Bankfull curves for the temperate rainforests in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina

Bankfull hydraulic geometry relationships, also called regional curves, relate bankfull stream channel dimensions and discharge to watershed drainage area. This paper describes results of bankfull curve relationships developed for the temperate rainforests of the Southern Appalachian Mountains primarily on Western North Carolina Mountain streams in the Southeastern United States. Gauge stations for small and larger catchments were selected with a range of 10 to 50 years of continuous or peak discharge measurements, no major impoundments, no significant change in land use over the past 10 years, and impervious cover ranges of <20%. Cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys were measured at each study reach to determine channel dimension, pattern, and profile information. Log-Pearson Type III distributions were used to analyze annual peak discharge data for nine small watersheds sites gauged by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory and for eleven larger watersheds gauged by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Power function relationships were developed using regression analyses for bankfull discharge, channel cross-sectional area, mean depth, and width as functions of watershed drainage area

Making Tactile Textures with Predefined Affective Properties

A process for the design and manufacture of 3D tactile textures with predefined affective properties was developed. Twenty four tactile textures were manufactured. Texture measures from the domain of machine vision were used to characterize the digital representations of the tactile textures. To obtain affective ratings, the textures were touched, unseen, by 107 participants who scored them against natural, warm, elegant, rough, simple, and like, on a semantic differential scale. The texture measures were correlated with the participants' affective ratings using a novel feature subset evaluation method and a partial least squares genetic algorithm. Six measures were identified that are significantly correlated with human responses and are unlikely to have occurred by chance. Regression equations were used to select 48 new tactile textures that had been synthesized using mixing algorithms and which were likely to score highly against the six adjectives when touched by participants. The new textures were manufactured and rated by participants. It was found that the regression equations gave excellent predictive ability. The principal contribution of the work is the demonstration of a process, using machine vision methods and rapid prototyping, which can be used to make new tactile textures with predefined affective properties

A Bell Inequality Analog in Quantum Measure Theory

One obtains Bell's inequalities if one posits a hypothetical joint probability distribution, or {\it measure}, whose marginals yield the probabilities produced by the spin measurements in question. The existence of a joint measure is in turn equivalent to a certain causality condition known as ``screening off''. We show that if one assumes, more generally, a joint {\it quantal measure}, or ``decoherence functional'', one obtains instead an analogous inequality weaker by a factor of $\sqrt{2}$. The proof of this ``Tsirel'son inequality'' is geometrical and rests on the possibility of associating a Hilbert space to any strongly positive quantal measure. These results lead both to a {\it question}: ``Does a joint measure follow from some quantal analog of `screening off'?'', and to the {\it observation} that non-contextual hidden variables are viable in histories-based quantum mechanics, even if they are excluded classically.Comment: 38 pages, TeX. Several changes and added comments to bring out the meaning more clearly. Minor rewording and extra acknowledgements, now closer to published versio

Quantum Dynamics without the Wave Function

When suitably generalized and interpreted, the path-integral offers an alternative to the more familiar quantal formalism based on state-vectors, selfadjoint operators, and external observers. Mathematically one generalizes the path-integral-as-propagator to a {\it quantal measure} $\mu$ on the space $\Omega$ of all ``conceivable worlds'', and this generalized measure expresses the dynamics or law of motion of the theory, much as Wiener measure expresses the dynamics of Brownian motion. Within such ``histories-based'' schemes new, and more ``realistic'' possibilities open up for resolving the philosophical problems of the state-vector formalism. In particular, one can dispense with the need for external agents by locating the predictive content of $\mu$ in its sets of measure zero: such sets are to be ``precluded''. But unrestricted application of this rule engenders contradictions. One possible response would remove the contradictions by circumscribing the application of the preclusion concept. Another response, more in the tradition of ``quantum logic'', would accommodate the contradictions by dualizing $\Omega$ to a space of ``co-events'' and effectively identifying reality with an element of this dual space.Comment: plainTeX, 24 pages, no figures. To appear in a special volume of {\it Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General} entitled ``The Quantum Universe'' and dedicated to Giancarlo Ghirardi on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Most current version is available at http://www.physics.syr.edu/~sorkin/some.papers/ (or wherever my home-page may be

Understanding Customers' Affective Needs with Linguistic Summarization

Abstract: To increase the chance of launching a successful product into market, it is essential to satisfy customers’ affective needs during the product design stage. However, understanding customers’ affective needs is very difficult task and product designers might misunderstand the customers’ affective needs. In this study, linguistic summarization with fuzzy set is used to present customers’ affective needs with natural language statements which could be easily understood by human beings. The relations between customers’ affective needs and product design elements are represented by type-I and type-II fuzzy quantified sentences. To illustrate the applicability of the linguistic summarization with fuzzy set in translating customers’ affective needs to natural language statements, a case study is conducted on mobile phone design. The results indicate that the linguistic summarization with fuzzy set can be a useful tool to assist designers to create products satisfying affective needs of customer

Aligning physical elements with persons' attitude: an approach using Rasch measurement theory

Affective engineering uses mathematical models to convert the information obtained from persons' attitude to physical elements into an ergonomic design. However, applications in the domain have not in many cases met measurement assumptions. This paper proposes a novel approach based on Rasch measurement theory to overcome the problem. The research demonstrates that if data fit the model, further variables can be added to a scale. An empirical study was designed to determine the range of compliance where consumers could obtain an impression of a moisturizer cream when touching some product containers. Persons, variables and stimulus objects were parameterised independently on a linear continuum. The results showed that a calibrated scale preserves comparability although incorporating further variables

Kinetics of the γ–δ phase transition in energetic nitramine-octahydro-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetrazocine

The solid, secondary explosive nitramine-octahydro-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7 or HMX has four different stable polymorphs which have different molecular conformations, crystalline structures, and densities, making structural phase transitions between these nontrivial. Previous studies of the kinetics of the β–δ HMX structural transition found this to happen by a nucleation and growth mechanism, where growth was governed by the heat of fusion, or melting, even though the phase transition temperature is more than 100 K below the melting point. A theory known as virtual melting could easily justify this since the large volume difference in the two phases creates a strain at their interface that can lower the melting point to the phase transition temperature through a relaxation of the elastic energy. To learn more about structural phase transitions in organic crystalline solids and virtual melting, here we use time-resolved X-ray diffraction to study another structural phase transition in HMX, γ–δ. Again, second order kinetics are observed which fit to the same nucleation and growth model associated with growth by melting even though the volume change in this transition is too small to lower the melting point by interfacial strain. To account for this, we present a more general model illustrating that melting over a very thin layer at the interface between the two phases reduces the total interfacial energy and is therefore thermodynamically favorable and can drive the structural phase transition in the absence of large volume changes. Our work supports the idea that virtual melting may be a more generally applicable mechanism for structural phase transitions in organic crystalline solids