2,225 research outputs found

    Tests of a small compressed air plant

    Get PDF
    Citation: Correll, James A. Tests of a small compressed air plant. Senior thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1903.Morse Department of Special CollectionsIntroduction: The following tests were made on the compressed air plant in the Engineering Laboratory of the Kansas State Agricultural College. The plant is equipped as follows: a vertical engine the make and rated horse power of which are unknown, belted, through a main shaft, to a double acting, horizontal, piston compressor manufactured by the Ingersoll-Sergeant Drill company, and rated at from 8 to13 horse power depending on the revolution, piston compressor manufactured by the Ingersoll-Sergeant Drill Company, and rated at from 8 to 13 horse power depending on the revolutions per minute and the receiver pressure. A Westinghouse engine with two 6 x 8 single acting cylinders was connected to the air receiver and used as an air motor. The object of the tests was to determine 1st the efficiency of the plant, or the ratio of the developed brake horse power of the motor to the indicated horse power of the engine; 2nd the efficiency between the engine and compressor cylinders, and between the compressor cylinder and the brake on the motor; 2rd the horse power lost in heating the air and the cooling water. A series of three tests was conducted, the duration of each of which was one hour. Indicator cards were taken on the engine and compressor every five minutes throughout the test; as there was no means of taking cards on the air motor, a rope brake was constructed and used instead. Every five minutes, at the same time that the indicator cards instead. Every five minutes, at the same time that the indicator cards were taken, the speeds of the engine compressor and motor were noted, and at the same time, the initial and final temperatures of the air and cooling water, and the readings of the scale of the rope brake on the motor were taken. All water which passed through the water jacket of the compressor was carefully weighed and recorder, so that the total weight of water which passed through the jacket during the test was known

    Is There a Doctor in the (Station) House?: Reassessing the Constitutionality of Compelled DWI Blood Draws Forty-Five Years After Schmerber

    Get PDF
    The vast majority of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence of the last century has been dedicated to parsing the physical and in- tangible boundaries of the home, developing the expectation of privacy, and, as of late, exploring the constitutional implica- tions of an increasingly electronic society. In the midst of this development, one major area has quietly fallen by the wayside - the preservation of bodily integrity. As technology has ren- dered the human body an ever-increasing source of crucial evi- dence, the Supreme Court has remained largely silent on the government\u27s power to harvest information through medical procedures. Since the Court\u27s consideration of the constitutio- nality of compelled blood draws in Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966), the Fourth Amendment questions atten- dant to bodily evidence have been largely left to the states. This Article examines a narrow subset of that state-level develop- ment: non-consensual DWI blood draws. A review of the state statutory and jurisprudential applications of Schmerber reveals increasing disagreement over the scope of the Fourth Amend- ment when police seek to recover fleeting evidence of blood al- cohol content. Based on this review, this Article suggests a number ofpolicy proposals designed to better insure police stay within the Fourth Amendment strictures of Schmerber while al- so procuring the most effective evidence possible

    Nicotine Sensitization in β-Arrestin 2 Knockout Adolescent Mice.

    Get PDF
    ß arrestin-2 is a protein involved in signaling of D2 receptors and plays a mediating role in sensitization to psychostimulants and the opiate morphine. In this study, 3-4 week old BA-2 KO and wild type C57/B6 mice received nicotine tartarate (s.c, 0.5 mg/kg free base) for 7 or 14 consecutive days followed by a drug-free period. An acute nicotine challenge followed the drugfree period. Results indicated that the absence of ß-arrestin-2 reduced sensitization to nicotine in Experiment 1. BA-2 KOs eventually demonstrated sensitization in Experiment 2. However, absence of ß-arrestin-2 blocked expression of sensitization on the challenge. After the challenge, brain tissue was removed and the nucleus accumbens was dissected and analyzed for brainderived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Results showed that BDNF positively correlated with behavioral results. These results appear to indicate the importance of the ß-arrestin-2 protein in locomotor sensitization and that dopamine signaling is related to BDNF

