2,324 research outputs found
Technological advances, human performance, and the operation of nuclear facilities
2017 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Many unfortunate and unintended adverse industrial incidents occur across the United States each year, and the nuclear industry is no exception. Depending on their severity, these incidents can be problematic for people, the facilities, and surrounding environments. Human error is a contributing factor in many such incidents. This dissertation first explored the hypothesis that technological changes that affect how operators interact within the systems of the nuclear facilities exacerbate the cost of incidents caused by human error. I conducted a review of nuclear incidents in the United States from 1955 through 2010 that reached Level 3 (serious incident) or higher on the International Nuclear Events Scale (INES). The cost of each incident at facilities that had recently undergone technological changes affecting plant operators' jobs was compared to the cost of events at facilities that had not undergone changes. A t-test determined a statistically significant difference between the two groups, confirming the hypothesis. Next, I conducted a follow-on study to determine the impact of the incorporation of new technologies into nuclear facilities. The data indicated that spending more money on upgrades increased the facility's capacity as well as the number of incidents reported, but the incident severity was minor. Finally, I discuss the impact of human error on plant operations and the impact of evolving technology on the 21st-century operator, proposing a methodology to overcome these challenges by applying the systems engineering process
Comment to the SEC in Support of the Enhanced Disclosure of Patent and Technology License Information
Intangible assets like IP constitute a large share of the value of firms, and the US economy generally. Accurate information on the intellectual property (IP) holdings and transactions of publicly-traded firms facilitates price discovery in the market and reduces transaction costs. While public understanding of the innovation economy has been expanded by a large stream of empirical research using patent data, and more recently trademark information this research is only as good as the accuracy and completeness of the data it builds upon. In contrast with information about patents and trademarks, good information about IP licensing is much less publicly available. Although IP royalties provide large in-bound trade flows to the United States, remarkably little is known about the economic realities of IP transactions. But not only are licensing royalties economically impactful, but building a better understanding of how markets for technology operate in a modern, innovation economy is important for the transparency of markets, and to the public and policy-makers. Open data on innovation is currently siloed, fragmented, and unfedeRrarated across a number of repositories (some electronic and others physical) including the Administrative Office of the Courts, Secretary of State Offices, Copyright Office, IRS, USPTO, SEC, FDA, NSF, SBA and others, raising search and discovery costs and undermining the goals of open data. Data on âcomparablesâ tend to be thin in the industry, a situation that may offer a sub-optimal market environment for startup firms: these young entities often rely on selling intangibles, but have low bargaining power, and limited resources to invest in search and price discovery.
Disclosures of material licenses and intellectual property information to the SEC addresses a number of existing gaps, with the potential to play an expanded role. In fact, IP license information is not widely available to the public through any other federal agency, even in cases where the IP was federally funded. Thus the IP license information available through the SEC is an invaluable resource to the public. One major limitation with the existing SEC licensing information, however, is that it is often difficult to find and manipulate. An impediment arises since the data are not tagged or designed to be easily combined with other information sources. One of us, for example, has sought to determine which firms have SEC-registered patent licenses over a period of time for the purpose of establishing a public database of licenses obtained through FOIA requests. However, there is no straightforward way for the public to search for this information, in the SEC record or otherwise.
The overall thrust of our comments is to commend the SEC on the valuable disclosures its requirements encourage and to recommend preserving and augmenting, rather than diminishing them, in order to 1) produce more useful data and 2) reduce the costs of discovering and using existing data disclosed to the SEC. In many cases, an SEC requirement will not require reporting entities to create new information (e.g., when disclosing patents or licenses) but it will greatly reduce the costs to third parties of searching for this information
Comment to the SEC in Support of the Enhanced Disclosure of Patent and Technology License Information
Intangible assets like IP constitute a large share of the value of firms, and the US economy generally. Accurate information on the intellectual property (IP) holdings and transactions of publicly-traded firms facilitates price discovery in the market and reduces transaction costs. While public understanding of the innovation economy has been expanded by a large stream of empirical research using patent data, and more recently trademark information this research is only as good as the accuracy and completeness of the data it builds upon. In contrast with information about patents and trademarks, good information about IP licensing is much less publicly available. Although IP royalties provide large in-bound trade flows to the United States, remarkably little is known about the economic realities of IP transactions. But not only are licensing royalties economically impactful, but building a better understanding of how markets for technology operate in a modern, innovation economy is important for the transparency of markets, and to the public and policy-makers. Open data on innovation is currently siloed, fragmented, and unfedeRrarated across a number of repositories (some electronic and others physical) including the Administrative Office of the Courts, Secretary of State Offices, Copyright Office, IRS, USPTO, SEC, FDA, NSF, SBA and others, raising search and discovery costs and undermining the goals of open data. Data on âcomparablesâ tend to be thin in the industry, a situation that may offer a sub-optimal market environment for startup firms: these young entities often rely on selling intangibles, but have low bargaining power, and limited resources to invest in search and price discovery.
