Aeromedical Transformation: From Clinical to Performance-Based Assessments.

Statement of the Problem or Issue: The traditional approach to aeromedical evaluation primarily focused on clinically based assessments may not comprehensively capture the dynamic demands of modern aviation operations. As aviation evolves, there is a recognized need for a paradigm shift from solely clinically based evaluations toward performance-based assessments. The existing model may not adequately reflect the nuanced and real-time factors influencing pilot performance and safety. Details of the Initiative or Program: This initiative advocates for a fundamental shift in aeromedical evaluation methodologies, emphasizing performance-based assessments. The program integrates cutting-edge technologies, data analytics, and human factors research to develop a holistic understanding of pilot capabilities. By incorporating real-time performance monitoring, stressors, and situational awareness, the initiative aims to provide a more accurate and dynamic assessment of a pilot\u27s fitness for duty. How the Initiative or Program Addresses the Problem or Issue: The initiative embraces a proactive approach by shifting the focus from static clinical evaluations to ongoing, performance-based assessments. By leveraging advanced technologies and comprehensive data analysis, the program addresses the limitations of traditional evaluations. It aims to capture the dynamic interplay between a pilot\u27s physiological and psychological well-being and their actual in-flight performance. The Intended or Realized Outcome of the Initiative or Program: The intended outcome of this paradigm shift is to enhance the precision and relevance of aeromedical evaluations. By aligning assessments with the actual demands of aviation tasks, the initiative aims to improve the identification of potential concerns, enhance early intervention strategies, and ultimately contribute to heightened aviation safety. The program seeks to redefine the evaluation process, ensuring it is both proactive and reflective of the evolving nature of aviation

Physiological Effects during Aerobatic Flights on Science Astronaut Candidates

Spaceflight is considered the last frontier in terms of science, technology, and engineering. But it is also the next frontier in terms of human physiology and performance. After more than 200,000 years humans have evolved under earth’s gravity and atmospheric conditions, spaceflight poses environmental stresses for which human physiology is not adapted. Hypoxia, accelerations, and radiation are among such stressors, our research involves suborbital flights aiming to develop effective countermeasures in order to assure sustainable human space presence. The physiologic baseline of spaceflight participants is subject to great variability driven by age, gender, fitness, and metabolic reserve. The objective of the present study is to characterize different physiologic variables in a population of STEM practitioners during an aerobatic flight. Cardiovascular and pulmonary responses were determined in Science Astronaut Candidates (SACs) during unusual attitude aerobatic flight indoctrination. Physiologic data recordings from 20 subjects participating in high-G flight training were analyzed. These recordings were registered by wearable sensor-vest that monitored electrocardiographic tracings (ECGs), signs of dysrhythmias or other electric disturbances during all the flight. The same cardiovascular parameters were also collected approximately 10 min pre-flight, during each high-G/unusual attitude maneuver and 10 min after the flights. The ratio (pre-flight/in-flight/post-flight) of the cardiovascular responses was calculated for comparison of interindividual differences. The resulting tracings depicting the cardiovascular responses of the subjects were compared against the G-loads (Gs) during the aerobatic flights to analyze cardiovascular variability aspects and fluid/pressure shifts due to the high Gs. Inflight ECG revealed cardiac variability patterns associated with rapid Gs onset in terms of reduced heart rate (HR) and some scattered dysrhythmic patterns (15% premature ventricular contractions-type) that were considered as triggered physiological responses to highG/unusual attitude training and some were considered as instrument artifact. Variation events were observed in subjects during the +Gz and –Gz maneuvers and these may be due to preload and afterload, sudden shift. Our data reveal that aerobatic flight influenced the breathing rate of the subject, due in part by the various levels of energy expenditure due to the increased use of muscle work during these aerobatic maneuvers. Noteworthy was the high heterogeneity in the different physiological responses among a relatively small group of SACs exposed to similar aerobatic flights with similar Gs exposures. The cardiovascular responses clearly demonstrated that SACs were subjected to significant flight stress. Routine ECG monitoring during high-G/unusual attitude flight training is recommended to capture pathology underlying dangerous dysrhythmias in suborbital flight safety. More research is currently being conducted to further facilitate the development of robust medical screening, medical risk assessment approaches, and suborbital flight training in the context of the evolving commercial human suborbital spaceflight industry. A more mature and integrative medical assessment method is required to understand the physiology state and response variability among highly diverse populations of prospective suborbital flight participants

Soil-Structure Interaction for Integrated Design of Weakened and Damped Structures

Previous research has shown the effectiveness of the integrated design of weakening and damping techniques (WeD) for the seismic retrofitting of structures. Indeed, WeD techniques are able to reduce inter-story drifts and total accelerations, the two major performance measures to evaluate the seismic behavior of structures. Past research has been applied to fixed-based structures considering relatively stiff soil conditions. It has been suspected, though, that using such techniques in soft soil sites while considering soil structure interaction, may diminish some of the advantages observed in past research. This paper examines the effect of site conditions and soil-structure interaction on the seismic performance of Weakening and Damping techniques. An established rheological soil-shallow foundation-structure model with equivalent linear soil behavior and nonlinear behavior of the superstructure has been used. A large number of models incorporating wide range of soil, foundation and structural parameters were generated using robust Monte-Carlo simulation. The various structural models, along with the various site conditions, have been used for the comparative study. The design methodologies previously developed by the authors have been applied to each model considering different site conditions leading to the optimal weakening and damping. The results of the comparative study are used to quantify the effects of site conditions and foundation °exibility on the performance of the retrofitted structures

Semantic Privacy Policies for Service Description and Discovery in Service-Oriented Architecture

Privacy preservation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an open problem. This paper focuses on the areas of service description and discovery. The problems in these areas are that currently it is not possible to describe how a service provider deals with information received from a service consumer as well as discover a service that satisfies the privacy preferences of a consumer. There is currently no framework which offers a solution that supports a rich description of privacy policies and their integration in the process of service discovery. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to propose a privacy preservation framework for the areas of service description and discovery in SOA. The framework enhances service description and discovery with the specification and intersection of privacy policies using a base and domain-specific privacy ontologies. Moreover, the framework extends SOA to include roles responsible for implementing a privacy registry as well as mediating the interactions between service consumers and providers and the privacy preservation component

Water pricing: are 'polluters' paying the environmental costs of flow regulation?

