An improved boundary force method for analyzing cracked anisotropic materials

The Boundary Force Method (BFM), a form of indirect boundary element method, is used to analyze composite laminates with cracks. The BFM uses the orthotropic elasticity solution for a concentrated horizontal and vertical force and a moment applied at a point in a cracked, infinite sheet as the fundamental solution. The necessary stress functions for this fundamental solution were formulated using the complex variable theory of orthotropic elasticity. The current method is an improvement over a previous method using only forces and no moment. The improved method was verified by comparing it to accepted solutions for a finite-width, center-crack specimen subjected to uniaxial tension. Four graphite/epoxy laminates were used: (0 + or - 45/90)sub s, (0), (+ or - 45)sub s, and (+ or - 30)sub s. The BFM results agreed well with accepted solutions. Convergence studies showed that with the addition of the moment in the fundamental solution, the number of boundary elements required for a converged solution was significantly reduced. Parametric studies were done for two configurations for which no orthotropic solutions are currently available; a single edge crack and an inclined single edge crack

Christianity as a Culture of Mobility: A Case Study of Asian Transient Migrants in Singapore

More than ever before, the global and transnational movements of young people for work and study have become part of everyday life. Yet there is very little research on this phenomenon in relation to how actors in transience create strategies to cope with being away from home nation (place of birth and/or citizenship) and from family. As part of the findings of a larger international study on the identities, social networks and media/communication use of transient migrants, researchers found that Christianity featured prominently during life in transience for Asian respondents. This paper thus puts forward the notion that Christianity may well function as a culture of mobility by looking at its significance to Asian “foreign talent” transient migrants in Singapore. Through face-toface interviews with fifty-seven Asian working professionals and international students, this paper found thirty that not only identified themselves as Christian, but whose social networks were also made up of Asian foreign talent transient migrant Christians. This paper thus suggests that Asian foreign talent transient migrants turn to Christianity as a way of coping with everyday life in transience. The Christian groups they join allow them to create a sense of community while being away from the home nation. This sense of community however is with other transient migrants, rather than with locals

Spatialising Threads/Hallucinations: Closing the Gap Between Installation and Performance

Threads/Hallucinations is a musical work that combines sound installation and live performance using an eight-speaker array. The work uses spatialisation as a means to control the performance, provide an immersive listening experience and extend musical composition parameters. The work draws on spatial and electronic music composition techniques, sound art installation and site-specific sounds. This paper will outline some key influences on the creation of this work as well as outlining concepts and methodologies for incorporating spatial techniques within the field of electronic music

“Two Opposite Ends of the World”: The Management of Uncertainty in an Autism-Only School

How do individuals maintain a sense of efficacy and purpose in the face of high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty? In research on medical uncertainty, sociologists often discuss the strategies health practitioners employ to control uncertainties relating to diagnosis and treatment. Over six months of ethnographic field work at an autism-only therapy school, we observed seventy-five students and forty-seven instructors and formally interviewed ten instructors and four parents. While other studies on medical uncertainty have focused on controls over external circumstances, we demonstrate that another management strategy is for individuals to perform ethical work on themselves in order to adjust how they conduct themselves in uncertain situations. Despite the ambiguity of both the autism diagnosis and the therapeutic method employed at the school, instructors are able to maintain a sense of efficacy and to recognize themselves as “doing floortime” by transforming themselves to become “child directed.

Amélioration par micro-ordinateur des acquisitions de données en spectrométrie Auger

La rapidité de mémorisation des techniques numériques permet d'accélérer les mesures et de suivre les évolutions des phénomènes de surfaces

Achieving the WHO/UNAIDS antiretroviral treatment 3 by 5 goal: what will it cost?

The "3 by 5" goal to have 3 million people in low and middle income countries on antiretroviral therapy (ART) by the end of 2005 is ambitious. Estimates of the necessary resources are needed to facilitate resource mobilisation and rapid channelling of funds to where they are required. We estimated the financial costs needed to implement treatment protocols, by use of country-specific estimates for 34 countries that account for 90% of the need for ART in resource-poor settings. We first estimated the number of people needing ART and supporting programmes for each country. We then estimated the cost per patient for each programme by country to derive total costs. We estimate that between US5.1 billion dollars and US5.9 billion dollars will be needed by the end of 2005 to provide ART, support programmes, and cover country-level administrative and logistic costs for 3 by 5

Ecologically Valid Explanations for Label Variation in NLI

Human label variation, or annotation disagreement, exists in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including natural language inference (NLI). To gain direct evidence of how NLI label variation arises, we build LiveNLI, an English dataset of 1,415 ecologically valid explanations (annotators explain the NLI labels they chose) for 122 MNLI items (at least 10 explanations per item). The LiveNLI explanations confirm that people can systematically vary on their interpretation and highlight within-label variation: annotators sometimes choose the same label for different reasons. This suggests that explanations are crucial for navigating label interpretations in general. We few-shot prompt large language models to generate explanations but the results are inconsistent: they sometimes produces valid and informative explanations, but it also generates implausible ones that do not support the label, highlighting directions for improvement.Comment: Findings at EMNLP 2023. Overlap with previous version arXiv:2304.1244