Disclosures of material licenses and intellectual property information to the SEC addresses a number of existing gaps, with the potential to play an expanded role. In fact, IP license information is not widely available to the public through any other federal agency, even in cases where the IP was federally funded. Thus the IP license information available through the SEC is an invaluable resource to the public. One major limitation with the existing SEC licensing information, however, is that it is often difficult to find and manipulate. An impediment arises since the data are not tagged or designed to be easily combined with other information sources. One of us, for example, has sought to determine which firms have SEC-registered patent licenses over a period of time for the purpose of establishing a public database of licenses obtained through FOIA requests. However, there is no straightforward way for the public to search for this information, in the SEC record or otherwise.
The overall thrust of our comments is to commend the SEC on the valuable disclosures its requirements encourage and to recommend preserving and augmenting, rather than diminishing them, in order to 1) produce more useful data and 2) reduce the costs of discovering and using existing data disclosed to the SEC. In many cases, an SEC requirement will not require reporting entities to create new information (e.g., when disclosing patents or licenses) but it will greatly reduce the costs to third parties of searching for this information
Using Board Games as Subject Matter for Developing Expertise in Model-Based Systems Engineering
As more organizations transition from traditional document-centric systems engineering to a model-based approach, many are challenged to train their staff in new languages, tools, and methodologies, while managing the expectations of stakeholders and their expected model outcomes. In particular, challenges associated with learning a new modeling language and developing skills in the 'art' of modeling present organizations with formidable obstacles to realizing this transition. This paper hypothesizes that systems engineers may more readily learn how to correctly model with SysML, and develop intuition about the art of modeling and using patterns, if their learning references a commonly and thoroughly-understood subject, such as a board game. This paper presents a case for the use of board games as subject matter for new modelers. It demonstrates the concept with a sample model of Hasbro's popular board game, Monopoly, and discusses the limitations of this approach and potential adaptations that may broaden the applicability of the learned skills to projects. Finally, results from a small feasibility assessment and concepts for more formal study to evaluate the hypothesis are presented
Conversion of no/low value waste frying oils into biodiesel and polyhydroxyalkanoates
A sustainable bioprocess was developed for the valorization of a no/low value substrate, i.e. waste frying oils (WFOs) with high content of free fatty acids (FFAs), otherwise unsuitable for biodiesel production. The bioprocess was verified using both recombinant (Escherichia coli) and native (Pseudomonas resinovorans) polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) producing cell factories. Microbial fermentation of WFOs provided a 2-fold advantage: i) the reduction of FFAs content resulting into an upgrading of the "exhausted waste oils" and ii) the production of a bio-based microbial polymer. Proper strain designing and process optimization allowed to achieve up to 1.5âgâL-1 of medium chain length, mcl-PHAs, together with an efficient conversion (80% yield) of the treated WFO into biodiesel
IC 4406: a radio-infrared view
IC 4406 is a large (about 100'' x 30'') southern bipolar planetary nebula,
composed of two elongated lobes extending from a bright central region, where
there is evidence for the presence of a large torus of gas and dust. We show
new observations of this source performed with IRAC (Spitzer Space Telescope)
and the Australia Telescope Compact Array. The radio maps show that the flux
from the ionized gas is concentrated in the bright central region and
originates in a clumpy structure previously observed in H_alpha, while in the
infrared images filaments and clumps can be seen in the extended nebular
envelope, the central region showing toroidal emission. Modeling of the
infrared emission leads to the conclusion that several dust components are
present in the nebula.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical
Journal; v.2 has changes in both figures and content; preprint forma
The gauge dual of Romans mass
We deform the recently proposed holographic duality between the ABJM N=6
Chern-Simons-matter theory and type IIA string theory in AdS4xCP3. We add a
non-zero Romans mass F_0, whose dual we identify as the sum of the Chern-Simons
levels for the two gauge groups. One can naturally identify four different
theories, with different amounts of supersymmetry and of flavor symmetry.Comment: 26 pages. v4: Corrected the sign for the probe brane potentia
Raman spectral shifts in naturally faulted rocks
Acknowledgements. We thank Colin Taylor at UoA for help in sample preparation.This study was supported by the School of Geosciences at the University of Aberdeen and in part by the NERC Centre for Doctoral Training in Oil & Gas (Grant Number: NE/R01051x/1).Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Flowing with Eight Supersymmetries in M-Theory and F-theory
We consider holographic RG flow solutions with eight supersymmetries and
study the geometry transverse to the brane. For both M2-branes and for
D3-branes in F-theory this leads to an eight-manifold with only a four-form
flux. In both settings there is a natural four-dimensional hyper-Kahler slice
that appears on the Coulomb branch. In the IIB theory this hyper-Kahler
manifold encodes the Seiberg-Witten coupling over the Coulomb branch of a U(1)
probe theory. We focus primarily upon a new flow solution in M-theory. This
solution is first obtained using gauged supergravity and then lifted to eleven
dimensions. In this new solution, the brane probes have an Eguchi-Hanson moduli
space with the M2-branes spread over the non-trivial 2-sphere. It is also shown
that the new solution is valid for a class of orbifold theories. We discuss how
the hyper-Kahler structure on the slice extends to some form of G-structure in
the eight-manifold, and describe how this can be computed.Comment: 29 pages, 1 figure, harvma
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