Medical Science and the Law

There are those who say that the earliest physician was the priest, just as the earliest judge was the ruler who uttered the divine command and was king and priest combined. Modern scholarship warns us to swallow with a grain of salt these sweeping generalities, yet they have at least a core of truth. Our profession - yours and mine - medicine and law have divided with the years, yet they were not far apart at the beginning

Nuclear Structure Studies at ISOLDE and their Impact on the Astrophysical r-Process

The focus of the present review is the production of the heaviest elements in nature via the r-process. A correct understanding and modeling requires the knowledge of nuclear properties far from stability and a detailed prescription of the astrophysical environment. Experiments at CERN/ISOLDE have played a pioneering role in exploring the characteristics of nuclear structure in terms of masses and beta-decay properties. Initial examinations paid attention to far unstable nuclei with magic neutron numbers related to r-process peaks, while present activities are centered on the evolution of shell effects with the distance from the valley of stability. We first show in site-independent applications the effect of both types of nuclear properties on r-process abundances. Then, we explore the results of calculations related to two different `realistic' astrophysical sites, (i) the supernova neutrino wind and (ii) neutron star mergers. We close with a list of remaining theoretical and experimental challenges needed to overcome for a full understanding of the nature of the r-process, and the role CERN/ISOLDE can play in this process.Comment: LATEX, 38 pages, 16 figures, submitted to Hyperfine Interaction

Mosses of a Northern Ohio Area

Author Institution: 14,556 Superior Road, Cleveland Heights 18, Ohi

An Open Source Software Business Model For Law Enforcement And Justice Systems

Software application projects that are being developed or planned for use in environments that have typically been distributed or marketed to outside organizations may now be posed with new parameters to consider.  Not only are project managers and stakeholders confronted with the usual project constraints of scope, cost, time, and quality, but also new application development and distribution models must be given careful consideration.  By application development and distribution models, I am referring to decisions to develop, market, or procure, open source or proprietary software code.  This decision is not as much dependent on the development methodology as the distribution license used for the finished product.  There is no secret that companies that develop proprietary software, whether systems or applications, usually devise strategies to obsolete their products so that the purchase of upgraded versions will be required.  Support is often dropped from older version of software to force the purchase in new versions.  In addition, vendors often try to lock their customers into their products by forcing huge investments in specialized employees, training, special hardware, unique features, and large initial capital outlays.  Also, licenses often do not allow a sufficient timeframe to drop one product and move on to another brand.  This paper will present an example of an open source software model for law enforcement and justice systems that will attempt to prevent many of the problems associated with procuring proprietary software.  This model will describe how a federal grant can fund the development of a criminal justice suite of software that can be distributed without cost to any law enforcement or justice agency.  The first module, a jail management system, has been completed and a business model has been developed for its open deployment

The Open Source Software Paradigm

A lot misinformation and mystery surrounds the topic of Open Source software.  The conceptual misunderstanding of software is fostered, in some respects, by a lack of understanding within the professional ranks of the computer field.  There are many different views of Open Source software today, based upon ones perspective.  After about 20 years of evolution, the position of Open Source in our economy still has not coalesced.  Few seems to understand whether Open Source is free software for running a computer (i.e., Linux) or just a way to obtain some software products without giving Microsoft ones money. “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come” - Victor Hug

Analysis of a mathematical model for the heave motion of a micro aerial vehicle with flexible wings having non-local damping effects

In this work we analyze a one dimensional model for a flexible wing micro aerial vehicle which can undergo heaving motion. The vehicle is modeled with a non-local type of internal damping known as spatial hysteresis as well as viscous external damping. We present a rigorous theoretical analysis of the model proving that the linearly approximated system is well-posed and the first order feedback system operators generate exponentially stable C0–semigroups. Furthermore, we present numerical simulations of control designs used on the linearly approximated model to control the associated nonlinear model in two different strategies. The first strategy used to control the system is a target tracking strategy. The second strategy used in this work is morphing the system to a target state over time. The controllers used in this work include Linear Quadratic Regulator, Linear Quadratic Gaussian, and central control. In light of the theory of this work we have incorporated the appropriate Riccati equation solutions into the control design for a system with a mode problem (i.e. zero eigenvalue for stiffness operator). This work remains consistent with the literature that concerns multiple component structures with a mode problem