface chemistry was evaluated for micron scale NiO powders subjected to impact milling with commonly employed milling additives: methanol, Vertrel XF, and amorphous carbon. The effect of the different comminution protocols on sintered body microstructure was evaluated for high temperature sintering in inert atmosphere (N2). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy showed that NiO powder surface chemistry is surprisingly sensitive to milling additive choice. In particular, the proportion of powder surface defect sites varied with additive, and methanol left an alcohol or alkoxy residue even after drying. Upon sintering to intermediate temperatures (1100 ℃), …

Azimuthal Asymmetries And The Emergence Of “Collectivity” From Multi-Particle Correlations In High-Energy Pa Collisions, Adrian Dumitru, Larry Mclerran, Vladimir Skokov

Publications and Research

We show how angular asymmetries ∼ cos 2φ can arise in dipole scattering at high energies. We illustrate the effects due to anisotropic fluctuations of the saturation momentum of the target with a finite correlation length in the transverse impact parameter plane, i.e. from a domain-like structure. We compute the two-particle azimuthal cumulant in this model including both one-particle factorizable as well as genuine two-particle non-factorizable contributions to the two-particle cross section. We also compute the full BBGKY hierarchy for the four-particle azimuthal cumulant and find that only the fully factorizable contribution to c₂{4} is negative while …

Higher Education Should Monitor Its Students, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Higher Education Needs To Listen Better, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Positive News For Lgbt People In Science Fields, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

There Are No Shortcuts To Increasing Enrollments, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

College Libraries Are Facing Multiple Threats, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Heterometallic Titanium–Gold Complexes Inhibit Renal Cancer Cells In Vitro And In Vivo, Jacob Fernandez-Gallardo, Benelita T. Elie, Tanmoy Sadhukha, Swayam Prabha, Mercedes Sanau, Susan A. Rotenberg, Joe W. Ramos, Maria Contel

Publications and Research

Following recent work on heterometallic titanocene–gold complexes as potential chemotherapeutics for renal cancer, we report here on the synthesis, characterization and stability studies of new titanocene complexes containing a methyl group and a carboxylate ligand (mba ¼ S–C6H4–COO) bound to gold(I)-phosphane fragments through a thiolate group [(h-C5H5)2TiMe(m-mba)Au(PR3)]. The compounds are more stable in physiological media than those previously reported and are highly cytotoxic against human cancer renal cell lines. We describe here preliminary mechanistic data involving studies on the interaction of selected compounds with plasmid (pBR322) DNA used as a model nucleic acid, and with selected protein kinases from a …

Nothing For Money And Your Work For Free: Internships And The Marketing Of Higher Education, Mara Einstein

Publications and Research

American universities have significantly increased their marketing expenditures over the last decade. The high cost of education, reductions in government funding, and precipitous declines in the traditional college-aged population (18-21 year olds) are some of the key factors forcing universities to be more aggressive with the promotional techniques they use to attract prospective students. In this competitive marketplace, schools promote the attributes they believe will be most compelling to high schoolers and their parents, including academics, sports, campus life, and careers. Tied into this last factor is the promotion of internship opportunities. While some of these hands-on experiences lead to …

A Principle Of Economy Predicts The Functional Architecture Of Grid Cells, Xue-Xin Wei, Jason Prentice, Vijay Balasubramanian

Publications and Research

Grid cells in the brain respond when an animal occupies a periodic lattice of ‘grid fields’ during navigation. Grids are organized in modules with different periodicity. We propose that the grid system implements a hierarchical code for space that economizes the number of neurons required to encode location with a given resolution across a range equal to the largest period. This theory predicts that (i) grid fields should lie on a triangular lattice, (ii) grid scales should follow a geometric progression, (iii) the ratio between adjacent grid scales should be √e for idealized neurons, and lie between 1.4 and 1.7 …

Pathway And Network Approaches For Identification Of Cancer Signature Markers From Omics Data, Jinlian Wang, Yiming Zuo, Yan-Gao Man, Itzhak Avital, Alexander Stojadinovic, Meng Liu, Xiaowei Yang, Rency S. Varghese, Mahlet G. Tadesse, Habtom W. Ressom

