Animal Experimentation as a Form of Rescue

In this paper I explore a new approach to the ethics of animal experimentation by conceiving of it as a form of rescue. The notion of rescue, I suggest, involves some moral agent(s) performing an action or series of actions, whose end is to prevent or alleviate serious harm to another party, harm that otherwise would have occurred or would have continued to occur, had that moral agent not intervened. Animal experiments that are utilized as a means to alleviate human illnesses mirror the structure of rescue cases and this means that we can and should apply principles of rescue to illuminate the moral status of animal experimentation. To do this I consider various principles of rescue that might justify animal experimentation. I’ll argue that all of these rescue principles are either not independently plausible, or else they fail to imply that animal experimentation is morally justified. This suggests that it is quite difficult to morally justify animal experimentation when conceived as a form of rescue

Cal Poly Women’s Basketball 2013-2014 Shot Selection Analysis

The initial goal of my senior project was to find some way to help the Cal Poly women’s basketball team score more efficiently. The first idea that came to my mind on how I could accomplish this goal was to look at the most important thing when it comes to scoring more points, the shot itself. I went with my initial idea and recorded each shot that a player took during the 2013-2014 season and categorized each shot by the distance it was taken (close, medium, long, or three), and whether the shot was open or guarded for a total of eight shots. I could now provide each player with a summary of how many field goals they made, how many field goals they attempted, and how many times they got fouled when taking each of these eight shots. These summary statistics themselves would be helpful insight because they will paint an overall picture of a player’s shooting ability from different spots on the floor. I wanted to provide more insight on shot selection that could help the team so I quantified each specific shot by calculating what the points expected are for the entire possession for each specific shot. This will allow comparison between different types of shots and also the team overall average. Shots that have an expected point total above team average should be theoretically taken, while shots below team average should be theoretically passed up because the team is expected to score more points if the player does not shoot. The finished product for summarizing each player’s shooting ability will consist of a shooting summary along with a colored coordinated shooting chart that contains the expected points per possession for each of the eight shot possibilities. I additionally constructed overall team shooting charts which had close two pointers and three pointers as the best shot options, but each player shoots well from different spots on the floor. Making individual shooting charts the most insightful and useful for accomplishing the main goal of this project, scoring more efficiently

A practical transition of employees towards information systems adoption: A public service perspective

This paper is a case study which studies change management in the pilot study phase of the implementation of an ERP system. This system, when rolled out in its entirety, will affect all parts of the public service and all state departments of an unnamed African country. Amongst the challenges faced is the matrix structure of the public sector, with one department seen as the driver of this change. This wide scope means that particularly skillful change management is required. Nine factors that had previously been identified from research literature on change management, IS adoption models, and different people-centric approaches to change management, that relate specifically to issues concerning the people involved with or affected by the proposed changes, are used as the basis for engaging research participants familiar with the case being studied. This is done in order to verify the relevance of the factors in practice and to show relationships between the factors. The results show that perceptions of change vary widely amongst the people involved and, therefore, inflexible or standardized change management processes are inappropriate. In addition, it is found that where there is a need to implement the system as a modular process, change will be extensive and lengthy and change management practice must take the possibility of change fatigue into account. The organization and the individuals need to be assisted to adapt and accept ongoing change as a norm rather than seeking stable periods after planned disruptions

