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EXPANDING APPROACHES TO CRITERION A: UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS PLACES AS THE CENTER OF RURAL COMMUNITY LIFE
No full textReligious properties are the centerfold of small rural communities, often functioning as the catalysis and setting for local community social life. Understanding the role of these properties within the field of historic preservation provides an avenue for establishing significance within the National Register program. Historic religious properties not only serve spiritual needs within communities, but they also are the settings for many components of social life, as meeting places, local wayfinding landmarks, cornerstones to familial histories, homes for clubs, educational resources, all contributing to the expansive story of local history.
I assert that historic preservation practitioners must make greater efforts to expand their gaze in order to build upon existing National Register frameworks, for the purposes of critically evaluating these properties under Criterion A. Many of these properties are first evaluated during reconnaissance level survey work, typically under environmental review or Certified Local Government survey work. This study examines the ways in which historic preservation practitioners currently approach the survey and evaluation of religious properties and provides advice for considering small rural communities as the context of the evaluation.
This study provides expanded ways to approach survey work, based on available National Register guidance and building on my own experiences as a historic preservation practitioner. Drawing upon the National Register program and studies of place attachment and sense of place in aligned fields, I present three case studies that incorporate the components of social history and community development through the interactions of people most closely tied to the place. Ultimately, rural religious properties offer deep insight into the ways in which communities create local social history
A Mediated Regression Analysis Examining the Relationship Between Sexual Orientation, Sense of Belonging, Organizational Justice, and Employee Engagement
No full textEmployee engagement, and the competitive edge it is perceived to provide to organizations, is of considerable interest to the fields of business, human resource management (HRM), psychology, and human resource development (HRD). Yet, few scholars have chosen to focus on the identity- and relationally based factors that may impact LGBTQ+ experiences of employee engagement or disengagement. Leveraging the insights of stigma, shame, heteronormativity, queer, belongingness and spillover, organizational justice, and critical HRD and HRM theories, this dissertation represents the first quantitative, explanatory analysis that includes LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ perceptions of organizational belonging and organizational justice in the workplace to identify and provide awareness of where and how we fall short in promoting employee engagement. The study design consisted of a quantitative, cross-sectional survey with closed, Likert-scale questions supplemented with three qualitative, open-ended questions. Quantitative data from LGBTQ+ (258 responses) and non-LGBTQ+ (244 responses) employees in the United States was analyzed using mediated regression. Results showed Organizational Belonging (β = .29, p < .001), Procedural Justice (β = .29, p < .001), and Distributive Justice (β = .29, p < .001) had direct and indirect mediating effects on the relationship between sexual orientation and employee engagement. Qualitative themes reinforced the quantitative findings; progressive organizations whose policies and supportive relationship practices embody and enforce diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) by championing the voices of LGBTQ+ employees are perceived to advance organizational culture. This study offers implications for business, HRM, and HRD researchers, scholars, and practitioners to support erosion of gendered norms (e.g., heteronormativity, cisnormativity) within the employee engagement literature and practical applications through DEIB initiatives for including LGBTQ+ perspectives to advance employee engagement for all workplace identities
An ADMM Algorithm for Structure Learning in Equilibrium Networks
No full textLearning the edge connectivity structure of networked systems from limited data is a fundamental challenge in many critical infrastructure domains, including power, traffic, and finance. Such systems obey steady-state conservation laws: x(t) = L∗y(t), where x(t) and y(t) ∈ Rᵖ represent injected flows (inputs) and potentials (outputs), respectively. The sparsity pattern of the p x p Laplacian L* encodes the underlying edge structure. In a stochastic setting, the goal is to infer this sparsity pattern from zero-mean i.i.d. samples of y(t). Recent work by Rayas et al. [1] has established statistical consistency results for this learning problem by considering an ℓ₁-regularized maximum likelihood estimator. However, their approach did not focus on developing a scalable algorithm but relies on solving a convex program via the CVX package in Python. To address this gap, we propose an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Our approach is simple, transparent, and computationally fast. A key contribution is demonstrating the role of a non-symmetric algebraic Riccati equation in the primal step of ADMM. Numerical experiments on a host of synthetic and benchmark networks, including power and water systems, show that our method achieves high recovery accuracy.http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.0318
