Frederick A. Milan (1924-1995)

Frederick A. Milan died on 28 January 1995 after a series of strokes and related illness of several years. ... His activities around the polar regions of the world are well known and fondly remembered. Fred was Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology and Anthropology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. ... His work as an assistant on the Harvard Peabody Museum Anthropological Expedition to the Aleutian Islands in 1949 heightened his interest in the Arctic. It also impressed upon him the utility of studying Russian for understanding the history of the region. Fred worked in the summers of 1950 and 1952 as an archaeological assistant at Deering and Kodiak, Alaska. He was a weather observer on the Juneau Icefield Research Project in the summer of 1951. His major scholastic interests were in anthropology and linguistics, and he graduated in 1952. In 1953 Fred began several years of association with the former United States Air Force Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory near Fairbanks. ... [In 1954] he and other Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory personnel participated in the Mount Wrangell Research Project, a high-latitude cosmic ray study. His role was as a collaborator in a study of high altitude acclimatization of the team members. ... Fred undertook graduate study at several institutions: the Universities of Oregon, Wisconsin and Copenhagen, and the London School of Economics. His linguistic skills became well developed, and he was especially interested in the Inuit language and culture. He spent one winter in northern Sweden traveling and living with a nomadic Sami family. Back in Alaska in 1956, he began his close association with the Inupiat Eskimo village of Wainwright, Alaska. His ability to speak the language enabled him to gain the villagers' confidence and elicit genealogical information, and endeared him to the people. These activities led eventually to successful completion of his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Wisconsin. ... In the 1960s Fred played an important role in establishing a worldwide study of northern people as part of the Human Adaptability section of the International Biological Program. ... He was a longtime advocate for multidisciplinary study of the needs for health care delivery and for the international exchange of information about circumpolar health problems and research efforts. In 1967 Fred, Dr. C. Earl Albrecht and colleagues in Alaska and other parts of the United States, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Greenland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics organized, with the support of the Arctic Institute of North America, the First International Symposium on Circumpolar Health. The symposium was held at Fairbanks in July 1967, and these meetings have continued at three-year intervals at various circumpolar locations. Fred was the president of the Sixth International Congress on Circumpolar Health held at Anchorage in 1984. ... During the 1970s and 1980s Fred was a faculty member at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He was a much-respected teacher, and he was noted for conveying his enthusiasm for scholarly work and his respect for the people of anthropological study to students and colleagues. The Fred Milan we knew was a genuine free spirit--he looked at the world through eyes wide with perceptive curiosity and interpreted it with kindness and good humor. We have been made richer and wiser by sharing in some of his generous and stimulating life

Some Structural and Thermal Characteristics of Snow Shelters

Reports investigations of dome-shaped shelters constructed in Alaska during winter 1955-56, some of loose, unconsolidated snow at the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, near Fairbanks, others of snow blocks on sea ice at Barter Island (70 08 N, 143 40 W). Pneumatic forms such as inflated weather balloons were useful, but not indispensable, in the loose snow type. Due to compaction, the density of the snow increased during construction from 0.22 gm/cu cm to 0.28 gm/cu cm and the hardness range from 8-80 gm/sq cm to 200-850 gm/sq cm Air temperatures in and outside both occupied and unoccupied shelters of this type (tabulated) demonstrate the efficacy of snow as an insulator and thermal advantages derived from ground heat. Inside temperature close to that at the ground surface, remained nearly constant (15-20 F) while outside temperatures ranged from -12 to -40 F Shelters were warmer during occupancy. In the snow-block shelters built on bare sea ice and on an 18 in deep drift, temperatures varied from 10-19 F at the top, 7-20 F in the center, and 7-18 F at the floor, while outside temperatures ranged from -2 to -5 F; thus subnivean warmth on sea ice can also be utilized. The temperature in a 2.5 ft deep trench in a drift, covered with a roof of horizontal snow blocks, was 20-24 F at the sleeping level 6 in above the floor

Multivariate Unsupervised Machine Learning for Anomaly Detection in Enterprise Applications

Existing application performance management (APM) solutions lack robust anomaly detection capabilities and root cause analysis techniques, that do not require manual efforts and domain knowledge. In this paper, we develop a density-based unsupervised machine learning model to detect anomalies within an enterprise application, based upon data from multiple APM systems. The research was conducted in collaboration with a European automotive company, using two months of live application data. We show that our model detects abnormal system behavior more reliably than a commonly used outlier detection technique and provides information for detecting root causes

Deep Neural Baselines for Computational Paralinguistics

Detecting sleepiness from spoken language is an ambitious task, which is addressed by the Interspeech 2019 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE). We propose an end-to-end deep learning approach to detect and classify patterns reflecting sleepiness in the human voice. Our approach is based solely on a moderately complex deep neural network architecture. It may be applied directly on the audio data without requiring any specific feature engineering, thus remaining transferable to other audio classification tasks. Nevertheless, our approach performs similar to state-of-the-art machine learning models.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; This paper was accepted at INTERSPEECH 2019, Graz, 15-19th September 2019. DOI will be added after publishment of the accepted pape

Compounding of short fiber reinforced phenolic resin by using specific mechanical energy input as a process control parameter

For a newly developed thermoset injection molding process, glass fiber-reinforced phenolic molding compounds with fiber contents between 0 wt% and 60 wt% were compounded. To achieve a comparable remaining heat of the reaction in all compound formulations, the specific mechanical energy input (SME) during the twin-screw extruder compounding process was used as a control parameter. By adjusting the extruder screw speed and the material throughput, a constant SME into the resin was targeted. Validation measurements using differential scanning calorimetry showed that the remaining heat of the reaction was higher for the molding compounds with low glass fiber contents. It was concluded that the SME was not the only influencing factor on the resin crosslinking progress during the compounding. The material temperature and the residence time changed with the screw speed and throughput, and most likely influenced the curing. However, the SME was one of the major influence factors, and can serve as an at-line control parameter for reactive compounding processes. The mechanical characterization of the test specimens revealed a linear improvement in tensile strength up to a fiber content of 40–50 wt%. The unnotched Charpy impact strength at a 0° orientation reached a plateau at fiber fractions of approximately 45 wt%

