Biographical Sketch of Spencer Fullerton Baird

Spencer Fullerton Baird was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, February 3, 1823. In 1834 he was sent to a Quaker boarding-school kept by Dr. McGraw, at Port Deposit, Maryland, and the year following to the Reading Grammar School. In 1836 he entered Dickinson College, and was graduated at the age of seventeen. After leaving college, his time for several years was devoted to studies in general natural history, to long pedestrian excursions for the purpose of observing animals and plants and collecting specimens, and to the organization of a private cabinet of natural history, which a few years later became the nucleus of the museum of the Smithsonian Institution. During this period he published a number of original papers on natural history. He also read medicine with Dr. Middleton Goldsmith, attending a winter course of lectures at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, in New York, in 1842. His medical course was never formally completed, although in 1848 he received the degree of M. D., honoris causa, from the Philadelphia Medical College. In 1845 he was chosen professor of natural history in Dickinson College, and in 1846 his duties and emoluments were increased by election to the chair of natural history and chemistry in the same institution. In 1848 he declined a call to the professorship of natural science in the University of Vermont. In 1849 he undertook his first extensive literary work, translating and editing the text for the "Iconographic Encyclopedia," an English version of Heck's Bilder Atlas, published in connection with Brockhaus's Conversations Lexikon

Asset Identification Under the Cape Town Convention and Protocols

A titania-supported nickel catalyst was prepared and tested in methanation in order to evaluate its catalytic properties (activity, selectivity and specially, activity loss), and compare it with an alumina-supported nickel catalyst. The titania-supported catalyst did not only show higher stability than alumina, but also presented a different cause of deactivation, carbon formation. In addition, a kinetic model was obtained for the titania-supported catalyst, and a study of the effect of different operating conditions (temperature, composition and partial pressures of synthesis gas and water) on the deactivation rate and carbon formation of this catalyst was performed. </p

Research Identities: Reflections of a Contract Researcher

This paper examines the institutional identity formation of contract research staff in the context of the Taylorisation of research knowledges. The author has been a contract researcher for many years, after initially training and practising as a Probation Officer. She makes links between her social work training, and her current practice as a qualitative researcher. Drawing on her experience of working on a variety of different projects, at a number of different institutions, and providing illustrative examples from projects in sociology, social policy, health, and education, she reflects on the implications of the current social organization of academic research both for professional research practice and for researcher identity. There is a paradox in the way that contract research staff accrue a wealth of experience of how research is organised and conducted in different contexts, a repertoire of skills, and a vast volume of various kinds of \'data\', whilst remaining vulnerable and marginalized figures within the academy, with few opportunities for professional development and advancement. She outlines a number of strategies she has employed in the preservation of the \'research self\', and concludes by suggesting that the academy has much to learn about the effective management of \'waste\', as embodied by researchers\' selves and their data, consequent upon the Taylorisation of research work.Taylorisation; Academic Work; Identities; Qualitative Research; In-Depth Interviews; Reflective Practice

Concrete - filled steel tube columns - tests compared with Eurocode 4

This paper summarises the data from 1819 tests on concrete-filled steel tube columns and compares their failure load with the prediction of Eurocode 4. The full data is given on the website http://web.ukonline.co.uk/asccs2 . The comparison with Eurocode 4 is discussed and shows that Eurocode 4 can be used with confidence and generally gives good agreement with test results, the average Test/EC4 ratio for all tests being 1.11. The Eurocode 4 limitations on concrete strength could be safely extended to concrete with a cylinder strength of 75 N/mm2 for circular sections and 60 N/mm2 for rectangular sections

Cinema in the country: the rural cinema scheme – Orkney (1946-67)

The act of transporting cinema to and exhibiting films for the rural communities of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland has attracted a fair amount of press attention at home and abroad recently ("Box Office"). This is partly due to the events pioneered by the British actress Tilda Swinton and the writer and critic Mark Cousins. This began with the film festival The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams held in Nairn on the north east coast of Scotland in 2008, followed a year later by A Pilgrimage which involved tugging a mobile cinema along an exhibition route from Fort Augustus to Nairn incorporating Loch Ness. These initiatives and less publicized others, such as The Small Islands Film Festival (2007-2009), are born of a passionate desire to not only take a preferred vision of cinema to selected areas of rural Scotland, but also, to offer potential audiences a different cinema-going experience by challenging what might be considered the norms of film exhibition

Location of planar targets in three space from monocular images

Many pieces of existing and proposed space hardware that would be targets of interest for a telerobot can be represented as planar or near-planar surfaces. Examples include the biostack modules on the Long Duration Exposure Facility, the panels on Solar Max, large diameter struts, and refueling receptacles. Robust and temporally efficient methods for locating such objects with sufficient accuracy are therefore worth developing. Two techniques that derive the orientation and location of an object from its monocular image are discussed and the results of experiments performed to determine translational and rotational accuracy are presented. Both the quadrangle projection and elastic matching techniques extract three-space information using a minimum of four identifiable target points and the principles of the perspective transformation. The selected points must describe a convex polygon whose geometric characteristics are prespecified in a data base. The rotational and translational accuracy of both techniques was tested at various ranges. This experiment is representative of the sensing requirements involved in a typical telerobot target acquisition task. Both techniques determined target location to an accuracy sufficient for consistent and efficient acquisition by the telerobot