Coping with rejection: what to do if your grant application is unsuccessful

With only so much grant money in the world, Adam Golberg’s first of a two-part series, looks at how to move forward when it becomes clear that your time courting a potential funder comes to an end

Unsteady two dimensional airloads acting on oscillating thin airfoils in subsonic ventilated wind tunnels

The numerical calculation of unsteady two dimensional airloads which act upon thin airfoils in subsonic ventilated wind tunnels was studied. Neglecting certain quadrature errors, Bland's collocation method is rigorously proved to converge to the mathematically exact solution of Bland's integral equation, and a three way equivalence was established between collocation, Galerkin's method and least squares whenever the collocation points are chosen to be the nodes of the quadrature rule used for Galerkin's method. A computer program displayed convergence with respect to the number of pressure basis functions employed, and agreement with known special cases was demonstrated. Results are obtained for the combined effects of wind tunnel wall ventilation and wind tunnel depth to airfoil chord ratio, and for acoustic resonance between the airfoil and wind tunnel walls. A boundary condition is proposed for permeable walls through which mass flow rate is proportional to pressure jump

Two dimensional aerodynamic interference effects on oscillating airfoils with flaps in ventilated subsonic wind tunnels

The numerical computation of unsteady airloads acting upon thin airfoils with multiple leading and trailing-edge controls in two-dimensional ventilated subsonic wind tunnels is studied. The foundation of the computational method is strengthened with a new and more powerful mathematical existence and convergence theory for solving Cauchy singular integral equations of the first kind, and the method of convergence acceleration by extrapolation to the limit is introduced to analyze airfoils with flaps. New results are presented for steady and unsteady flow, including the effect of acoustic resonance between ventilated wind-tunnel walls and airfoils with oscillating flaps. The computer program TWODI is available for general use and a complete set of instructions is provided

The Geography of Incarceration

The Boston Foundation's Boston Indicators Project, MassINC, and the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, released The Geography of Incarceration: The Cost and Consequences of High Incarceration Rates in Vulnerable City Neighborhoods, a new study that compares the geography of incarceration to the geography of crime in our city.The report accessed a novel data set from Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins and depicts how incarcerations have had a disproportionate impact on Boston's most vulnerable neighborhoods."This is needed work because the American criminal justice is characterized by high incarceration rates, especially for people of color. This produces cascading negative effects, not just on the lives of the imprisoned but on their families, neighborhoods and our city as a whole," said Paul Grogan, President and CEO of the Foundation.  "I'm hopeful that this work will build on the leadership Chief Justice Gants and the commitment from Governor Baker, Speaker DeLeo and Senate President Rosenberg to work with the Council of State Governments to produce meaningful reform."Among the report's findings, are:Even as Massachusetts has touted its "progressiveness," incarceration rates have been rising faster in recent years in this state than in the rest of the United States, as a whole.More was spent in 2013 incarcerating Codman Square residents than on statewide gang prevention efforts.The cost of housing all Suffolk County Jail inmates in 2013 was two-and-a-half times the Commonwealth's combined FY13 budgets for Bunker Hill and Roxbury community colleges and nearly as much as Boston's combined budgets for Parks and Recreation and Youth and Families departments.The report was released during a forum at The Boston Foundation that included a panel discussion with Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins, Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell, State Representative Evandro Carvalho, and John Larivee, President & CEO of Community Resources for Justice. The report recommended a series of reforms, including the redesigning houses of correction so they excel at addressing risks and needs, and eliminating mandatory minimum jail sentences, and in increased focus on diversion and re-entry programming for offenders

ESRC success rates by discipline: what on earth is going on?

It’s long been known that some academic subjects do better than others under the ESRC’s open call Research Grants scheme, but Adam Golberg argues that the latest figures show spectacular differences in success rates between different academic disciplines, and wonders why this might be