Development of an injection molding process for long glass fiber-reinforced phenolic resins

Glass fiber-reinforced phenolic resins are well suited to substitute aluminum die-cast materials. They meet the high thermomechanical and chemical demands that are typically found in combustion engine and electric drive train applications. An injection molding process development for further improving their mechanical properties by increasing the glass fiber length in the molded part was conducted. A novel screw mixing element was developed to improve the homogenization of the long fibers in the phenolic resin. The process operation with the mixing element is a balance between the desired mixing action, an undesired preliminary curing of the phenolic resin, and the reduction of the fiber length. The highest mixing energy input leads to a reduction of the initial fiber length L0 = 5000 μm to a weighted average fiber length of Lp = 571 μm in the molded part. This is an improvement over Lp = 285 μm for a short fiber-reinforced resin under comparable processing conditions. The mechanical characterization shows that for the long fiber-reinforced materials, the benefit of the increased homogeneity outweighs the disadvantages of the reduced fiber length. This is evident from the increase in tensile strength from σm = 21 MPa to σm = 57 MPa between the lowest and the highest mixing energy input parameter settings

Development of an Injection Molding Process for Long Glass Fiber-Reinforced Phenolic Resins

Glass fiber-reinforced phenolic resins are well suited to substitute aluminum die-cast materials. They meet the high thermomechanical and chemical demands that are typically found in combustion engine and electric drive train applications. An injection molding process development for further improving their mechanical properties by increasing the glass fiber length in the molded part was conducted. A novel screw mixing element was developed to improve the homogenization of the long fibers in the phenolic resin. The process operation with the mixing element is a balance between the desired mixing action, an undesired preliminary curing of the phenolic resin, and the reduction of the fiber length. The highest mixing energy input leads to a reduction of the initial fiber length L(0) = 5000 μm to a weighted average fiber length of L(p) = 571 μm in the molded part. This is an improvement over L(p) = 285 μm for a short fiber-reinforced resin under comparable processing conditions. The mechanical characterization shows that for the long fiber-reinforced materials, the benefit of the increased homogeneity outweighs the disadvantages of the reduced fiber length. This is evident from the increase in tensile strength from σ(m) = 21 MPa to σ(m) = 57 MPa between the lowest and the highest mixing energy input parameter settings

Sample identification and pedigree reconstruction in Wolverine (Gulo gulo) using SNP genotyping of non-invasive samples

For conservation genetic studies using non-invasively collected samples, genome-wide data may be hard to acquire. Until now, such studies have instead mostly relied on analyses of traditional genetic markers such as microsatellites (SSRs). Recently, high throughput genotyping of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) has become available, expanding the use of genomic methods to include non-model species of conservation concern. We have developed a 96-marker SNP array for use in applied conservation monitoring of the Scandinavian wolverine (Gulo gulo) population. By genotyping more than a thousand non-invasively collected samples, we were able to obtain precise estimates of different types of genotyping errors and sample dropout rates. The SNP panel significantly outperforms the SSR markers (and DBY intron markers for sexing) both in terms of precision in genotyping, sex assignment and individual identification, as well as in the proportion of samples successfully genotyped. Furthermore, SNP genotyping offers a simplified laboratory and analysis pipeline with fewer samples needed to be repeatedly genotyped in order to obtain reliable consensus data. In addition, we utilised a unique opportunity to successfully demonstrate the application of SNP genotype data for reconstructing pedigrees in wild populations, by validating the method with samples from wild individuals with known relatedness. By offering a simplified workflow with improved performance, we anticipate this methodology will facilitate the use of non-invasive samples to improve genetic management of many different types of populations that have previously been challenging to survey

Prophylactic titanium elastic nailing (TEN) following femoral lengthening (Lengthening then rodding) with one or two nails reduces the risk for secondary interventions after regenerate fractures: a cohort study in monolateral vs. bilateral lengthening procedures

Background: Femoral fracture rates of up to 30% have been reported following lengthening procedures using fixators. “Lengthening then rodding” uses one or two titanium elastic nails (TENs) for prophylactic intramedullary nailing to reduce this complication. The aim of the study was to decide if usage of only one TEN is safe or has it a higher risk of getting a fracture? And we asked if there is a difference between patients with monolateral or bilateral lengthening procedures according to their fracture rate? Methods: One or two TENs were implanted in two groups of patients (monolateral and bilateral) after femoral lengthening procedures. The regenerate quality was classified using the Li system and fractures were categorized using the Simpson and Kenwright classification. The follow-up period was at least 1 year after removal of the frame. Results: Sixty-seven patients with 101 femoral lengthening procedures were included in 2007–2011. Group A included 34 patients with bilateral lengthening due to congenital short stature. Group B consisted of 33 patients with congenital disorders with leg length discrepancies. Seven fractures in six patients were seen in group A and five fractures in group B. One patient had residual shortening of 1 cm, and 11 fractures healed without relevant deviation (< 5°) or shortening (< 5 mm). A soft-tissue infection in one patient led to early removal of one TEN. Conclusions: Fractures occurred in both groups of patients in total in 12 of the 101 cases (12%). The rate of secondary interventions was markedly reduced. Usage of one or two TENs did not influence the fracture rate.<br