Connections Between Abstract Algebra and Polynomial Equations: The Legacy of Lagrange
No full textThis paper investigates the evolution and theory of polynomial factorization, tracing a path from classical solutions of quadratics to modern techniques for analyzing quintic polynomials. We begin with foundational methods for factoring quadratics and cubics, including Cardano’s formula and its algebraic extensions. Moving into quartic equations, we compare the approaches of Ferrari and Descartes, and introduce Lagrange’s revolutionary perspective on root symmetries. This sets the stage for a deeper exploration into the structure of polynomials through Group Theory and Gröbner bases. While traditional methods fail to provide general solutions for the quintic, we demonstrate how modern algebraic tools and computational techniques allow us to investigate its structure through the lens of the symmetry
I Hate the News Apr 1
No full textThe weekly news analysis from I Hate Politics: Maryland House of Delegates passes the 2026 budget amidst pushback and now the state Senate debates. Maryland reconsiders how local police interact with ICE. Delaware pushes through new law to restore its reputation as the corporate registration capital of the US. Also from Delaware, why Senator Stephanie Hansen is upset with Ocean City, Maryland? And more. Music by Washington DC area composer Anna Rubin.https://open.spotify.com/episode/2DmA6WiGm9CGwvJrmoLns
The X-ray Integral Field Unit at the end of the Athena reformulation phase
No full textThe Athena mission entered a redefinition phase in July 2022, driven by the imperative to reduce the mission cost at completion for the European Space Agency below an acceptable target, while maintaining the flagship nature of its science return. This notably called for a complete redesign of the X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) cryogenic architecture towards a simpler active cooling chain. Passive cooling via successive radiative panels at spacecraft level is now used to provide a 50 K thermal environment to an X-IFU owned cryostat. 4.5 K cooling is achieved via a single remote active cryocooler unit, while a multi-stage Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator ensures heat lift down to the 50 mK required by the detectors. Amidst these changes, the core concept of the readout chain remains robust, employing Transition Edge Sensor microcalorimeters and a SQUID-based Time-Division Multiplexing scheme. Noteworthy is the introduction of a slower pixel. This enables an increase in the multiplexing factor (from 34 to 48) without compromising the instrument energy resolution, hence keeping significant system margins to the new 4 eV resolution requirement. This allows reducing the number of channels by more than a factor two, and thus the resource demands on the system, while keeping a 4’ field of view (compared to 5’ before). In this article, we will give an overview of this new architecture, before detailing its anticipated performances. Finally, we will present the new X-IFU schedule, with its short term focus on demonstration activities towards a mission adoption in early 2027we would like to re-express our gratitude to the lead funding agencies supporting X-IFU for their unfailing and vigorous support, at a time when the future of the mission was not secured, and from now on, towards the goal of adopting NewAthena in 2027. The Italian contribution to XIFU is supported by ASI (Italian Space Agency) through Contract No. 2019- 27-HH.0. The X-IFU consortium members working at Instituto de Física de Cantabria acknowledge Grant PID2021_122955OB-C41 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10686-025-09984-
Reflections from the 2024 Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry
No full textHere, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from scientific literature. Each team submission is presented in a summary table with links to the code and as brief papers in the appendix. Beyond team results, we discuss the hackathon event and its hybrid format, which included physical hubs in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Lausanne, and Tokyo, alongside a global online hub to enable local and virtual collaboration. Overall, the event highlighted significant improvements in LLM capabilities since the previous year's hackathon, suggesting continued expansion of LLMs for applications in materials science and chemistry research. These outcomes demonstrate the dual utility of LLMs as both multipurpose models for diverse machine learning tasks and platforms for rapid prototyping custom applications in scientific research.Planning for this event was supported by NSF Awards #2226419 and #2209892. We would like to thank event sponsors who provided platform credits and prizes for teams, including RadicalAI, Iteratec, Reincarnate, Acceleration Consortium, and Neo4j.http://arxiv.org/abs/2411.1522
Cultivating change: an evaluation of departmental readiness for faculty diversification