    Experience-Based Planning with Sparse Roadmap Spanners

    Full text link
    We present an experienced-based planning framework called Thunder that learns to reduce computation time required to solve high-dimensional planning problems in varying environments. The approach is especially suited for large configuration spaces that include many invariant constraints, such as those found with whole body humanoid motion planning. Experiences are generated using probabilistic sampling and stored in a sparse roadmap spanner (SPARS), which provides asymptotically near-optimal coverage of the configuration space, making storing, retrieving, and repairing past experiences very efficient with respect to memory and time. The Thunder framework improves upon past experience-based planners by storing experiences in a graph rather than in individual paths, eliminating redundant information, providing more opportunities for path reuse, and providing a theoretical limit to the size of the experience graph. These properties also lead to improved handling of dynamically changing environments, reasoning about optimal paths, and reducing query resolution time. The approach is demonstrated on a 30 degrees of freedom humanoid robot and compared with the Lightning framework, an experience-based planner that uses individual paths to store past experiences. In environments with variable obstacles and stability constraints, experiments show that Thunder is on average an order of magnitude faster than Lightning and planning from scratch. Thunder also uses 98.8% less memory to store its experiences after 10,000 trials when compared to Lightning. Our framework is implemented and freely available in the Open Motion Planning Library.Comment: Submitted to ICRA 201

    Pediatric Telebehavioral Health in Rural Primary Care: An Electronically-Mediated Warm Handoff

    Get PDF

    When the Body Became Data: Historical Data Cultures and Anatomical Illustration

    Full text link
    With changing attitudes around knowledge, medicine, art, and technology, the human body has become a source of information and, ultimately, shareable and analyzable data. Centuries of illustrations and visualizations of the body occur within particular historical, social, and political contexts. These contexts are enmeshed in different so-called data cultures: ways that data, knowledge, and information are conceptualized and collected, structured and shared. In this work, we explore how information about the body was collected as well as the circulation, impact, and persuasive force of the resulting images. We show how mindfulness of data cultural influences remain crucial for today's designers, researchers, and consumers of visualizations. We conclude with a call for the field to reflect on how visualizations are not timeless and contextless mirrors on objective data, but as much a product of our time and place as the visualizations of the past

    Long-acting injectable versus daily oral antipsychotic treatment trials in schizophrenia: pragmatic versus explanatory study designs

    Get PDF
    Trial design characteristics related to the explanatory:pragmatic spectrum may contribute toward the inconsistent results reported in studies comparing long-acting injectable (LAI) versus daily oral antipsychotic (AP) treatments in schizophrenia. A novel approach examined the hypothesis that a more pragmatic design is important to show the advantages of LAI versus oral APs. A literature search identified comparative studies assessing the clinical efficacy/effectiveness of LAI versus oral APs in more than 100 schizophrenia patients, with 6-month or more duration/follow-up, and published between January 1993 and December 2013 (n=11). Each study\u27s design was rated using the six-domain ASPECT-R (A Study Pragmatic:Explanatory Characterization Tool-Rating). Nonparametric Wilcoxon rank-sum tests compared ratings of studies supporting (n=7) and not supporting (n=4) a LAI advantage. ASPECT-R total and domain scores were significantly higher (more pragmatic) in studies finding a LAI versus oral AP treatment advantage than those that did not. The rank order of this significance among domains was as follows: participant compliance assessment\u27 (P=0.005), medical practice setting/practitioner expertise\u27 (P=0.006), intervention flexibility\u27 (P=0.007), follow-up intensity/duration\u27 (P=0.009), primary trial outcomes\u27 (P=0.012), and participant eligibility\u27 (P=0.015). Findings support that more pragmatic, less explanatory design features are important to show advantages for LAI treatment. Explanatory studies may introduce features that obscure advantages related to adherence

    Delayed identification and diagnosis of Huntington\u27s disease due to psychiatric symptoms

