An investigation of rotor harmonic noise by the use of small scale wind tunnel models

Noise measurements of small scale helicopter rotor models were compared with noise measurements of full scale helicopters to determine what information about the full scale helicopters could be derived from noise measurements of small scale helicopter models. Comparisons were made of the discrete frequency (rotational) noise for 4 pairs of tests. Areas covered were tip speed effects, isolated rotor, tandem rotor, and main rotor/tail rotor interaction. Results show good comparison of noise trends with configuration and test condition changes, and good comparison of absolute noise measurements with the corrections used except for the isolated rotor case. Noise measurements of the isolated rotor show a great deal of scatter reflecting the fact that the rotor in hover is basically unstable

Peer-to-Peer Planning for Space Mission Control

Planning and scheduling for space operations entails the development of applications that embed intimate domain knowledge of distinct areas of mission control, while allowing for significant collaboration among them. The separation is useful because of differences in the planning problem, solution methods, and frequencies of replanning that arise in the different disciplines. For example, planning the activities of human spaceflight crews requires some reasoning about all spacecraft resources at timescales of minutes or seconds, and is subject to considerable volatility. Detailed power planning requires managing the complex interplay of power consumption and production, involves very different classes of constraints and preferences, but once plans are generated they are relatively stable

PAR Loop Schedule Review

The schedule for the installation of the PAR slurry loop experiment in the ·South Facility af the ORR has been reviewed and revised. Changed design philosophy to include maintainability of the loop auxiliaries required extension of the main construction period to the end of,June, with a three month period ending in September, for test and run in during which construction will be completed

PAR Loop Schedule Review

The schedule for the installation of the PAR slurry loop experiment in the ·South Facility af the ORR has been reviewed and revised. Changed design philosophy to include maintainability of the loop auxiliaries required extension of the main construction period to the end of,June, with a three month period ending in September, for test and run in during which construction will be completed

STATUS OF COMPOUND DRC-1339 REGISTRATIONS

Compound DRC-1339 is a restricted-use, slow-acting avicide that is registered to control a number of avian pests. It is unique because of its selective high toxicity to most pest birds, low-to-moderate toxicity to most mammals and predatory birds, and lack of known secondary hazards when used on baits. The most widely known product containing DRC- 1339 is Purina Mills’ Starlicide Complete®, a pelleted bait used to control blackbirds and starlings in feedlots. Other DRC- 1339 registrations are held by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA/APHIS), for the use of nonpelletized baits at feedlots and for the control of gulls in or near their nesting colonies. Over 20 State Special Local Need 24(c) registrations have also been issued to APHIS for special DRC-1339 uses. To consolidate these registrations, APHIS has submitted data to amend its feedlot registration for blackbirds and starlings, and applied for three registrations for control of 1) raven and crow depredations on livestock and for wildlife protection, 2) pigeons in and around structures, and 3) blackbirds, starlings, and crows at preroosting staging areas. Because most of the submitted data were collected in the 1960s and 1970s, none of it was produced under the Environmental Protection Agency\u27s (EPA) Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) regulations; therefore, new data will probably be needed to support these registrations. Future data needs and procedures for collecting valid information for DRC-1339 are suggested

PCI-SS: MISO dynamic nonlinear protein secondary structure prediction

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Since the function of a protein is largely dictated by its three dimensional configuration, determining a protein's structure is of fundamental importance to biology. Here we report on a novel approach to determining the one dimensional secondary structure of proteins (distinguishing α-helices, β-strands, and non-regular structures) from primary sequence data which makes use of Parallel Cascade Identification (PCI), a powerful technique from the field of nonlinear system identification.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using PSI-BLAST divergent evolutionary profiles as input data, dynamic nonlinear systems are built through a black-box approach to model the process of protein folding. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are applied in order to optimize the architectural parameters of the PCI models. The three-state prediction problem is broken down into a combination of three binary sub-problems and protein structure classifiers are built using 2 layers of PCI classifiers. Careful construction of the optimization, training, and test datasets ensures that no homology exists between any training and testing data. A detailed comparison between PCI and 9 contemporary methods is provided over a set of 125 new protein chains guaranteed to be dissimilar to all training data. Unlike other secondary structure prediction methods, here a web service is developed to provide both human- and machine-readable interfaces to PCI-based protein secondary structure prediction. This server, called PCI-SS, is available at <url>http://bioinf.sce.carleton.ca/PCISS</url>. In addition to a dynamic PHP-generated web interface for humans, a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface is added to permit invocation of the PCI-SS service remotely. This machine-readable interface facilitates incorporation of PCI-SS into multi-faceted systems biology analysis pipelines requiring protein secondary structure information, and greatly simplifies high-throughput analyses. XML is used to represent the input protein sequence data and also to encode the resulting structure prediction in a machine-readable format. To our knowledge, this represents the only publicly available SOAP-interface for a protein secondary structure prediction service with published WSDL interface definition.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Relative to the 9 contemporary methods included in the comparison cascaded PCI classifiers perform well, however PCI finds greatest application as a consensus classifier. When PCI is used to combine a sequence-to-structure PCI-based classifier with the current leading ANN-based method, PSIPRED, the overall error rate (Q3) is maintained while the rate of occurrence of a particularly detrimental error is reduced by up to 25%. This improvement in BAD score, combined with the machine-readable SOAP web service interface makes PCI-SS particularly useful for inclusion in a tertiary structure prediction pipeline.</p