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Participatory action research in the development and delivery of self-harm awareness sessions in prison: involving service users in staff development
Uprated OMS Engine Status-Sea Level Testing Results
The current Space Shuttle Orbital Maneuvering Engine (OME) is pressure fed, utilizing storable propellants. Performance uprating of this engine, through the use of a gas generator driven turbopump to increase operating pressure, is being pursued by the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). Component level design, fabrication, and test activities for this engine system have been on-going since 1984. More recently, a complete engine designated the Integrated Component Test Bed (ICTB), was tested at sea level conditions by Aerojet. A description of the test hardware and results of the sea level test program are presented. These results, which include the test condition operating envelope and projected performance at altitude conditions, confirm the capability of the selected Uprated OME (UOME) configuration to meet or exceed performance and operational requirements. Engine flexibility, demonstrated through testing at two different operational mixture ratios, along with a summary of projected Space Shuttle performance enhancements using the UOME, are discussed. Planned future activities, including ICTB tests at simulated altitude conditions, and recommendations for further engine development, are also discussed
Supersonic quantum communication
When locally exciting a quantum lattice model, the excitation will propagate
through the lattice. The effect is responsible for a wealth of non-equilibrium
phenomena, and has been exploited to transmit quantum information through spin
chains. It is a commonly expressed belief that for local Hamiltonians, any such
propagation happens at a finite "speed of sound". Indeed, the Lieb-Robinson
theorem states that in spin models, all effects caused by a perturbation are
limited to a causal cone defined by a constant speed, up to exponentially small
corrections. In this work we show that for translationally invariant bosonic
models with nearest-neighbor interactions, this belief is incorrect: We prove
that one can encounter excitations which accelerate under the natural dynamics
of the lattice and allow for reliable transmission of information faster than
any finite speed of sound. The effect is only limited by the model's range of
validity (eventually by relativity). It also implies that in non-equilibrium
dynamics of strongly correlated bosonic models far-away regions may become
quickly entangled, suggesting that their simulation may be much harder than
that of spin chains even in the low energy sector.Comment: 4+3 pages, 1 figure, some material added, typographic error fixe
Identifying Functional Thermodynamics in Autonomous Maxwellian Ratchets
We introduce a family of Maxwellian Demons for which correlations among
information bearing degrees of freedom can be calculated exactly and in compact
analytical form. This allows one to precisely determine Demon functional
thermodynamic operating regimes, when previous methods either misclassify or
simply fail due to approximations they invoke. This reveals that these Demons
are more functional than previous candidates. They too behave either as
engines, lifting a mass against gravity by extracting energy from a single heat
reservoir, or as Landauer erasers, consuming external work to remove
information from a sequence of binary symbols by decreasing their individual
uncertainty. Going beyond these, our Demon exhibits a new functionality that
erases bits not by simply decreasing individual-symbol uncertainty, but by
increasing inter-bit correlations (that is, by adding temporal order) while
increasing single-symbol uncertainty. In all cases, but especially in the new
erasure regime, exactly accounting for informational correlations leads to
tight bounds on Demon performance, expressed as a refined Second Law of
Thermodynamics that relies on the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy for dynamical
processes and not on changes purely in system configurational entropy, as
previously employed. We rigorously derive the refined Second Law under minimal
assumptions and so it applies quite broadly---for Demons with and without
memory and input sequences that are correlated or not. We note that general
Maxwellian Demons readily violate previously proposed, alternative such bounds,
while the current bound still holds.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures,
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/mrd.ht
Analytical model of brittle destruction based on hypothesis of scale similarity
The size distribution of dust particles in nuclear fusion devices is close to
the power function. A function of this kind can be the result of brittle
destruction. From the similarity assumption it follows that the size
distribution obeys the power law with the exponent between -4 and -1. The model
of destruction has much in common with the fractal theory. The power exponent
can be expressed in terms of the fractal dimension. Reasonable assumptions on
the shape of fragments concretize the power exponent, and vice versa possible
destruction laws can be inferred on the basis of measured size distributions.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
Post Big Bang Processing of the Primordial Elements
We explore the Gnedin-Ostriker suggestion that a post-Big-Bang
photodissociation process may modify the primordial abundances of the light
elements. We consider several specific models and discuss the general features
that are necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) to make the model work. We
find that with any significant processing, the final D and He abundances,
which are independent of their initial standard big bang nucleosynthesis (SBBN)
values, rise quickly to a level several orders of magnitude above the
observationally inferred primordial values. Solutions for specific models show
that the only initial abundances that can be photoprocessed into agreement with
observations are those that undergo virtually no processing and are already in
agreement with observation. Thus it is unlikely that this model can work for
any non-trivial case unless an artificial density and/or photon distribution is
invoked.Comment: 12 page Latex file (AASTEX style). Tarred, gzipped, and uuencoded
postscript files of seven figures. Also available (with ps file of paper) at
ftp://www-physics.mps.ohio-state.edu/pub/nucex/phot
Dynamic Matrix Factorization with Priors on Unknown Values
Advanced and effective collaborative filtering methods based on explicit
feedback assume that unknown ratings do not follow the same model as the
observed ones (\emph{not missing at random}). In this work, we build on this
assumption, and introduce a novel dynamic matrix factorization framework that
allows to set an explicit prior on unknown values. When new ratings, users, or
items enter the system, we can update the factorization in time independent of
the size of data (number of users, items and ratings). Hence, we can quickly
recommend items even to very recent users. We test our methods on three large
datasets, including two very sparse ones, in static and dynamic conditions. In
each case, we outrank state-of-the-art matrix factorization methods that do not
use a prior on unknown ratings.Comment: in the Proceedings of 21st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining 201
The effect of composition on the mechanism of stress-corrosion cracking of titanium alloys in nitrogen tetroxide, and aqueous and hot- salt environments Annual summary report, 1 May 1967 - 30 Apr. 1968
Stress corrosion data for titanium alloys in aqueous, hot salt, and nitrogen dioxide environment
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