Publications and Research

The advancement of high throughput omic technologies during the past few years has made it possible to perform many complex assays in a much shorter time than the traditional approaches. The rapid accumulation and wide availability of omic data generated by these technologies offer great opportunities to unravel disease mechanisms, but also presents significant challenges to extract knowledge from such massive data and to evaluate the findings. To address these challenges, a number of pathway and network based approaches have been introduced. This review article evaluates these methods and discusses their application in cancer biomarker discovery using hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) …

Framing The Question, "Who Governs The Internet?", Robert J. Domanski

Publications and Research

There remains a widespread perception among both the public and elements of academia that the Internet is “ungovernable”. However, this idea, as well as the notion that the Internet has become some type of cyber-libertarian utopia, is wholly inaccurate. Governments may certainly encounter tremendous difficulty in attempting to regulate the Internet, but numerous types of authority have nevertheless become pervasive. So who, then, governs the Internet? This book will contend that the Internet is, in fact, being governed, that it is being governed by specific and identifiable networks of policy actors, and that an argument can be made as to …

Proceedings Of The 2nd Annual Cuny Games Festival, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Francesco Crocco, Carlos Hernandez, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Deborah Sturm, Cuny Games Network

Publications and Research

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 16-17, 2015, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Health Games - Language and Composition - Design: Classroom Considerations - Games in the Physical Environment - Games and Behavioral Science - Play, Politics & Economics - Gaming Curricula, Disciplines & Programs - Gaming and History - Institutional Programming with Games - Philosophy and Roleplaying - Ed. Game Design: Strategy & Tactics - Repurposing Game Genres - Narrative, Storytelling & Games - Community & Social Justice - Extemporaneity - Personal & Social Transformation - Cognition, Design & Play …

Automated Computation Of Scattering Amplitudes From Integrand Reduction To Monte Carlo Tools, Hans Van Deurzen, Gionata Luisoni, Pierpaolo Mastrolia, Giovanni Ossola, Zhibai Zhang

Publications and Research

After a general introduction about the calculation of one-loop scattering amplitudes via integrand-level techniques, which led to the construction of efficient and automated computational tools for NLO predictions, we briefly describe an approach to the reduction of scattering amplitudes based on integrand-level reduction via multivariate polynomial division also applicable beyond one-loop amplitudes. We also review the main features of the GoSam 2.0 automated framework for NLO calculations and show some of its application to Standard Model processes involving the production massive particles, such as the Higgs boson or top-quark pairs, obtained embedding of the virtual amplitudes produced by GoSam within …

Demographics And Education In The Twenty-First Century, Norman Eng

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Re-Conceptualizing Developmental Areas Of Assessment For Screening, Eligibility Determination And Program Planning In Early Intervention, Bonnie Keilty, Patricia M. Blasco, Serra Acar

Publications and Research

Contemporary recommended practices in early childhood assessment strive to gain a holistic picture of child learning and development to inform screening, eligibility, and program planning decisions. These practices have traditionally focused on competencies reflected in developmental domains with limited attention to the approaches-tolearning used to acquire those competencies. In this article, we call for the examination of early childhood constructs that impact a child’s ability to learn and develop, such as executive function (EF), mastery motivation, self-regulation and selfdetermination, specifically in the infant-toddler period. With EF defined as a wide range of central control processes in the brain that link …

The Phytotronist And The Phenotype: Plant Physiology, Big Science, And A Cold War Biology Of The Whole Plant., David Munns

Publications and Research

This paper describes how, from the early twentieth century, and especially in the early Cold War era, the plant physiologists considered their discipline ideally suited among all the plant sciences to study and explain biological functions and processes, and ranked their discipline among the dominant forms of the biological sciences. At their apex in the late-1960s, the plant physiologists laid claim to having discovered nothing less than the “basic laws of physiology.” This paper unwraps that claim, showing that it emerged from the construction of monumental big science laboratories known as phytotrons that gave control over the growing environment. Control …

Differentiability Of Correlations In Realistic Quantum Mechanics, Alejandro Cabrera, Edson De Faria, Enrique Pujals, Charles Tresser