No full textDespite the increasing number of racially and ethnically minoritized (REM) individuals earning PhDs and the substantial investment in diversity initiatives within higher education, the relative lack of diversity among faculty in tenure-track positions reveals a persistent systemic challenge. This study used an adaptation of the Community Readiness Tool to evaluate readiness for faculty diversification efforts in five biomedical departments. Interviews with 31 key informants were transcribed and coded manually and using NVIVO 12 in order to assign scores to each department in the six domains of readiness. The results revealed no meaningful differences in overall scores across institutional types, but did show differences within specific domains of readiness. These findings indicate that readiness is multi-faceted and academic departments can benefit by identifying priority areas in need of additional faculty buy-in and resources to enhance the success of diversification efforts.The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), through the following Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) awards: #1820984, #1820974, #1820971, #1820983, and #1820975.https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1553580/ful
On the Promise for Assurance of Differentiable Neurosymbolic Reasoning Paradigms
No full textTo create usable and deployable Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, there requires a level of assurance in performance under many different conditions. Many times, deployed machine learning systems will require more classic logic and reasoning performed through neurosymbolic programs jointly with artificial neural network sensing. While many prior works have examined the assurance of a single component of the system solely with either the neural network alone or entire enterprise systems, very few works have examined the assurance of integrated neurosymbolic systems. Within this work, we assess the assurance of end-to-end fully differentiable neurosymbolic systems that are an emerging method to create data-efficient and more interpretable models. We perform this investigation using Scallop, an end-to-end neurosymbolic library, across classification and reasoning tasks in both the image and audio domains. We assess assurance across adversarial robustness, calibration, user performance parity, and interpretability of solutions for catching misaligned solutions. We find end-to-end neurosymbolic methods present unique opportunities for assurance beyond their data efficiency through our empirical results but not across the board. We find that this class of neurosymbolic models has higher assurance in cases where arithmetic operations are defined and where there is high dimensionality to the input space, where fully neural counterparts struggle to learn robust reasoning operations. We identify the relationship between neurosymbolic models' interpretability to catch shortcuts that later result in increased adversarial vulnerability despite performance parity. Finally, we find that the promise of data efficiency is typically only in the case of class imbalanced reasoning problems.This work was conducted under the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program at at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a multiprogram National Laboratory operated by Battelle Memorial Institute for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830. This article has been cleared by PNNL for public release as PNNL-SA-208413.http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.0893
Home Literacy and Mathematics in Bulgaria, Israel, Spain, and the U.S.: How Do Preschool Parents Socialize Academic Readiness?
No full textPrevious research shows that preschool parents in the United States (U.S.) prioritize literacy over mathematics, despite the importance of both subjects for their child's future academic success. However, less is known about how parents in other countries socialize the literacy and mathematics skills of young children. This paper examines the beliefs of preschool parents from Bulgaria (N=103), Israel (N=167), Spain (N=138), and the U.S. (N=183). These countries were selected due to differences in location, economics, religions, languages, and alphabet. Specifically, we examine the importance parents place on home literacy and mathematics, the time spent in the home on those activities, and parents' confidence in supporting their child's learning in both domains. We also examined the type of support and resources parents in each country would value receiving from their child's teacher. The results indicated the importance of expanding research from just U.S. participants. Parents from all four countries valued home literacy and mathematics but viewed literacy as significantly more important. While parents from all four countries viewed literacy as more important, differences between countries were noted when it came to the time spent on different subjects, with Spain and the U.S. spending more time on literacy and Bulgaria and Israel spending more time on mathematics. Parents from the U.S. indicated significantly higher levels of confidence in supporting literacy than parents in the other three countries; however, no differences were noted in confidence for supporting mathematics. The types of resources that parents would like to receive also varied by country.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10643-025-01861-