Numerical Simulations of Indian Ocean Tsunami by Tuna-m2

The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of magnitude 9.3 on the Richter scale occurred on 26 December 2004. It triggered off a series of tsunami waves that caused tremendous damage to the properties and lives along the affected coastal areas. The earthquake was located where the India Plate dives under the Burma Plate, and was extremely large in geographical extent, beginning off the coast of Aceh and proceeding northwesterly over a period of about 100 seconds. An estimated fault length is about 800 km, with a fault width of about 85 km and an initial vertical displacement of 11 m. There were no tsunami warning systems in the Indian Ocean to detect tsunamis, nor to warn the general populace living around the ocean. Thus, there is a need for early warning systems to predict the characteristics of tsunami propagation, including tsunami wave heights and arrival times. There are three phases of tsunami evolution, which are generation, propagation and runup. Tsunami is generated by the disturbance associated with seismic activity, explosive volcanism, and submarine landslide phenomena. Propagation of tsunami waves transports seismic energy away from the earthquake source. During the deep ocean propagation stage, the wave height is small compared to the wavelength and the ocean depth. Therefore, the linear wave theory can be applied. Tsunami runup is the most destructive phase of tsunami evolution. The wave behavior at the shoreline depends on such characteristics as the relationships between wavelength and water depth and between the wavelength of the wave and its height. This paper will present the simulations of these tsunami propagations in the Indian Ocean and discuss wave height characteristics near the coast of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India to highlight tsunami hazards and coastal vulnerability. The need for an early warning system in the Indian Ocean would appear urgent. The simulation is performed by means of an in-house tsunami numerical simulation model TUNA-M2 that solves the shallow water equation by the staggered finite difference method

An Analysis of Sketching Skill and Its Role in Early Stage Engineering Design

Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of sketching in design cognition, particularly in the early stages of engineering design. The goal of this preliminary study is to consider the role of a designer's sketching ability and to examine the potential link between sketching skill and measures of engineering design performance. Sketching ability was evaluated on three distinct aspects relevant to engineering design: visual recall, rendering, and novel visualization. These evaluations were correlated with each other and with measures for sketch fluency, reviewer ranking, and design project outcome. The results of this study suggest that sketching skill is not comprehensive nor is it solely task based. Rather, a designer's sketching ability lies between these two poles. Positive correlations were found between the quantity of sketches produced and two of the sketching skills that emphasize drawing facility, but a negative correlation was found between sketch quantity and a skill related to mechanism visualization. No conclusive correlations were found between the sketching skills and design outcome and reviewer ranking. This study's findings suggest an important interplay between a designer's ability to sketch and their ability to visualize in their heads or through prototypes. Results also suggest that designers who are given sketch instruction tended to draw more overall

Vulnerability of populations and the urban health care systems to nuclear weapon attack – examples from four American cities

BACKGROUND: The threat posed by the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) within the United States has grown significantly in recent years, focusing attention on the medical and public health disaster capabilities of the nation in a large scale crisis. While the hundreds of thousands or millions of casualties resulting from a nuclear weapon would, in and of itself, overwhelm our current medical response capabilities, the response dilemma is further exacerbated in that these resources themselves would be significantly at risk. There are many limitations on the resources needed for mass casualty management, such as access to sufficient hospital beds including specialized beds for burn victims, respiration and supportive therapy, pharmaceutical intervention, and mass decontamination. RESULTS: The effects of 20 kiloton and 550 kiloton nuclear detonations on high priority target cities are presented for New York City, Chicago, Washington D.C. and Atlanta. Thermal, blast and radiation effects are described, and affected populations are calculated using 2000 block level census data. Weapons of 100 Kts and up are primarily incendiary or radiation weapons, able to cause burns and start fires at distances greater than they can significantly damage buildings, and to poison populations through radiation injuries well downwind in the case of surface detonations. With weapons below 100 Kts, blast effects tend to be stronger than primary thermal effects from surface bursts. From the point of view of medical casualty treatment and administrative response, there is an ominous pattern where these fatalities and casualties geographically fall in relation to the location of hospital and administrative facilities. It is demonstrated that a staggering number of the main hospitals, trauma centers, and other medical assets are likely to be in the fatality plume, rendering them essentially inoperable in a crisis. CONCLUSION: Among the consequences of this outcome would be the probable loss of command-and-control, mass casualties that will have to be treated in an unorganized response by hospitals on the periphery, as well as other expected chaotic outcomes from inadequate administration in a crisis. Vigorous, creative, and accelerated training and coordination among the federal agencies tasked for WMD response, military resources, academic institutions, and local responders will be critical for large-scale WMD events involving mass casualties

Gait and Force Analysis of Provoked Pig Gait on Clean and Fouled Concrete Surfaces

Gait and force analysis have proven to be useful methods in linking claw injuries to surface material conditions. To determine the relationship between claw disorder and floor properties such as friction and surface abrasiveness, the factors controlling gait must be characterised. The effects of fouled concrete floor conditions on the gait of 10 pigs walking in a curve, using kinematics and kinetics to record gait parameters and slip frequency are described and compared with clean conditions. Pigs adapted to fouled floor conditions by reducing their walking speed and stride length, using a higher number of 3-foot support phases and by lowering diagonality. This adaption produced lower vertical forces, a twofold reduction in propulsion and outward stabilisation force and a threefold increase in braking force, without reducing the peak utilised coefficient of friction (UCOF). The UCOF values for both limbs of the curve walking pigs exceeded the recorded dynamic coefficient of friction and the corresponding UCOF values for pigs walking a straight line in fouled floor condition. As UCOF increased and available friction from the fouled floor surface decreased, this resulted in higher forward and backward slip frequency in both limbs for pigs walking in a curve. Pigs provoked to walk in a curve can adapt to fouled floor condition, but if the floor is heavily fouled this adaption is not sufficient to ensure safe walking

