The Industrial Ontologies Foundry proof-of-concept project

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up

Dietary molasses enhances ruminal biohydrogenation and partially alleviates diet- induced milk fat depression

Dairy Research, 2008 is known as Dairy Day, 2008Milk fat depression remains a problem on dairy farms, and in recent years, incorporation of distillers grains (typically with solubles added and often dried) has contributed to this problem on some farms. In this study, we evaluated whether molasses could prevent milk fat depression in cows fed a high-risk diet. Replacing up to 5% of dietary corn with cane molasses linearly increased the yield of short- and medium-chain fatty acids in milk, indicating a positive effect on de novo fatty acid synthesis in a milk fat depression environment. Molasses, however, tended to linearly decrease milk yield and linearly decreased milk protein yield, resulting in no net effect on energy- or solids-corrected milk yield. These results indicate that the potential exists for sources of dietary sugar to prevent milk fat depression, but further research is needed to determine when sugar sources might be most effective

Some Throughput Metrics for (SOA) Application Development

Given the growing concerns about unethical usage of Information Technology (IT) becoming a major security concern, this research-in-progress paper conceptually models IS practitioner (professional) attitude toward unethical IT use. Based on the ethical notions of universalism and particularism, it argues for a two-dimensional analysis to judge development of attitude toward using IT unethically: understand the IS professional as a human being subscribing to universal principles and understand the IS professional as rooted to an organizational community of practice. Through its articulation of two powerful lenses of universalism and particularism, this paper contributes by understanding how philosophical perspectives of ethics can inform our understanding of IS security. Finally, the paper discusses future research and practice implications arising out of this conceptual treatment

Temperature-dependent Hall scattering factor and drift mobility in remotely doped Si:B/SiGe/Si heterostructures

Hall-and-Strip measurements on modulation-doped SiGe heterostructures and combined Hall and capacitance–voltage measurements on metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS)-gated enhancement mode structures have been used to deduce Hall scattering factors, rH, in the Si1 – xGex two-dimensional hole gas. At 300 K, rH was found to be equal to 0.4 for x = 0.2 and x = 0.3. Knowing rH, it is possible to calculate the 300 K drift mobilities in the modulation-doped structures which are found to be 400 cm2 V – 1 s – 1 at a carrier density of 3.3 × 1011 cm – 2 for x = 0.2 and 300 cm2 V – 1 s – 1 at 6.3 × 1011 cm – 2 for x = 0.3, factors of between 1.5 and 2.0 greater than a Si pMOS control

Enhanced Dopamine D1 and BDNF Signaling in the Adult Dorsal Striatum but not Nucleus Accumbens of Prenatal Cocaine Treated Mice

Previous work from our group and others utilizing animal models have demonstrated long-lasting structural and functional alterations in the meso-cortico-striatal dopamine pathway following prenatal cocaine (PCOC) treatment. We have shown that PCOC treatment results in augmented D1-induced cyclic AMP (cAMP) and cocaine-induced immediate-early gene expression in the striatum of adult mice. In this study we further examined basal as well as cocaine or D1-induced activation of a set of molecules known to be mediators of neuronal plasticity following psychostimulant treatment, with emphasis in the dorsal striatum (Str) and nucleus accumbens (NAc) of adult mice exposed to cocaine in utero. Basally, in the Str of PCOC treated mice there were significantly higher levels of (1) CREB and Ser133 P-CREB (2) Thr34 P-DARPP-32 and (3) GluA1 and Ser 845 P-GluA1 when compared to prenatal saline (PSAL) treated mice. In the NAc there were significantly higher basal levels of (1) CREB and Ser133 P-CREB, (2) Thr202/Tyr204 P-ERK2, and (3) Ser845 P-GluA1. Following acute administration of cocaine (15 mg/kg, i.p.) or D1 agonist (SKF 82958; 1 mg/kg, i.p.) there were significantly higher levels of Ser133 P-CREB, Thr34 P-DARPP-32, and Thr202/Tyr204 P-ERK2 in the Str that were evident in all animals tested. However, these cocaine-induced increases in phosphorylation were significantly augmented in PCOC mice compared to PSAL mice. In sharp contrast to the observations in the Str, in the NAc, acute administration of cocaine or D1 agonist significantly increased P-CREB and P-ERK2 in PSAL mice, a response that was not evident in PCOC mice. Examination of Ser 845 P-GluA1 revealed that cocaine or D1 agonist significantly increased levels in PSAL mice, but significantly decreased levels in the PCOC mice in both the Str and NAc. We also examined changes in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Our studies revealed significantly higher levels of the BDNF precursor, pro-BDNF, and one of its receptors, TrkB in the Str of PCOC mice compared to PSAL mice. These results suggest a persistent up-regulation of molecules critical to D1 and BDNF signaling in the Str of adult mice exposed to cocaine in utero. These molecular adaptations may underlie components of the behavioral deficits evident in exposed animals and a subset of exposed humans, and may represent a therapeutic target for ameliorating aspects of the PCOC-induced phenotype

The effects of climate change on ecologically-relevant flow regime and water quality attributes

The management of freshwater ecosystems is usually targeted through the regulation of water quantity (limiting diversions and providing environmental flows) and regulation of water quality (setting limits or targets for constituent concentrations). Clima

Single Pilot Workload Management During Cruise in Entry Level Jets

Advanced technologies and automation are important facilitators of single pilot operations, but they also contribute to the workload management challenges faced by the pilot. We examined task completion, workload management, and automation use in an entry level jet (ELJ) flown by single pilots. Thirteen certificated Cessna Citation Mustang (C510-S) pilots flew an instrument flight rules (IFR) experimental flight in a Cessna Citation Mustang simulator. At one point participants had to descend to meet a crossing restriction prior to a waypoint and prepare for an instrument approach into an un-towered field while facilitating communication from a lost pilot who was flying too low for ATC to hear. Four participants experienced some sort of difficulty with regard to meeting the crossing restriction and almost half (n=6) had problems associated with the instrument approach. Additional errors were also observed including eight participants landing at the airport with an incorrect altimeter setting

Interoperable human behavior models for simulations

Modern simulations and games have limited capabilities for simulated characters to interact with each other and with humans in rich, meaningful ways. Although significant achievements have been made in developing human behavior models (HBMs) that are able to control a single simulated entity (or a single group of simulated entities), a limiting factor is the inability of HBMs developed by different groups to interact with each other. We present an architecture and multi-level message framework for enabling HBMs to communicate with each other about their actions and their intents, and describe the results of our crowd control demonstration system which applied it to allow three distinct HBMs to interoperate within a single training-oriented simulation. Our hope is that this will encourage the development of standards for interoperability among HBMs which will lead to the development of richer training and analysis simulations.Postprint (author’s final draft

Single-Pilot Workload Management

Integrated glass cockpit systems place a heavy cognitive load on pilots (Burian Dismukes, 2007). Researchers from the NASA Ames Flight Cognition Lab and the FAA Flight Deck Human Factors Lab examined task and workload management by single pilots. This poster describes pilot performance regarding programming a reroute while at cruise and meeting a waypoint crossing restriction on the initial descent