Separation of Church and State: Helping or Hindering Religion?

Separation of Church and State: Helping or Hindering Religion? A Dialogue Featuring: Gary S. Gildin, professor of law and director of the Miller Center for Public Interest Advocacy at Penn State Dickinson School of Law. Bradley P. Jacob, associate professor of Law at Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Va. Moderated by the Rev. Mark Wm. Radecke, D.Min,, Susquehanna University chaplain since 1997. Presented Thursday, Mar. 31, 2005 Degenstein Center Theate

Experimental Determination of Load Carrying Capacity of Point Contacts at Zero Entrainment Velocity

A capacitance technique was used to monitor the film thickness separating two steel balls of a unique tribometer while subjecting the ball-ball contact to highly stressed, zero entrainment velocity (ZEV) conditions. All tests were performed under a N2 purge (R.H. < 1.0%) and utilized 52100 steel balls (R(sub a) = 0.02 mm). Tribometer operations and capacitance-to-film-thickness accuracy were verified by comparing the film thickness approximations to established theoretical predictions for test conditions involving pure rolling. Pure rolling experiments were performed under maximum contact stresses and entrainment velocities of 1.0 GPa and 1.0 m/s to 3.0 m/s, respectively. All data from these baseline tests conformed to theory. ZEV tests were initiated after calibration of the tribometer and verification of film thickness approximation accuracy. Maximum contact stresses up to 0.57 GPa were supported at zero entrainment velocity with sliding speeds from 6.0 to 10.0 m/s for sustained amounts of time up to 28.8 minutes. The protective lubricating film separating the specimens at ZEV had a thickness between 0.10 and 0.14 mm (4 to 6 min), which corresponds to an approximate L-value of 4. The film thickness did not have a strong dependence upon variations of load or speed. Decreasing the sliding speed from 10.0 m/s to 1 m/s revealed a rapid loss in load support between 3.0 and 1.0 m/s. The formation of an immobile film formed by lubricant entrapment is discussed as an explanation of the load carrying capacity at these zero entrainment velocity conditions, relevant to the ball-ball contact application in retainerless ball bearings

Physical and social access to land: Spatio-temporal patterns of agricultural expansion

Abstract The expansion of agriculture is posited as one of the main dynamics of land cover change globally, and the robust modeling of these processes is important for policy as well as academic concerns. Madagascar&apos;s farmers stand accused as the &quot;proximate agents&quot; of land conversion in one of the world&apos;s &quot;hottest&quot; biodiversity hotspots, and numerous studies have been conducted to describe and model the processes by which the country&apos;s forests are giving way to agriculture. This paper concerns a relatively small area on the island&apos;s eastern escarpment where considerable national and international attention has been paid to slow the expansion of agriculture into the remaining natural forests. The approach adopted here is to begin by examining the degree to which patterns of agricultural conversion can be attributed to a set of factors that have been identified as significant at broader scales in Madagascar and elsewhere, namely topography and prior human settlement and land use patterns. A regression model is constructed, and its predictions compared to the observed land conversion over a 43-year period. The study then examines in detail the spatial patterns highlighted by the failure of the model (the residuals of the regression), breaking the study area into smaller zones, or landscapes. The spatio-temporal trajectories of these zones are then contrasted, with particular attention to the institutional arrangements governing access to land resources. The study finds that while overall land change patterns in the region are largely explained by elevation and village proximity, more specific, sub-regional, trajectories reflect the signatures of institutions governing access to land

Distributed Response Time Analysis of GSPN Models with MapReduce

widely used in the performance analysis of computer and communications systems. Response time densities and quantiles are often key outputs of such analysis. These can be extracted from a GSPN’s underlying semi-Markov process using a method based on numerical Laplace transform inversion. This method typically requires the solution of thousands of systems of complex linear equations, each of rank n, where n is the number of states in the model. For large models substantial processing power is needed and the computation must therefore be distributed. This paper describes the implementation of a Response Time Analysis module for the Platform Independent Petri net Editor (PIPE2) which interfaces with Hadoop, an open source implementation of Google’s MapReduce distributed programming environment, to provide distributed calculation of response time densities in GSPN models. The software is validated with analytically calculated results as well as simulated ones for larger models. Excellent scalability is shown. I