People and guns involved in denied and completed handgun sales

Objective: Denial of handgun purchases by prohibited people and knowledge of the structure of gun commerce have helped to deter and prevent firearm violence. The authors hypothesize that handguns involved in a denied purchase would more closely resemble those used in crime compared with handguns sold. Design: Cross sectional. Setting: Denied and completed handgun sales in California, 1998 -- 2000. Main outcome measures: Handgun and purchaser characteristics of denied and completed sales were compared. In particular, handgun characteristics most closely associated with crime guns (type, caliber, barrel length, price) were examined. Results: Compared with handguns sold, handguns in denied sales were somewhat more likely to be semiautomatic pistols (74.6% v 69.4%), to have short barrels (25.9% v 22.2%), and be of medium caliber (48.9% v 37.3%). Ten percent of the handguns in denied sales and 3.4% of handguns sold were identified as inexpensive. Conclusions: The characteristics of denied handguns are similar to those seen among crime guns. Both groups of guns may reflect the desirability for criminal purposes of pistols, which have larger ammunition capacities than other handguns, and short barrels, which increase their ability to be concealed

Reliability modeling of a 1-out-of-2 system: Research with diverse Off-the-shelf SQL database servers

Fault tolerance via design diversity is often the only viable way of achieving sufficient dependability levels when using off-the-shelf components. We have reported previously on studies with bug reports of four open-source and commercial off-the-shelf database servers and later release of two of them. The results were very promising for designers of fault-tolerant solutions that wish to employ diverse servers: very few bugs caused failures in more than one server and none caused failure in more than two. In this paper we offer details of two approaches we have studied to construct reliability growth models for a 1-out-of-2 fault-tolerant server which utilize the bug reports. The models presented are of practical significance to system designers wishing to employ diversity with off-the-shelf components since often the bug reports are the only direct dependability evidence available to them

Evaluation of the impact of solder die attach versus epoxy die attach in a state of the art power package

Subject of this paper is the thermal investigation of epoxy (EDA) and solder (SDA) die attaches by a comparison of an ASIC with multiple heat sources in different package assemblies. Static and transient thermal measurements and simulations were performed to investigate the thermal behavior of two samples in a state of the art QFP power package differing only in the die attach material (EDA and SDA).Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

A Third Planet Orbiting HIP 14810

We present new precision radial velocities and a three-planet Keplerian orbit fit for the V = 8.5, G5 V star HIP 14810. We began observing this star at Keck Observatory as part of the N2K Planet Search Project. Wright et al. (2007) announced the inner two planets to this system, and subsequent observations have revealed the outer planet planet and the proper orbital solution for the middle planet. The planets have minimum masses of 3.9, 1.3, and 0.6 M_Jup and orbital periods of 6.67, 147.7, and 952 d, respectively. We have numerically integrated the family of orbital solutions consistent with the data and find that they are stable for at least 10^6 yr. Our photometric search shows that the inner planet does not transit.Comment: ApJL, accepte

A Spin-Orbit Alignment for the Hot Jupiter HATS-3b

We have measured the alignment between the orbit of HATS-3b (a recently discovered, slightly inflated Hot Jupiter) and the spin-axis of its host star. Data were obtained using the CYCLOPS2 optical-fiber bundle and its simultaneous calibration system feeding the UCLES spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The sky-projected spin-orbit angle of $\lambda = 3\pm25^{\circ}$ was determined from spectroscopic measurements of Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. This is the first exoplanet discovered through the HATSouth transit survey to have its spin-orbit angle measured. Our results indicate that the orbital plane of HATS-3b is consistent with being aligned to the spin axis of its host star. The low obliquity of the HATS-3 system, which has a relatively hot mid F-type host star, agrees with the general trend observed for Hot Jupiter host stars with effective temperatures $>6250$K to have randomly distributed spin-orbit angles.Comment: 13 pages. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Multiplier Sequences for Simple Sets of Polynomials

In this paper we give a new characterization of simple sets of polynomials B with the property that the set of B-multiplier sequences contains all Q-multiplier sequence for every simple set Q. We characterize sequences of real numbers which are multiplier sequences for every simple set Q, and obtain some results toward the partitioning of the set of classical multiplier sequences

Development of high-emittance scales on thoriated nickel-chromium-aluminum-base alloys

The surface regions of a DSNiCrAl alloy have been doped, by a pack diffusion process, with small amounts of Mn, Fe, or Co, and the effect of these dopants on the total normal emissivity of the scales produced by subsequent high temperature oxidation has been measured. While all three elements lead to a modest increase in emissivity, (up to 23% greater than the undoped alloy) only the change caused by manganese is thermally stable. However, this increased emissivity is within 85 percent of that of TDNiCr oxidized to form a chromia scale. The maganese-doped alloy is some 50 percent weaker than undoped DSNiCrAl after the doping treatment, and approximately 30 percent weaker after oxidation