BOOK REVIEWS: Ethics at the Edges of Life / Samuel Johnson

Professor Paul Ramsey,\u27 writing as a Christian ethicist, has revised, extended, and updated the Bampton Lectures in America that he delivered in 1975 at Columbia University. The resulting book is Ethics at the Edges of Life: Medical and Legal Intersections. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to critical analysis of a number of landmark court decisions, all of which were rendered after his delivery of the Bampton lectures--Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, on abortion; Commonwealth v. Edelin, on the treatment of a fetus during or immediately after an abortion; In re Quinlan, on the termination of life support; and Superintendent of Belchertown State School v. Saikewicz,\u27 on the decision not to provide life-prolonging treatment. The book also analyzes a statutory post-Bampton development-the 1976 California Natural Death Act.\u27 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - With the observation that Samuel Johnson has fascinated more people than any other writer except Shakespeare, Professor W. Jackson Bate of Harvard University opens this profound biography. Now available to readers for more than three years, with the immediate excitement of its publication well-passed, the book clearly stands out as the quintessential presentation of the life of Johnson and as a monument of its genre. The force of Bate\u27s book results from his ability to combine research and literary talents.From a vast amount of material, Professor Bate has ferreted out the essential data for the composition of a portrait that depicts Johnson as the whole man, his eccentricity and greatness blended to perfection. Moreover, Bate has compiled his findings in a manner both pleasant and instructive that makes his presentation an independent work of art

A dynamic network in a dynamic population: asymptotic properties

We derive asymptotic properties for a stochastic dynamic network model in a stochastic dynamic population. In the model, nodes give birth to new nodes until they die, each node being equipped with a social index given at birth. During the life of a node it creates edges to other nodes, nodes with high social index at higher rate, and edges disappear randomly in time. For this model we derive criterion for when a giant connected component exists after the process has evolved for a long period of time, assuming the node population grows to infinity. We also obtain an explicit expression for the degree correlation $\rho$ (of neighbouring nodes) which shows that $\rho$ is always positive irrespective of parameter values in one of the two treated submodels, and may be either positive or negative in the other model, depending on the parameters

Exact two-terminal reliability of some directed networks

The calculation of network reliability in a probabilistic context has long been an issue of practical and academic importance. Conventional approaches (determination of bounds, sums of disjoint products algorithms, Monte Carlo evaluations, studies of the reliability polynomials, etc.) only provide approximations when the network's size increases, even when nodes do not fail and all edges have the same reliability p. We consider here a directed, generic graph of arbitrary size mimicking real-life long-haul communication networks, and give the exact, analytical solution for the two-terminal reliability. This solution involves a product of transfer matrices, in which individual reliabilities of edges and nodes are taken into account. The special case of identical edge and node reliabilities (p and rho, respectively) is addressed. We consider a case study based on a commonly-used configuration, and assess the influence of the edges being directed (or not) on various measures of network performance. While the two-terminal reliability, the failure frequency and the failure rate of the connection are quite similar, the locations of complex zeros of the two-terminal reliability polynomials exhibit strong differences, and various structure transitions at specific values of rho. The present work could be extended to provide a catalog of exactly solvable networks in terms of reliability, which could be useful as building blocks for new and improved bounds, as well as benchmarks, in the general case

Diurnal and Seasonal Activity Patterns of Drosophilid Species (Diptera: Drosophilidae) Present in Blackberry Agroecosystems With a Focus on Spotted-Wing Drosophila

Drosophilid species with different life histories have been shown to exhibit similar behavioral patterns related to locating and utilizing resources such as hosts, mates, and food sources. Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) is an invasive species that differs from other frugivorous drosophilids in that females lay eggs in ripe and ripening fruits instead of overripe or rotten fruits. We hypothesized that there may be diurnal and/or seasonal patterns associated with the movement of drosophilid species into and out of crop fields and their attraction to fermentation-odor-based monitoring traps, and that D. suzukii would conform to similar patterns. To test these hypotheses, we deployed passive, 2-headed Malaise traps between crop fields and wooded edges to simultaneously catch flies moving into and out of crop fields. We also deployed monitoring traps with a fermentation-based bait between crop fields and wooded edges and within crop rows. Traps were deployed weekly in June–August in 2014 and 2015 at two commercial blackberry farm in Cleveland County, NC, and were checked hourly for 24 h, except during darkness. Both D. suzukii and other drosophilid species moved between crop fields and wooded edges and were attracted to monitoring traps primarily during the morning and evening hours. Whereas other drosophilids were captured in traps throughout the season, few D. suzukii were caught in traps until early to mid-July in both years and increased as the season progressed. Understanding D. suzukii movement and activity patterns is essential for the development of effective management strategies

Vertex importance extension of betweenness centrality algorithm

Variety of real-life structures can be simplified by a graph. Such simplification emphasizes the structure represented by vertices connected via edges. A common method for the analysis of the vertices importance in a network is betweenness centrality. The centrality is computed using the information about the shortest paths that exist in a graph. This approach puts the importance on the edges that connect the vertices. However, not all vertices are equal. Some of them might be more important than others or have more significant influence on the behavior of the network. Therefore, we introduce the modification of the betweenness centrality algorithm that takes into account the vertex importance. This approach allows the further refinement of the betweenness centrality score to fulfill the needs of the network better. We show this idea on an example of the real traffic network. We test the performance of the algorithm on the traffic network data from the city of Bratislava, Slovakia to prove that the inclusion of the modification does not hinder the original algorithm much. We also provide a visualization of the traffic network of the city of Ostrava, the Czech Republic to show the effect of the vertex importance adjustment. The algorithm was parallelized by MPI (http://www.mpi-forum.org/) and was tested on the supercomputer Salomon (https://docs.it4i.cz/) at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, the Czech Republic.808726

Extraction of flank wear growth models that correlates cutting edge integrity of ball nose end mills while machining titanium

The application of titanium alloys are increasingly seen at aerospace, marine, bio-medical and precision engineering due to its high strength to weight ratio and high temperature properties. However, while machining the titanium alloys using solid carbide tools, even with jet infusion of coolant lower tool life was vividly seen. The high temperatures generated at the tool–work interface causes adhesion of work-material on the cutting edges; hence, shorter tool life was reported. To reduce the high tool–work interface temperature positive rake angle, higher primary relief and higher secondary relief were configured on the ball nose end-mill cutting edges. However, after an initial working period, the growth of flank wear facilitates higher cutting forces followed by work-material adhesion on the cutting edges. Therefore, it is important to blend the strength, sharpness and surface integrity on the cutting edges so that the ball nose end mill would demonstrate an extended tool-life. Presently, validation of tool geometry is very tedious as it requires extensive machining experiments. This paper illustrates a new feature-based ball-noseend-mill–work interface model with correlations to the material removal mechanisms by which the tool geometry optimization becomes easier. The data are further deployed to develop a multi-sensory feature extraction/correlation model to predict the performance using wavelet analysis and Wagner Ville distribution. Conclusively, this method enables to evaluate the different ball nose end mill geometry and reduces the product development cycle time