Evaluation of ceramics for stator application: Gas turbine engine report

Current ceramic materials, component fabrication processes, and reliability prediction capability for ceramic stators in an automotive gas turbine engine environment are assessed. Simulated engine duty cycle testing of stators conducted at temperatures up to 1093 C is discussed. Materials evaluated are SiC and Si3N4 fabricated from two near-net-shape processes: slip casting and injection molding. Stators for durability cycle evaluation and test specimens for material property characterization, and reliability prediction model prepared to predict stator performance in the simulated engine environment are considered. The status and description of the work performed for the reliability prediction modeling, stator fabrication, material property characterization, and ceramic stator evaluation efforts are reported

FRØ i SØR: Utvikling og kompetanse-bygging i engfrøavlen i Aust-Agder. Rapport fra fjerde prosjektår 2015 / Sluttrapport

-Rapporten viser aktivitet og faglige resultater i prosjektet ‘FRØ i SØR’ i 201

"To live a better life": the making of a Mozambican middle class

This dissertation is a cultural history of the making of a Mozambican middle class in the capital city of Maputo. It focuses on multigenerational debates, anxieties, and struggles among men and women over the meanings of, and aspirations for, economic and social inclusion in the modern world. The study spans the colonial-capitalist, socialist, and post-socialist eras in Mozambique’s modern history, and is set in the young city that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as the Portuguese colonial capital of Lourenço Marques, later renamed Maputo in 1976 after independence. The rise of urban African middle classes as the key to modernizing Africa has come to the fore in recent scholarly and popular analyses of the continent’s economic and political future. Debates over how to define the middle class have revitalized the relevance of class analysis for understanding inequality and social change in urban Africa. However, little work has thoroughly examined the central role of changing gender relations in processes of middle-class formation. This dissertation begins to remedy this gap by examining the gendered relationship between class and culture that yields new insights into the lives and experiences that have occupied spaces in between wealth and poverty in an African city. Based on interviews, archival collections, newspapers and other print sources, I argue that Mozambican middle-class culture is the product of stitching together old and new ideas about what it means to live a better life, fueled by gendered debates over the role of “tradition,” and the position of women, in modern urban society. Focusing on debates surrounding assimilation, marriage, public life, and managing the home, I contend that men and women have negotiated, shifted, and redefined possibilities for upward social mobility in pursuit of education, meaningful work, loving relationships, and desires for greater comforts of urban life. The process of middle-class formation in Maputo has reflected shared aspirations among upwardly mobile women and men as stakeholders in colonial and postcolonial promises of “progress” and “development,” and been conditioned by periods of possibility and constraint under Portuguese colonial-capitalist, postcolonial socialist, and post-socialist Frelimo state rule. Ultimately, my research shows that the middle class has been unified over time by ambitions to modernize Mozambique, but fractured by deeply gendered debates over how to modernize

Image quality assessment using artificial neural networks

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An Investigation Into Teaching Sports Analytics

Sports analytics arrived in the mainstream media through the novel and film Moneyball. However, its origins date back to operations researchers following World War II. Often considered a subdiscipline of statistics, sports analytics draws from statistics but also includes concepts from data science, communication, and marketing. As a passionate fan of sports, I have pursued statistics in my undergraduate and graduate education with the dream of working in sports for my career. However, educational opportunities in sports analytics are limited nationwide, and more specifically, there is no educational opportunity at my university, California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. This thesis investigates the sports analytics discipline, aiming to explain what sports analytics is, how it differs from statistics, how sports analytics is used in various organizations, what sports analysts do, and how sports analytics should be taught at the undergraduate level here at Cal Poly. To accomplish this, I have taken three online sports analytics courses, conducted interviews with professors of sports analytics and sports analysts of professional and college teams, done extensive online research and literature review, and gauged interest campus-wide in a potential sports analytics course. Ultimately, this thesis led me to conclude that sports analytics differs from statistics, and there should be a course in sports analytics at Cal Poly offered by the Statistics Department. Skills including SQL and Tableau, communication to various sports constituents, data collection and data management, machine learning methods such as classification trees and clustering, advanced statistical methods such as General Additive Models and spatial analysis, and visualization techniques are all prominent in sports analytics. Statistics students at Cal Poly do not gain a firm foundation in all of these ideas and could benefit from a course which teaches these skills. The significance of this work is that I have created a course proposal for a sports analytics course. If this course were to be adopted by the Statistics Department, students would learn essential skills to prepare them for a career in sports or any data related career. This work can advance sports analytics education and lead to the creation of other courses in the discipline down the line

Utilization of Regrowth for Forage in Seed Stands of Meadow Fescue (Festuca pratensis Huds.)

