Corotational velocity strain formulations for nonlinear analysis of beams and axisymmetric shells

Finite element formulations for large strain, large displacement problems are formulated using a kinematic description based on the corotational components of the velocity strain. The corotational components are defined in terms of a system that rotates with each element and approximates the rotation of the material. To account for rotations of the material relative to this element system, extra terms are introduced in the velocity strain equations. Although this formulation is incremental, in explicitly integrated transient problems it compares very well with formulations that are not

Visuals Dominate Investor Decisions about Entrepreneurial Pitches

Entrepreneurs and investors often deem substantive content to be particularly important as they evaluate the potential value of business propositions. Yet across 12 studies and 1,855 participants using live entrepreneurial pitch competitions, silent videos—but not sound recordings, video-with-sound recordings, or pitch transcriptions—best allowed both experts and novices to identify the original investors' selections of winning entrepreneurial pitches. These results suggest that people’s judgment may be highly influenced by visual information. Further, people do not seem to fully recognize how much visual information factors into their decisions, such that they neglect the more substantive metrics that they explicitly cite and value as core to their decisions. The findings highlight the power of dynamic visual cues—including gestures, facial expressions, and body language—and demonstrate that visible passion can dominate the content of business propositions in entrepreneurial pitch competitions

Transmission of Sex Preferences Across Generations: The Allocation of Educational Resources Among Siblings

The purpose of this paper is to test whether there is an intergenerational transmission of gender preferences in educational resource allocation among children. The unique data set of Taiwan’s Panel Study of Family Dynamics project provides us a rich 3-generation education information and allows us to probe into this question. We performed our analysis along two directions: the first is to see whether the society as a whole has any macro change in gender-specific education achievement, and the second is to see whether there is any within-lineage transmission of gender preferences across generations. After carefully reviewing the education system and societal characteristics in Taiwan, we set up an empirical model to estimate and test the hypotheses of intergenerational transmission of gender preferences. We also perform various statistical analyses to support our findings, e.g. contraposition of a proposition. As far as the macro pattern is concerned, we found that although there is a clear tendency of differential treatment against females in the old generation, this tendency is significantly weakened and nearly vanishes in the young generation. Furthermore, the supporting effect of senior siblings in the old generation becomes a crowding (resource-dilution) effect in the young generation. However, within each micro lineage, there is a mild “habitus” effect in gender-specific educational resource allocation in the sense that parents who had the experience of gender-specific differential treatment tend to treat their children in a similar fashion. Moreover, this mild habitus effect is stronger for female respondents (who were the deprived group) than for male respondents (who were the privileged group).

Harmful Attributions: The Role of Mind Perception

Introduction: Drawing from literature in social and clinical psychology, we explore mechanisms associated with the lack of empathy for people who engage in self-injurious behaviors. Methods: Using implicit and explicit measures across three samples, we tested whether knowledge of prior self-injury impacts observers’ empathy, perceived agency, perspective taking, and willingness to help a target individual. Results: We found in Studies 1-2 that observers report decreased empathy, perceive less agency, and make more dispositional attributions toward a person who engages in deliberate self-injury, compared to accidental injury. Study 3 indicates that observers perceive a target who engaged in deliberate selfinjury to have lower agency. Furthermore, when evaluating a target who has been victimized, observers report less empathy, compassion, and likelihood of helping if the target has a history of deliberate self-injury. Perceived agency accounted for decreased empathy, whereas empathy accounted for lower likelihood of helping. Discussion: Our findings imply that observers may be better able to empathize with people with a history of self-injury if they focus on the agency of the individual and situational causal explanations for the behavior

Radiative diffusivity factors in cirrus and stratocumulus clouds: Application to two-stream models

A diffusion-like description of radiative transfer in clouds and the free atmosphere is often used. The two stream model is probably the best known example of such a description. The main idea behind the approach is that only the first few moments of radiance are needed to describe the radiative field correctly. Integration smooths details of the angular distribution of specific intensity and it is assumed that the closure parameters of the theory (diffusivity factors) are only weakly dependent on the distribution. The diffusivity factors are investigated using the results obtained from both Stratocumulus and Cirrus phases of FIRE experiment. A new theoretical framework is described in which two (upwards and downwards) diffusivity factors are used and a detailed multistream model is used to provide further insight about both the diffusivity factors and their dependence on scattering properties of clouds

Between steps: Intermediate relaxations between big-M and convex hull formulations

This work develops a class of relaxations in between the big-M and convex hull formulations of disjunctions, drawing advantages from both. The proposed "P-split" formulations split convex additively separable constraints into P partitions and form the convex hull of the partitioned disjuncts. Parameter P represents the trade-off of model size vs. relaxation strength. We examine the novel formulations and prove that, under certain assumptions, the relaxations form a hierarchy starting from a big-M equivalent and converging to the convex hull. We computationally compare the proposed formulations to big-M and convex hull formulations on a test set including: K-means clustering, P_ball problems, and ReLU neural networks. The computational results show that the intermediate P-split formulations can form strong outer approximations of the convex hull with fewer variables and constraints than the extended convex hull formulations, giving significant computational advantages over both the big-M and convex hull

New generation methods for spur, helical, and spiral-bevel gears

New methods for generating spur, helical, and spiral-bevel gears are proposed. These methods provide the gears with conjugate gear tooth surfaces, localized bearing contact, and reduced sensitivity to gear misalignment. Computer programs have been developed for simulating gear meshing and bearing contact