The Manufacture of Walnut Gun Stocks in Iowa

Few people know that an Iowa company is the largest producer of rough gun stocks in the world. The Des Moines Saw Mill Company, located at the capitol city of the State, produces annually about 1,200,000 walnut gun stocks. This number has been sold by the company during the past year. It has been variously estimated that this number equals from 50 to 75 per cent of the total yearly supply of walnut stocks in the United States. With the exception of a few manufacturers of fire arms, the Des Moines Saw Mill Company supplies all of the leading gun companies of the United States using walnut stocks. Although a large part of the blank gun stocks are further manufactured in this country, some stocks are marketed in Europe

Research and development of the dry tape battery concept Quarterly report no. 2, 9 Sep. - 8 Dec. 1965

Magnesium-aluminum chloride, hydrogen chloride- trichlorotriazinetrione system for dry tape batterie

Impact of radon and thoron levels on technosphere objects in the total urban environment

Thoron and radon exhalation from earth's crust is the most important source of atmospheric radioactive gases, along with its daughter products present in the soil is one of the major contributors to the external gamma dose in the atmosphere, since its distribution in the earth's crust is important for controlling the production of 220Rn and 222Rn. In this study trace amount of 232Th, 238U permeate almost all soils and rocks, in part due to the influence of buildings from which radioactive gas can emanate over geological time scales. Results obtained from this study indicate that the region has background radioactivity levels within the natural limits and a detailed discussion of the results is presented in the work

Scaling behavior of self-avoiding walks on percolation clusters

The scaling behavior of self-avoiding walks (SAWs) on the backbone of percolation clusters in two, three and four dimensions is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. We apply the pruned-enriched Rosenbluth chain-growth method (PERM). Our numerical results bring about the estimates of critical exponents, governing the scaling laws of disorder averages of the end-to-end distance of SAW configurations. The effects of finite-size scaling are discussed as well.Comment: 6 page

Index Construction for Multiple Objective Analysis of Land and Water Use in a High Mountain Watershed

Comprehensive planning is an elusive ideal. The practical planner must sort the relevant information from the vast amounts of data that modern technology can collect. The objective of this study was to use the Upper Blackfoot watershed in the mountains of Southeastern Idaho as an arena for developing methods for construction, refinement, and application of indices needed to design land and water management schemes, compare alternatives, and influence the public in their uses of the area. A total of 21 uses were examined on 242 land units of a 160 square-mile area ranging in elevation from 6300 to 9000 feet and where the principal activities of grazing, lumbering, mining, and recreation can only be undertaken in the summer after the snow has melted. The indices considered were a reasonability index for screening out unreasonable uses at the start of the planning process, an index of use intensity for estimating an amount for reasonable uses, and an index for estimating the utility of the amount of use made from the public viewpoint. Data were collected on 42 attributes for the 343 land units and used in a linear programming model to maximize 1) economic benefits from use of the area and 2) minimize environmental disturbance. The resolution in the available use data limited the model solution to allocating uses among 18 larger land units. The primary factor limiting the modeling, however, was the lack of information for defining the interactions among the uses. The analysis provides a framework for classifying and identifying interactions beginning with the simplest case of simultaneous use by two uses in near proximity. The contribution of the study was a framework for analysis and the identification of the needs for research on the physical interactions among simultaneous uses, the perceived interactions of simultaneous users, and characterization of attributes for defining the quality of an area for a use

Awareness of vaccination status and its predictors among working people in Switzerland

BACKGROUND: Adult vaccination status may be difficult to obtain, often requiring providers to rely on individual patient recall. To determine vaccination status awareness and the sociodemographic predictors of awareness for tetanus, hepatitis A and B, tick born encephalitis (TBE) and influenza vaccination. METHODS: Multivariate analyses were used to evaluate a questionnaire survey of 10 321 employees (4070 women and 6251 men aged 15–72 years) of two companies in Switzerland. RESULTS: Among 10 321 respondents, 75.5% reported knowing their tetanus vaccination status, 64.1% hepatitis A, 61.1% hepatitis B, 64.3% TBE and 71.9% influenza. Between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 employees were not aware of their vaccination status. Differences in awareness for the five vaccinations considered correlated with gender and language. These differences persisted in multivariate analyses. CONCLUSION: Women employees, German-speaking employees and employees who paid more attention to their diet were more often aware of their vaccination status. A more reliable and readily accessible data source for vaccination status is needed in order to capitalize on opportunities to update vaccinations among Swiss employees

Using Structure to Explore the Sequence Alignment Space of Remote Homologs

Protein structure modeling by homology requires an accurate sequence alignment between the query protein and its structural template. However, sequence alignment methods based on dynamic programming (DP) are typically unable to generate accurate alignments for remote sequence homologs, thus limiting the applicability of modeling methods. A central problem is that the alignment that is “optimal” in terms of the DP score does not necessarily correspond to the alignment that produces the most accurate structural model. That is, the correct alignment based on structural superposition will generally have a lower score than the optimal alignment obtained from sequence. Variations of the DP algorithm have been developed that generate alternative alignments that are “suboptimal” in terms of the DP score, but these still encounter difficulties in detecting the correct structural alignment. We present here a new alternative sequence alignment method that relies heavily on the structure of the template. By initially aligning the query sequence to individual fragments in secondary structure elements and combining high-scoring fragments that pass basic tests for “modelability”, we can generate accurate alignments within a small ensemble. Our results suggest that the set of sequences that can currently be modeled by homology can be greatly extended