Geology of Virginia for Teachers at Radford University

The Radford University version of the Virginia Earth Science Collaborative‘s Geology of Virginia was taught during Summer 2006 and 2007, and was entitled, Geology of Virginia for Teachers (GEOL 691). A total of eighteen teachers, primarily from southside and southwestern Virginia, attended the class. The goal of the course was to provide essential knowledge and advanced skills in geology in general, and the geology of Virginia in particular. The course had a strong field emphasis, using Virginia as a natural teaching laboratory to illustrate such concepts as plate tectonics, rock interpretation, and Steno‘s Laws. Lectures and lab activities were used to guide and inform the field trips, and to provide an overall “big picture” of the time and scale of geology. Maps and materials provided in the course, plus samples and pictures collected by the teachers, created a wealth of materials that can be used in teaching. Teachers developed fmal projects that highlighted the geology of their home counties. The course featured the experimental use of “podcasts” as a way to deliver content to geographically dispersed teachers. Evaluation results show that teachers gained substantial geologic knowledge, and felt better prepared and more confident in their own teaching

Mobility: a double-edged sword for HSPA networks

This paper presents an empirical study on the performance of mobile High Speed Packet Access (HSPA, a 3.5G cellular standard) networks in Hong Kong via extensive field tests. Our study, from the viewpoint of end users, covers virtually all possible mobile scenarios in urban areas, including subways, trains, off-shore ferries and city buses. We have confirmed that mobility has largely negative impacts on the performance of HSPA networks, as fast-changing wireless environment causes serious service deterioration or even interruption. Meanwhile our field experiment results have shown unexpected new findings and thereby exposed new features of the mobile HSPA networks, which contradict commonly held views. We surprisingly find out that mobility can improve fairness of bandwidth sharing among users and traffic flows. Also the triggering and final results of handoffs in mobile HSPA networks are unpredictable and often inappropriate, thus calling for fast reacting fallover mechanisms. We have conducted in-depth research to furnish detailed analysis and explanations to what we have observed. We conclude that mobility is a double-edged sword for HSPA networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public report on a large scale empirical study on the performance of commercial mobile HSPA networks

Experimental study of contact transition control incorporating joint acceleration feedback

Joint acceleration and velocity feedbacks are incorporated into a classical internal force control of a robot in contact with the environment. This is intended to achieve a robust contact transition and force tracking performance for varying unknown environments, without any need of adjusting the controller parameters, A unified control structure is proposed for free motion, contact transition, and constrained motion in view of the consumption of the initial kinetic energy generated by a nonzero impact velocity. The influence of the velocity and acceleration feedbacks, which are introduced especially for suppressing the transition oscillation, on the postcontact tracking performance is discussed. Extensive experiments are conducted on the third joint of a three-link direct-drive robot to verify the proposed scheme for environments of various stiffnesses, including elastic (sponge), less elastic (cardboard), and hard (steel plate) surfaces. Results are compared with those obtained by the transition control scheme without the acceleration feedback. The ability of the proposed control scheme in resisting the force disturbance during the postcontact period is also experimentally investigated

The Glasgow raspberry pi cloud: a scale model for cloud computing infrastructures

Data Centers (DC) used to support Cloud services often consist of tens of thousands of networked machines under a single roof. The significant capital outlay required to replicate such infrastructures constitutes a major obstacle to practical implementation and evaluation of research in this domain. Currently, most research into Cloud computing relies on either limited software simulation, or the use of a testbed environments with a handful of machines. The recent introduction of the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, low-power single-board computer, has made the construction of a miniature Cloud DCs more affordable. In this paper, we present the Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud (PiCloud), a scale model of a DC composed of clusters of Raspberry Pi devices. The PiCloud emulates every layer of a Cloud stack, ranging from resource virtualisation to network behaviour, providing a full-featured Cloud Computing research and educational environment

Negative Electron-electron Drag Between Narrow Quantum Hall Channels

Momentum transfer due to Coulomb interaction between two parallel, two-dimensional, narrow, and spatially separated layers, when a current I_{drive} is driven through one layer, is studied in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field B. The current induced in the drag layer, I_{drag}, is evaluated self-consistently with I_{drive} as a parameter. I_{drag} can be positive or negative depending on the value of the filling factor \nu of the highest occupied bulk Landau level (LL). For a fully occupied LL, I_{drag} is negative, i.e., it flows opposite to I_{drive}, whereas it is positive for a half-filled LL. When the circuit is opened in the drag layer, a voltage \Delta V_{drag} develops in it; it is negative for a half-filled LL and positive for a fully occupied LL. This positive \Delta V_{drag}, expressing a negative Coulomb drag, results from energetically favored near-edge inter-LL transitions that occur when the highest occupied bulk LL and the LL just above it become degenerate.Comment: Text file in Latex/Revtex/preprint format, 7 separate PS figures, Physical Review B, in pres

The Role of Phase Space in Complex Fragment Emission from Low to Intermediate Energies

The experimental emission probabilities of complex fragments by low energy compound nuclei and their dependence upon energy and atomic number are compared to the transition state rates. Intermediate-mass-fragment multiplicity distributions for a variety of reactions at intermediate energies are shown to be binomial and thus reducible at all measured transverse energies. From these distributions a single binary event probability can be extracted which has a thermal dependence. A strong thermal signature is also found in the charge distributions. The n-fold charge distributions are reducible to the 1-fold charge distributions through a simple scaling dictated by fold number and charge conservation.Comment: 15 pages, TeX type, psfig, also available at http://csa5.lbl.gov/moretto/ps/brazil.ps, to appear in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Nuclear Dynamics at Long and Short Distances, April 8-12, 1996, Angra dos Reis, Brazi

Remote surface inspection system

This paper reports on an on-going research and development effort in remote surface inspection of space platforms such as the Space Station Freedom (SSF). It describes the space environment and identifies the types of damage for which to search. This paper provides an overview of the Remote Surface Inspection System that was developed to conduct proof-of-concept demonstrations and to perform experiments in a laboratory environment. Specifically, the paper describes three technology areas: (1) manipulator control for sensor placement; (2) automated non-contact inspection to detect and classify flaws; and (3) an operator interface to command the system interactively and receive raw or processed sensor data. Initial findings for the automated and human visual inspection tests are reported

On the design of robust deadbeat regulators

This paper considers the synthesis of state feedback gains which provide robustness against perturbation in deadbeat regulation. It is formulated as an unconstrained optimization problem. Through a posteriori perturbation analysis of the closed-loop eigenvalues, the justification of the use of a new objective function to measure the robustness of deadbeat systems is established. The objective function does not require the computation of eigenvectors and has simple analytical gradient and Hessian. A numerical example is employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.published_or_final_versio

The JPL telerobotic Manipulator Control and Mechanization (MCM) subsystem

The Manipulator Control and Mechanization (MCM) subsystem of the telerobot system provides the real-time control of the robot manipulators in autonomous and teleoperated modes and real time input/output for a variety of sensors and actuators. Substantial hardware and software are included in this subsystem which interfaces in the hierarchy of the telerobot system with the other subsystems. The other subsystems are: run time control, task planning and reasoning, sensing and perception, and operator control subsystem. The architecture of the MCM subsystem, its capabilities, and details of various hardware and software elements are described. Important improvements in the MCM subsystem over the first version are: dual arm coordinated trajectory generation and control, addition of integrated teleoperation, shared control capability, replacement of the ultimate controllers with motor controllers, and substantial increase in real time processing capability