GTOSS: Generalized Tethered Object Simulation System

GTOSS represents a tether analysis complex which is described by addressing its family of modules. TOSS is a portable software subsystem specifically designed to be introduced into the environment of any existing vehicle dynamics simulation to add the capability of simulating multiple interacting objects (via multiple tethers). These objects may interact with each other as well as with the vehicle into whose environment TOSS is introduced. GTOSS is a stand alone tethered system analysis program, representing an example of TOSS having been married to a host simulation. RTOSS is the Results Data Base (RDB) subsystem designed to archive TOSS simulation results for future display processing. DTOSS is a display post processors designed to utilize the RDB. DTOSS extracts data from the RDB for multi-page printed time history displays. CTOSS is similar to DTOSS, but is designed to create ASCII plot files. The same time history data formats provided for DTOSS (for printing) are available via CTOSS for plotting. How these and other modules interact with each other is discussed

Strengthening rules-based order in the Asia-Pacific

This paper explores the opportunities for both Australia and Japan jointly to promote their shared interest in strengthening the rule of law in the Asia–Pacific. Overview The rule of law is an essential condition if cooperation and orderly behaviour are to be advanced in the Asia–Pacific. We need norms and rules that guide—and govern—relations among regional states. Australia and Japan share an interest in minimising the role that coercion plays in the Asia–Pacific and maximising cooperation across the region. We’re both liberal democracies, with a strong bilateral security relationship, an alliance with the United States and a genuine commitment to the rule of law. All Asia–Pacific states would profit by following Australia and Japan’s example in promoting and abiding by the rule of law in their external policies. Indeed, our region would be a much safer place if they did. ASPI has this year worked on a project to explore the opportunities for both Australia and Japan jointly to promote our shared interest in strengthening the rule of law in the Asia–Pacific. This report sets out the project’s key findings and outlines policy proposals to enhance Australia–Japan cooperation to bolster the rule of law in the region

Block Stability for MAP Inference

To understand the empirical success of approximate MAP inference, recent work (Lang et al., 2018) has shown that some popular approximation algorithms perform very well when the input instance is stable. The simplest stability condition assumes that the MAP solution does not change at all when some of the pairwise potentials are (adversarially) perturbed. Unfortunately, this strong condition does not seem to be satisfied in practice. In this paper, we introduce a significantly more relaxed condition that only requires blocks (portions) of an input instance to be stable. Under this block stability condition, we prove that the pairwise LP relaxation is persistent on the stable blocks. We complement our theoretical results with an empirical evaluation of real-world MAP inference instances from computer vision. We design an algorithm to find stable blocks, and find that these real instances have large stable regions. Our work gives a theoretical explanation for the widespread empirical phenomenon of persistency for this LP relaxation

Full-depth Coadds of the WISE and First-year NEOWISE-Reactivation Images

The Near Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) Reactivation mission released data from its first full year of observations in 2015. This data set includes ~2.5 million exposures in each of W1 and W2, effectively doubling the amount of WISE imaging available at 3.4 and 4.6 microns relative to the AllWISE release. We have created the first ever full-sky set of coadds combining all publicly available W1 and W2 exposures from both the AllWISE and NEOWISE-Reactivation (NEOWISER) mission phases. We employ an adaptation of the unWISE image coaddition framework (Lang 2014), which preserves the native WISE angular resolution and is optimized for forced photometry. By incorporating two additional scans of the entire sky, we not only improve the W1/W2 depths, but also largely eliminate time-dependent artifacts such as off-axis scattered moonlight. We anticipate that our new coadds will have a broad range of applications, including target selection for upcoming spectroscopic cosmology surveys, identification of distant/massive galaxy clusters, and discovery of high-redshift quasars. In particular, our full-depth AllWISE+NEOWISER coadds will be an important input for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) selection of luminous red galaxy and quasar targets. Our full-depth W1/W2 coadds are already in use within the DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS) and Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) reduction pipelines. Much more work still remains in order to fully leverage NEOWISER imaging for astrophysical applications beyond the solar system.Comment: coadds available at http://unwise.me, zoomable full-sky rendering at http://legacysurvey.org/viewe

Federal agency debt: another side of federal borrowing

Debts, Public