Sagnac interferometry for high-sensitivity optical measurements of spin-orbit torque

Sagnac interferometry can provide a significant improvement in signal-to-noise ratio compared to conventional magnetic imaging based on the magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE). We show that this improvement is sufficient to allow quantitative measurements of current-induced magnetic deflections due to spin-orbit torque even in thin-film magnetic samples with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy for which the Kerr rotation is second-order in the magnetic deflection. Sagnac interfermometry can also be applied beneficially for samples with in-plane anisotropy, for which the Kerr rotation is first order in the deflection angle. Optical measurements based on Sagnac interferometry can therefore provide a cross-check on electrical techniques for measuring spin-orbit torque. Different electrical techniques commonly give quantitatively inconsistent results, so that Sagnac interferometry can help to identify which techniques are affected by unidentified artifacts

Does Sketching Skill Relate to Good Design?

Sketching is an activity that takes place throughout the engineering design process, and is often linked to design cognition. This preliminary study identifies different skills that contribute to a designer's sketching ability and explores how those skills might be related to sketch fluency and design outcome. A positive correlation was found between the quantity of sketches produced and sketch skills that emphasize drawing facility, but a negative correlation was found between sketch quantity and a skill related to mechanism visualization. Sketching is sometimes considered a generic skill, but this study suggests that there are differences among the different types of sketching skills in the context of engineering design. No notable relationship was found between sketching ability and design outcome. Results also suggest that students provided with explicit instruction in sketching tended to draw more overall, although there are likely many other factors involved

Undergraduate module on nutrition education and communication for Africa: Profiles of potential students

To be adequately nourished, individuals need to have access to sufficient and good quality food. They also need to have an understanding of what constitutes a good diet for health, and have the skills and motivation to make good food choices. Nutrition education equips people to make such choices. Building countries’ capacities to provide effective nutrition education and promote healthy diets is part of the work carried out by the Nutrition Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The FAO Effective Education for Nutrition in Action (ENACT) project is assisting countries to develop institutional and professional capacities in nutrition education in Africa by producing a basic module on nutrition education at undergraduate level for use by national universities and other training institutions. The course materials will be available for online, face-to-face or blended use and are being piloted and revised to improve and adapt them to local context and consumer need. Creating a learner profile is an accepted step in course design, particularly important in situations where course developers do not have close contact with the students, as in this case. The ENACT learner profile was compiled from replies to a short questionnaire of 32 questions administered to a sample of students. The respondents were the actual piloting students, or were representative of those who would be piloting the course. One hundred and twenty eight responses were received from universities in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda, approximately 20 per university. On average, respondents answered 96% of the questions in the questionnaire. Information was obtained on areas such as students’ social/cultural  interests; food and nutrition experience and expertise; food and eating habits; ideas of nutrition education and training in nutrition education; and study preferences. In addition, the profile of a typical learner in each country (including age, gender and information on socio-economic  background, urban/rural background and English proficiency) was compiled from the questionnaires and from additional information supplied by the tutors. The study findings have helped the course developers to select course content and structure learning activities to meet students’ needs and circumstances.Key words: professional training, nutrition education, Afric

Rodents as receptor species at a tritium

New methods are being employed on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site to deal with the disposal of tritium, including the irrigation of a hardwood/pine forest with tritiated water from an intercepted contaminant plume to reduce concentrations of tritium outcropping into Fourmile Branch, a tributary of the Savannah River. The use of this system has proven to be an effective means of tritium disposal. To evaluate the impact of this activity on terrestrial biota, rodent species were captured on the tritium disposal site and a control site during two trapping seasons in order to assess tritium exposure resulting from the forest irrigation. Control site mice had background levels of tritium, 0.02 Bq/mL, with disposal site mice having significantly higher tritium concentrations, meanZ34.86 Bq/mL. Whole body tritium concentrations of the mice captured at the disposal site were positively correlated with tritium application and negatively correlated with precipitation at the site

Recording advances for neural prosthetics

An important challenge for neural prosthetics research is to record from populations of neurons over long periods of time, ideally for the lifetime of the patient. Two new advances toward this goal are described, the use of local field potentials (LFPs) and autonomously positioned recording electrodes. LFPs are the composite extracellular potential field from several hundreds of neurons around the electrode tip. LFP recordings can be maintained for longer periods of time than single cell recordings. We find that similar information can be decoded from LFP and spike recordings, with better performance for state decodes with LFPs and, depending on the area, equivalent or slightly less than equivalent performance for signaling the direction of planned movements. Movable electrodes in microdrives can be adjusted in the tissue to optimize recordings, but their movements must be automated to be a practical benefit to patients. We have developed automation algorithms and a meso-scale autonomous electrode testbed, and demonstrated that this system can autonomously isolate and maintain the recorded signal quality of single cells in the cortex of awake, behaving monkeys. These two advances show promise for developing very long term recording for neural prosthetic applications