Intensive utilization of autumn regrowth for forage production was compared to other autumn treatments in nine seed production fields of meadow fescue (Festuca pratensis) during 1993-96. Uncut plots without a N application in autumn always had the lowest number of reproductive tillers and the lowest subsequent year seed yields. Intensive utilization of regrowth, by application of 80 kg N ha-1 immediately after seed harvest and forage harvests in September or October, did not have any negative impact on the following yearsí seed yields. Delaying forage harvest from 10 September to 10 October increased forage yields, but lowered the forage quality

Complexity Begets Crosscutting, Dooms Hierarchy (Another Paper on Natural Kinds)

There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’ (or ‘assumption’ or ‘thesis’). According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique (i.e., there is only one taxonomy of such natural kinds) and traditional (i.e., said taxonomy consists of nested relations between specific and then more general kinds, each kind occupying one and only one particular place within that framework of relations). Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes for a certain order in nature cannot be fulfilled. Natural kinds crosscut one another, ubiquitously so, and this crosscutting spells the end of the hierarchical dream

Evaluation and Revision of Swarm's Redistribution Smart Contract

Decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) storage networks using blockchain technology such as Swarm emerge as a viable alternative to central cloud storage. Providing a solution to having a single point of failure, added security by not having to trust third party cloud providers, and resistance against possible censorship. However, ensuring the longevity, reliability, and fairness of such networks presents formidable challenges in the face of node churn and free riding. Each network participant needs to be compensated accordingly for both their storage capacity needed to persist user files, and the bandwidth needed for clients to upload and retrieve their files. Swarm in particular aims to be a zero cost of entry, self regulating, and sustainable storage network, boasting that storage incentives is the missing piece for blockchain. The Swarm storage incentives are handled by a redistribution game that is run by a set of Ethereum compatible smart contracts. Each round of this game decides on a network participant to receive the reward for storing files through the redistribution smart contract. In this thesis we are evaluating the storage incentives in Swarm by analysing the redistribution smart contract. Our analysis shows that the current truth selection and freezing mechanisms in Swarm, lead to a viable free riding strategy for malicious storage nodes. We propose two alternative solutions to mitigate the problem: the alpha solution, and the bank solution. Both solutions have the attribute, that the reward in a redistribution round might not be handed out to storage node network participants. In the case where multiple different proofs of storage are submitted in a round, thus providing incentive for every network node to work together in submitting the same value. We refer to the case of when there is no winning storage node, as a win for the bank entity. The bank solution is more simple, and it is easier to implement such that it minimizes the gas cost of the contract. Whereas the alpha solution is overall more fair, but trickier to implement, and with more gas overhead. Further key milestones in this thesis are that. We show how both solutions can be implemented in the Solidity programming language. That we evaluate the implemented solutions by using real data from previous redistribution rounds. In this evaluation we showed that the implemented smart contracts could be run in a realistic albeit development setting with ganache blockchain. And we were able to confirm that we were effective in mitigating the strategy of sending in arbitrary proof of storage, whilst comparing the two different solutions. %In order to both confirm that the solutions are potentially ready to be deployed on a real blockchain, and to confirm we have When deciding what to do when the bank entity wins, we take care to analyse what happens if we burn or carry the reward over into the next round. Particularly interesting is the latter case (which we decided to implement), where new possible storage incentive exploits could occur. These are exploits that rely on a node operator being present in multiple Swarm neighbourhoods, to try and increase their chance to win the carried over reward. We looked into ones where said node operator had i) the same stake in each neighbourhood, and ii) dividing the neighbourhoods the operator is in by two, having a separate stake in each. The majority of exploits we looked at needed an unfeasible amount of investment to pull off for bank, and alpha. However we did discover that the bank solution is vulnerable to ii)

Exploring the impact of elevated depressive symptoms on the ability of a tailored asthma intervention to improve medication adherence among urban adolescents with asthma

BACKGROUND: In patients with asthma, medication adherence is a voluntary behavior that can be affected by numerous factors. Depression is an important co-morbidity in adolescents with asthma that may significantly impact their controller medication adherence and other asthma-related outcomes. The modifying effect of depressive symptoms on an asthma intervention’s ability to improve asthma controller medication adherence among urban adolescents with asthma has not yet been reported. OBJECTIVE: To assess self-reported symptoms of depression as an effect modifier of the relationship between randomization group and controller medication adherence at 6-month follow-up. METHODS: These analyses use data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in Detroit high schools to evaluate a tailored asthma management program. The intervention included referrals to school or community resources for students reporting symptoms of depression and other issues. “Elevated depressive symptoms” was defined as a positive answer to ≥ 5 of 7 questions from a validated tool included on the baseline questionnaire. Self-reported adherence to controller medication was collected at intervention onset (session 1) and at 6-month follow up. Analyses were restricted to students with report of a controller medication at baseline. Logistic regression was used to assess elevated depressive symptoms as an effect modifier of the relationship between randomization group and 6-month adherence. RESULTS: Of the 422 students enrolled in the RCT, a controller medication was reported at intervention onset by n = 123 adolescents (29%). Analyzing this group, we observed an interaction between elevated depressive symptoms and adherence (p = 0.073). Stratified analysis showed better adherence in treatment group adolescents meeting criteria for elevated depressive symptoms at baseline as compared to the control group (adjusted Odds Ratio [aOR] = 9.50; p = 0.024). For adolescents without elevated depressive symptoms at baseline, differences in adherence by group assignment did not reach statistical significance (aOR 1.40, p = 0.49). CONCLUSIONS: In this sample of students reporting controller medications at baseline, report of elevated depressive symptoms at baseline and randomization to the intervention group was associated with significantly better adherence at 6-month follow up when compared to that of a control group. Larger studies are needed to evaluate the impact of depression on the relationship between adherence and asthma intervention effectiveness