Publications and Research

We prove a version of Bell’s theorem in which the locality assumption is weakened. We start by assuming theoretical quantum mechanics and weak forms of relativistic causality and of realism (essentially the fact that observable values are well defined independently of whether or not they are measured). Under these hypotheses, we show that only one of the correlation functions that can be formulated in the framework of the usual Bell theorem is unknown. We prove that this unknown function must be differentiable at certain angular configuration points that include the origin. We also prove that, if this correlation is assumed …

Matrix Multiplication, Trilinear Decompositions, Apa Algorithms, And Summation, Victor Pan

Publications and Research

Matrix multiplication (hereafter we use the acronym MM) is among the most fundamental operations of modern computations. The efficiency of its performance depends on various factors, in particular vectorization, data movement and arithmetic complexity of the computations, but here we focus just on the study of the arithmetic cost and the impact of this study on other areas of modern computing. In the early 1970s it was expected that the straightforward cubic time algorithm for MM will soon be accelerated to enable MM in nearly quadratic arithmetic time, with some far fetched implications. While pursuing this goal the mainstream research …

Imperatives In Informal Organizational Resource Exchange In Central Europe, David Jancsics

Publications and Research

This paper challenges the mainstream social scientific approach that emphasizes “moral inferiority” in corruption and bribery in Central and Eastern Europe. We argue that in many cases, people participate in informal organizational resource exchanges not because of immorality or greed but rather because of powerful external forces. By using the case of contemporary Hungary to support this argument, this paper provides a systematic analysis of such imperatives. The findings of 50 in-depth qualitative interviews suggest that two main imperatives can be distinguished; macro-level social and meso-level organizational forces. Macro-level forces may be linked to historical paths, Hungary's socialist and pre- …

Non-Planar On-Shell Diagrams, Sebastían Franco, Daniele Galloni, Brenda Penante, Congkao Wen

Publications and Research

We initiate a systematic study of non-planar on-shell diagrams in N = 4 SYM and develop powerful technology for doing so. We introduce canonical variables generalizing face variables, which make the d log form of the on-shell form explicit. We make significant progress towards a general classification of arbitrary on-shell diagrams by means of two classes of combinatorial objects: generalized matching and matroid polytopes. We propose a boundary measurement that connects general on-shell diagrams to the Grassmannian. Our proposal exhibits two important and non-trivial properties: positivity in the planar case and it matches the combinatorial description of the diagrams in …

Nuclear Structure Aspects Of Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay, B. Alex Brown, Mihai Horoi, Roman A. Sen′Kov

Publications and Research

We decompose the neutrinoless double-beta decay matrix elements into sums of products over the intermediate nucleus with two less nucleons. We find that the sum is dominated by the J^pi=0^+ ground state of this intermediate nucleus for both the light and heavy neutrino decay processes. This provides a new theoretical tool for comparing and improving nuclear structure models. It also provides the connection to two-nucleon transfer experiments.

Dynamics Of Propagation Of Premature Impulses In Structurally Remodeled Infarcted Myocardium: A Computational Analysis, Candido Cabo

Publications and Research

Initiation of cardiac arrhythmias typically follows one or more premature impulses either occurring spontaneously or applied externally. In this study, we characterize the dynamics of propagation of single (S2) and double premature impulses (S3), and the mechanisms of block of premature impulses at structural heterogeneities caused by remodeling of gap junctional conductance (Gj) in infarcted myocardium. Using a sub-cellular computer model of infarcted tissue, we found that |INa,max|, prematurity (coupling interval with the previous impulse), and conduction velocity (CV) of premature impulses change dynamically as they propagate away from the site of initiation. There are fundamental differences between the dynamics …

C-Metrics In Gauged Stu Supergravity And Beyond, H. Lu, Justin F. Vázquez-Poritz

Publications and Research

We construct charged generalizations of the dilaton C-metric in various fourdimensional theories, including STU gauged supergravity as well as a one-parameter family of Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theories whose scalar potential can be expressed in terms of a superpotential. In addition, we present time-dependent generalizations of the dilaton C-metric and dilaton Ernst solutions, for which the time evolution is driven by the dilaton. These C-metric solutions provide holographic descriptions of a strongly-coupled three-dimensional field theory on the background of a black hole, a gravitational soliton, and a black hole undergoing time evolution.