Visualizing networked writing activity

In conjunction with the Honors Fellow program and two faculty advisors from both the English and Computer Science departments, another student and I have written software to visualize how participants collaborate on networked writing projects. Using Google Docs as a way to allow students to instantaneously interact with a document in real-time, this software captures data from Google's cloud service and displays it in a pair of visualizations. We used agile methods of software development to devise a way to implement their ideas in an appealing way. This document contains detailed instructions on where the latest iteration of the software can be located. It also details the process of making the system operational on a new machine, stating how the software works and where it should be placed in the file system. The document also explains how one can use the system to visualize writing collaboration. Finally, many failed iterations of the software have led to meaningful reflections on software development practices. The document serves as a technical report for the software, but also elaborates on the hardships of development, as well as provides insight on how this software may evolve toward richer experiences. Also included is an Author's Statement which reveals many of the learning experiences that arose throughout the development of this project.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?.

Solar diameter measurements for study of Sun climate coupling

Changes in solar shape and diameter were detected as a possible probe of variability in solar luminosity, an important climatic driving function. A technique was designed which will allow the calibration of the telescope field, providing a scale for long-term comparison of these and future measurements

Relationship between Thermodynamic Driving Force and One-Way Fluxes in Reversible Chemical Reactions

Chemical reaction systems operating in nonequilibrium open-system states arise in a great number of contexts, including the study of living organisms, in which chemical reactions, in general, are far from equilibrium. Here we introduce a theorem that relates forward and re-verse fluxes and free energy for any chemical process operating in a steady state. This rela-tionship, which is a generalization of equilibrium conditions to the case of a chemical process occurring in a nonequilibrium steady state, provides a novel equivalent definition for chemical reaction free energy. In addition, it is shown that previously unrelated theories introduced by Ussing and Hodgkin and Huxley for transport of ions across membranes, Hill for catalytic cycle fluxes, and Crooks for entropy production in microscopically reversible systems, are united in a common framework based on this relationship.Comment: 11 page

Clothing longevity perspectives: exploring consumer expectations, consumption and use

The production, distribution, use and end-of-life phases of the clothing lifecycle all have significant environmental impacts, but complete lifecycle assessment has identified that extending the active life of garments through design, use and re-use is the single most effective intervention in reducing the overall impact of the clothing industry (WRAP, 2011). In response, Government funded clothing longevity research seeks to develop and test industry-led design strategies to influence and enable consumers to keep garments in active use for longer (Cooper et al., 2014). While recent UK research has indicated significant potential to influence more sustainable consumer behaviour (Langley et al., 2013; YouGov, 2012), up-to-date qualitative research is required to discover how consumer attitudes, expectations and behaviours in relation to clothing lifetimes affects garment care and clothing use. This will help to inform industry-led strategies by understanding where effective changes can be made that will potentially have most impact. This paper presents preliminary findings from a Defra funded action based research project, ‘Strategies to improve design and testing for clothing longevity’. Qualitative research methods are used to explore consumer attitudes, expectations and behaviours at purchase, use and disposal stages of garment lifetimes, and gather data on practices of garment wash, wear, care and maintenance in everyday life. The research findings are discussed in relation to industry-led strategies aimed at extending the life of clothes

Knowledge and Preference in Reporting Financial Information

This article models respondent behavior in a financial survey with a framework explicitly integrating a respondent’s knowledge of and willingness to reveal his or her financial status. Whether a respondent provides a valid answer, a “don’t know”, or a “refusal” to a financial question depends on the interaction of his or her financial knowledge and preferences regarding revealing the knowledge. Using asset response and nonresponse data from the Health and Retirement Study (2000), we found that knowledge and preferences play interrelated roles in reporting financial information, that a respondent’s age, gender, education, and race and ethnicity are important predictors of respondent behavior, and that race and ethnicity affect a respondent behavior only via their influence on preferences, while gender only via its influence on knowledge. We also found strong heterogeneity in respondents’ financial knowledge and their willingness to reveal the knowledge.

Study of cardiovascular function using a coupled left ventricle and systemic circulation model

To gain insight into cardio-arterial interactions, a coupled left ventricle-systemic artery (LV–SA) model is developed that incorporates a three-dimensional finite-strain left ventricle (LV), and a physiologically-based one-dimensional model for the systemic arteries (SA). The coupling of the LV model and the SA model is achieved by matching the pressure and the flow rate at the aortic root, i.e. the SA model feeds back the pressure as a boundary condition to the LV model, and the aortic flow rate from the LV model is used as the input for the SA model. The governing equations of the coupled system are solved using a combined immersed-boundary finite-element (IB/FE) method and a Lax–Wendroff scheme. A baseline case using physiological measurements of healthy subjects, and four exemplar cases based on different physiological and pathological scenarios are studied using the LV–SA model. The results of the baseline case agree well with published experimental data. The four exemplar cases predict varied pathological responses of the cardiovascular system, which are also supported by clinical observations. The new model can be used to gain insight into cardio-arterial interactions across a range of clinical applications

Rethinking CMB foregrounds: systematic extension of foreground parameterizations

Future high-sensitivity measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and energy spectrum will be limited by our understanding and modeling of foregrounds. Not only does more information need to be gathered and combined, but also novel approaches for the modeling of foregrounds, commensurate with the vast improvements in sensitivity, have to be explored. Here, we study the inevitable effects of spatial averaging on the spectral shapes of typical foreground components, introducing a moment approach, which naturally extends the list of foreground parameters that have to be determined through measurements or constrained by theoretical models. Foregrounds are thought of as a superposition of individual emitting volume elements along the line of sight and across the sky, which then are observed through an instrumental beam. The beam and line of sight averages are inevitable. Instead of assuming a specific model for the distributions of physical parameters, our method identifies natural new spectral shapes for each foreground component that can be used to extract parameter moments (e.g., mean, dispersion, cross-terms, etc.). The method is illustrated for the superposition of power-laws, free-free spectra, gray-body and modified blackbody spectra, but can be applied to more complicated fundamental spectral energy distributions. Here, we focus on intensity signals but the method can be extended to the case of polarized emission. The averaging process automatically produces scale-dependent spectral shapes and the moment method can be used to propagate the required information across scales in power spectrum estimates. The approach is not limited to applications to CMB foregrounds but could also be useful for the modeling of X-ray emission in clusters of galaxies.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, accepted by MNRAS, minor revision