    Get PDF
    Huntington\u27s disease (HD) is a progressive neurodegenerative illness that affects 2-9/100.000 of the general population. The usual onset is at around age 35-40 years, but there were cases with onset above 55 years. The disease manifests clinically with many neurological and psychiatric symptoms, leading in advanced phases to dementia, but cognitive symptoms are frequently present much earlier in the disease course. HD is caused by an expanded polyglutamine stretch in the N-terminal part of a 350 kDa protein called huntingtin (HTT). This stretch is encoded by a trinucleotide CAG repetition in exon 1 of HTT. An expansion of greater than 36 repeats results in HD. The number of repeats is inversely correlated with the age of onset of motor symptoms, and disease onset during childhood or adolescence is associated with more than 60 CAG repeats. Mood disturbances may be one of the earliest symptoms of HD and may precede the onset of the motor pheno-type for almost 10 years. Neuropsychiatric symptoms may delay the appropriate diagnosis of HD and have major implications for disease management, prognosis and quality of life for patients and families. This case study is about a 58 years old female patient with late identification of Huntington\u27s disease after two admissions to psychiatric inpatient units, for the treatment of behavioral disturbances

    Local Communication Protocols for Learning Complex Swarm Behaviors with Deep Reinforcement Learning

    Full text link
    Swarm systems constitute a challenging problem for reinforcement learning (RL) as the algorithm needs to learn decentralized control policies that can cope with limited local sensing and communication abilities of the agents. While it is often difficult to directly define the behavior of the agents, simple communication protocols can be defined more easily using prior knowledge about the given task. In this paper, we propose a number of simple communication protocols that can be exploited by deep reinforcement learning to find decentralized control policies in a multi-robot swarm environment. The protocols are based on histograms that encode the local neighborhood relations of the agents and can also transmit task-specific information, such as the shortest distance and direction to a desired target. In our framework, we use an adaptation of Trust Region Policy Optimization to learn complex collaborative tasks, such as formation building and building a communication link. We evaluate our findings in a simulated 2D-physics environment, and compare the implications of different communication protocols.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, version 2, accepted at ANTS 201

    Role of social media and the Internet in pathways to care for adolescents and young adults with psychotic disorders and non-psychotic mood disorders

    Get PDF
    AIMS: Although psychosis often occurs during adolescence, there has been little research on how the ubiquitously used Internet and social media could impact pathways to care. We examined how youth with psychotic spectrum disorders (PSD) versus non-psychotic mood disorders (NPMD) use online resources in the early illness stages. METHODS: Social media use and pathways to care data were collected using a semi-structured interview from 80 youth (PSD = 40 and NPMD = 40) aged 12-21 years within 2 years of symptom onset. RESULTS: A total of 97.5% of participants (mean age = 18.3 years) regularly used social media, spending approximately 2.6 +/- 2.5 h per day online. There were 22.4% of our sample (PSD = 19.4%, NPMD = 25.0%, P = 0.56) who reported waiting to reach out for help believing that symptoms would disappear. A total of 76.5% (PSD = 67.5%, NPMD = 85.0%, P = 0.06) noticed social media habit changes during symptom emergence. Thirty per cent reported discussing their symptoms on social media (PSD = 22.5%, NPMD = 37.5%, P = 0.14). NPMD patients sought information most on how to stop symptoms (40.0% vs. 13.5%, P = 0.01), while PSD youth were more commonly interested in what caused their symptoms (21.6% vs. 15.0%, P = 0.45). More PSD patients (42.9% vs. 25.0%, P = 0.10) would prefer to receive mental health information via the Internet. Altogether, 63.6% (PSD = 64.9%, NPMD = 62.5%, P = 0.83) were amenable to clinicians proactively approaching them via social media during symptom emergence. A total of 74.3% (PSD = 78.4%, NPMD = 70.0%, P = 0.40) liked the idea of obtaining help/advice from professionals via social media. CONCLUSIONS: The Internet and social media provide an unparalleled opportunity to supplement and potentially transform early intervention services, and acceptance of this approach appears to be high
    • …
    corecore