River ecosystems are severely affected by dams and reservoirs. The Water Framework Directive states that polluters should be financially responsible for the caused environmental damage. Nevertheless, the environmental costs associated to flow regulation often are not fully paid by water users. This study presents an approach to value the environmental costs of flow regulation based on the "polluter pays" principle, i.e., the amount to be paid should be proportional to the caused environmental impact. The procedure includes three major steps: (i) assessing the admissible range of regulated flow variability based on flow data during the pre-dam period, (ii) estimating the daily environmental impact of regulated flows according to the resulting hydrological change in terms of the intensity, duration and frequency of the impact, and (iii) calculating the environmental costs of flow regulation subject to spatiotemporal characteristics. This paper applies the proposed methodology in the Luna River, Spain. The advantages over other water cost valuation methodologies are discussed. The approach enlarges the current recognition of water environmental costs and represents a simple and practical management tool for achieving the objectives of the Water Framework Directive

On neutrino-mediated potentials in a neutrino background

The exchange of a pair of neutrinos with Standard Model weak interactions generates a long-range force between fermions. The associated potential is extremely feeble, $\propto G_F^2/r^5$ for massless neutrinos, which renders it far from observable even in the most sensitive experiments testing fifth forces. The presence of a neutrino background has been argued to induce a correction to the neutrino propagator that enhances the potential by orders of magnitude. In this brief note, we point out that such modified propagators are invalid if the background neutrino wavepackets have a finite width. By reevaluating the 2--$\nu$ exchange potential in the presence of a neutrino background including finite width effects, we find that the background-induced enhancement is reduced by several orders of magnitude. This confirms the intuitive result that coherent enhancements to the potential can only be large for distances of the order of the background wavepacket width. Unfortunately, this pushes the resulting 2--$\nu$ exchange potential away from present and near-future sensitivity of tests of new long-range forces.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures. Results unchanged. Added Not

Gauging classical and quantum integrability through out-of-time-ordered correlators

Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) have been proposed as a probe of chaos in quantum mechanics, on the basis of their short-time exponential growth found in some particular setups. However, it has been seen that this behavior is not universal. Therefore, we query other quantum chaos manifestations arising from the OTOCs, and we thus study their long-time behavior in systems of completely different nature: quantum maps, which are the simplest chaotic one-body system, and spin chains, which are many-body systems without a classical limit. It is shown that studying the long-time regime of the OTOCs it is possible to detect and gauge the transition between integrability and chaos, and we benchmark the transition with other indicators of quantum chaos based on the spectra and the eigenstates of the systems considered. For systems with a classical analog, we show that the proposed OTOC indicators have a very high accuracy that allow us to detect subtle features along the integrability-to-chaos transition.Fil: Fortes, Emiliano M.. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; ArgentinaFil: Garcia-Mata, Ignacio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mar del Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Físicas de Mar del Plata. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Físicas de Mar del Plata; ArgentinaFil: Jalabert, Rodolfo. Université de Strasbourg; FranciaFil: Wisniacki, Diego Ariel. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; Argentin

Observations of the first electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave source by the TOROS collaboration

We present the results of prompt optical follow-up of the electromagnetic counterpart of GW170817 by the Transient Optical Robotic Observatory of the South Collaboration (TOROS). We detected highly significant dimming in the light curves of the counterpart over the course of only 80 minutes of observations obtained ∼35 hr after the trigger with the T80-South telescope. A second epoch of observations, obtained ∼59 hr after the event with the EABA 1.5m telescope, confirms the fast fading nature of the transient. The observed colors of the counterpart suggest that this event was a blue kilonova relatively free of lanthanides

Cloaking resonant scatterers and tuning electron flow in graphene

We consider resonant scatterers with large scattering cross-sections in graphene that are produced by a gated disk or a vacancy, and show that a gated ring can be engineered to produce an efficient electron cloak. We also demonstrate that this same scheme can be applied to tune the direction of electron flow. Our analysis is based on a partial-wave expansion of the electronic wave-functions in the continuum approximation, described by the Dirac equation. Using a symmetrized version of the massless Dirac equation, we derive a general condition for the cloaking of a scatterer by a potential with radial symmetry. We also perform tight-binding calculations to show that our findings are robust against the presence of disorder in the gate potential.NMRP acknowledges support from EC under Graphene Flagship (Contract No. CNECT-ICT604391), the hospitality of the Instituto de Física of the UFRJ, and stimulating discussions with Bruno Amorim on the Lippamnn-Schwinger equation for Dirac electrons. TGR thanks the Brazilian agencies CNPq and FAPERJ and Brazil Science without Borders program for nancial support. FAP acknowledges CAPES (Grant No. BEX 1497/14-6) and CNPq (Grant No. 303286/2013-0) for financial suppor