Multivariate Design of Experiments for Engineering Dimensional Analysis

We consider the design of dimensional analysis experiments when there is more than a single response. We first give a brief overview of dimensional analysis experiments and the dimensional analysis (DA) procedure. The validity of the DA method for univariate responses was established by the Buckingham $\Pi$-Theorem in the early 20th century. We extend the theorem to the multivariate case, develop basic criteria for multivariate design of DA and give guidelines for design construction. Finally, we illustrate the construction of designs for DA experiments for an example involving the design of a heat exchanger

Weeding One STEPP at a Time

Joyner Library recently had to make space for a new campus partner. To do so we focused our activity on print journals. We created a set of rules guiding our deselection, storage, and retention decisions

Knowledge of childhood: materiality, text, and the history of science – an interdisciplinary round table discussion

This roundtable discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and illustrate historiographical and methodological questions at a range of examples: Topics include the emergence of children’s rooms in US consumer magazines; research on the unborn in nineteenth century sciences of development; the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry; German literary discourses about the child’s initiation in scripture; and the socio-politics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly prone to interdisciplinary perspectives that consider the history of science part of a broader history of knowledge

Ancient Maya Rural Settlement Patterns, Household Cooperation, and Regional Subsistence Interdependency in the Río Bec Area: Contributions from G-LiHT

Research on intensive agricultural features contributes to the social relations of farming, including the means by which farmers mobilize labor and the possible destination of surplus. Lidar provides high-resolution data on ancient houses and agricultural features at a regional scale. This paper uses lidar data from NASA’s G-LiHT airborne imager to derive insights about rural demography, interhousehold cooperation, and subsistence interdependency among the ancient Maya. We assess the differences in intensity of agricultural investment in rural and urban areas of the Río Bec region of southern Campeche and Quintana Roo, Mexico, leading to inferences about regional food exchange and complex economies. The scale of interconnected ridges and terraces clearly implies interhousehold cooperation, yet this cooperation was not centralized. Rather, we envision a landscape of smallholders who jointly planned the layout and articulation of agricultural features but pooled most of their labor at the level of the household

Coronary and structural heart interventions in Switzerland 2018

Since the first coronary angioplasty by Andreas Grüntzig in Zurich in 1977, the number of cardiac interventional procedures has steadily increased. The aim of this report is to summarise the state of catheter-based cardiac interventions in adults in Switzerland in 2018. Since 1987, the Working Group Interventional Cardiology of the Swiss Society of Cardiology has collected annually aggregate data from all facilities with cardiac catheterisation laboratories in the country, currently 36 institutions in 17 cantons of Switzerland. Over past years, the numbers of coronary angiography procedures (CAs) and percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) increased steadily reaching 57,309 for CA and 27,318 for PCI in 2018. Among structural heart interventions, a broad spectrum of transcatheter procedures is currently available in Switzerland. Numbers of transcatheter aortic valve implantations similarly increased, with 1781 implantations in 2018

Marine Copepods, The Wildebeest of the Ocean

Copepods are amongst the most abundant animals on our planet. Who knew?! These small (typically 1–10 mm) crustaceans are found in all of the world’s oceans and play an important role in regulating Earth’s climate. Like wildebeest in the Serengeti graze on grasslands and are food for lions, herbivorous copepods represent a vital link in oceanic food chains between microscopic algae and higher predators, such as fish, birds, and whales. A group of copepods called Calanus are particularly important in the Northern Hemisphere. These tiny-but-mighty animals also share the wildebeest’s need to make a large annual migration—but in their case, they sink thousands of meters downwards to spend the winter in the deep, dark ocean. Understanding the lives of marine copepods, and how their populations will respond to climate change, is crucial for predicting the future health of the marine environment and how it helps our planet

