Working dogs for the farm : 4-H club project

October, 1952."Acknowledgement and thanks are due to Dr. A. H. Groth, Dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, for help in preparing the circular."--Page 3."University of Missouri College of Agriculture and the United States Department of Agriculture Cooperating"--Page [27].Title from caption

General flux to a trap in one and three dimensions

The problem of the flux to a spherical trap in one and three dimensions, for diffusing particles undergoing discrete-time jumps with a given radial probability distribution, is solved in general, verifying the Smoluchowski-like solution in which the effective trap radius is reduced by an amount proportional to the jump length. This reduction in the effective trap radius corresponds to the Milne extrapolation length.Comment: Accepted for publication, in pres

From Suspicion and Accommodation to Structural Transformation: Enhanced Scholarship through Enhanced Community-University Relations

   While substantial efforts are being made in some universities to democratize the production, ownership, and use of knowledge through partnership with the community, significant barriers to community-university partnership persist, maintained through inequitable research relations, reductionist definitions of knowledge, and disincentives for faculty who are interested in community-based scholarship. The perseverance of this disconnect, we argue, is indicative of an existential aversion to community that lies deep within the psyche of the university. We liken the aversion to that of a disgust response, a social response that creates distance from that which is perceived to be dangerous, which in this case serves to preserve the university’s privileged status as knowledge producer. In this paper we bring forward arguments for the importance of community-engaged scholarship to the university’s civic role, to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the principles of democracy. We highlight promising advances in how some universities are accommodating community partnership within their definitions of scholarship and academic production, and, drawing upon Gordon’s theory of structural transformation and Bourdieu’s conceptualization of agency and habitus, we consider how such changes might be brought about at a deeper, structural level within the university

Manufacturability verification through feature-based ontological product models

To achieve efficient, fast and cost effective production, designers must consider all the manufacturing stages a product has to go through. A case study in a manufacturing setup shows that owing to the differences in perception of an engineering component, the coordination between design and manufacturing becomes difficult. Semantic interoperability problems are therefore faced when knowledge sharing for the purpose of manufacturability verification is attempted through computer-based knowledge bases. Ontologies have a reputation for solving semantic interoperability problems. Combined with shape feature-based models of components, ontologies provide a basis for seamless knowledge sharing. This article demonstrates the use of ontologies for analyzing the manufacturability of engineering components in the early design stages. This is done by developing shape feature-based ontological models of these components and associating manufacturability knowledge with these models. To achieve this, an ontological modelling technique is proposed that uses shape feature-based geometrical models of engineering components as building blocks. The knowledge associated with these models to demonstrate their use for manufacturability verification is derived from the findings of a case study also detailed in this article. © IMechE 2012

Three years of Fermi GBM Earth Occultation Monitoring: Observations of Hard X-ray/Soft Gamma-Ray Sources

The Gamma ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on board Fermi has been providing continuous data to the astronomical community since 2008 August 12. In this paper we present the results of the analysis of the first three years of these continuous data using the Earth occultation technique to monitor a catalog of 209 sources. From this catalog, we detect 99 sources, including 40 low-mass X-ray binary/neutron star systems, 31 high-mass X-ray binary neutron star systems, 12 black hole binaries, 12 active galaxies, 2 other sources, plus the Crab Nebula, and the Sun. Nine of these sources are detected in the 100-300 keV band, including seven black-hole binaries, the active galaxy Cen A, and the Crab. The Crab and Cyg X-1 are also detected in the 300-500 keV band. GBM provides complementary data to other sky-monitors below 100 keV and is the only all-sky monitor above 100 keV. Up-to-date light curves for all of the catalog sources can be found at http://heastro.phys.lsu.edu/gbm/.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

Mediation of foundation ontology based knowledge sources

Ontologies are helpful in giving interoperable structures to sources of knowledge and information. This interoperability, however, is greatly hindered by the heterogeneity of independently developed ontologies which in turn increases the requirements for mediation systems to reconcile the differences. A core concepts ontology for a certain domain contained by a foundation ontology can be used to alleviate this problem and to facilitate the reconciliation efforts. Possible differences in the use of concepts from the core concepts to model entities in domain ontologies can be prevented by binding the domain ontology developers to some rules. These rules can be particularly useful for domain ontologies requiring some kind of traceability of their concepts in the foundation ontology. The mediation system can then use this traceability to establish similarities between two ontologies. Software applications, like the one explained in this paper, can then be developed to perform the mediation task automatically and accurately

Recent Upgrades to NASA SPoRT Initialization Datasets for the Environmental Modeling System

The NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center has developed several products for its NOAA/National Weather Service (NWS) partners that can initialize specific fields for local model runs within the NOAA/NWS Science and Training Resource Center Environmental Modeling System (EMS). The suite of SPoRT products for use in the EMS consists of a Sea Surface Temperature (SST) composite that includes a Lake Surface Temperature (LST) analysis over the Great Lakes, a Great Lakes sea-ice extent within the SST composite, a real-time Green Vegetation Fraction (GVF) composite, and NASA Land Information System (LIS) gridded output. This paper and companion poster describe each dataset and provide recent upgrades made to the SST, Great Lakes LST, GVF composites, and the real-time LIS runs

Enabling interoperable manufacturing knowledge sharing in PLM

Traditional approaches to integrated information sharing fall far short of meeting the requirements for the seamless sharing of knowledge to support enterprise activities through the product lifecycle. Recent advances in ontological approaches to manufacturing knowledge organisation is showing promise that a step change in knowledge sharing capability can be achieved from the application of rigorous logic based languages, combined with methods for modelling context relationships. This paper discusses the issues involved in providing an interoperable manufacturing knowledge sharing environment and proposes a manufacturing foundation ontology as a key requirement for interoperable manufacturing knowledge sharing