Glacial action in Tasmania

Through the courtesy of the secretary I have been allowed to read Mr. Moore's paper on " The discovery of glaciation in Tasmania " read at the April meeting of the Royal Society, at which I was unfortunately unable to be present, and have thus been enabled to prepare a few notes upon it. Having myself come upon evidences of ice action in February last in the neighbourhood of Mount Pelion, and being at that time ignorant of Mr. Moore's discovery four months earlier, I had intended in any case to submit to the Society a few observations on the subject of glaciation, and in continuing the discussion on this important and interesting subject I shall make a few remarks upon Mr. Moore's paper, and then pass on to what I saw myself and to a few observations on more general aspects of the matter. Alexander Montgomery came to Tasmania in 1889 to become Geological Surveyor and who later became Inspector of Mines

An investigation of train drag reduction using sub-boundary layer vortex generators on a simplified intermodal well car geometry

Railroad companies in the United States spent about $6.6 billion on diesel to move freight in 2015. One way to save money and reduce fuel consumption is to reduce the drag on the train. With the length of trains in the United States the drag due to the gaps between cars in the train is substantial. To reduce the drag between cars the intermodal well car was investigated. These cars carry intermodal containers often stacked two high. There were 12.2 million intermodal containers shipped in 2015, making the intermodal well car one of the most common cars in use. To avoid the need for major structural changes to the intermodal container wishbone vortex generators were investigated. Using steady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes simulations the flow field around a train consisting of a scaled and simplified locomotive and two intermodal cars was investigated. Sub-boundary layer vortex generators were then added to this model in two configurations. The first configuration added vortex generators to the rear of the intermodal cars, whereas the second configuration added vortex generators to both the front and rear of the intermodal cars. The vortex generators were sized according to two different boundary layer heights. The first height was found using flat plate turbulent boundary layer theory. The second used the boundary layer developed at the end of the first intermodal car. The addition of the smaller vortex generator showed a 2% drag reduction. While this reduction is close to the minimum accuracy of the simulation, the change in the drag on each car shows that further study is necessary to truly evaluate these devices. The larger vortex generators on the other hand show a 12% increase in the drag of the train

Numerical Analysis of a Model for the Growth of Microorganisms

A system of first-order differential equations that arises in a model for the growth of microorganisms in a chemostat with Monod kinetics is studied. A new, semi-implicit numerical scheme is proposed to approximate solutions to the system. It is shown that the scheme is uniquely solvable and unconditionally stable, and further properties of the scheme are analyzed. The convergence rate of the numerical solution to the true solution of the system is given, and it is shown convergence of the numerical solutions to the true solutions is uniform over any interval [0, T ] for T \u3e 0

Inequalities of correlation type for symmetric stable random vectors

The final version of this paper appears in: "Statistics and Probability Letters" 28 (1996): 485-490. Print.We point out a certain class of functions f and g for which random variables f(X1,...,Xm) and g(Xm+1,...,Xk) are non-negatively correlated for any symmetric jointly stable random variables Xi. We also show another result that is related to the correlation problem for Gaussian measures of symmetric convex sets

Centrality in Politics: How Networks Confer Power

A traditional view of power in politics is that it comes from the possession of important resources. The relative possession of resources is thought to provide actors such as people, organizations, and states with means of coercion or influence over others. This traditional view is highly limiting, since power also comes from ties (patterns of association) that link together actors in networks. These ties, whether material (like trade flows) or social (like friendship), determine an actor’s ability to have access to, make connections between, or quickly spread resources to, other actors. An actor’s relative position in a network formed by these ties thus provides another important source of influence over others. In this article, we introduce three classes of network centrality positions (degree, betweenness, and closeness), explain the advantages of each, and demonstrate that network notions of power that derive from centrality can significantly inform the study of politics

Basketball and drugs: Wastewater-based epidemiological estimation of discharged drugs during basketball games in Kentucky

High school sports gather a significantly larger number of fans than college and professional sports in the U.S. Adolescent and adult students in high schools and colleges (aged 12–25) are among the most vulnerable population to substance use. Event planners, risk managers, and emergency medical service personnel can extrapolate the mass loads of drugs in wastewater in this study to evaluate the spectator behavior in relatively larger basketball gatherings. Thirty-three illicit and prescribed psychotic drug residues (out of target 36) and five new psychoactive substances (NPS, out of target 40) were quantified in wastewater, using ultra-performance liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry, discharged during a college and a high school basketball games that were played in the same stadium in Kentucky. The wastewater concentrations of amphetamine, methylphenidate, hydromorphone were significantly higher (p ≤ 0.040) during a high school basketball game whereas cocaine, hydrocodone, and gabapentin was significantly higher (p ≤ 0.006) in a college basketball game. Higher cocaine to its metabolite ratio suggested that a significant amount of cocaine may have directly discharged down the drain during the college basketball game. Two synthetic cathinones (methcathinone and 4-methyl pentedrone) and three other NPSs (4-ANPP, mCPP, and 4-methylamphetamine) were also quantified in wastewater indicate the prevalence of NPSs in Kentucky. This is the first report of quantified substances of potential abuses at basketball games