A Survey on Job and Task Scheduling in Big Data

Bigdata handles the datasets which exceeds the ability of commonly used software tools for storing, sharing and processing the data. Classification of workload is a major issue to the Big Data community namely job type evolution and job size evolution. On the basis of job type, job size and disk performance, clusters are been formed with data node, name node and secondary name node. To classify the workload and to perform the job scheduling, mapreduce algorithm is going to be applied. Based on the performance of individual machine, workload has been allocated. Mapreduce has two phases for processing the data: map and reduce phases. In map phase, the input dataset taken is splitted into keyvalue pairs and an intermediate output is obtained and in reduce phase that key value pair undergoes shuffle and sort operation. Intermediate files are created from map tasks are written to local disk and output files are written to distributed file system of Hadoop. Scheduling of different jobs to different disks are identified after completing mapreduce tasks. Johnson algorithm is used to schedule the jobs and used to find out the optimal solution of different jobs. It schedules the jobs into different pools and performs the scheduling. The main task to be carried out is to minimize the computation time for entire jobs and analyze the performance using response time factors in hadoop distributed file system. Based on the dataset size and number of nodes which is formed in hadoop cluster, the performance of individual jobs are identified\ud Keywords — \ud hadoop; mapreduce; johnson algorith

Aerothermodynamic Analysis of a Reentry Brazilian Satellite

This work deals with a computational investigation on the small ballistic reentry Brazilian vehicle SARA (acronyms for SAt\'elite de Reentrada Atmosf\'erica). Hypersonic flows over the vehicle SARA at zero-degree angle of attack in a chemical equilibrium and thermal non-equilibrium are modeled by the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, which has become the main technique for studying complex multidimensional rarefied flows, and that properly accounts for the non-equilibrium aspects of the flows. The emphasis of this paper is to examine the behavior of the primary properties during the high altitude portion of SARA reentry. In this way, velocity, density, pressure and temperature field are investigated for altitudes of 100, 95, 90, 85 and 80 km. In addition, comparisons based on geometry are made between axisymmetric and planar two-dimensional configurations. Some significant differences between these configurations were noted on the flowfield structure in the reentry trajectory. The analysis showed that the flow disturbances have different influence on velocity, density, pressure and temperature along the stagnation streamline ahead of the capsule nose. It was found that the stagnation region is a thermally stressed zone. It was also found that the stagnation region is a zone of strong compression, high wall pressure. Wall pressure distributions are compared with those of available experimental data and good agreement is found along the spherical nose for the altitude range investigated.Comment: The paper will be published in Vol. 42 of the Brazilian Journal of Physic

ANTS:Articulated Nested Telescoping Simulation

This paper addresses the problem of scale in simulations by investigating a novel kind of interactive simulation system which can be run on desktop machines. In this system, data is represented at various levels of abstraction. The system is navigated in such a way that the data can be viewed and modified at each of those levels. However, at deeper levels in the model, only a subset of the total system is represented in detail. This subset is generated, as the user moves down a level, out of aggregates in the level above and compressed into aggregates, when the user moves up a level. Simulation rules are applied to each level of the simulation in a modular manner, independent of the level of the simulation. This system is found to increase efficiency dramatically, since only a subset of the data is represented in detail. A certain amount of data loss inevitably occurs as a result of data compression. The system is therefore only appropriate in those cases where data precision is not of paramount importance. An interface was designed by means of the PICTIVE participatory design technique. A subset of this interface design was implemented. It was then evaluated using the constructive interaction method and was found to be generally intuitive and user friendly

Development of ERAU VOLTRON Hybrid-Electric Powerplant

The energy density of today’s batteries is not high enough for electric powered aircraft to achieve an operationally viable range plus FAA stipulated reserve flight times. Hybrid-electric power generation systems may be able to bridge the gap, providing a way for these aircraft to fly distances not possible with batteries alone. There is a recognition that gasoline-electric hybrid systems can deliver specific energy and specific power that are higher than any currently available battery system. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s (ERAU’s) Eagle Flight Research Center (EFRC) is building a 70+ kW hybrid-electric power generation system using a rotary engine and Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM) & Inverter. The rotary engine will be directly coupled to the PMSM which will generate electrical energy to power multi-rotor eVTOL vehicles. These results will be achieved by utilizing advanced control systems implemented on a National Instruments Compact RIO. Past research conducted at the EFRC demonstrated the ability to design and operate a hybrid-electric powerplant. The VOLTRON project will attempt to create a system with an even higher specific energy but with the compact size and high power characteristics of a rotary engine and eventually alternative fuel flexibility