Bringing bioinformatics to schools with the 4273pi project

The work was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) under Grants STFC ST/R000328/1 (including salary to S.A.B., D.B., H.P., T.R.M. and non-salary costs) and STFC ST/T000872/1 (including salary to S.A.B., D.B., K.C., T.R.M. and non-salary costs), the Darwin Trust of Edinburgh (https://darwintrust.bio.ed.ac.uk; including salary to S.A.B. and H.P. and non-salary costs), the Wellcome Trust-University of Edinburgh Institutional Strategic Support Fund under Wellcome Trust Grant number 204804/Z/16/Z (salary to H.P.), a Public Engagement with Genetics Tier 2 Grant from the Genetics Society (https://genetics.org.uk; non-salary costs), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) under Grant NE/P000592/1 (including salary to N.C. and M.G.R. and non-salary costs), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) under Grant BB/S018506/1 (including salary to F.A. and non-salary costs), the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh (https://www.ed.ac.uk/biology; including salary to S.A.B. and H.P. and non-salary costs) and its Institute of Evolutionary Biology (https://www.ed.ac.uk/biology/evolutionary-biology; non-salary costs), the Access for Rural Communities project (ARC) at University of St Andrews (https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study/access/projects/arc; non-salary costs) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under Grant EP/V52038X/1 (including salary to S.A.B. and non-salary costs). E.W.J.W. is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society [208779/Z/17/Z] (including salary to E.W.J.W.).Over the last few decades, the nature of life sciences research has changed enormously, generating a need for a workforce with a variety of computational skills such as those required to store, manage, and analyse the large biological datasets produced by next-generation sequencing. Those with such expertise are increasingly in demand for employment in both research and industry. Despite this, bioinformatics education has failed to keep pace with advances in research. At secondary school level, computing is often taught in isolation from other sciences, and its importance in biological research is not fully realised, leaving pupils unprepared for the computational component of Higher Education and, subsequently, research in the life sciences. The 4273pi Bioinformatics at School project (https://4273pi.org) aims to address this issue by designing and delivering curriculum-linked, hands-on bioinformatics workshops for secondary school biology pupils, with an emphasis on equitable access. So far, we have reached over 180 schools across Scotland through visits or teacher events, and our open education resources are used internationally. Here, we describe our project, our aims and motivations, and the practical lessons we have learned from implementing a successful bioinformatics education project over the last 5 years.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The effects of a single whole-body cryotherapy exposure on physiological, performance and perceptual responses of professional academy soccer players following repeated sprint exercise

In professional youth soccer players, the physiological, performance and perceptual effects of a single whole body cryotherapy (WBC) session performed shortly after repeated sprint exercise were investigated. In a randomized, counter-balanced and crossover design, 14 habituated English Premier League academy soccer players performed 15 x 30 m sprints (each followed by a 10 m forced deceleration) on two occasions. Within 20 min of exercise cessation, players entered a WBC chamber (Cryo: 30 s at -60°C, 120 s at -135°C) or remained seated (Con) indoors in temperate conditions (~25°C). Blood and saliva samples, peak power output (countermovement jump) and perceptual indices of recovery and soreness were assessed pre-exercise and immediately, 2 h and 24 h post exercise. When compared to Con, a greater testosterone response was observed at 2 h (+32.5 ± 32.3 pg·ml-1, +21%) and 24 h (+50.4 ± 48.9 pg·ml-1, +28%) post-exercise (both P=0.002) in Cryo (trial x treatment interaction: P=0.001). No between trial differences were observed for other salivary (cortisol and testosterone/cortisol ratio), blood (lactate and Creatine Kinase), performance (peak power output) or perceptual (recovery or soreness) markers (all trial x treatment interactions: P>0.05); all of which were influenced by exercise (time effects: all P<0.05). A single session of WBC performed within 20 min of repeated sprint exercise elevated testosterone concentrations for 24 h but did not affect any other performance, physiological or perceptual measurements taken. While unclear, WBC may be efficacious for professional soccer players during congested fixture periods

No Time for Dead Time: Timing analysis of bright black hole binaries with NuSTAR

Timing of high-count rate sources with the NuSTAR Small Explorer Mission requires specialized analysis techniques. NuSTAR was primarily designed for spectroscopic observations of sources with relatively low count-rates rather than for timing analysis of bright objects. The instrumental dead time per event is relatively long (~2.5 msec), and varies by a few percent event-to-event. The most obvious effect is a distortion of the white noise level in the power density spectrum (PDS) that cannot be modeled easily with the standard techniques due to the variable nature of the dead time. In this paper, we show that it is possible to exploit the presence of two completely independent focal planes and use the cross power density spectrum to obtain a good proxy of the white noise-subtracted PDS. Thereafter, one can use a Monte Carlo approach to estimate the remaining effects of dead time, namely a frequency-dependent modulation of the variance and a frequency-independent drop of the sensitivity to variability. In this way, most of the standard timing analysis can be performed, albeit with a sacrifice in signal to noise relative to what would be achieved using more standard techniques. We apply this technique to NuSTAR observations of the black hole binaries GX 339-4, Cyg X-1 and GRS 1915+105.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Ap